Sources of opposition and support for woman suffrage are analyzed with the use of the responses of male voters to constitutional referenda held in six key states during the Progressive era. Traditional axes of opposition and support for suffrage are examined, establishing that stable sources of suffrage support originate most often from Protestant and northern European constituencies (with the exception of Germans), whereas southern Europeans and Catholics (except for Germans) generally show no consistent patterns. Opposition to suffrage is most constant from Germans—both Catholic and Protestant—and from urban constituencies. A structural model indicating the greater importance of prohibition as an intervening variable compared to partisanship or turnout at the grass-roots level of voting behavior explicates the sources of direct and indirect support for suffrage while it also demonstrates the influence of educational commitment in determining suffrage voting patterns. Except in the West, opposition to suffrage was intense and greater at the grass-roots level than among legislative elites. The ultimate success of the federal amendment is discussed in the context of state referenda, the changed political climate after American entry into World War I, and the innovative efforts of state legislatures to grant “presidential” suffrage, thereby circumventing what proved to be the difficult referenda route.

When an American looks at British politics, one of his first questions is likely to be, “Where are your pressure groups?” Since the subject has hardly been studied and most works on British government largely ignore it, he may feel some surprise when he finds that, even if compared with American examples, pressure groups in Britain are numerous, massive, well-organized, and highly effective. In this article I wish in the first place simply to sketch the pattern of pressure group activity in Britain and to illustrate the influence of pressure politics on the policy of British governments in recent years. This cannot be done, however, if the analysis is confined to pressure groups alone. For their aims, methods, and effectiveness are profoundly affected by the context within which they act. We all recognize, for instance, the differences from the American pattern of pressure politics which result from the discipline of British parties and the centralized power of cabinet government.

I am very grateful to Dean Burnham for his labor in checking out a number of “plausible rival hypotheses” that I proposed some years ago might account for the bundle of changes in American voting statistics he had first described in his seminal 1965 paper. I had pointed out these possibilities with some vigor, since if they could be shown to have empirical merit, they would seem to put a rather different light on those historical changes, relative to the interpretations Burnham originally provided.

I now read the current paper as indicating that for the areas covered, changes in registration practices do appear to have affected turnout adversely, following one of our original rival hypotheses. It also suggests, however, that this registration change does not begin to account for all of the decline in turnout that occurred around 1900, particularly in states like Pennsylvania. It goes on to imply that some other familiar factors affecting turnout, such as party competition, also contributed to that change. In effect, the turnout decline not accounted for by structural change seems greatest where the realignment of 1896 moved states from competitive to rather noncompetitive status (the more frequent case); but states moved by the same events from noncompetitive into competitive status, like Missouri and, in fact, numerous other upper midwestern states, do not show the same pattern as Pennsylvania.

All this is well and good, particularly as Burnham in his penultimate paragraph sets aside the 1965 conspiratorial interpretation of the change that had originally prompted our own brief inquiries as to probable causes.

Based upon a survey of the USSR in December 1989, Finifter and Mickiewicz (1992) found that respondents with higher education were less inclined than those with lower education to support individual, versus state, responsibility, and that supporters of individual responsibility were slightly less likely than those favoring state responsibility to support political change. A recent critique challenged this analysis, arguing that higher education is always associated with support for individual responsibility and that preference for individual responsibility is always positively associated with support for political reform, and reported findings to that effect. This analysis resolves these discrepant findings and clarifies why they occurred. A replication using data from 40 societies demonstrates that the relationship between education and locus of responsibility is not universal; indeed, it appears in only a few countries. Moreover, large differences in sampling and measurement procedures and extraordinary changes over time in the real world contributed to the differences between our findings and those of our critics.

How does ethnoracial demography relate to public goods provision? Many studies find support for the hypothesis that diversity is related to inefficient outcomes by comparing diverse and homogeneous communities. We distinguish between homogeneity of dominant and disadvantaged groups and argue that it is often impossible to identify the effects of diversity due to its collinearity with the share of disadvantaged groups. To disentangle the effects of these variables, we study new data from Brazilian municipalities. While it is possible to interpret the prima facie negative correlation between diversity and public goods as supportive of the prominent “deficit” hypothesis, a closer analysis reveals that, in fact, more homogeneous Afro-descendant communities have lower provision. While we cannot rule out that diversity is consequential in other contexts, our results cast doubt on the reliability of previous findings related to the benefits of local ethnoracial homogeneity for public outcomes.

This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to study the features of mass purges in authoritarian regimes. We contend that mass purges are an instrument of top-down accountability meant to motivate and screen a multitude of agents (e.g., single-party members, state bureaucrats). We show that the set of purged agents is well delineated in mild purges, whereas no performance indicator is a guarantee of safety in violent purges. The proportion of purged agents is non-monotonic in the intensity of violence. For the autocrat, increasing the intensity of violence always raises performance, but it improves the selection of subordinates only if violence is low to begin with. Hence, even absent de jure checks, the autocrat is de facto constrained by her subordinates’ strategic behavior. We use historical (including the Soviet purges and the Cultural Revolution) and recent (the Erdogan purge) events to illustrate our key theoretical findings.

Recent studies of public opinion on Vietnam reveal a surprising positive association between socioeconomic status (SES) and support for “tougher” military policies. In an effort to extend and understand such findings, this study reanalyzes several public opinion surveys conducted during the Korean War. The demographic correlates of military policy preferences are found to be similar to those reported for the Vietnamese War, but the Korean data qualify the proposition that higher SES is associated with support for “tougher” policies in two respects: (1) policy preferences of the Korean public did not appear to be organized on a simple “soft-to-tough” dimension—those who supported escalation were only slightly more likely than average to oppose disengagement; (2) while SES was positively associated with opposing disengagement, it was not associated with supporting escalation. Factor analyses of several surveys reveal two distinct, orthogonal dimensions that underlay military policy preferences: an “isolationist-to-interventionist” dimension associated with opposition to disengagement; and a “trust-to-distrust of the Truman Administration” dimension associated with support for escalation. Respondents are subdivided into four types in accordance with their positions on these dimensions. The demographic characteristics and military preferences of the four types are analyzed, and the overall findings arc discussed with reference to Vietnam as well as public opinion on military policy more generally.

In an article published in the December 30, 1967 issue of the Dutch weekly magazine Vrij Nederland, Mr. Frans Grosfeld suggested the following modification of the procedure of parliamentary representation of political parties. Instead of the conventional method of allocating to each party a number of representatives proportional to the number of votes cast for the party, he proposed to allocate a number of representatives which is proportional to the square of the number of votes. Thus, when there are n parties and when p1, …, pn are the proportions of the total number of votes obtained by these parties, the idea is to allocate a fraction qi of the representatives to the ith party determined by

Mr. Grosfeld made this suggestion for the Dutch political system, because in his view n is so large and even the largest pi belongs to a minority party, so that on many occasions several months of negotiations were necessary to obtain a coalition cabinet of one form or another. By squaring the pi's one obtains much larger relative differences between the larger and the smaller parties, and one party or a pair of politically related parties then has a much better chance of obtaining a parliamentary majority. Also, the system (1.1) provides an incentive for parties to merge, which contributes to a reduction of the degree to which the country is politically divided. This system should be contrasted with another system which is applied on a rather large scale, viz., that of declining any seat to those parties whose pi is less than a pre-assigned fraction θ (for example, θ = .03).

The political transition in Spain provides a rare opportunity to monitor popular attitudes toward alternative regimes. Through the analysis of national surveys conducted in 1978, 1979–80, and 1984, we first establish that the Spanish public distinguishes not only between successive governments—the Franquist and the center-right and socialist governments of the post-Franco period—but also between Francoism and democracy as political systems. Second, we show that during the post-Franco era the criteria of legitimacy have begun to shift from formal political to social democratic values. These analytical results are achieved by comparing standard with less orthodox measures of political legitimacy and performance, and by revising conventional theories of system support. Third, we estimate the determinants of support for and opposition to the two regimes. The Franquist system remains more polarizing than does the democratic system; the constituencies of the democratic regime are considerably broader and more heterogeneous. However, while the new democratic state is comparatively inclusive and autonomous, low rates of political participation and changes in traditional socialist ideology have made the institutional bases of legitimacy ambiguous.

Recent comparative, quantitative studies of state politics conclude that party competition and other political variables have little or no impact on important state policies such as per pupil expenditure, old age assistance, unemployment compensation, and aid to dependent children. These are rather unexpected and disturbing conclusions for they disconfirm relationships predicted by some of the most important theoretical formulations concerning democratic politics. Before re-examining the bases for these conclusions, a review of theory is in order.

V. O. Key, Jr., set the context for examining the effects of political variables on state policies. He stressed the importance of two-party competition, or bi-factionalism in one-party states, as a determinant of policy. Key sees the degree of party competition as crucial because it reflects the extent to which politics is organized or unorganized. Party competition by producing some semblance of an organized politics lessens the difficulty of lower status groups in sorting out political actors and issues, thereby enabling them to promote their own interests more effectively. Since state social welfare policies are undoubtedly relevant to the interests of “have-nots,” we can utilize state expenditures in this area as a measure of the success that these groups have enjoyed. Key's formulation, then, would lead to a simple two variable model:

P = e1

S = k1P + ez

Where P is inter-party competition, S is expenditure on social welfare, and e1 and ez represent error or variables left out of the system, and k1 is a constant.

Since the 1970s, Latino politics research has evolved, alternately responding to real-world political events and demographic changes, embracing new and emerging trends in the broader discipline, and offering new insights of its own that contribute to the development of political science. In so doing, there have emerged both an intellectual foundation and a growing body of empirical results, each of which challenges long-held theories and findings in the discipline more broadly. Thus, Latino politics research is central in refining and broadening our understanding of American politics. Immigration, social marginality, and their uncertain status as a racial or ethnic minority make this population unique and raise important obstacles in applying existing interpretations and orthodoxies from the discipline's other traditions to this emerging and rapidly growing segment of American society. The major contributions of this line of inquiry are identified in five key areas: pluralism, group identity and mobilization, political participation, institutions and representation, and assimilation. We conclude with some thoughts regarding how the evolution of American society and its Latino population will pose important questions for future generations of political scientists.

Viewing the African American experience through a systemic perspective tells much about the nature and operation of the political system. I suggest that a systemic perspective incorporates a broad range of factors that must be considered in a constitutional context that guides not only the choice of goals and strategies, but also signals the relative chances of success in the outcome of interest conflict. I focus on the capacity and limits of various strategies, and show how the political system generally militates against fundamental policy change. However, on rare occasions such policy change does occur, but it is difficult to implement and maintain, especially regarding the matter of race. Under the circumstances, I suggest that overcoming America's continuing dilemma of race requires extraordinary leadership and people of good will who are determined to see the constitutional-democratic system work.

Eligible voters have been coordinating their turnout and vote decisions for the House of Representatives in midterm elections. Coordination is a noncooperative rational expectations equilibrium. Stochastic choice models estimated using individual-level data from U.S. National Election Studies surveys of the years 1978–1998 support the coordinating model and reject a nonstrategic model. The coordinating model shows that many voters have incentives to change their votes between the presidential year and midterm after learning the outcome of the presidential election. But this mechanism alone does not explain the size of midterm cycles. The largest source of loss of support for the president's party at midterm is a regular pattern in which the median differences between the voters' ideal points and the parties' policy positions have become less favorable for the president's party than they were at the time of the presidential election (nonvoters show the same pattern). The interelection changes are not consistent with the theory of surge and decline.

Research on political tolerance has made substantial progress in recent years by improving the measures used to gauge public opinion. Much attention has been devoted to developing indicators that control for group affect. Controls for activity affect have not been pursued as vigorously. Indeed, much of the progress has been along the lines of specifying tolerance for unpopular political minorities rather than tolerance for unorthodox or threatening political activities. More generally, tolerance research has not been sensitive to the variety of contextual factors that determine citizen attitudes in civil-liberties disputes.

A new approach to measuring political tolerance is presented in this article. The measures developed in this approach disaggregate the traditional measures of tolerance (such as Stouffer's (1955) support for “a communist making a speech in your community”). In particular, scales measuring support for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of political association are presented. As multiple-indicator measures posing conflicts among values, these scales are related to traditional tolerance measures. However, because they reflect the complexity and conflict associated with actual civil-liberties disputes, they will no doubt serve as better predictors of opinions and behaviors in actual disputes.

Different beliefs about how to achieve shared goals are common in political organizations such as government agencies, campaigns, and NGOs. However, the consequences of such conflicts have not yet been explored. We develop a formal model in which a principal and an agent disagree about the right policy for achieving their shared goals. Disagreement creates a motivational problem, but we show how both observing policy outcomes and experimenting with policies can ameliorate it. We also show that the principal often defers to the agent in order to motivate him, thereby generating more informative policy outcomes and building future consensus. Most surprisingly, she sometimes allows the agent to implement his desired policy even when she is sure it is wrong, to persuade him through failure that he is mistaken. Using the model, we generate empirical implications about performance measurement and Presidential appointments in U.S. federal agencies.

Marx is surely right when he says that the way men earn their living shapes their relations to each other and to the state; but this is, of course, only the beginning. Aside from all the other non-economic factors which also have these effects, there is the matter of the source of income, the level of income, and, especially, the security of income. Moreover, each of these factors has both an individual effect, a set of influences apparent in the study of individual enrichment or immiseration, and a social effect, the influences which appear when whole societies become richer or more secure economically. So I am led to inquire into what is happening to men's political interests, behavior, and attitudes toward politics and government in an Age of Affluence, a period when men's economic security and income have increased and when, for the first time in history, it appears likely that the business cycle can now be controlled. Like Marx's, my interest is in change over time.

A continuum of voters, indexed by income, have preferences over economic outcomes. Two political parties each represent the interests of given constituencies of voters: the rich and the poor. Parties/candidates put forth policies—for instance, tax policy, where taxes finance a public good. Voters are uncertain about the theory of the economy, the function that maps policies into economic outcomes. Parties argue, as well, for theories of the economy. Each voter has a prior probability distribution over possible theories of the economy; after parties announce their theories of the economy, each voter constructs an a posteriori distribution over such theories. Suppose that voters are unsure how efficiently the government converts tax revenues into the public good. Under reasonable assumptions the party representing the rich argues that the government is very inefficient and the party representing the poor argues the opposite. What appear as liberal and conservative ideological views emerge as simply good strategies in the electoral game.

It is noteworthy that the recent spate of writings in the field of “political development” has shown a pronounced tendency to omit consideration of Latin America. Thus the “communications” and “bureaucracy” volumes in the SSRC political development series are totally innocent of Latin American data, as is an excellent recent treatment of—of all things!—the political behavior of the military in developing areas.

The Latin Americanists, for their part, have largely stressed those key features of the area's politics which have long remained constant—executive predominance, military intervention, and the influence of the peculiarities of Hispanic culture. At the same time, it is clear that the social changes usually collectively termed “modernization”—urbanization, technological borrowing, and the development of mass communications grids—together with their political correlate, the expansion of the political community to include hitherto excluded social elements, are proceeding in Latin America too. Accordingly, it becomes desirable to reexamine the “statics” of Latin American politics in the light of the “dynamics” of the processes of political development and social mobilization.

The present article attempts this reexamination with respect to the most characteristic feature of Latin American politics, the coup d'état and the establishment of a de facto military government.

A priori, mutually contradictory theses about the relations of the military coup to social development can be constructed—and indeed the literature on the subject abounds in such contradictory theses, evidence to support each of which is always available.

A curious state of affairs has developed within the academic discipline that bravely calls itself Political Science—the discipline that in a much-quoted phrase has been called “a device, invented by university teachers, for avoiding that dangerous subject politics, without achieving science.” A growing and now indeed a predominant proportion of leading American political scientists, the behavioralists, have become determined to achieve science. Yet in the process many of them remain open to the charge of strenuously avoiding that dangerous subject, politics.

Consider a recent essay on the behavioral persuasion in politics. The conclusion stresses the purpose of political inquiry: “The Goal is Man.” There is to be a commitment to some humane purpose after all. But what kind of man? A democratic kind of man, a just man, or perhaps a power-seeking man? The answer follows: “These are philosophical questions better left to the philosophers.”

“Political gerontology” is the study of the political aspects of aging and the aged. Although psychology and sociology have research subfields concerning aging, this interest is just beginning to develop systematically within political science. Consequently, this article describes theory and research from several disciplines which together provide a foundation for research in “political gerontology.” Demographic analysis suggests that old people constitute a continuously growing component of the American population. Social-psychological analysis indicates that the aged are likely to engage in substantial political activity. Political analysis suggests that old people are likely to make increasing demands upon the political system. This multidisciplinary knowledge base, combined with the predicted increasing political salience of the aging population, suggests the contours of a research agenda for “political gerontology.”