bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Support for the System
Authors: Green Leslie
Published: January 2009

So-called ‘general theory’, or ‘systems theory’, is now nearly friendless among political scientists. The charm it once held as an ordering framework for empirical research has given way to that of the economic models of the rational choice school. While the successor paradigm was self-consciously reacting against the ‘over-socialized’ conception of man underlying systems theory and political sociology in general, much of its broader appeal was founded on similar claims: the promise of a testable, empirical theory, and an aspiration to complete generality. Perhaps these two goals will turn out to be irreconcilable; there is some plausibility in the view that, in practical affairs anyway, the idea of a general empirical theory is a contradiction in terms. In this article, however, I wish to examine a problem for systems theory which isnotdue to this tension, one which has gone unnoticed, and which has survived the decline and fall of the research programme.
The Relationship Between Government Popularity and Approval for the Government's Record in the United Kingdom
Authors: Hudson John
Published: January 2009

The past decade has seen the growth of a considerable literature on the link between government popularity, as reflected by the proportion of the public indicating their intention to vote for the government in opinion polls, and the state of the economy, as represented by certain key variables. The work began in the early 1970s with articles by Goodhart and Bhansali, Mueller, and Kramer. It continued through the decade; some of the more recent contributions can be found in a set of readings edited by Hibbs and Fassbender. However, despite the amount and quality of this work, problems remain. Principal amongst these, as Chrystal and Alt have pointed out, is the inability to estimate a relationship which exhibits any degree of stability either over time or between researchers. Nearly all the studies have been successful in finding a significant relationship for specific time periods, but when these are extended, or when the function is used to forecast outside the original estimation period, the relationship appears to break down.
Extreme Advocacy Leadership in the Pre-Reform House: Wright Patman and the House Banking and Currency Committee
Authors: Owens John E.
Published: January 2009

Committee chairmen in the United States House of Representatives were often very powerful figures until the reforms of the early 1970s – as the numerous tales about those stereotyped villains, the southern Democrats, bear witness. Yet, surprisingly little explicit typologizing about leadership in congressional committees appears in the academic literature despite a growing awareness of the different goals which congressmen pursue and the variety of environments in which they operate. Just two different models of chairmen's power were developed in the context of the pre-reform Congress. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the accepted view, perhaps caricature, was that committee chairmen were autocratic, obstructionist (at least as far as liberals were concerned), conservative, possibly senile, and more than likely representative of constituencies outside the mainstream of national politics. A list of chairmen seen as fitting into this mould would include men such as ‘Judge’ Howard Smith, chairman of the Rules Committee from 1955 to 1967; his somewhat less skilful successor from 1967 to 1972, William Colmer of Mississippi; Graham Barden, the provocative chairman of the Education and Labor Committee between 1953 and 1960; and the authoritative Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee for seventeen years until 1966.
Esoteric Policy Debate: Nuclear Safety Issues in the Soviet Union and German Democratic Republic
Authors: Debardeleben Joan T.
Published: January 2009

At a time when the nuclear power industry in many Western countries faces political and economic obstacles to expansion, commitment to assertive development of nuclear power continues to intensify in the Soviet Union, as well as in most East European countries. Although in 1980 nuclear power provided only about 5·1 per cent of electrical generating capacity in the Soviet Union, the 11th Five Year Plan (1981–85) projected an increase to 14 per cent, or to approximately 38,000 MW (megawatts) of installed capacity. Although longer-run projections are less definite, it appears that by 1990 authorities hope to achieve between 80,000 and 90,000 MW of nuclear generating capacity. A similar commitment to nuclear power exists in most CMEA countries, particularly in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). As of 31 December 1982, the GDR's 1,830 MW of nuclear generating capacity was the highest in Eastern Europe (outside the Soviet Union), although Bulgaria has overtaken the GDR in terms of proportion of electrical capacity provided by nuclear power (16 per cent for Bulgaria and 11 per cent for the GDR in 1980). According to projections, Czechoslovakia should increase its nuclear capacity from 880 MW in 1980 to between 3,100 and 3,600 MW by 1985, while the GDR plans to raise its capacity to 2,270 MW.
Urban Politics and Markets
Authors: King Roger
Published: January 2009

The study of urban politics has undergone considerable change over the last ten to fifteen years. During the 1950s and 1960s the ‘community power’ approach became well-established in American political science as the dominant form of analysis of local politics, although it was less marked in Britain. In contrast, and in part as reaction, to the ecological determinism and naturalistic explanation of the Chicago school in urban sociology that preceded it, power and decision making were seen as key features in explaining urban processes. Intentionality and human action were afforded explanatory dominance. In turn, however, this approach came under sustained critique as part of the ‘anti-behaviouralist’ or structuralist resurgence in Western social science in the 1970s which attributed causal primacy to structural determination and system contradictions, not actors or voluntarism. Yet structural approaches face methodological problems of functionalism and circularity, and in constructing tests of empirical adequacy and falsifiability. Some of the more interesting, recently-published work in urban politics seeks to maintain a non-behaviouralist, more structuralist interpretation of local policy outcomes within empirically-grounded analyses that allow space for politics and power. Dunleavy, Friedland and Saunders provided three of the best examples of such an approach, and have each sought to understand either a particular policy, or a set of policies in a particular locality, through frameworks which in varying degrees incorporate structuralist assumptions. They seek to apply objective cost-benefit analyses of public policies as empirically refutable hypotheses and accept the necessity of objective criteria for assessing whether or not interests have been met in any given situation. This article examines the extent to which these selected ‘non-behaviouralist’ interpretations of urban politics have successfully been applied to empirical contexts. A central element in this examination is a consideration of the way in which business is seen as a major influence in local politics.
Carter and Congress: From the Outside In
Authors: Jones Charles O.
Published: January 2009

It seems a reasonable enough proposition that a president will organize his congressional relations to suit his policy goals and his personal style. Available literature supports this expectation – at least before the administration of Jimmy Carter. But, of course, recent presidents have been wise in the ways of Washington as a consequence of lengthy experience in the nation's capital. In fact, most have served in Congress. Among post-Second World War presidents, only Eisenhower before Carter lacked service on Capitol Hill (and Fred Greenstein now assures us that his political savvy was fine tuned).
Bureaucrats, Budgets and the Growth of the State: Reconstructing an Instrumental Model
Authors: Dunleavy Patrick
Published: January 2009

This article forms part of a longer-term project dealing with the impact of public choice theories in political science. The focus here is on economic models of bureaucracy, which despite their increasing theoretical significance and influence on practical politics have heretofore been little analysed, except by their exponents. I have argued elsewhere that amongst existing public choice accounts there are two seminal works, Antony Downs's pluralist treatment inInside Bureaucracyand William Niskanen's new right thesis inBureaucracy and Representative Government. The central innovation of economic approaches is their stress on rational officials' attachment to budget maximization strategies. In Downs's case this is a finite maximand limited by bureaucrats' conservatism and other motivations. But in Niskanen's case budget maximization is an open-ended process, constrained only by external limits on agencies' abilities to push up their budgets. None the less, despite their disparate approaches and conclusions, both these books share four failings common to almost all other public choice work in the field:

(1) They operate with vague and ill-defined definitions of bureaucrats' utility functions.

(2) They assume that all bureaucracies are hierarchical line agencies.
Soviet Images of the Environment
Authors: Ziegler Charles E.
Published: January 2009

The purpose of this article is to outline some of the more important ‘images’ of the environment held in the Soviet Union. By ‘images’ of the environment I refer to the manner in which people utilize the natural environment in order to meet their biological, social or aesthetic needs, and their perception of the means for fulfilling these needs. The environment may be perceived as infinitely renewable, and thus as a resource to be exploited with minimal attention to future consequences. Or the natural environment may be perceived as a scarce commodity, a unique gift in danger of being destroyed by humankind's productive activities. Furthermore, attitudes toward the environment may vary across cultures, or within the same culture depending on age, socio-economic status, political ideology, occupation or area of residence. The environmental image maintained by a group, culture or individual has implications far beyond any immediate impact on nature. Fundamental ideas about the structuring of society, the economy and the political system are involved. Positive attitudes towards environmental protection may clash with deeply held values – faith in science and technology, a commitment to quantitative economic growth and confidence in the existing hierarchical structure of social and political power. One's environmental image, therefore, may either support the established order, or may support fundamental change.
Marginality and Turnout in General Elections in the 1970s
Authors: Denver David , Hands Gordon
Published: January 2009

In an article published some time ago. we analysed in a systematic way the relationship between constituency marginality and turnout in British general elections between 1955 and 1970. Previous considerations of marginality had concentrated on its effect upon change in turnout from one election to the next, but we were concerned with the relationship between the absolute level of turnout in constituencies in one election and their marginality at the previous election (‘previous marginality’). We found that there was a consistent, significant, positive relationship between previous constituency marginality and turnout.
The Limitations of Reform: Changes in the Nominating Process
Authors: Reiter Howard L.
Published: January 2009

For more than a decade, a debate has been raging among American political activists, journalists and scholars about the numerous rules changes enacted by the Democratic party since its tumultuous 1968 national convention, and the various legal changes at the state and federal levels that have also affected the Presidential nominating process. The rules changes have included the introduction of fairer practices such as written state party rules for delegate selection; proportional representation of candidates' supporters in the delegations; increased representation of women, racial minorities and young people at the convention; and measures to require nominees to respond in writing to the party platform. The legal changes include the proliferation of delegate selection primaries and the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 and its various subsequent amendments. The debate has centred around the desirability of these changes, which will here be referred to generically as ‘the reforms’, with no normative connotation intended.
Comment on Reiter
Authors: Polsby Nelson W.
Published: January 2009

I am sure that all of us who have been attempting to make sense of American party politics these last couple of decades welcome Professor Reiter's contribution, and look forward to the publication of his book. As I understand the argument he is making, at least four positions are possible with respect to the recent history of political parties and Presidential nominations in the United States: (1) that no changes have occurred; (2) that long-term secular trends account for all changes; (3) that party reforms account for all changes; and (4) that a combination of longer-term trends and party reforms account for changes. Perhaps in order to hold the attention of readers, Professor Reiter has chosen to contrast positions (2) and (3).
Explaining America and the Welfare State: An Alternative Theory
Authors: Klass Gary M.
Published: January 2009

Although research on the welfare state is fundamentally comparative and cross-national, empirical observation of the peculiarities of the American case has structured much of the thinking on the subject. Explaining variations in welfare state policy usually begins with the identification of cross-national variations in the initiation, scope or size of national social service programs such as social security, workman's compensation, unemployment insurance, national medical care and public housing. The coverage of the programs that have been established, the number of programs and the size of the benefits distributed are typically found to be smaller in the United States than in other industrialized democracies. The relative lateness of the United States' adoption of major social welfare programs, along with the low percentage of either Gross National Product or government revenue expended in social service programs, constitutes clear evidence that the welfare state is a function of more than the level of national economic development. To the extent that welfare state research devotes itself to explaining the extreme variations represented by American policy performance, its theory often derives from interpretations made of corresponding peculiarities of American popular ideology, social structure, political institutions and history. As a consequence, explaining the welfare state often depends on how one explains America.
Was Keynes Kuhnian? Keynes and the Idea of Theoretical Revolutions
Authors: Parsons David Wayne
Published: January 2009

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of his argument, T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions continues to have a significant impact on the way in which economics and other social sciences view themselves. Indeed, it could be said that Kuhn's influence has been much the greater on the more methodologically disposed social sciences than upon the natural sciences to which his original thesis was addressed. However, since the first flush of enthusiasm for Kuhn amongst the social sciences there has emerged, as Keith Tribe has noted, a growing unease with the thesis on the grounds that it is ‘not capable of doing the work that it is called upon to perform’. Nevertheless, despite these new found doubts Kuhn's ideas still provide – to use a ‘Kuhnian’ expression – a powerful ‘framework’ through which changes in economic theory, such as the ‘Keynesian Revolution’, may be understood. Because consideration of such matters has been primarily the preserve of economists preoccupied with the development of techniques of economic analysis, rather than of students of politics concerned with the history of ideas, other issues, such as Keynes's notion of theoretical change and revolution, have in the analysis of the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ been neglected. Indeed, as Axel Leijonhufvud has observed, the absence from the debate on the structure of scientific revolutions of philosophically disposed case studies from economics and other social sciences has itself left social science ‘unsure about what exactly we can learn from it’.
Roles and Reasons in Foreign Policy Decision Making
Authors: Hollis Martin , Smith Steve
Published: January 2009

Explaining the foreign policy behaviour of states has proved a particularly difficult task for theorists of international relations. For centuries it relied on an analogy between states and individuals in the state of nature, so that an endemic tendency to international anarchy resulted from states having ‘interests’; systemic, determinist theories could therefore explain foreign policy by appealing to such notions as national interest and power maximization. The elusive, contestable character of these notions later led many analysts to focus on the empirical decision-making process for explanations of foreign policy behaviour. Yet these attempts have run into a fundamental problem: the proper weight to be attached to the perceptions and reasons of the actors. Some of the literature takes the actors very seriously and relies either on a psychology of perception or on a decision-theoretic model of individual choice. Some of it, on the other hand, by-passes the actors altogether and concentrates on such structural features as bureaucratic position. In this article we shall argue the case for a concept of role, requiring a less mechanical view of action than the standard approaches allow, both separately and in combination.
Politics and Markets: Corporate Money in American National Elections
Authors: Eismeier Theodore J. , Pollock Philip H.
Published: January 2009

The current American debate about the relationship between business and government represents the most significant reopening of that issue since the New Deal. The debate is in part about government's role in the economy, but the issue of business's role in politics is being joined as well, joined in fact on several fronts. There are, of course, the polemics of corporations and their critics, in which business is cast alternately as victim and villain. The issue also divides more serious students of American politics and has fostered a wealth of theorizing about the role of the state. Finally, the issue of business influence pervades discussions about campaign finance.
Capital Markets and Central–Local Politics in Britain
Authors: Sbragia Alberta
Published: January 2009

Local government borrowing is often referred to as a highly technical, not to say arcane, activity of local government. It should not be dismissed so easily. In reality, such borrowing illuminates broader relations between government and market by highlighting interdependencies which exist between central government, local government and financial markets.
A General Model of Tactical and Inverse Tactical Voting
Authors: Tsebelis George
Published: January 2009

‘Tactical voting’ refers to voting contrary to one's nominal preferences. The usual form of tactical voting described in the literature consists of ‘third’ party supporters in plurality electoral settings voting for one of the two major parties in their constituency. This Note aims to demonstrate both theoretically and empirically the existence of the converse phenomenon, i.e. followers of one of the two big parties voting for a small one. We shall call this phenomenon ‘inverse tactical voting’ (ITV).
Philosophy into Dogma: The Revival of Cultural Conservatism
Authors: Rayner Jeremy
Published: January 2009

The conservative revival that has taken place on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years has been an intellectual as well as a practical accomplishment. That this remarkable fact has received scant attention from political theorists can be attributed to two main causes. First, and less important, there has been an understandable tendency to focus on personalities and party politics where expediency blurs the sharp outlines of doctrine. As President Reagan confronts the problems of a second-term presidency, as Mrs Thatcher's iron grip on her party seems to weaken and as Chancellor Kohl or Mr Mulroney make their inevitable compromises and evasions, the conservative politician in office is revealed to be not dissimilar to his liberal or socialist predecessor. Now – as Elie Kedourie noted when asking the question ‘Is neo-conservatism viable?’ back in 1982 – this is only to be expected. The constraints of democratic politics will inevitably narrow ideological differences until they appear to be little more than rhetoric. If there has been a conservative revival, its significant and enduring features must be sought elsewhere.
Political Ecology and the Social Sciences – The State of the Art
Authors: Lowe Philip D. , Rüdig Wolfgang
Published: January 2009

The ‘environment’ as a political issue has had a mixed history. Its sudden upsurge in the late 1960s was followed by many ups and downs. It has, however, continued to press itself on to the political agenda in various forms. Most recently, the rise of green parties in Western Europe has demonstrated that the environment is not one of many issues which come and go but has led to more fundamental political change.
Laboratory Results on Rawls's Distributive Justice
Authors: Frohlich Norman , Oppenheimer Joe A. , Eavey Cheryl L.
Published: January 2009

The behavioural underpinnings of Rawls's notion of distributive justice as outlined inA Theory of Justiceare tested in experimental contexts. Under conditions approximating Rawls's ‘original position’ (including the appropriate agenda, a ‘veil of ignorance’ and a choice rule designed to capture his main theoretical constraints), we test his ‘predictions’ that individuals would reach a unanimous consensus on a principle of distributive justice and would select the difference principle: a principle that maximizes the welfare of the worst-off individual in the society. This view is contrasted with our belief, that any general concern for fairness (or distributive justice) will take a different form: one that both attempts to take into account several values and pays attention to cardinal rather than ordinal measures of utility. Our results strongly indicate that individuals are capable of reaching consensus but that they choose what Rawls has called an ‘intuitionistic’ principle which attempts to take into account not only the position of the worst-off individual but the potential expected gain for the rest of society. The overwhelmingly preferred principle is maximizing the average income with a floor constraint.
A Paradigm of ‘Crisis’ Decision Making: The Case of Synfuels Policy
Authors: Ahrari Mohammed E.
Published: January 2009

In explaining the making and unravelling of the synfuels policy in the United States, a new approach—the ambivalent-majoritarian paradigm—is presented in this article. This paradigm fills a significant conceptual gap for the study of domestic policy formulated under crisis conditions.

It is argued that the self-imposed necessity to respond to a crisis condition involving a policy decision is likely to force legislators to adopt a policy option that they would not adopt under normal conditions. The crisis response is likely to be passed by a ‘majoritarian’ crisis coalition which would also include a significant number of ‘ambivalents’, i.e., those legislators who have serious misgivings about the correctness or feasibility of the policy. In order for such a policy response to survive, it must withstand the scrutiny of ‘normal’ conditions involving that policy.
Books for Teaching British Politics
Authors: Epstein Leon D.
Published: January 2009

To review books introducing students to the British political system will not strike everyone as an edifying experience even when, as here, the task includes only some of many available textbooks plus a few supplemental works. Focusing on textbooks, despite their often admirable scholarship, reflects primarily our concern as teachers. My concern comes from almost forty years of teaching British politics in American classrooms. What I look for in a text probably differs from expectations of teachers in Britain. But I may also evaluate such books differently from American colleagues who teach British politics only within a broader and more popular course covering several nations. I am among the modest number of American professors devoting an entire semester to British subject-matter, and I can only try to take into account other teaching experiences when I describe the books at hand.
Federal Responses to Urban Fiscal Stress and Decline in the United States
Authors: King Desmond S. , Gurr Ted Robert
Published: January 2009

This Note reports some findings from a larger study we are embarked upon. Our broader objective is to develop a general theory of the national state's interest in cities in advanced industrial societies. We argue that state officialsgenerallypursue their own interests in the protection and expansion of state power and resources andspecificallyhave interest in the viability of cities, interests that do not simply reflect the interests of private capital or any other societal groups. A broad twofold distinction is made between those state activities necessary for the perpetuation of the state (maintenance of public order, legitimacy, durable political institutions, revenue base) and those necessary for the perpetuation of cities (provision of collective goods, developmental policies and social services). Space limitations preclude a full account and justification of these arguments here. Rather, we present some hypotheses about how such state interests should inform the allocation of funds across cities and report the findings of some initial empirical tests for the United States.
Corporatism and Pluralism: A Critique of Schmitter's Typology
Authors: Cohen Youssef , Pavoncello Franco
Published: January 2009

The purpose of this Note is two-fold. First, it shows that Schmitter implicitly includes in his definitions of systems of interest intermediation faulty statements concerning the causal link from institutional forms to power relations between the state and interest groups. Second, it argues that in order to avoid such errors, and benefit in other ways, students of systems of interest representation should remove implicit statements about power from their definitions and explicitly state their hypotheses connecting institutional forms and power relations involving the two actors of those systems.
Government Popularity and Attitude Towards the Government's Record Revisited
Authors: Stray S. J. , Beaumont C. D.
Published: January 2009

A recent paper in this Journal (John Hudson, ‘The Relationship Between Government Popularity and Approval for the Government's Record in the United Kingdom’, XV (1985), 165–86) examined the relationship between government popularity as indicated by the voting intentions series of the opinion polls and approval for the government's record. Among other things it demonstrated that government popularity increased in the quarter prior to an election and declined in the quarter thereafter and that in the two years following the election of a new government the polarization of political allegiances declined (low approval at this time yielded higher levels of government popularity than would otherwise be the case and high levels of approval yielded somewhat lower levels of government support than in other periods). No evidence was found for any other form of electoral cycle of the type suggested in previous studies. The conclusions were based on ordinary least squares estimates and the use of the Cochrane-Orcutt technique, employed because of potential problems with serial correlation in residuals. Whilst this attempt to examine the relationship between these two variables is to be welcomed, especially the theoretical developments hitherto frequently lacking in this area, there are a number of points of concern.
Interest Groups and Theories of Power in America
Authors: McFarland Andrew S.
Published: January 2009

Three models of interest groups, power and political process in America are contrasted: (1) the Truman-Dahl-Lindblom pluralism of the 1960s; (2) the unfinished plural elitism of the 1970s, a theory emphasizing special-interest capture of policy systems whose most influential exponent is Lowi; (3) the ‘triadic’ model of process set forth by Wilson inThe Politics of Regulation. The triadic model assumes the normality in policy systems of organized economic producers being challenged by the countervailing power of other organized interests, while state agencies act autonomously. It is argued that the triadic model is the most advanced of the three, although it still needs development. Eighteen illustrative propositions are presented in terms of triadic power. These include relationships among interest groups and state autonomy, ‘high polities’ and routine politics, and types of coalitions in policy systems. Other propositions describe links to possible cycles between triadic power and plural elitism, to corporatist decision-making, and to the ‘resource mobilization’ theory of social movements.
Crude Politics: Oil and the Political Economy of Unemployment in Britain and Norway, 1970–85
Authors: Alt James E.
Published: January 2009

This article extends existing political-economic models to deal more rigorously with politics in countries with trade-dependent economies, and in particular with the policy consequences of oil-exporting in industrial countries. Models drawn from economics and finance show how much of Britain's recent unemployment results from North Sea oil, at first through speculation in sterling in rapidly-growing international currency markets and more recently through the balance of payments. In Norway, by contrast, speculation was deterred by a variety of policies on fixing exchange rates, and the unemployment problem contained by better-planned and executed employment subsidy programmes. These policy variations are explained by differences in available ideas, institutions and, ultimately, structural characteristics.
Insurgent Violence Versus Image Management: The Struggle for National Images in Southern Africa
Authors: Manheim Jarol B. , Albritton Robert B.
Published: January 2009

The authors examine the countervailing effects of two forces on external news coverage of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa during the 1970s. The first is purposeful government efforts at news management and information control undertaken by each of the two regimes. The second is the civil unrest which was present in the region during that period. They conclude that these effects and the policy consequences that flow from them are functions of the pre-existing image environment of each country in the foreign (US) press and of the character of its domestic unrest.
The British Electorate Twenty Years On: Electoral Change and Election Surveys
Authors: Scarbrough Elinor
Published: January 2009

The surveys for the 1983 general election marked the first twenty years' systematic study of the British electorate. The British Election series – originating with the 1963 pre-election Nuffield survey by Butler and Stokes, followed by the Essex series in the 1970s conducted by Särlvik and Crewe, and latterly in the hands of Heath, Jowell and Curtice – yield exceptionally rich portraits of voters and their responses to politics. The growing crop of secondary analyses, tracing changes in the electorate over those years, reflects the continuities of the series. More recently, a number of studies have challenged the ‘Michigan conventions’ central to the first generation of British electoral studies. It is a good time, then, to take stock of our understanding of voting behaviour in Britain. Let us start with what is generally agreed.
Special Elections: A Comparative Perspective
Authors: Studlar Donley T. , Sigelman Lee
Published: January 2009

There have been many comparative studies of British and American parties and elections, but little attention has been paid to comparisons of special elections (or by-elections) to fill vacancies in the two lower houses of the central legislatures, the House of Commons and the House of Representatives. Although British by-elections have been closely studied for a long time, even the most basic facts about American special elections were unknown until recently. Despite the lack of direct examination of how by-elections compare in the two countries, American academics have often dismissed American special elections with such passing comments as ‘because of their unsystematic nature and unsynchronized timing, American special elections, unlike British by-elections, have negligible predictive value’.
Adult Socialization and Out-Group Politicization: An Empirical Study of Consciousness-Raising
Authors: Chapman Jenny
Published: January 2009

At the heart of the feminist theory of consciousness-raising is a very precise hypothesis about the conditions in which most women – and members of any other socio-political out-group – will overcome their socialization into the culture of the dominant in-group to acquire political consciousness. The hypothesis is that separate interaction directly among themselves in autonomous, all-female groups will lead women to develop a new consciousness of women as a political category with interests distinct from those of men. This article uses new data about local women politicians in Scotland to test the hypothesis that there will be a strong, symmetrical and independent relationship between a woman politician's political orientation towards women and her experience of separate interaction. This relationship holds good for experience of any kind of separate interaction, even if it is confined to groups of an entirely non-political character, thereby confirming the causal inference that politicization is the consequence of separate experience and not ils precondition.
Urban Systems Theory and Urban Policy: A Four-Nation Comparison
Authors: Aiken Michael , Newton Kenneth , Land Roger Fried , Martinotti Guido
Published: January 2009

There are few systematically comparative cross-national studies of urban policy or service provision, partly because there is little in the way of empirical testable theory that might guide research and partly because the variety of institutional methods of providing and financing urban services in different nation states makes it difficult to carry out such comparisons. Urban systems theory, however, applies to all levels of urban society from local collections of towns and villages right up to the world system of cities. It also enables the development of empirically testable hypotheses linking the hierarchical system of cities with the level of expenditure on public services in metropolitan areas. An examination of data for seventy-six metropolitan regions in France, eighty-three in Italy, seventy-four in West Germany, and sixty-three in England and Wales supports the hypothesis. The article concludes that urban systems theory offers a theoretically well-developed and empirically powerful means of carrying out systematic cross-national comparative urban research.
Political Science and the Study of Corporate Power: A Dissent from the New Conventional Wisdom
Authors: Vogel David
Published: January 2009

Over the last fifteen years political scientists have become much more critical of the role that business plays in American politics. Two decades ago business was primarily regarded as another interest group; now many scholars perceive a tension between the large business corporation and the principles and practices of pluralist democracy.

This article challenges this new ‘conventional wisdom’ by critically examining the recent writings of Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom. Dahl regards the corporation as undemocratic because its managers are not accountable to its employees. Yet, the corporation is hardly unique in this regard: not one single institution in our society – including the government itself – is governed by those who work for it. Lindblom contends that business occupies a privileged position in capitalist democracies. But he exaggerates the role investment decisions play in the performance of the economy, underestimates the options available to politicians to manipulate business decisions and fails to appreciate that businessmen are not unique in requiring inducements to perform their social role. The article concludes by suggesting that while corporations do exercise considerable political power, both its scope and magnitude can be satisfactorily analysed within the framework of interest-group politics.
Steering the Ship of State: One Tiller but Two Pairs of Hands
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: January 2009

Policy-making reflects the combined activity of both politicians and higher civil servants; both have their hands on the tiller of the ship of state. But they approach problems of governing from different perspectives – partisan or bureaucratic – and each has a different contribution to make. This article considers six models of the relationship, varying according to inputs of political will and the probability of programmes achieving success. They are: willpower dominates; perfectly informed trade-offs; everything is uncertain; everything is predetermined; capture by civil servants; and policies dominate. The analysis emphasizes that there is a greater need for changes in the knowledge and behaviour of politicians in office than for further reform of the civil service.
Declining Turnout in an Era of Waning Partisanship
Authors: Denardo James
Published: January 2009

This study examines the logic of recovering information about the decay of partisan loyalties in the electorate from observed patterns of declining turnout. If we entertain plausible assumptions about the behaviour of core and peripheral voters, the rates of electoral participation become a surprisingly useful barometer for measuring the intensity and character of partisan dealignment.
Changing Pressure-Group Politics: The Case of the Trades Union Congress, 1976–84
Authors: Mitchell Neil J.
Published: January 2009

This Note presents a variety of new evidence on the paths and channels that one pressure group, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), has used to influence or obstruct public policy in Britain over the last decade. Where is pressure applied? At what level? Which departments are most important? What is the role of tripartite organizations? How are policy positions communicated? In addition to these and similar questions the evidence permits a systematic examination of the impact made by a change in the party of government upon the structure of group-government interaction. Two contrasting patterns of interaction, which represent a rapid and sharp change coinciding with the change in government, are revealed. Government decisions themselves appear to be determinants of pressure-group influence and activities – even for a group with such a central position in British politics as the TUC – as well as the other way around; ‘Bentley on his head’ as Harry Eckstein puts it.
Group Identities and Individual Influence: Reconstructing the Theory of Interest Groups
Authors: Dunleavy Patrick
Published: January 2009

Public-choice models argue that large interest groups are less likely to overcome free-rider problems because of the irrelevance of individual's participation to the supply of non-excludable group benefits. But these accounts are constructed in terms of ‘objective’ variables, and hence rely on perfect information assumptions. Paying attention instead to how people learn that interest groups are relevant for them indicates a key role for group identities, i.e. subjective perceptions of interests shared with others. Recasting the decision to form or join groups in terms of subjective variables highlights the imporlance of perceived group viability. In a liberal democratic context, increasing group size has ambiguous effects; it somewhat accentuates the irrelevance of individual participation to supply, and yet (ceteris paribus) also increases (he group's viability. Applying the group identity approach sheds light on a problem which public-choice theory cannot adequately explain: the reasons why (apart from group size) social interests are differentially difficult or easy to organize.
The Role of Social Groups in Political Thinking
Authors: Conover Pamela Johnston
Published: January 2009

This article outlines a cognitive-affective model of the role of social groups in political thinking. The model is based on the assumptions that people have stored information and emotional reactions to social groups, and that people are purposive in their thinking about social groups in the sense that they are interested in understanding what various groups have obtained and whether it is deserved. The process through which social groups influence political thinking varies significantly depending upon whether an individual identifies with the group in question. Generally, people are more inclined to feel sympathetic towards the groups to which they belong. These ideas are illustrated with an empirical analysis that focuses on women's issues and makes use of data collected in the 1984 National Election Study Pilot Study.
Political Independence in America, Part I: On Being an Independent Partisan Supporter
Authors: Dennis Jack
Published: January 2009

With the decline in popular attachment to the two major parties in the United States since the mid-1960s, collective political independence has risen. Using new survey questions introduced in 1980, this article employs alternative measures of independence to reassess the phenomenon of independence in America. These new measures give us fresh insights beyond what we had using only the traditional measures. One casualty of this new approach is the portrait of the Independent given byThe American Voter. This portrait appears seriously misleading, given that it is those who deny beingeitherpartisan or Independent who fit that portrait – not Independentsper se. And the most politically involved voters turn out to be Independent Partisan Supporters; not simple partisans.
Party Voting in the United States Congress
Authors: Patterson Samuel C. , Caldeira Gregory A.
Published: January 2009

By the standard of most European parliaments, levels of party voting in the United States Congress are relatively low. Nevertheless, party voting does occur in the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the American context, a party vote occurs when majorities of the two congressional parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, oppose one another. The authors construct measurements of levels of party voting in Congress in the years after the Second World War. They then develop a model to test the effects of a number of independent variables that influence fluctuations in party voting levels over time. The study models the time series for party voting and demonstrates striking differences between the House and Senate in the correlates of partisan cleavage.
Electoral Distortion under STV Random Sampling Procedures: A Rejoinder to Fischer
Authors: Gallagher Michael , Unwin A. R.
Published: January 2009

We are grateful to Fischer for pointing out his work on STV random sampling, which precedes ours. While acknowledging our oversight in not referring to his articles, we cannot accept the validity of either of the substantive criticisms he makes in his Comment.
Nested Games: The Cohesion of French Electoral Coalitions
Authors: Tsebelis George
Published: January 2009

This article introduces a theory of Nested Games which accounts for the cohesion of coalitions. The parties in a coalition are considered to be playing a game with variable payoffs. The payoffs depend on a higher-order game between the coalition and its opponents. Several political situations approximate to this conceptualization, such as Government and Opposition coalitions, factions inside parties, international coalitions, class conflict. The theory of Nested Games predicts the cohesion of coalitions as a function of the relative size of both the coalitions and the partners within each coalition.

The test case of the theory is the cohesion of French electoral coalitions in 1978. Empirical results corroborate the theory. All parties behave according to its predictions. Moreover, a difference in the way parties behave, according to whether the game is visible (by the electorate) or invisible, is discovered and explained.
The European Steel Unions and the Steel Crisis, 1974–84: A Study in the Demise of Traditional Unionism
Authors: Rhodes Martin , Wright Vincent
Published: January 2009

This article explores some of the major reasons for the weakness of the European steel unions during the crisis years of 1974–84. The crisis revealed the absence of viable union strategies and the inefficiency of their tactics, and also exposed – and aggravated – the divisions within and between the unions and their inability fully to control their members. The crisis underlined the dilemmas inherent in tripartite crisis management and the problems of adjusting to the internationalization of the market and the Europeanization of decision making. Finally, the crisis highlighted the fact that subcontracting, new technology, new working practices and new patterns of labour relations at plant level harboured damaging implications for union organization and influence.
An Extension of Nurmi's Summary Analysis of Voting Procedures
Authors: Paine Neil R.
Published: January 2009

Nurmi has analysed a number of voting procedures with respect to various criteria. The purpose of this Comment is to extend Nurmi's analysis to include the so-called social utility method of candidate selection. This method assumes that each voter has a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function defined over all candidates (i.e., that, roughly speaking, each voter can assign a cardinal rating to each candidate); then the winning candidate is the one with the greatest utility total.
Formal Models of Bureaucracy
Authors: Bendor Jonathan
Published: January 2009

Formal analysis is fairly new in public administration, and there is some scepticism in the field about the intellectual advantages of mathematical methods. This is appropriate. Using these methods is now faddish, and fads can cause goal displacement. A formal model of bureaucracy should be only a tool for deepening our knowledge about public organizations. If the underlying ideas are silly, translating them into mathematics will do little good. If they are promising, however, deductive reasoning can help us explore their potential: if one believesAis a general property of bureaucracies, to fail to work outA's logical implications would be throwing away information. Analysis can also increase the falsifiability of our ideas: ifAimpliesBbut empirically we find not-B, the truth status ofAis brought into question. Or it may turn out, as Arrow discovered about democratic principles, that our informal ideas are logically inconsistent: we thought propertiesCandDdescribe existing or possible institutions, but recasting the ideas into mathematical form reveals that such an institution is impossible. Finally, some problems are just too hard to tackle without formal tools. It is unlikely, for example, that Robert Axelrod would have discovered the robustness of the simple strategy of tit-for-tat in the two person prisoners' dilemma without the help of a computer (to pit tit-for-tat against many opponents in thousands of rounds of play) and of mathematics (to prove some generic properties of tit-for-tat).