This issue is headed by six political theory articles that provide new evidence, as if any new evidence were needed, of the wide variety of scholarly work that passes under the label “political theory.” By my inexpert reckoning, the first of these theory articles is more or less classical, verging on contemporary; the second is more or less contemporary, verging on feminist; the third is more or less feminist, verging on modern; the fourth is contemporary, of the pragmatist persuasion; and the fifth and sixth are formal. In recognition of this variety, our cover graphic depicts an array of spices–the obvious connection being that variety is the spice of the political theory field, just as it is of our far-flung discipline more generally.

Deliberative democratic theorists (in this essay, Seyla Benhabib and Jurgen Habermas) seek to resolve, manage, or transcend paradoxes of democratic legitimation or constitutional democracy. Other democratic theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe, embrace such paradoxes and affirm their irreducibility. Deliberativists call that position “decisionism.” This essay examines the promise and limits of these various efforts by way of a third paradox: Rousseau's paradox of politics, whose many workings are traced through Book II, Chapter 7 of the Social Contract. This last paradox cannot be resolved, transcended, managed, or even affirmed as an irreducible binary conflict. The paradox of politics names not a clash between two logics or norms but a vicious circle of chicken-and-egg (which comes first—good people or good law?). It has the happy effect of reorienting democratic theory: toward the material conditions of political practice, the unavoidable will of the people who are also always a multitude, and the not only regulative but also productive powers of law.

Feminist thinkers have long criticized liberal theory's public/private distinction for perpetuating indifference to injustices within the family. Thinkers such as Susan Okin have extended this criticism in evaluating the theory of political liberalism, suggesting that this theory's reliance on a public conception of citizenship renders it indifferent to the way in which the internal politics of the family can undermine equality. However, I argue in this article that the feminist concern to ensure equality within the domestic sphere can in fact be incorporated into a reconstructed account of political liberalism. Central to my strong public reconstruction is the principle of publicly justifiable privacy, according to which the public/private distinction itself must be formulated with reference to the values of free and equal citizenship. On my account, the public values of citizenship should figure prominently in evaluations of family life. This reformulation of the public/private distinction answers feminist critics who suggest that political liberalism fails to offer a politics of the personal.

One important legacy of republicanism is the ideal of good citizenship; a related legacy of republicanism is the equation of citizenship and masculinity. These legacies are at once strange and familiar: today, masculinity and citizenship are often conceptualized as discrete and distinctive identities, and some critics, most notably feminists, suggest that in modern democracies good citizenship and masculinity may even be contradictory ideals. The source of these conceptual paradoxes is the transformation of gender and civic discourse in the early modern period, particularly the “long eighteenth century.” Understanding the implications of these changes helps us better grasp both the relationship of gender and citizenship today, and how a more effectively engaged and meaningfully egalitarian form of democratic citizenship, for men and women, might be realized.

Politics reflects a seemingly incontrovertible condition—any imaginable human population is diverse across multiple, overlapping dimensions including material interests, moral and ethical commitments, and cultural attachments. Such diversity means, in turn, that disagreement and conflict are unavoidable. Under these circumstances politics largely consists in contests over the contours of shared institutional arrangements. Given that there almost always are a number of ways to institutionalize social interaction, any population occupying the circumstances of politics must determine which institutional form or arrangement to rely on in any particular domain. The “priority” of democracy, on our account, derives from its usefulness in approaching this crucial task. This priority derives from features that are, in our view, unique to democracy, namely a level of reflexivity that distinguishes it from other ways of coordinating ongoing social interaction. As we demonstrate, much of the literature on social institutions tacitly and improperly privileges a quite different component of our institutional arrangements, namely markets. We show that once one clarifies the premises and argumentative strategies common to this literature, it simply is not possible to sustain the privilege it accords to markets. In fact, we argue that the analytical models and explanatory strategies that institutionalists deploy actually sustain our case for the priority of democracy.

Empirical evidence suggests that a prime minister benefits from firing ministers who are involved in political scandals. We explore a model in which scandals are positively related to policy activism, so that a prime minister may wish to protect a minister from resignation calls. We find that protection can sometimes discourage activism: it enhances the value of a minister's career and hence encourages him to “sit tight” by moderating his activities. On the other hand, an exogenous increase in exposure to scandals may lead a minister to “live for today” by pursuing controversial policies. The prime minister's ability to protect ministers is limited by her short-term incentive to fire. She may, however, enhance her credibility by building a collective reputation with the cabinet; the heterogeneity of cabinet membership plays an important role.

We develop a bargaining model in which a legislature divides a budget among particularistic and collective goods. By incorporating both private and public goods in a unified model, we uncover nonmonotonic relationships between legislative preferences for collective spending and the amount of the budget actually allocated to collective goods. Put simply, policy proposers can exploit coalition partners' strong preferences for public goods to actually provide fewer public goods in equilibrium while directing more private goods to themselves. These results explain why policy reforms to limit special interest spending often fail. This unified model also sheds new light on when legislatures prefer open or closed amendment rules and when coalitions take different sizes and shapes.

I examine the relationship between interest group hard money contributions and legislators' attention to policy analysis in U.S. congressional committees. I argue that groups tend to contribute to members who have a high capacity to develop effective policies and legislation. Consequently, over the long term, contributions create incentives for members of Congress to enhance their analytical capacity for policymaking. Using data from hearings on the Medicare program and latent variable modeling techniques, I demonstrate that members who have a higher latent analytical policymaking capacity tend to attract more contributions and at the same time tend to engage in analytical discourse in committee hearings. In addition, members with higher analytical capacity tend to disengage from discussions of the symbolic aspects of policies that are of interest to constituents. The results help shed new light on debates over campaign finance reform regarding the normative value of hard money contributions.

This article analyzes the strategic use of public policy as a tool for reshaping public opinion. In the 1990s, “progressive revisionists” argued that, by reforming welfare, liberals could free the Democratic Party of a significant electoral liability, reduce the race-coding of poverty politics, and produce a public more willing to invest in anti-poverty efforts. Connecting this argument to recent scholarship on policy feedback, we pursue a quantitative case study of the potential for new policies to move public opinion. Our analysis reveals that welfare reform in the 1990s produced few changes in mass opinion. To explain this result, we propose a general framework for the analysis of mass feedback effects. After locating welfare as a “distant-visible” case in this framework, we advance four general propositions that shed light on our case-specific findings as well as the general conditions under which mass feedback effects should be viewed as more or less likely.

We offer a theory of intertemporal bureaucratic decision making which proposes that an agency's forecast optimism is related to the extent to which it discounts future reputation costs associated with bureaucratic incompetence. Agency forecasts of the distant future are more likely to be optimistic than short-term forecasts. We claim that unstable organizations will discount reputation costs at a steeper rate than stable organizations, and therefore will produce more optimistic forecasts. We test our theory using macroeconomic forecasts produced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) across six forecast horizons from 1979 to 2003. The statistical results are generally consistent with our theory: OMB generates more optimistic long-term forecasts than SSA. Further, differences in forecast optimism between these executive branch agencies widen as the forecast horizon increases. Our evidence suggests that more stable agencies place a premium on minimizing reputation costs. Conversely, less stable agencies are more likely to accommodate political pressures for forecast optimism. These findings underscore the importance of institutional design for understanding how executive agencies balance the conflicting goals of political responsiveness and bureaucratic competence within the administrative state.

It is widely believed that rational choice theory is grossly inconsistent with empirical observations about voter turnout. We report the results of an experiment designed to test the voter turnout predictions of the rational choice Palfrey–Rosenthal model of participation with asymmetric information. We find that the three main comparative statics predictions are observed in the data: the size effect, whereby turnout goes down in larger electorates; the competition effect, whereby turnout is higher in elections that are expected to be close; and the underdog effect, whereby voters supporting the less popular alternative have higher turnout rates. We also compare the quantitative magnitudes of turnout to the predictions of Nash equilibrium. We find that there is undervoting for small electorates and overvoting for large electorates, relative to Nash equilibrium. These deviations from Nash equilibrium are consistent with the logit version of Quantal Response Equilibrium, which provides a good fit to the data, and can also account for significant voter turnout in very large elections.

It is typically assumed that African leaders enact policies that benefit their ethnoregional group using all types of patronage. Crop production and political power are geographically concentrated in many African countries, and this paper exploits this overlap to cast doubt on this conventional wisdom. It shows, using data on 50 country-crop combinations, that cash crop farmers who are ethnically identified with the head of state face higher taxes. Furthermore, democratic regimes impose lower taxes. This paper shows that farmers who have few alternatives face higher taxes. African leaders have used local intermediaries to exert control over the countryside and to ensure that farmers do not support alternative candidates. It suggests that as leaders are better at selecting and monitoring these intermediaries in their home areas, they can extract more from the majority at home than abroad using taxes on cash crops, which are regionally but not individually targetable.

This paper theorizes the link between ethnicity and conflict. Conventional research relies on the ethnolinguistic fractionalization index (ELF) to explore a possible causal connection between these two phenomena. However, such approaches implicitly postulate unrealistic, individualist interaction topologies. Moreover, ELF-based studies fail to articulate explicit causal mechanisms of collective action. To overcome these difficulties, we introduce the new index N* of ethnonationalist exclusiveness that maps ethnic configurations onto political violence. This formalization is confirmed statistically in regression analysis based on data from Eurasia and North Africa.

Partly hidden beneath the complexities of N* and an attack on the supposedly individualist presumptions of ethnic fractionalization measures, a simple and valuable question lies implicit in Cederman and Girardin's (2007) article (henceforth, CG). Are countries at greater risk of civil war when the state is controlled by an ethnic minority?