Political Research Quarterly

International economic flows have become an increasingly prominent component of both international relations and domestic politics over the last two decades. Even though politically motivated governments have played a growing role in shaping these transactions, empirical studies have largely ignored the political determinants of international trade patterns. This study addresses that important gap in our understanding of the international political economy with particular reference to United States trade. We theorize that two aspects of the relations between nations should predict enhanced trade levels: similarity in political system and similarity in foreign policy orientation. We test this proposition for U.S. exports to 76 importing nations over an 18-year period in a pooled time- series design that controls for known influences on trade flows. Our results suggest that these two political factors have a substantial and predictable impact on U.S. export patterns. We consider some possible criticisms of our results along with some suggestions for future research.

Gary Jacobson (1987a, 1987b) has suggested that increased vote proportions for incumbent House candidates during the 1960s and 1970s have not resulted in greater electoral safety, primarily because of greater observed volatility in interelection vote swings occurring during the same era. Using data on House elections from 1824 to 1978, we find that both "marginal" and "safe" incumbents are much more vulnerable to electoral defeat during the 19th century than during the 20th century. This pattern seems to be explained by greater homogeneity of interelection vote swings during the 20th century. Overall, our results lend strong support to Jacobson's assertion that the meaning of electoral marginality varies substantially over time.

What affects Americans knowledge of the partisan makeup of the House of Representatives? Using National Election Studies from 1960 to 1984, we find that two sets of factors help explain what people know about party control of the lower chamber of the national legislature. The first reflects personal variables usually used to account for levels of political knowledge: education, gender, race, strength of partisanship, political interest, and media dependence. The second set includes contextual factors of U.S. politics, including divided party control of national elective institutions, divided control of the legislature itself, and whether elections change party control of the presidency. Contextual factors' importance as predictors of information show they merit closer study in future attempts to understand the dynamics of political information.

As part of a larger effort to develop an independent system-level theory of interest groups, we explore the system-level trait of interest group diversity. A model of state interest group diversity is developed and tested with state data from the early 1980s. We find that interest group diversity is related to economic diversity and economic size, whereas its relation to wealth and to the number of interest groups contrasts sharply with much of our conventional wisdom about state interest groups. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding state interest group politics and outline how they contribute to a larger research program on state interest group systems.

Rawls stabilizes and secures his liberal institutions with a stategy of reconciliation that progressively narrows and even closes the spaces of politics and contest. But the democratic politics and pluralism to which Rawls himself is committed thrive best in a setting that resists the closure that he postulates as their necessary condition. Rawls' theorization of punishment illustrates the point. In his effort to justify punishment and move it beyond the reach of contestation, Rawls is driven back to a discourse that his own theory of (distributive) justice disavows, the discourse of antecedent moral worth: Criminals are demonized as "bad characters" and misfits are viewed by Rawlsian citizens as outside agitators. These impulses touch every politics but they are aggravated, not alleviated, by Rawls' effort to contain contestation.

This paper examines how the problem of cyclical majorities affects the logical structure of the liberal model of democracy. I argue that Riker's (1982) defense of liberalism is unsatisfying in that it ultimately depends upon the hope that cycles are not common events. As an alternative solution, I propose that the assumptions of a properly construed liberal model imply conditions that prohibit the occurrence of the voter's paradox. I conclude that liberalism continues to survive despite the fact that its internal structure depends upon the transitivity of collective preferences, and that this fact in turn provides a theoretical foundation for pursuing more robust or "populistic" conceptions of democracy.

In the study of American Government, there have been few ideas more persistent or provocative than the notion that the Constitution was designed to restrict governmental responsiveness. At least since Beard, critics of the American system have argued that widely supported progressive policies are thwarted by the institutional features of Madisonian democracy. Since progressive policies include efforts to make income distribution more equal, advocates of "participative" or "expansive" democracy naturally hypothesize that greater institutional responsiveness will lead to greater social and economic equality. It is argued here that this empirical question cannot be constructively addressed within the conceptual frameworks of either the progressive adherents of such reforms or of most established rational choice perspectives. I construct a model to indicate how the effect of institutional responsiveness on equality depends on the distribution across classes of political participation, the differences between positive and defensive political action, and the costs of lobbying movements.

Based on a representative sample of 504 respondents from the Moscow oblast of the Soviet Union, gender differences in both political and non- political variables (which may serve to explain the connection between gender and the political) were investigated. With controls for age, edu cation, income and membership in the Communist party, women were found to be more favorable to the Communist party, less in favor of radical change, less politically interested and efficacious, more likely to vote but less likely to be involved in unconventional participation. Several inter vening variables were examined as possible explanations for these gender differences, including feminist orientation, compassion, religiosity and fatigue.