This paper is a revision of the Presidential Address delivered to the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Los Angeles, California, September 10, 1970. It identifies nine aspects of political theories: storage and retrieval of memories; assistance to insight; simplification of knowledge; heuristic effectiveness; self-critical cognition; normative awareness of values; scientifically testable knowledge; pragmatic skills; and wisdom, or second-order knowledge of what contexts are worth choosing—a wisdom subject to the possibility of radical restructuring. These nine aspects of theory form an integrated production cycle of knowledge. “Scientific” and “humanistic” political theorists need each other to understand the central task of politics: the collective self-determination of societies. To appraise this steering performance of political systems, large amounts of empirical data as indicators of social performance are indispensable. Political science has grown in knowledge of cases, data, research methods, and sensitivity to problems of disadvantaged groups and of the individual. It is learning to recognize qualities and patterns, verify the limited truth content of theories, and be more critical of its societies and of itself. It needs to increase research on implementation of insights, on positive proposals for reform, changes in political wisdom, and on the abolition of poverty and large-scale war. For these tasks, cognitive contributions from political theory are indispensable; working to make them remains a moral commitment.

Arguments are presented for and against a series of hypotheses about the influence of the parliamentary party system on the stability of governments, and the hypotheses are tested against data on 196 governments in parliamentary democracies since 1945. A strong relation is found between the duration of governments and the fragmentation of the parliamentary party system and of the government parties, but the fragmentation of the opposition parties seems not to affect stability. One-party governments are more stable than coalition governments, and majority governments more than minority governments. The ideological dispersion of the parties—in the whole parliament, in the government, or in the opposition—does not explain stability any better than fragmentation, which is based upon only the number and sizes of parties; but the proportion of seats held by ‘anti-system’ parties (communists and neo-fascists, mainly) is a good indicator of stability. The best explanation of government stability found here is the combined linear influence of the size of the anti-system parties and the fragmentation of the pro-system parties.

The paper argues that ethical discourse is intimately involved in the research literature of social science, and especially of political science, but is relegated to a subsidiary position. It therefore shares some of the vagueness, flexibility, and potential self-contradiction of the discourse of everyday life, rather than being sharpened by rational criticism. The norms governing scientific discourse provide not only for empirical testing, but also for rational criticism in the formulation of theories; an analogous type of criticism is shared by legal discourse. Some of the norms of scientific communication may be transferred to ethics by the specification of rules for ethical argument, requiring that arguments derive from previously specified, clear and consistent “ethical hypotheses.” Within such rules, ethical systems formulated by social scientists and philosophers may be compared critically. Systems amenable to such comparison include those of welfare economics, cost-benefit analysis, and formal democratic theory. The discourse embodying this argument and criticism is particularly appropriate within the normative tradition of political science. Its possible benefits include clarity about our valuations; communication among disciplines that enlarges the perspectives of each discipline; and a more independent, self-conscious examination within the university of the criteria for policy formation.

This article contends that the voting behavior of individuals depends not only upon their own traits but also upon the social context within which it takes place. Left voting depends upon the extent of class consciousness of the workers, where class consciousness is defined as the marginal rate of change of left voting when social structure changes. Marxist theory does not predict that workers will always vote for left parties but only that they will do so when the class is politically organized. According to this theory, the behavior of individuals depends upon the characteristics of the class and not vice versa. Several models can be constructed on the basis of these hypotheses. The choice of the proper function relating the variables is crucial for theory construction. This choice must be theoretically determined, i.e., it must follow from the premises of the theory. However, several theories may equally well explain the reality and the choice on the basis of empirical criteria is not always possible.

This paper starts from the premise that traditional views of political roles among married couples emphasize role-differentiation, leading to masculine superiority; more recent perspectives stress role-sharing, leading to equality. The implications for individual political participation and political socialization vary according to the prevalence of and conditions surrounding the two patterns. Interview data from a national sample of middle-aged couples reveal substantial equality with respect to command over political resources, attention paid to politics, and manifest political participation. Levels of equality remain high under a variety of controls. When inequalities do exist, male dominance is more common, but the extent of that dominance varies across the range of political labor. Superiority of either parent in one arena tends to occur in others also, suggesting fixed modes of behavior. The relative advantage in education and personal efficacy which one partner holds over the other vitally affects the political advantage. These factors and mother's employment status operate more strongly among working class than middle class couples. Age of children has no appreciable impact. To achieve political parity or superiority mothers ordinarily need extraordinary resources to overcome the built-in constraints of culturally-defined sex roles.

This paper seeks to clarify choices in income maintenance, not to advocate a particular policy alternative. It makes explicit the trade-offs between competing objectives that are required of policymakers, but often obscured by polemics about the advantages or disadvantages of particular transfer mechanisms (e.g., negative income taxes, child allowances, demogrants). The paper first presents a critique of contemporary public debate on welfare reform and antipoverty cash transfer schemes. The next section distinguishes among the goals of reforming the present system of public assistance, substantially reducing American poverty, and making both the tax system and the social distribution of income more equitable. There follows a discussion of six criteria for evaluating and comparing alternative measures to one or another of these goals. The paper concludes with an application of the evaluative scheme to the welfare reform alternatives considered by the Nixon Administration in the spring of 1969.

The article defines indirect government as self-government through intermediaries authorized by the people, as opposed to the direct rule of the people. It requires that the people abstain from government after authorizing it, and hence that political debate center on whether or how the government is representative, not on what it should do. Almost all modern government is indirect and based on the indirect question of representation. Hobbes, though not the founder of indirect government, was the founder of the science by which men could be induced to consent to be governed not in accordance with their opinions of good and bad but on the basis of their passions, particularly fear. To achieve a form of consent that was voluntary and yet not based on opinion, he was forced to understand consent almost as resigning to the inevitable, yet his purpose in attempting to expel opinions from politics was to clear away divisions of opinion, especially religious opinion, and thus remove the obstacle to progress in human power. Hobbes' doctrine and modern representative government must both be understood from the historical standpoint of Hobbes' hostility to Christianity.

The paper contends that political democracy is a matter of degree, a variable property of political institutions. An index for this property, Q, measures the extent to which complex institutions approximate a generalized definition of majority-rule (e.g. that losing coalitions must be smaller than winning or blocking ones.) This index for degrees of political democracy is in turn treated as a function of simpler structural variables, such as decision-rule, the sizes of veto groups, the sizes of groups excluded from decision-making, and simple patterns of representation. Finally, it is suggested that there is no necessity that more democracy produce more satisfaction with outcomes, but that this property does set a “maxi-min” constraint on rates of satisfaction: the more democratic an institution, the larger is the smallest possible proportion of a group (or “domain”) which can be satisfied with any single (binary) outcome.

This paper, based on a statewide survey of 907 Florida high school seniors, reveals that self-reported marijuana use, regardless of cause, has social and political implications, though not at the high level of association suggested by the stereotype of a pot-smoking, hippie, political radical. Demographically, the user is typically an urban white male from a wealthier and better educated family. Marijuana users are differentiated from non-users in their more negative views toward the most proximate authority structures and their desire for changes in laws regulating behaviors commonly associated with youth. Marijuana use was not associated with broader social concerns or political ideology, and was only tenuously associated with political alienation. The relationship between measures of social discontent and political alienation reveals a more homogeneous pattern among users than non-users, thus supporting Goode's “subcommunity” hypothesis.

This paper develops several simple multivariate statistical models and applies them to explain fluctuations in the aggregate vote for the United States House of Representatives, over the period 1896-1964. The basic hypothesis underlying these models is that voters are rational in at least the limited sense that their decisions as to whether to vote for an incumbent administration depend on whether its performance has been “satisfactory” according to some simple standard. Because of data limitations, the analysis focuses on measures of economic performance, treating other aspects of an incumbent's performance, such as its handling of foreign affairs, as stochastic perturbations of the underlying relationship to be estimated. (Examination of residuals suggests this assumption is not unreasonable, at least during peacetime.) Possible effects of coattails from presidential races, of incumbency, and of secular trends in the underlying partisanship of the electorate are also taken into account. The models, estimated by maximum-likelihood methods, are found to be successful. Close to two-thirds of the variance in the vote series is accounted for, and the structural coefficients of the models are of the correct signs and of quite reasonable magnitudes. Economic growth, as measured by the changes in real per capita income, is the major economic variable; unemployment or inflation have little independent effect. Presidential coattails are also found to be of some importance.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the agrarian base of Indian communism through the use of statistical data and techniques in which the Communist vote over three general elections since 1957 is correlated with 35 largely socio-economic variables taken from Indian census data. The results indicate that two of these variables—landlessness in densely populated areas—explain a significant percentage of the variance in the Indian Communist vote. It is further suggested on the basis of statistical data accumulated by other investigators for Java and the Philippines that the same two variables are highly correlated with Communist strength in other parts of Asia.

In the climate of ethnic insecurity present in Nigeria in 1964, workers tended to support ethnic over labor parties. A small fraction of workers who were cross-pressured between their ethnic and their labor loyalties however, tended to report that they supported both ethnic and labor parties. These are called the “incon-sistent.” Looking more closely at this group, it was possible to distinguish between those who were descriptively inconsistent (they would describe themselves as supporting an ethnic and a labor party at the same time); and those who were prescriptively inconsistent (they would prescribe support for a labor party while actually supporting an ethnic party). Though descriptive inconsistency varied inversely with political information, prescriptive inconsistency varied directly with it. The immediate political significance of the inconsistents lay in their confusing the predictions of labor leaders who were counting on their support. Beyond that, however, it may be suggested that the inconsistents added to the felt unpredictability of rapidly changing, plural societies such as Nigeria.

This paper observes that analyses of the process of decentralization often fail to recognize that constraints are imposed by the nature of the organization being examined. In particular, the analysis of an organization producing economic goods can be misleading if applied, without qualification, to organizations producing government goods. Taking as its point of departure the analysis of an economic organization, the article focuses on three salient differences in the operation of the two types of organizations. First, in the economic organization both its personnel and its clients agree on the items produced. In the government organization there may be substantial disagreement about what should be produced. Second, in the economic organization the information flows will generally be of a compact numerical form. In the government organization the information flow will often not take a numerical form. Information transmission will be less dense and, therefore, more expensive. Third, in the economic organization prices act as “sufficient statistics,” which completely measure the organization's performance of its objective (profit maximization). For many government organizations no such sufficient statistics exist.

This research note proposes a model in which an “equilibrium” share of the vote figures as a measurable quantity. Variants of the model are fitted to election data for the U. S. House of Representatives.

This research note attempts to test the relationship between levels of socio-economic development and variation in political democracy with data gathered in Japanese prefectures. The operational measures of socio-economic development are the levels of urban-industrialism and social overhead capital, which are derived from the results of factor analysis of fifteen socio-economic indicators. Three measures of political democracy are obtained by factor-analyzing political indicators: they are the degrees of political competition, political participation, and representation equality. The analysis of the data reveals weak relationships between the two measures of socio-economic development and the three measures of political democracy. This finding challenges the validity of some generalizations regarding economic-political linkages previously reported in many cross-national studies. In the context of within-nation comparisons, this study suggests the need for a re-evaluation of the relationship between socio-economic development and political democracy.