This article attempts to fill two gaps in the literature on individual party choice. First, it deals with hitherto unanswered questions about relationships between social cleavages and party choice in Israel. Second, the article attempts to overcome methodological problems arising in the multivariate analysis of multiparty systems by utilizing Goodman's method of log-linear contingency table analysis. In the sample, occupation is not as strongly related to party choice as is a nonhierarchical dimension of economic position, sector of the economy. Ethnicity is modestly related to party choice, but hypotheses that the relationship is affected by place of birth, age, or other variables are disconfirmed. Hypotheses that the relationship between religiosity and party choice is affected by economic position are also disconfirmed. The advantages of using log linear contingency table analysis are demonstrated.

The diminishing salience of territorial issues, the restraints imposed by the nuclear balance, the shift away from the primacy of military-strategic elements of power to the primacy of economic elements, the day-to-day realities of economic interdependence, and changes in the nature of the nation-state have produced a new international order which resembles in important ways the domestic political systems prevalent in the industrialized noncommunist part of the world. This leads to the “domestication” of international politics. At the same time competitive nationalism, the vitality of the nation-state, differing perceptions of the proper role of government in the economy, and other considerations allow not much more than a tenuous coordination of foreign policies even among similar nation-states, making it unlikely that the European Economic Community and the Atlantic alliance will proceed beyond existing structures toward tighter integration.

In making review decisions, Supreme Court justices are predisposed to support underdogs and upperdogs. disproportionately but, also, are motivated to hide any "bias" that may be at work in determining votes.

In balancing these two values, justices may be expected to vote their "bias" more frequently (1) when that vote will determine outcome, and (2) when the "bias" will be harder to detect. The latter goal may be served by voting the "bias" more frequently in close cases and less frequently otherwise.

In an analysis of the voting patterns of five justices in the decade 1947–56, I found that two liberal and two conservative justices conformed to these expectations. A fifth, or control justice, defined as neither liberal nor conservative, did not pattern his votes in the manner predicted for liberals and conservatives. This relationship held when four projected intervening variables were controlled individually and collectively.

Incomplete understanding of the connection between campaign spending and election outcomes has hindered evaluation of enacted and proposed congressional campaign finance reforms. Reanalysis of the 1972 and 1974 House and Senate campaign spending data using both OLS and 2SLS regression models shows that spending by challengers has a much greater impact on the outcome than does spending by incumbents. A similar analysis of the effects of spending on voters' recall of candidates in the 1972 and 1974 SRC surveys supports the explanation that campaign expenditures buy nonincumbents the necessary voter recognition already enjoyed by incumbents prior to the campaign. The 1974 survey questions on Senate candidates indicate that, although the inability to remember candidates' names does not preclude having opinions about them, voters recalling candidates are much more likely to offer evaluative comments, and these more frequently refer to candidates personally. Aware voters offer more negative as well as positive evaluations (though positive outnumber negative); familiarity is not automatically advantageous. And voters' evaluations of candidates strongly influence how they vote. The implications of these findings for congressional campaign finance policy are readily apparent.

Many empirical investigations indicate that information is scarce and therefore costly to holders and seekers of public office. Indeed, some studies suggest that imperfect information may account for important aspects of the behavior of politicians. Nevertheless, there is as yet no theoretical investigation of political decision making that illustrates the impact of costly information or behavior.

In this paper the authors develop a model of electoral competition in which the candidates are only imperfectly aware of public preferences over issues and in which they may have the opportunity to increase the amount of information they hold at some cost. It turns out that the absence of perfect information profoundly affects the strategic structure of candidate competition. If information is costless, two-party electoral contests are naturally modeled as symmetric two-person zero-sum games. However, if candidates have distinct beliefs about voter behavior, the natural game-theoretic representation becomes a non-zero-sum game. This article is concerned mostly with analyzing the consequences of this transformation.

Eric Voegelin's evaluation of politics is grounded in the symbols and experiences which illumine man's participation in the process of reality. The trail of symbols and equivalent experiences whic constitute history provides the fundamental criteria by which the language of politics is to be evaluated. The central philosophical symbol is the Between (metaxy), coined by Plato. It indicates that human existence is a tension between the poles of the divine height and the cosmic depth. Politics and its language must acknowledge the limitations of this tension: that the human perspective is always from within reality. Existentially, man is a participant, not an observer looking at non-metric reality from the “outside.” The existential balance of the open psyche is the product of a perpetual struggle against the tendency to distortions. Such distortions can arise when one or other aspect of reality is allowed to absorb the whole, and individual thinkers attempt to abolish the tension by replacing it with a system which provides the “solution” to the mystery of reality.

This article attempts to examine alliance formation behavior as a stochastic process amenable to systems interpretation. We test two hypotheses linking the systems characteristics of bipolar distribution/tightly knit bloc structure to serial dependence and stability of alliance formation behavior and multipolar distribution/loosely knit bloc structure to randomness and process instability.

For testing these hypotheses, we have introduced a modeling strategy whereby identification of serial dependence and parameter estimation are accomplished by means of stochastic difference equations and time series autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions, and systems interpretation is facilitated by employing its continuous analogue in differential equation form.

We analyze data on three sets of observations corresponding to three distinct periods of international relations: 1815–1914, 1919–1939, 1945–1965. The results do confirm the proposed hypotheses revealing randomness and instability of alliance formation behavior in the multipolar/loosely knit periods of 1815–1914 and 1919–1939 and serial dependence and stability in the bipolar/tightly knit 1945–1965 period. Finally, we consider the implications of these results for the earlier findings, the balance of power model, and the probability of war.

Despite almost two decades of behavioral research, our models relating the key variables in judicial decision making are incomplete and inadequate. In particular, the impact of two widely used variables, judges' attitudes and role orientations, is poorly understood. While there appears to be a consensus that attitudes and role orientations are important predictors of behavior, no research has been successful in developing a comprehensive model capable of predicting judges' behaviors. This article's objective is the development of a single model incorporating attitudes, role orientations, and decision-making behavior. While attitudes and role orientations taken singly explain insignificant amounts of the variation in behavior, an interactive model of attitudes and role orientations is shown to be extremely useful for understanding behavior. Although this research focuses on the sentencing decisions of Iowa trial court judges, the proposed model is potentially applicable to all instances of decision making.

Within the last ten years a new conventional wisdom has surfaced in political science which tells us that presidents inexorably become less popular over time. Not much else matters. Neither the economy, nor the Vietnam War, not even Watergate seems to have had much independent effect on presidential popularity once time is taken into account. Before embracing these conclusions we need to reconsider the method that produced them. I argue that previous research too willingly accepted time as an explanatory variable, enshrouding it with theoretical meaning. To preserve its explanatory power alternative, substantive variables were shortchanged in their operational definitions and measurement. In this article I reverse the emphasis. Here, time is rejected as an explanatory variable and is employed only as a diagnostic indicator of the adequacy of the equations. A variety of alternative representations of real-world forces such as the economy and war are tested and some considerably improve the time-series correlation between the environment and presidential popularity. With these substantive variables I propose a simpler, if less glamorous, theory of presidential popularity consisting of two hypotheses: first, popularity is related to real events and conditions, and second, that it responds slowly to environmental change. Popularity is then both experiential and incremental. The findings for Presidents Truman through Nixon support this common-sense view. The Korean War (measured by U.S. casualties), the Vietnam War (measured by the number of bombing missions over North Vietnam and the U.S. war dead), the economy (especially six-month changes in consumer prices), Watergate, international “rally” events, and early term surges of approval all contribute independently to short-term fluctuations in presidential popularity. Moreover, as predicted, popularity appears to be autoregressive even when represented by an instrumental variables surrogate measure to minimize serial correlation. When the equations are specified in this way, time proves to be unnecessary in order to explain trends in presidential popularity.

Leo Strauss's epic rendition of the history of Western political philosophy has been a principal factor in the establishment and perpetuation of the myth of the tradition or the belief that the conventional series of classic works from Plato to Nietzsche represents the development of modern political ideas and constitutes the core of an inherited pattern of thought which, in turn, provides the basic context for interpreting particular texts. Much of the scholarly commentary on the history of political philosophy has been directed toward a critique of contemporary political thought and action, and the idea of the tradition has served as a vehicle for this historical etiology. In Strauss's argument, the concept of the tradition plays a strategic rhetorical function, but the myth of the tradition in its various forms has become a pervasive regulative assumption in both teaching and research.

Alexander Bickel's three most comprehensive books explore a common constitutional-political theme, the manner in which sound political judgment should guide judges and scholars who authoritatively interpret the United States Constitution. Yet the works differ, and the differences illuminate a dual development of Bickel's understanding: a growing fear of the contemporary obstacles to politic constitutional judgment, and a growing thoughtfulness in coming to grips with these obstacles. The Least Dangerous Branch had invented politic techniques for applying the judiciary's principles. The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress cautioned against judicial application, by novel techniques, of an impolitic egalitarian faith. The Morality of Consent, upon which this paper concentrates, elaborates Bickel's turn from the techniques of judicial power to the wise direction of judicial power. The paper considers the direction that Bickel proposes.

Fair districting requires more than compact, contiguous equal-sized districts; namely, sets of districts should also possess certain features. Specifically, they should be neutral (treat all parties alike) and responsive to changes in votes. In order to establish the extent to which these goals can be achieved, we give a precise definition to the concept of neutrality and expand the notion of responsiveness into three characteristics: the range in actual votes over which a districting plan is responsive; the degree of responsiveness in the vicinity of the “normal vote” (i.e., competitiveness); and the constancy of the swing ratio (i.e., the rate at which vote changes yield seat changes) over a range of votes. We show that while all possible values for these features are readily attainable when considered individually, certain combinations of values cannot be achieved. Finally, we identify the nature of the compromises required and the properties that the compromises possess, and show the kinds of trade-offs that result in reasonably fair districting plans.

Several alternative explanations of U.S. defense expenditure policy-making behavior have been heralded as theoretically sound and empirically supported representations of U.S. defense expenditure policy making. This has created an atmosphere in which almost as much effort is directed towards criticizing and/or defending existing explanations as is given to improving them through continued theoretical and empirical investigations. To overcome this impasse, I have developed in this article a working synthesis of three current approaches–Arms Race, Organizational Politics, Bureaucratic Politics–based on the insights and observations of Samuel Huntington (1961), Warner Schilling (1962), Colin Gray (1971), and James Rosenau (1971). The resulting formulation, which is labeled the Reactive Linkage Model, characterizes the pattern of U.S. defense spending in terms of an initial response by the armed services to the anticipated USSR expenditure level which is subsequently filtered through the president, Congress, and the Departmen t of Defense to determine the magnitude, scale, and timing of the reaction.

On the basis of the theoretical and empirical analyses here presented, I have reached the following conclusions. First, the Reactive Linkage Model successfully synthesizes the three existing explanations of U.S. defense expenditure policy making into a coherent and plausible whole. Second, the estimated version of the model provides an accurate representation of the pattern of U.S. defense expenditure policy making from 1954 to 1973. Specifically, the individual equations account for a large portion of the variance with parameter estimates that are both sharp and plausible and the model as a whole generates extremely accurate historical forecasts. Finally, I investigate the impact of war, presidential party, and negative public opinion on individual decisions, basing my inquiry on the assumption that the model accurately represents U.S. defense expenditure policy making. The results show that different events have an impact on only some of the steps in the policy-making process and the steps which are so affected vary from event to event. As a consequence of these results, I argue that the Reactive Linkage Model, and hence the idea of combining the key elements from competing explanations, represents a positive step forward in the study of U.S. defense expenditure policy making.

This article analyzes the social and political conditions associated with the incidence of racial violence in a sample of 119 American cities. Data on the incidence of racial disorders are drawn from newspaper accounts compiled by the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence during the period 1967–1969. A total of 334 disorders are analyzed.

Two alternative hypotheses are examined. The first assumes that the causes of the black urban riots are rooted largely in the disorganized environment of socially marginal individuals. The second attempts to locate the outbreak of rioting primarily within a closed and unresponsive political system. Paradoxically, the results tend to provide empirical support for both theoretical perspectives. At the same time, the data suggest the need to reformulate and revise conventional interpretations of the black urban riots. This is done by synthesizing and testing a developmental model which implies a curvilinear relationship between the incidence of racial violence on the one hand, and black political development on the other.

Social class has long been recognized as being the preeminent influence upon electoral choice in Britain, but recent studies provide support for the argument that it has become a weakened force. These studies differ only in the interpretation that they place on its decline. Through the simultaneous estimation of the effects on voting choice of class measured by occupation, and other variables, this article shows how one of the recent studies implied an overestimate of the declining importance of occupational class. Further it shows that when the indirect effects of class on party choice are taken into account, by means of causal modeling techniques, its preeminent position in determining voting choice in Britain can still be seen. The article seeks to clarify the nature of class-based voting behavior during a period of dramatic decline in this phenomenon, terminating at the last point at which traditional measures can reasonably be used.

The seventeenth-century conflict between patriarchal and liberal political thought grew out of a shift in views on the nature of man and society. Sir Robert Filmer insisted that the king ruled absolutely, the divinely ordained father of his people. Sidney, Tyrrell, and Locke grounded political power in an act of consent on the part of free-born individuals.

To what extent did these changing beliefs about human nature also bring about new perspectives on the nature, role and status of women? While this aspect of political theory has usually remained unexplored, it was an important critical weapon in the battle between patriarchal and liberal thought. Patriarchal theorists, relying on the Book of Genesis, could assign women to an appropriately subordinate place in family and society. Consent theories, though, as Filmer noted, depended for consistency on the inclusion of women (as well as children) in the formation of civil society. Early liberal writers including Tyrrell and Sidney were unwilling, then, to abandon patriarchal theory in all its forms and insisted that the consent of the “promiscuous multitude” of women and children was unnecessary. John Locke never specifically dealt with the role of women in the formation of society. Thus, he seemed to have escaped some of the difficulties of finding a place for women consistent with both traditional views of female status and newer views of human nature. Where Locke did speak directly about women, he often departed from traditional views in favor of an individualist approach. Examples of this may be found in his comments on marriage, education and in his discussion of female preaching.

This article presents a theory of corruption which unifies the moral, political, economic and social causes and patterns of corruption in one theoretical framework. The theory is constructed from the scattered insights about the “corruption of the body politic,” building in particular upon the work of five theorists–Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli and Rousseau. Corruption is defined as the moral incapacity of citizens to make reasonably disinterested commitments to actions, symbols and institutions which benefit the substantive common welfare. This extensive demise of loyalty to the commonwealth comes from the interaction of human nature with systematic inequality of wealth, power and status. The corruption of the polity results in certain identifiable patterns of political conflict and competition. The central feature of these patterns is the emergence of quasi-governmental factions and an increasingly polarized class system. The politics of the factions leads to an undermining of the efficacy of the basic political structures of the society and the emergence of systematic corruption in all aspects of political life. The theory advanced in this article identifies several crucial prescriptions to stave off the tendency towards corruption. Among these are an extension of maximum substantive participation by all citizens in all aspects of political life and a stringent control over all sources of great or permanent inequality in the polity.

This article develops a formal framework to aid political designers in the comparison of social choice functions. It generalizes earlier assumptions of “impartial culture” so that we may begin to investigate the effect of politically interesting variations on the probability that different social choice functions will satisfy given performance criteria. As an application of the framework, a detailed Monte Carlo study compares the ability of four different social choice functions to select a Condorcet winner when voter preference orders have been generated from a spatial representation of ideal points and alternatives. We also investigate the potential of alternative methods of selecting winners in presidential primary elections.

Previous studies of legislative-constituency representation have focused almost exclusively on pairs of Congress members and their constituencies. It is possible, however, to think of representation collectively, i.e., to consider the extent to which Congress as an institution represents the American people. Our analysis delineates this concept of representation, analyzes its existence by use of probability theory and the Miller-Stokes data, and then considers the relationship between collective representation and electoral control. We conclude that citizens probably get better representation than is suggested by the Miller-Stokes analysis, that the amount of representation may be more a function of institutional arrangements than of electoral control, and that citizen indifference towards many aspects of legislative politics is quite reasonable, given the existence of collective representation.

This article critically examines the commonly held proposition that Madison advocated separation of powers as a means of thwarting majority rule, or, conversely, of protecting identifiable minority interests. Rather, Madison's chief purpose in advancing the doctrine of separation of powers–one which was shared by the majority of his contemporaries–was to prevent governmental tyranny whose characteristic feature was seen as arbitrary and capricious rule resulting in government of men, not of laws. Many modern critics' analyses of the Madisonian model (most notably, Burns, Dahl, and advocates of a responsible party system) are seriously deficient because they fail to take into account this dimension of the model. Madison's writings, principally in The Federalist, as well as his remarks at the Philadelphia convention, clearly indicate that one of his central concerns was simultaneously to provide for protection against governmental tyranny and to guarantee popular control of government. This article examines in some detail certain critical aspects of this endeavor.