Political Research Quarterly

Machiavelli is best known for his bold realism, and The Prince is a self-conscious alternative to the moral teachings of Christian and classical thought. The author demonstrates, however, that most of Machiavelli's famous maxims are in fact derivative from ancient authors. Given the similarities between The Prince and classical texts, Machiavelli's realism must be reexamined. The author analyzes chapter 3 of The Prince to show that Machiavelli appropriates the decisive rhetorical strategy of many religious texts by appealing to an inevitable fear as the basis for his new moral outlook. If Machiavelli appropriates the methods he criticizes in others, then this article serves as an invitation to read both Machiavelli and classical thinkers with a renewed and genuine interest in the originality and realism of each.

There is a positive relationship between how much we talk about politics and current events and how much we participate in civic activities. However, analytical biases make it difficult to accurately estimate the causal influence of talk on individual behavior. Moreover, existing data sources do not include information on the mechanisms that might explain how individuals translate talk into action. These problems are addressed with new data that were collected through a natural experiment. The results show that civic discussions promote civic participation largely because during such discussions we are recruited to become involved.

This article examines whether political accountability—the heart of a functioning democracy—is enhanced by citizen participation in voluntary associations. The authors contend that involvement in associations offers an easy avenue for acquiring political information, thereby aiding citizens in evaluating the president on the basis of the policies produced by the president. General Social Survey data from ten years, paired with presidential policy liberalism scores, are used to test the key hypothesis. The authors find support for the idea that membership in voluntary associations facilitates a more sophisticated policy accountability among citizens.

Scholars know that institutions such as corporations and nonprofits make up much of the lobbying community, yet there is no general theory as to why these organizations, which are not primarily established for advocacy, would ever choose to do it. By integrating the literatures on advocacy in economics, sociology, and political science, the authors propose a theoretical framework using the broad dimensions of organizational mission and external environment that they test with data on charter school advocacy from a four-state survey. The results support the authors' framework and provide greater insight into advocacy choices regarding venue shopping, tactical choices, and resource allocation.

This article examines how the presence and usage of the initiative process impact the electoral chances of state legislators. Using individual-level data on state legislators across the states from 1970 to 1989, the authors find that the presence and frequency of use of the initiative do not hurt legislators' electoral chances. In fact, under certain institutional settings, the initiative process can have a small beneficial impact on legislator's reelection fortunes. In addition, the initiative can insulate legislators' electoral chances from national economic conditions. The authors argue these findings are compatible with the notion of state legislators adapting to the initiative process.

The lack of female politicians has been attributed to a lack of female candidates for office. However, the reason why there are so few female candidates is not clear. The author examines whether differences in fund-raising perceptions and effort between female and male state legislative candidates contribute to the lack of female candidates. The results indicate that women do tend to be more concerned about fund-raising, as is evidenced by greater effort devoted to this campaign function as compared to their male counterparts. Women use more techniques and rely on more sources to secure funds for their campaigns. This suggests that part of the reason women are reluctant to run for office may be due to the fact that they will have to devote more effort to a task candidates generally find distasteful.

Conventional wisdom has long held that Republicans are advantaged when partisan labels are removed from the ballot. However, in this article, the authors argue that the advantage gained from nonpartisan elections favors the minority party because the low-cost partisan cue is hidden from voters who otherwise would be inclined to support majority party candidates. The authors test this hypothesis using aggregate-level data from state legislative races in nonpartisan Nebraska and partisan Kansas, mayoral races in nonpartisan Phoenix and partisan Tucson, and California statewide races including the nonpartisan contest for superintendent of public instruction. Findings indicate that nonpartisan elections have partisan consequences but that the effect is in favor of the minority party rather than the Republican Party.

This article investigates the policy opportunities in presidential honeymoons. Specifically, after reviewing a standard (pivotal politics) model of lawmaking where presidents' election results are treated as exogenous, we develop a (honeymoon politics) model in which a president's election results are treated as endogenous—that is, where legislators' positions factor in the president's electoral results among their constituents. Applying both models to every newly elected president and corresponding Senate since 1932, comparative statics show that presidents' policy-making prospects always improve in “honeymoon” settings, though this effect varies depending on lawmakers' preference distribution, presidents' electoral coalition, and the threshold required to invoke cloture.

The debate between which model, directional or proximity, better describes citizens' political behavior engages scholars because the former constitutes a serious challenge to long-standing, Downsian, spatial logic. Despite an engaging series of empirical tests, scholars comparing the two models continue to disagree about which model performs better. Noting experimental methods remain conspicuously absent from methods deployed to date, the author describes an experiment designed to settle key assumption debates and measure subjects' reactions to candidates in contexts in which the models make very different predictions. The author reports results vindicating Downs's assertion that proximity matters and direction does not.

While the election of racial/ethnic minority lawmakers has diversified American legislative institutions, scholars continue to find evidence of racial backlash in public policy decisions. This seems to undermine the Madisonian conception of the ability of minority interests to offset majoritarian resentment through representation and raises the question, Can minority group representatives influence policy decisions in majoritarian institutions? Using evidence from the American states, this study shows that the fastest-growing ethnic minority group, Latinos, do benefit from descriptive representation, as increases in Latino representation and legislative incorporation offset the negative effects of Latino population size on social welfare policy.

The growth of the Latino population and the increasing political importance of this group leads to questions about the potential political importance of this group. As such, it is important to gain a better understanding of political attitudes among Latinos. This study focuses on the relationship between Latino acculturation and attitudes toward immigration-and non-immigration-related public policies. The results indicate that Latino attitudes toward immigration related issues as well as other more general policy items vary as a function of one's level of acculturation.

Researchers continue to disagree over how minority rights fare in direct democracy elections. The authors enter this debate by reviewing previous research and outlining more systematic criteria for assessing minority rights in the context of direct democracy. In applying these criteria, an analysis of direct democracy contests involving gay and lesbian civil rights suggests that minorities are more likely to lose in these contests. The authors suggest that the conclusions of previous researchers may have been premature and that their criteria should be applied to other minority groups.

As the racial composition of the United States becomes increasingly diverse, scholars have begun to examine whether interminority, or rainbow, coalitions are feasible. The power thesis suggests that lower levels of social distance between Anglos and Latinos will make the formation of Anglo-Latino coalitions more likely than black-Latino coalitions. This hypothesis is reexamined using fifteen hundred school board election results. The findings offer little evidence for the formation of Anglo-Latino coalitions. There are, however, indications that Anglo-black coalitions form when an area becomes populated by Latino noncitizens, possibly due to the increased social distance this causes between Latinos and other racial/ethnic communities.

The authors contrast the 2002 Senate and 2003 gubernatorial runoffs in Louisiana, noting that the margin and the breadth of victory were greater for a gubernatorial candidate who enjoyed less political resources than her copartisan. The authors argue that the GOP's southern strategy has constrained its ability to diversify its coalition and contributed to the defeat of its nonwhite candidate for governor. Using aggregate parish level data and individual survey responses, the authors demonstrate that the customary polarization of whites in favor of Republican nominees was undermined in the 2003 election. The authors offer some thoughts on the implications of the findings.

Recent scholarship on unilateral presidential actions has recast our understanding of modern presidential policy making. However, our knowledge on this issue remains incomplete. In this article, the authors expand the literature on the unilateral presidency by exploring presidential proclamations from 1977 to 2005 (Presidents Carter to Bush) and identifying the importance of these tools as a policy-making instrument in expanding presidential power. By carefully examining the use of presidential proclamations, the authors discover that a majority of presidential proclamations involve presidential authority under congressionally delegated powers of international trade (and presidents most often use this authority to propose new trade arrangements or modify existing trade agreements), and they use this power in coordination with (but largely independent of) Congress. Presidents also use proclamations on the issue of national parks and federal lands exclusively to initiate new federal arrangements to establish new national parks or protections for federal lands, often against the will of Congress.