The world is complex, and yet people are able to make some sense out of it. This paper offers an information-processing model to describe this aspect of perception and cognition. The model assumes that a person receives information which is less than perfect in terms of its completeness, its accuracy, and its reliability. The model provides a dynamic description of how a person evaluates this kind of information about a case, how he selects one of his pre-existing patterns (called schemata) with which to interpret the case, and how he uses the interpretation to modify and extend his beliefs about the case. It also describes how this process allows the person to make the internal adjustments which will serve as feedback for the interpretation of future information. A wide variety of evidence from experimental and social psychology is cited to support the decisions which went into constructing the separate parts of the schema theory, and further evidence is cited supporting the theory's system-level predictions. Since the schema theory allows for (but does not assume) the optimization of its parameters, it is also used as a framework for a normative analysis of the selection of schemata. Finally, a few illustrations from international relations and especially foreign-policy formation show that this model of how people make sense out of a complex world can be directly relevant to the study of important political processes.

The purpose of this research note was to determine whether Philippine politics could be characterized as fitting a “machine politics model” (James Scott, “Corruption, Machine Politics, and Political Development, APSR, 63 [December, 1969], 1142–1158). A province was selected which matched the criteria cited in Scott's model, and provincial political leaders and subleaders were asked to evaluate important considerations they used in deciding whom to support for public office.

Scott proposed that in electoral political systems, support moves from a dependence on deference to a dependence on particularistic rewards, and finally to dependence on ideology. Part of the study tested the three-phase model using factor analysis on ten variables generally thought to be crucial in Philippine politics. The factor analysis revealed six factors, three which matched Scott's three phases plus: the chance of winning, the use of threats, and party loyalty. Although Scott's three-phase model was rejected as inadequate, at the descriptive level the general attributes of machine politics (particularly as Philippine politics has moved from a reliance on deference and personal loyalty to a dependence on material reward) could be used to characterize Philippine politics.

This paper offers a critique and a reformulation of Brian Fry and Richard Winters's policy output study published in this Review June, 1970. Fry and Winters focused on the redistributive impact of public policy in the states. After devising a “redistribution ratio” that involves allocating state revenue burdens and expenditure benefits to families across income classes, they developed a model to explain the variance of this ratio from state to state. In contrast to the findings of many earlier policy output studies, they hypothesized that political variables would have more explanatory power than socioeconomic variables.

Unfortunately some methodological shortcomings detract from the potential value of the Fry and Winters study. In this paper, alternative methodologies are used to reformulate a redistribution ratio for each state, and the recalculated ratios are found to vary significantly from those obtained by Fry and Winters.

The shortcomings of the Fry and Winters explanatory model are discussed. Despite these shortcomings, however, the regression analysis employed by Fry and Winters is repeated using the reformulated redistribution ratios in order to test the impact of this reformulation. Again the results obtained in this paper vary substantially from those of Fry and Winters.

The market is a decentralized system that can bring about efficient economic decisions. This paper examines whether social choice mechanisms can duplicate this success in the political arena. The famed Arrow result tells us centralized systems cannot achieve efficient, nondictatorial outcomes unless they rely on cardinal preferences. With decentralization, efficiency comes to require something more: the truthful revelation of preferences. Schemes that elicit honest preferences are derived here. By their very structure they are shown to lead to inefficient outcomes. This negative result leads to the question whether the validity of the initial analogy continues. Market-based standards of performance may be innappropriate for investigations of political phenomena.

This paper focuses on the requirement of the U. N. Charter that members shall promote human rights “without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.” It asks: (1) whether “without distinction” means “without any differentiation” or “without discrimination”; (2) whether the naming of race, sex, language, and religion means that “distinction” on other bases remains permissible, or whether what is ruled out is discrimination of any kind that affects human rights; and (3) whether the search for equality has not been internationalized, at least in principle, and what the implications of the internationalization may be. The inquiry can be classified as legal/philosophical.

The third question leads to an analysis of the “without distinction” clause of the Charter in terms of the principle of equality. Claims to nondiscrimination are negative claims to equality, and they have as their counterpart claims to affirmative action on behalf of equality—often for groups. The problem is that affirmative action promoting equality for groups entails differentiations among individuals that may be discriminatory. To resolve the dilemma, the test of reasonableness is endorsed—and the search for standards for judging it goes on—at both the domestic and international levels.

The concept of shape is considered in abstract terms drawing on approaches outside the electoral districting literature. The concept is broken down into a series of four divergences from “compactness” relating to “elongation,” “indentation,” “separation,” and “puncturedness.” Given this conceptual framework, the use of shape measures in electoral districting is reconsidered and a new shape measure is proposed. This assesses the indentation of a district shape and is based on the internal angles within the shape. It is suggested that this measure may be particularly relevant to the evaluation of proposed new districting patterns. The technique is illustrated using proposed new Congressional Districts for Iowa.

Frequent elections and a long tradition of census taking in India should combine to provide excellent scope for aggregate data analysis, but so far they have not, largely because the electoral constituencies and the census tracts do not match. A number of ways have been devised to surmount the problem, none of them very satisfactory. This paper offers a new solution in the form of isoplethic mapping, a method that avoids the shortcomings of other approaches and permits use of demographic and voting data at the level of the state legislative assembly constituency.

Substantively the paper traces patterns of voting for Muslim candidates to the Bihar Legislative Assembly and the relationship between Muslim population distribution and vote polled by different political parties over six elections. Instead of becoming more integrated over time within the general body politic, it appears that the Muslim minority group has become more politically cohesive and better able to elect Muslims to office where their numbers are strong. At the same time, Muslims have become less able to win elections where they are fewer in numbers. This tendency has not reached a state of political polarization between the Hindu and Muslim communities, however.

Recent quantitative studies vastly understate the political conflicts and policy choices that are embedded in the budgetary process. The reason for this lies in the way these quantitative studies have organized budgetary data. Thus far the units of analysis have been federal agencies, the administrative categories of government. The “striking regularities” that have been reported reflect—quite accurately—the great stability of the administrative structure of government. However, these categories do not describe the intense competition between programs and policies that takes place within the framework. We argue, further, that the entire metaphor of an inert bureaucratic machine doing this year essentially what it did last year is erroneous. Rather, priority setting in the federal bureaucracy more resembles the market situation of nineteenth century capitalism where aggressive “policy entrepreneurs,” unequal in talent and resources, struggle to build and sustain support for their programs. The competition between policies is both reflected in and promoted by the budgetary process. By shifting the units of analysis to programs and transforming these data so that programs of different size are commensurate, we develop an index that reflects the relative growth and decay of programs as they compete for budgetary resources.

Students of political participation have generally taken as given that nonparticipation in politics is a result of apathy, and that apathy is a function of low income, low education, and low status. This article suggests that there are two additional potential explanations of political participation rates besides that offered by the conventional wisdom. One of these acknowledges that political participation for some people in some circumstances involves considerable risk, so that nonparticipation can be explained more accurately in terms of fear than in terms of apathy. The other views political participation as a response to a sense of “relative deprivation” or discrimination. After each of these three “models” of political participation is translated into operational terms, it is tested by determining how well it accounts for the variations in black political participation rates in Mississippi during the first half-decade following the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The conclusion that emerges from these tests is that political scientists have erred seriously by overlooking the role of fear in political life. In situations like those faced by blacks in Mississippi, situations that are probably similar to those in parts of the “developing world,” apathy compares poorly with fear as an explanation of political participation.