Four major new compilations of macropolitical data are compared and evaluated. Each summarizes a large-scale research effort to code or to collect data suitable for theoretically relevant, cross-national comparisons. As a group the new handbooks incorporate many improvements and innovations on earlier handbooks, which concentrated mainly on cross-sectional, aggregate data or simplistically coded judgments about nation-states. About a third of their measures consist of “made” data, derived by coding journalistic and historical sources. All provide some measures for cross-time comparisons; one is devoted exclusively to time-series data. Many of their measures denote properties of internal and international conflict and of international transactions. All but one are painfully self-conscious about problems of reliability and comparability of data. One criticism is the reliance of several of the handbooks on “counts” of conflict events rather than assessment of more theoretically relevant properties of conflict. A second is the paucity of indicators of inequality and, more generally, of measures which give a “view from the bottom” of political systems.

Article 16 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, prefixed to the French Constitution of 1791, reads as follows: “Every society in which a guarantee of rights is not assured nor a separation of powers determined does not have a constitution.” Without question the men of 1789 had come under the influence of Montesquieu as well as of John Locke. It is true that a separation of powers is to be found in the Two Treatises of Government; but that doctrine is set out in bolder relief and more sharply defined by Montesquieu than by Locke. However, the men of 1789 took only one half the teachings of Montesquieu; the other half they rejected. The exclusive, oligarchical, tyrannical spirit of the corporations of the ancient régime, the abuse of the principle of aristocracy—privileges without services, as Taine puts it—the growth of the spirit of equality as a result of the industrial revolution, all set men stoutly against a “corporative” (in contrast with a pulverized) structure of society. Rousseau, Turgot and the Physiocrats demanded a leveling of hierarchized society: the mountains must be brought low, the valleys filled up and a highway made for the plain man to walk thereon. It was only with the Restoration that the value of an aristocratic element—from Montesquieu's point of view a corporative element—came into prominence. It was widely discussed during that period, and Montesquieu was the authority of the day.

In this research letter, we examine whether gender and racial bias affect interruption rates at one of the most visible events in American politics: US Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Using original data from 1939 to 2022, we find that male and white participants are more likely to interrupt women and person of color speakers, respectively, relative to male and white speakers. This finding holds for both senators and nominees as interrupters. Our results provide evidence that biased interruptive behavior occurs in even the most public and salient of political settings and that it can be mitigated (or intensified) by shared (or opposite) partisanship among speaking pairs. We also find interruption inequalities are not isolated to women as the interrupted, revealing that people of color in political and legal settings are subject to heightened rates of interruptions as well.

Does mass repression have a long-term economic legacy, and if so, what explains persistence? I argue repression can undermine development by delimiting human capital. I study the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The regime implemented a campaign of violence to reorganize society, yet governing elites varied across the communist ideological spectrum. I exploit an arbitrary border that allocated villages to either the loyalist Mok or the relatively moderate Sy in Kampong Speu province. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find villages in the more extremist Southwest zone are poorer today compared with villages in the adjacent West zone, and had lower human capital immediately after the regime. Exposure to more intense repression shapes labor markets and child health, explaining intergenerational persistence. I find no conclusive evidence for other persistence channels. My findings add a novel pathway to the library of mechanisms which explain why historical coercion undermines development.

The new Italian Constitution was written by the 556 deputies the Italian people elected to their first Constitutional Assembly on June 2, 1946. The Assembly approved the Constitution on December 22, 1947, by a vote of 453 favorable, 62 opposed, and 31 absent. After this approval the Constitution was promulgated by the Provisional President of Italy, Enrico de Nicola, and became effective ten days later, on January 1, 1948. Numerous evaluations of the Constitution are available, and it is not our purpose here to duplicate this work. We are concerned solely with discovering to what extent the Constitution was actually in effect during the four and one-half year period following its promulgation and with explaining, if possible, why there has been so much delay in implementing some of its basic provisions.

What we shall find is that some enabling legislation was passed by the Constitutional Assembly in the interim period between the effective date of the Constitution and the election of the first Parliament in April, 1948. Parliament has implemented a few more constitutional provisions, but vast and basic sections of the Constitution are still ineffective, owing to Parliament's inaction. To a lesser degree the administration and the courts are in a position to implement the Constitution.

Many professional observers have come to the conclusion that, despite denials and technical problems whose solutions are not publicly known, Israel already has nuclear weapons or has completed all but the final steps in their fabrication. It is also widely believed that one or more Arab states will come into atomic possession within a 10 to 15 year time frame. The present analysis explores the consequences of the establishment of a regional mini-balance of terror. The central hypothesis is that apocalyptic images and doomsday visions have been accepted too readily and out of proportion to the arguments that are given, and that a stable system of mutual deterrence may be viable in the Middle East and may make a positive contribution to the process of political settlement. Problems of rationality, credibility, second-strike force survivability, escalation, tactical nuclear weapons, accidents, permissive action links, terrorism, preventive war, and the disclosure of nuclear weapons possession are discussed.

Robert H. Jackson died more than a decade ago, and his departure from the Supreme Court marked the end of an era in American judicial politics, since he left behind as a minority those remaining of the colleagues who had joined with him to compose the so-called Roosevelt Court. He was still very much alive when I interviewed him shortly after the Steel Seizure decision in 1952, and subsequently when the initial stages of the present research were designed and carried out. His unanticipated and fatal heart attack had two incidental consequences that are relevant here: it fixed an unavoidable natural closure for the data—his activities-that I was studying, and at the same time imposed an insurmountable foreclosure upon one of my research ambitions. For the best way to validate generalizations about a man's attitudinal predispositions and belief systems is to check them as predictions against his future behavior; social scientists understandably repose lesser confidence in findings about hypotheses that can be validated only statistically, and then only by retrospective testing. Perhaps it was an error, therefore, not to have switched from Jackson to some other justice as a subject; but even one who chose a younger justice (such as Arthur Goldberg) might have guessed wrongly about his tenure, and Jackson's career did offer several unusual advantages—for reasons that will be explained shortly—which it seemed important to exploit.

It has been argued by Mancur Olson and others that Karl Marx's theory of revolution is logically defective in that front its premises one cannot draw Marx's conclusion that workers will unite to revolt against capitalism. Workers who might wish for large social changes are confronted with a collective action problem that Marx fails to appreciate—so runs the criticism. The critics are assuming that Marx is reasoning from a Hobbesian premise to the effect that insofar as they are rational, individuals act always to fulfill narrowly self-interested goals. This article denies the assumption. In particular it is urged that to make sense of Marx's optimistic hopes about the likely outcome of successful majoritarian working-class revolution, one must attribute to him a secular faith that most people are disposed to play fair with others. This disposition is relatively weak and only sporadically effective in determining behavior, but in the right revolutionary circumstances, Marx hopes, it might play a considerably greater role in this respect. (A circumstance on which Marx places great weight is material abundance.) Being optimistic about the future, Marx cannot be as cynical about human motivation in the present as commentators often take him to be.

The National Security Council, created by the National Security Act of 1947, is the instrument through which the President obtains the collective advice of the appropriate officials of the executive branch concerning the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security. An outline of the genesis of this new governmental agency will indicate in part its present rôle.

Even before World War II, a few far-sighted men were seeking for a means of correlating our foreign policy with our military and economic capabilities. During the war, as military operations began to have an increasing political and economic effect, the pressure for such a correlation increased. It became apparent that the conduct of the war involved more than a purely military campaign to defeat the enemy's armed forces. Questions arose of war aims, of occupational policies, of relations with governments-in-exile and former enemy states, of the postwar international situation with its implications for our security, and of complicated international machinery.

As a part of its work, the committee on research of the American Political Science Association has undertaken a survey of the relation of politics to kindred types of inquiry, including psychology, anthropology, geography, biology, engineering and others. The purpose of such an inquiry is to explore the relationships that exist with kindred sciences, to facilitate coöperation with our fellow-workers, to improve our methods of investigation, and to promote the progress of political science.

The committee is not responsible for this report, for its form or content, its scope or method, its sins of omission or commission. Probably the general sentiment of the committee toward psychology would be expressed by the phrase, con amore ma non troppo.

It may be worth while at the outset to scrutinize some of the earlier relations of psychology to political science, for the friendship is one of long standing. In the earlier forms of political thinking, there are crude types of psychology that are of great interest and significance in the development of the art of political thinking. These philosophers evidently utilized all of the psychology that was current in the construction of their political systems.

To develop a general theory of leadership we must locate the function of political leadership in a theory of historical causation. One may begin by identifying sources of leadership in the wants and needs, aspirations and expectations, of humankind. In helping to gratify these “motive-bases,” leaders move followers “up” the hierarchy of needs and other motivations and thus create new social configurations in which leaders act. As persons–especially children-move “up” through stages of morality, they also create structures of values that both empower and constrain would-be leaders. Leadership over human beings is exercised when would-be leaders, possessing certain motives of their own, mobilize their own psychological, institutional, pohtical, and other resources relevant to potential followers' motive bases in such a way as to satisfy the motives of both leaders and followers. The test of leadership is the achievement of goals of both leaders and followers in a context of open conflict over ends and means, with leaders and followers mutually and freely defining their values and purposes.

By a turn of legal fate, the first case between two American states to be decided by either the International Court of Justice or its predecessor, the Permanent Court of International Justice, is one which involves the controversial practice of diplomatic asylum. One can choose to regard diplomatic asylum as a principle of American international law or as a “permissive local custom,” though in no sense a principle of international law, or one can agree that “the fact that asylum is not exercised in the territory of the leading states, and is mainly resorted to in the ‘backward’ countries of the Near and Far East and of Latin America, suggests that it is a practice followed only in relation to states who are not fully civilized in the Western sense of the term, and that as such it is a temporary exception to the system of international law which obtains in the community of civilized nations.” Whatever the viewpoint, the fact remains that the practice has been indulged in for a long time, with and without formal legal sanction, and in more places than Latin America. The Colombian-Peruvian Asylum Case brings to attention the issues of the validity in international law of diplomatic asylum and of its desirability in international relations. A short sketch of the origin and development of diplomatic asylum will indicate something of its nature.

Professor Hibbs's article presents an ingenious model wherein political support of the government depends on “cumulative discounted relative performance.” Specifically, “the worse (better) the performance of the prior government, the higher (lower) will be the initial support of the new government… (G)overnments following bad acts by the opposition are likely to enjoy greater initial support than governments following good acts.”

This is a reasonable hypothesis, and it may well be correct. However, Hibbs offers no evidence of its correctness other than the overall performance of his model, and he reports no consideration, let alone rejection, of alternative hypotheses. Instead he assumes that the discounted past performance affects the new government's support with the opposite sign but with the same slope. Pursuit of Hibbs's illustrative example shows that the assumption is far from trivial, and that it produces some startling results.

The Vietnam Draft Lotteries, which randomly assigned men to military service, enable researchers to assess the long-term effects of interracial contact on racial attitudes. Using a new draft status indicator for respondents to the General Social Surveys 1978–2021, we show that white men who were selected for the draft subsequently expressed less negative attitudes toward Black people and toward policies designed to help them. These effects are apparent only for cohorts that were actually drafted into service, suggesting that interracial contact during military service led to attitude change. These findings have important implications for theories of political socialization and prejudice reduction.

Applications of moral foundations theory in political science have revealed differences in the degree to which liberals and conservatives explicitly endorse five core moral foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and sanctity. We argue that differences between liberals and conservatives in their explicit ratings of abstract and generalized moral principles do not imply that citizens with different political orientations have fundamentally different moral intuitions. We introduce a new approach for measuring the importance of the five moral foundations by asking U.K. and U.S. survey respondents to compare pairs of vignettes describing violations relevant to each foundation. We analyze responses to these comparisons using a hierarchical Bradley–Terry model which allows us to evaluate the relative importance of each foundation to individuals with different political perspectives. Our results suggest that, despite prominent claims to the contrary, voters on the left and the right of politics share broadly similar moral intuitions.

This article highlights a new way in which descriptive representation enhances democracy through inclusive party building. We theorize that parties retain and promote incumbents based on gendered criteria, disproportionately incentivizing women to recruit party members. However, gendered resource inequalities lower women’s access to the patronage required for recruitment. Women respond by recruiting more women members, as it lowers recruitment costs, is role-congruent, and eases credit claiming. Using rich administrative data on party membership from 2004 to 2020 and a regression discontinuity design in Brazil, we find that, despite resource disparities, women mayors recruit new members at similar rates as men but reduce the gender gap in party membership. As expected, women are more likely to be promoted in constituencies where they most lower the gender gap in party membership. We also find that women’s increased membership improves party resilience. Our findings suggest that descriptive representation strengthens party building by including underrepresented citizens.