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Outcomes of summit budgeting in 1990, 1995, and 1998 demonstrate the limitations of two rational choice methodologies—spatial positioning and game payoffs. They also call into question some axioms of budget politics, to wit, that maintaining the integrity of the process itself is an important value, that it is better to conclude an agreement that can be reached when the other side goes more than halfway than it would be to walk away from the deal, and that it is better to get something done and act in a bipartisan manner than it is to act confrontationally and rely on presidential prerogative.

Henry Jones Ford published The Rise and Growth of American Politics in 1898, and in it he looked back into the eighteenth century to find meaning in the developments of the nineteenth and provide material for his forecasts of the twentieth. So, too, do we look back for meaning in our own era, and use what we find to forecast about things to come. It is worthwhile, then, to reexamine the final section of Ford's work, "Tendencies and Prospects of American Politics," because doing so helps us to understand the opportunities and pitfalls awaiting political scientists who forecast.Ford began his prophesying venture with the bold statement that there are no new ideas. In America, he claimed, we seem to be bound by the Whig theory of governance: with us, it is all separation of powers and checks and balances. We tinker with them, and we bind the constitutional fabric ever tighter to prevent abuses of power by vile politicos. "The belief that the Constitution could be tinkered into some sort of mechanical excellence" hampered British thinkers and ours as well (1898, 355). In the late eighteenth century, the British concentrated on institutional reforms, but nothing could help, because men entered politics in order to gain wealth and position.

Der Artikel analysiert das politische System und das Rechtssystem der Vereinigten Staaten am Beispiel des Amtenthebungsverfahrens gegen Präsident Bill Clinton. Er stellt sich die Frage, inwiefern der Präsident trotz der innenpolitischen Affäre weiterhin im Amt bleiben konnte, und es unabhängigen Gerichten und Strafverfolgern nicht gelungen ist, Clinton zu verurteilen. Präsident Clinton hat sich dabei zweier Mittel bedient, zum einen der Immunität vor Strafverfolgung und zum anderen der Verweigerung der Zeugenaussage, beides Mittel, die erstmals eingesetzt wurden, und die in Zukunft das Amt des Präsidenten schädigen werden (SWP-Drh)