In a recent article (this Review, 63 [June, 1969]), Bruce Russett attempts to answer the title question by using two-variable regression analysis to estimate the “trade-off” relationships between the defense spending proportion of Gross National Product (GNP) and the other nondefense expenditure proportions of GNP for the 1939–68 period. This paper contends that Russett's method of analysis is misleading because it does not permit the detection of possible subperiod shifts in the trade-off relationships. The results of a multiple regression, dummy variable analysis indicate that significant shifts in both the sign and the numerical values of the trade-off relationships occurred between the three war periods and the peacetime period. Two attempts to identify the reasons for the shifts produced mixed results, but our tentative conclusion is that the shifts are related to subperiod differences in the unemployment rate and the methods of financing defense expenditures.

Professor VanDeVeer has given a scrupulously fair account of my defense of noncognitivism (N), and has raised questions which are both searching and stimulating.

His most basic criticism is that I fail to demonstrate N—the thesis that the utterance of a moral principle expresses the speaker's moral commitment, but does not affirm or deny that something is the case, and therefore does not result in a statement which is true or false. To provide adequate positive support for N would involve me—so he claims—in complicated problems of the theory of meaning. My reply is that I do, and can, rely on the very theory of meaning which, as Hempel states it, is generally accepted by contemporary philosophers of science, namely that

… a sentence makes a cognitively significant assertion, and thus can be said to be either true or false, if and only if either (1) it is analytic or contradictory—in which case it is said to have purely logical meaning or significance—or else (2) if it is capable, at least potentially, of test by experiential evidence—in which case it can be said to have empirical meaning or significance.

Given this basic principle (which Hempel says [p. 101] “is not peculiar to empiricism alone”), and given my demonstration that moral principles are neither analytic nor empirical, it follows that they are not cognitively either true or false.

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.

I do not think that Professor Oppenheim and I are any nearer agreement, but perhaps the various forks in the road are clearer. I will try to be as fair, as clear, and to the point as Oppenheim has been. I will consider most, but not all, of his replies and will do so in the order he has followed.

Oppenheim concedes that he is relying upon the principle that a sentence is cognitively significant if and only if (briefly) it is logically significant or empirically testable, and he claims that this principle is generally accepted by contemporary philosophers of science. I do not think it is generally accepted; indeed, on the page after the one quoted by Oppenheim, Carl Hempel states that he feels “less confident” that such a criterion can establish “sharp dividing lines” between “those sentences which do have cognitive significance and those which do not.” The proper estimate of the current situation is, I think, that whether a general criterion of “cognitive” meaning can be had, and if so, just what it is—are notoriously unsettled questions. If any estimate is correct, it is that among philosophers of language there is widespread suspicion of the neat distinctions between analytic/synthetic, a priori/a posteriori, cognitively meaningful/meaningless which prevailed prior to and during the 1950's. The work of W. V. O. Quine and Noam Chomsky has only muddied the waters further.

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.

Brams and O'Leary (this Review, 64 [June 1970], pp. 449–470) generate a model of the behavior of a voting body by first applying a simple combinatorial argument to the results of voting on a single issue and then extending this model by assuming voting behavior is independent across issues. In this note we show that their argument can be extended to cover voting across issues without relying on the assumption of independence. This alternative approach gives insight into the Brams and O'Leary model and strengthens their results by making several of their indices exact instead of approximate. Thus if the modification proposed in this note is used, the indices proposed by Brains and O'Leary can be used empirically without worrying about independence.

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 study sets forth the post-1945 development and present status of Japanese constitutional and procedural law on court-mass media relations, while analyzing aspects of the interaction between law and sociopolitical thought and behavior. A recent and dramatic illustration of the issues is provided by the Hakata Station Film Case: A Fukuoka court's subpoena (August 29, 1969) for newsfilm taken during a student-police encounter occasioned conflict between Japan's mass media and courts; the dispute was resolved by a film seizure (March 4, 1970) three months after the Supreme Court had upheld the subpoena's constitutionality. The media maintain that Article 21 of the Constitution (freedom of expression) gives them the right to determine when their used or unused television film or still photographs may be employed as court evidence, even in the absence of privileged communications. This and other court cases considered, arising from Japan's perennial demonstrations, illustrate a strong tendency toward in-group unanimity, new problems in news and evidence gathering, and the operation of a non-Western legal system influenced by Japanese, European, and American traditions.

The few case studies of participation in local elections display distinct patterns, but the measurements lack comparability with each other or with national election voting studies. By application of the methodology, variables, and categories of the presidential election studies to a Toledo city election, the composition of the electorate is compared with that in presidential elections and some sharp contrasts which appear to have significant implications are observed. Some data calculated from Merriam and Gosnell's classic Non-Voting reveal some developments since 1923. From two prominent characteristics of municipal elections, nonpartisan form and low turnout, a few hypotheses about participation in city elections are deduced and examined. The data support the general proposition that most of the psychological, demographic, and socioeconomic variables display comparable amplitudes in city and presidential elections, but their significance is much greater in city elections, because the low voting level makes their impact proportionately greater.

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.

The core of welfare economics consists of the proof that, for certain classes of goods, perfectly competitive markets are efficient in that they provide Pareto optimal allocations of these goods. In this paper, the efficiency of competitive elections is examined. Elections are modeled as two-candidate zero-sum games, and three kinds of equilibria for such games are identified: pure, risky, and mixed strategies. It is shown, however, that regardless of which kind of equilibrium prevails, if candidates adopt equilibrium strategies, an election is efficient in the sense that the candidates advocate Pareto optimal policies. But one caveat to this analysis is that while an election is Pareto optimal, citizens can unanimously prefer markets to elections as a mechanism for selecting future policies.

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.

This note attempts to show the explanatory limits of current generalizations about political participation behavior by analyzing a deviant case (West Virginia). Voter participation patterns in West Virginia cannot be explained in terms of traditional research findings based on socioeconomic variables. The present study therefore suggests a research framework that complements the customary socioeconomic and political output analysis. Its thesis, broadly stated, is that political style, culture, and organizational variables must be included in any paradigm that attempts to explain the relationships between state political systems and voting behavior patterns. The West Virginia data support this thesis.