Political Research Quarterly

Of all the strategies for civilization reviewed by Albert O. Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests, one is distinctly missing: that civilization might be rendered more decent and peaceful by cultivating the civilizing emotions based upon love and pity. The reason, it seems, is not the fear that these civilizing emotions are too weak to quell rage, greed, and violence, but too strong, too likely to cause problems of their own, which is why Kant writes of "pathological love." Turning to Greek tragedy, I argue that it provides a paideia in pity, an account of what it would take to educate and channel the civilizing emotions, so that they might foster civilization. Here is an alternate account of what it might take to tame civilization and its discontents, an account neglected in modem political theory.

Edmund Burke's involvement in Indian politics forced him to reconsider one of the central concepts of his political thought: his theory of trusteeship. During the course of the debate over India, Burke came to realize that the theory could not work there because the Indians shared few political values with their English rulers and were unable to call those rulers to account. He, therefore, revised his approach to appeal to a natural law standard and to make the English Parliament and people surrogates for the Indians. However, these devices also failed, for the former proved unenforceable and the latter was undermined by the House of Lords' acquittal of Hastings. The theory of trusteeship thus proved to be critically defective, for, without greater popular accountability than Bruke was willing to permit, it failed to provide government which was both effective and responsible.

A set of concepts for the comparison of the institutional roles of judiciaries is used to sketch a preliminary theory of the interactions of courts and crisis regimes. Case studies of the Philippines, India, and Pakistan supreme courts in the 1970s explore how their crisis regimes responded to the independence, impartiality, scope, and depths of their supreme courts' decision making and how those courts were or were not able to maintain their performance of other functions and their institutional positions relative to the crisis rulers. The case studies suggest that the most usual relations between courts and crisis regimes involve efforts to restrict the scope and depth, in preference to the independence and impartiality of the courts' decision making. In addition, the judiciary backs down when faced with opportunities to assert its authority by challenging the legitimacy of the crisis regime and exerting its regime limiter/citizen rights protector function.

Over the past two decades there has been a rapid increase in the number of amicus curiae briefs filed in the Supreme Court. Some cases studied suggest that these briefs may have a substantial effect on the Supreme Court's decisions, but no systematic studies have examined the efficacy of such briefs. The present study utilizes a precision matching strategy to determine if litigants supported by amici have a greater chance of success in the Supreme Court than comparable litigants in matched pairs who have no amicus support. The analysis uncovers no evidence that support from amici substantially increases the chance of success of the supported litigants.

We investigate the gender gap in policy preferences among political contributors. We find a bivariate gap in both parties, with Democratic women being more liberal than Democratic men, and Republican women more conservative than Republican men. This reverse gender gap among Republican contributors is explained by the greater appeal of Pat Robertson to women. After controls for religious variables, Republican women contributors are found to be more liberal than their male counterparts.

This article sheds light on the relationship between municipal electoral characteristics, progressive reform adoption, and the presence of machine political systems for the period between 1910 and 1930. Machine politicians and their supporters did stand in the way of reform, but not everywhere. A two-stage model suggests that the electoral factors contributing to machine presence are not exactly the same as those contributing to resistance to reform. Ethnic factors figure prominently in the results. Cities with high and increasing percentages of Irish immigrants resisted reforms even in cities where there was no machine. Literacy rates and the availability of patronage are important to the presence of machine organization, but make no independent difference to reform resistance. Receptivity to reform was frequently exogenous to whether a city was machine dominated.

Previous accounts of the determinants of women's service on city councils focused on the degree of women's representation. In this paper we suggest that understanding women's representation on these legislative bodies requires that attention also be paid to potential differences between communities where women have been able to break the cycle of exclusion from those where they have not. This paper compares two different measures of women's council representation using both logit and the OLS regression. The results indicate that, alone, electoral structure is not a significant explanatory factor in understanding either the presence of women on city councils or the extent of women's representation on these legislative bodies. However, the size of the legislative body has a significant effect which, except among district election cities, largely improves the likelihood of electing a woman to the council (as compared to improving the degree of women's representation). Other results indicate significant regional disparities which favor the Midwest and West over the Northeast and South.

Cities were the source of a substantial amount of policy activity regarding recycling during the 1980s. This paper explores a set of variables, based on alternative conceptions of municipal policymaking, to explore differences between cities adopting residential curbside recycling programs and cities not adopting such policy changes. Probit analysis finds empirical support for explanations of policy adoption based on need, party competition, fiscal capacity and interest groups organization.

This note develops a county-level measure of state legislative party competition for the periods between 1968-73, 1974-79, and 1980-85. The validity of the measure is evaluated through confirmatory factor analysis, a comparison to Ranney's state-level measure, and through an examination of the county-level data. In all cases, the county-level measure shows it is a valid indicator of party competition at the state legislative level.