Studies of the effects of interest groups on congressional roll-call voting typically view party and ideology as competing factors and rely on a factoral model of interests or a sectoral model including only interest groups with a direct stake in the vote. We depart from that strategy in several ways. We define interest groups at the level of Standard Industrial Classification two-digit codes and observe the universe of interests. For 1979–90, we use measures of geographically and nongeographically based economic interests to estimate the representative's party and ideology. We also consider the factor endowments of individuals within a district to examine their impact on floor votes. We then investigate the influence of these interests on members' party affiliation and ideology, as well as a pool of five floor votes on foreign trade, using instrumental variables for party and ideology. Economic interests account for a substantial portion of the variance in all cases, and models that also include other explanatory variables are highly accurate in estimating floor votes.

Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sydney Verba's Designing Social Inquiry exploits the metaphor of researcher-as-statistician to develop guidelines for conducting social scientific research that are allegedly applicable to all empirical investigations. Their approach has sharp and often unflattering implications for case studies and similar research strategies. Because their statistical worldview is unable to make sense of important aspects of case study research or of the importance that is sometimes attached to the findings of a single case, their argument seemingly casts doubt on the wisdom of producing or consuming such studies.I argue that the foundation of classical statistics and the epistemology of Carl Hempel and Karl Popper is an inadequate and misleading basis for a critical evaluation of case studies. I then present examples of research that are not easily accommodated within the authors' framework and sketch the elements of an alternative epistemological framework rooted in a “pattern” model of explanation. The latter is a standpoint that is much more helpful in understanding and criticizing case studies than the framework presented in Designing Social Inquiry.

How can protectionism and “free” trade succeed one another? Our answer focuses on the changing balance of private actors' political demands. These actors acquire interests in tariff policies because their assets are spatially concentrated, and trade in these assets is subject to various limitations. Actors in regions experiencing no new investment in an established industry (“old” regions) have interests that sometimes differ from those in regions where there is new investment. We show that old regions have no reason to be involved in tariff politics at business cycle peaks; during troughs, whether a state becomes more or less protectionist depends, ceteris paribus, on the relative political strength of old import-competing and old exporting interests. If old import-competing industries outweigh the old exporters, then protection will tend to increase at the trough and decrease at the peak of a business cycle; the opposite result occurs when old exporters are more influential.

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Although the theory of hegemonic stability has attracted an impressive array of adherents, current formulations leave many conceptual issues unresolved. Existing formulations also fail to draw from the theory any implications concerning the process by which a hegemonic state creates and maintains a regime. As an example, Great Britain is generally agreed to have been hegemonic in the nineteenth century, but Britain's behavior was generally inconsistent with that implied by a theory of hegemonic stability. I advance an alternative set of explanations for changes in international tariff levels based on the notion of a “political business cycle.”