bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Note on Overseas Chinese Political Participation in Urban Malaya
Authors: Rabushka Alvin
Published: May 2006

The object of this note is to demonstrate that generalizations about political participation may be invalid when applied to “developing” or “transitional” societies. Specifically, the relationship between rates of voter turnout and levels of education for urban Chinese in Malaya is not consistent with results reported for Western societies.

A geographical classification of bibliographic entries in Lester Milbrath's Political Participation discloses a very interesting statistic: only 3 of the 288 listed entries concern the transitional societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The lack of data on developing areas may, in large measure, explain the emphasis placed on studies of political participation in North America and Western Europe. Although there is more research on transitional societies today, most studies still focus on advanced industrial societies. The validity of the generalizations presented in Political Participation, therefore, is restricted to North America and Western Europe.

Using data collected in Malaya (1957), I examine four of Milbrath's hypotheses. These include:

(1) higher education increases participation (p.122);

(2) middle-aged persons participate more than young or old persons (p. 134);

(3) men are more likely to participate than women (p. 133); and

(4) religion affects participation (p. 137).
Voting, or a Price System in a Competitive Market Structure
Authors: Shubik Martin
Published: May 2006

In this brief note it is demonstrated that if all the conditions for the existence of a competitive equilibrium are satisfied, then simple majority voting to determine the distribution of goods may be less efficient than a price system.

The argument here may be somewhat cryptic for those not familiar with the work of Anthony Downs. A considerably more discursive presentation of the background material is given in “A Two Party System, General Equilibrium and the Voters' Paradox.” The tax and public goods aspect of the voting problem have been discussed elsewhere in “Notes on the Taxonomy of Problems Concerning Public Goods.” The result presented here, nevertheless, stands by itself, hence is presented in this brief form.

The political system is modeled at its simplest. We assume the existence of two players called “political parties.” The goal of each player is to win an election by as large a vote as possible. A strategy for each player is to name a policy that it will carry out if it is elected. A policy is any point in the set of feasible distributions of final product. It follows immediately that, although any policy may be considered as a strategy, any non-Pareto optimal policies are dominated by some policy that is optimal. A discussion of the reasons for modeling a party in this simple manner is given in detail elsewhere. It is assumed that all voters are passive or “mechanistic,” i.e., they do not form groups but merely vote individually, selecting optimally between the two policies offered.
John Locke: From Absolutism to Toleration
Authors: Kraynak Robert P.
Published: May 2006

Many of Locke's early writings have been discovered and published in the last 30 years. Among them are two short tracts in which Locke argues that the power of the civil magistrate should be absolute. Because these early tracts are very different from Locke's later teachings, they have been misunderstood by contemporary scholars who do not see any connection between absolutism and liberal toleration. I explain the connection by reconstructing Locke's critique of religious politics, which reveals that absolutism and toleration are the same in principle despite their great difference in practice. I then use this demonstration to explain Locke's development and to illuminate the foundations of contemporary liberalism.
The Minimal Contributing Set as a Solution to Public Goods Problems
Authors: van de Kragt Alphons J. C. , Orbell John M. , Dawes Robyn M.
Published: May 2006

This article reports small group experiments in which subjects may choose to contribute a fixed amount of money toward a monetary public good, and in which the good itself is supplied only if a specified number of contributions (or more) are made. Given the opportunity to communicate, our subjects organized themselves by specifying precisely the number of required contributors and who they would be. This organization, which we call designation of aminimal contributing set,always resulted in provision of the public good, and provision in a nearly optimal manner. In contrast, groups presented with the identical problem but not allowed to communicate failed to generate a sufficient number of contributions 35 percent of the time, and in slightly over half of the successful groups, overprovision produced inefficiency.

We present hypotheses about why designating a minimal contributing set works, and data indicating that the mechanism results in reduced normative conflict and felt risk, as well as increased efficiency. The essential property of the minimal contributing set, we hypothesize, iscriticalness:the contributions of the members of the minimal contributing set are each critical to obtaining the public good the members desire, and they know it. It is reasonable (albeit not a dominant strategy) to contribute because reasonable behavior can be expected from other minimal contributing set members who are in the same situation. Unreasonableness is a problem that increases with the size of groups, but adaptations exist that, we argue, can reduce its seriousness.
Effects of Public Opinion on Policy
Authors: Page Benjamin I. , Shapiro Robert Y.
Published: May 2006

The responsiveness of government policies to citizens' preferences is a central concern of various normative and empirical theories of democracy. Examining public opinion and policy data for the United States from 1935 to 1979, we find considerable congruence between changes in preferences and in policies, especially for large, stable opinion changes on salient issues. We present evidence that pubic opinion is often a proximate cause of policy, affecting policy more than policy influences opinion. One should be cautious, however, about concluding that democratic responsiveness pervades American politics.
The War Trap Revisited: A Revised Expected Utility Model
Authors: de Mesquita Bruce Bueno
Published: May 2006

The expected utility framework developed in The War Trap is revised to correct several deficiencies. Risk-taking orientations are now treated as an integral part of the model by introducing concavity or convexity into the utility functions. The zero-sum properties of the theory are largely eliminated, and the tendency toward interpersonal comparisons of utility is removed. Several earlier results are replicated with the new model, and with annual capabilities data. New propositions are deduced that identify important limitations on conflict initiation, and relationships resulting from differences in perceptions are tested. Support is found for the contention that the revised version of the theory, of which the original model is a special case, is a powerful tool for integrating many extant hypotheses about conflict and for explaining a substantial portion of the tendency for some threats to escalate to violence or warfare and for others to be resolved peacefully.
Conflict, War, and Redistribution
Authors: Brito Dagobert L. , Intriligator Michael D.
Published: May 2006

This article analyzes the circumstances under which conflict leads to the outbreak of war using a formal model which incorporates both the redistribution of resources as an alternative to war and imperfect information. Countries act as rational agents concerned with both consumption and the public bad of a war. In the first period both countries can either consume or build arms, whereas in the second period there can be either the threat or the use of force to reallocate resources. If both countries are fully informed, then there will be no war but rather a voluntary redistribution of resources. In a situation of asymmetric information, however, in which one country is fully informed and the other is not, a war can occur if the uninformed country uses a separating equilibrium strategy, precommitting itself to a positive probability of war in order to prevent bluffing by the informed country.
“Two Nations”: Class and Periphery in Late Victorian Britain, 1885-1910
Authors: Wellhofer E. Spencer
Published: May 2006

Structural equation modeling techniques test a series of hypotheses on the mobilization of class voting in late Victorian Britain. The enfranchisement of the working class triggers an organizational proliferation as parties seek to mobilize the new citizenry as well as a countermobilization of religious and territorial cleavages which divide the working-class vote along pre-industrial cleavage lines. Class voting appeared as early as the 1895 election as the newly enfranchised voters of 1884 supported the Labour and Lib-Lab parties. During the period the Liberals became increasingly isolated with their middle class, Nonconformist base as organized labor in particular moved to Labour and the Lib-Labs. Conservative support appears stable among middle-class and Catholic voters. Models of regional politics show Central England to evolve quite differently, with class voting less important than in the remainder of the country. In the periphery the Liberals appealed to the Celtic fringe, while Labour garnered the working class vote. The mobilization of the lower strata, which might have united class against class, generated a countermobilization, which divided the periphery against the center.
Political Parties, World Demand, and Unemployment: Domestic and International Sources of Economic Activity
Authors: Alt James E.
Published: May 2006

This article replicates and extends earlier work on the politics of macroeconomic policy by considering political effects on unemployment in 14 western industrial nations between 1960 and 1983. Changes of party control of government display broadly the expected effects, namely that unemployment falls under left-wing governments and rises under right-wing governments. However, the principal conclusions of this article are that partisan effects on unemployment in open economies (that is, economies heavily dependent on trade with other countries) can only be satisfactorily estimated relative to the constraint imposed by the level of world economic activity, and that in addition to politicians' strategic incentives, political institutions and economic regime constraints also determine whether partisan effects on unemployment will be sustained, transitory, or absent. With respect to the latter, on the whole no effects are found where no such effects were promised by the new government before taking office; where one-party or dominant-partner coalitions form, the effect on unemployment is transitory, whereas where broad coalitions form, it is sustained or absent. Finally, ceteris paribus, any partisan effects are more likely where governments secure parliamentary majorities.
A Directional Theory of Issue Voting
Authors: Rabinowitz George , Macdonald Stuart Elaine
Published: May 2006

From Stokes's (1963) early critique on, it has been clear to empirical researchers that the traditional spatial theory of elections is seriously flawed. Yet fully a quarter century later, that theory remains the dominant paradigm for understanding mass-elite linkage in politics. We present an alternative spatial theory of elections that we argue has greater empirical verisimilitude.

Based on the ideas of symbolic politics, the directional theory assumes that most people have a diffuse preference for a certain direction of policy-making and that people vary in the intensity with which they hold those preferences. We test the two competing theories at the individual level with National Election Study data and find the directional theory more strongly supported than the traditional spatial theory. We then develop the implications of the directional theory for candidate behavior and assess the predictions in light of evidence from the U.S. Congress.
Authority Patterns: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry
Authors: Eckstein Harry
Published: May 2006

The paper proposes a novel (even if not wholly unprecedented) solution to an old and fundamental problem: What should be the scope of political studies? Arguments have long been directed against the conventional equation of the scope of the field with the study of “state-organizations” and structures that directly impinge upon such organizations. The arguments are convincing. However, the principal proposed alternatives have important flaws of their own. These alternatives are the extension of the scope of the field to phenomena “functionally” similar to state-organizations and the inclusion in polititcal study of all “asymmetrical” social relations—power, influence, or control relations. By means of the classificatory method of “progressive differentiation,” an alternative that seems preferable is worked out: equating political study with the study of authority patterns in any and all social units. That conception of the subject matter of the field, it is argued, avoids all the difficulties raised by other conceptions and affords all of their advantages. Above all, it reconciles subjective interests with scientific (or disciplinary) imperatives and achieves a proper trade-off between the numerousness and homogeneity of phenomena covered by the field—a trade-off critical for the achievement of general, testable, informative empirical theory. A concluding section discusses the place in political study, thus conceived, of the study of international relations and of recent work in “political economy,” which appears to focus on symmetrical, not asymmetrical, interactions.
National and Local Forces in State Politics: The Implications of Multi-Level Policy Analysis
Authors: Rose Douglas D.
Published: May 2006

Studies of American states and their policies are severely handicapped by the use of a single level of analysis. The operations of American politics and the assumptions of correlation methodology imply that only a multi-level approach can adequately comprehend state politics. All major aspects of politics, but particularly policies, are distorted by the single level approach. The extent of distortion suggests that relations among states and between states and the national government are the prime determinants of state politics and that the study of states ought to be organized around these relations. This approach accounts for the salient characteristics of state politics, indicating that states are not political systems but collections of tangentially related components of a national system. States which appear systematic derive their coherence from interactions with the national pattern, a process with important residual effects on the legitimacy of state governments.
Minority Electoral Politics in a North Indian State: Aggregate Data Analysis and the Muslim Community in Bihar, 1952–1972
Authors: Blair Harry W.
Published: May 2006

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.
Assessing the Partisan Effects of Redistricting
Authors: Cain Bruce E.
Published: May 2006

The purpose of this article is to assess the reality behind the politician's perception that redistricting matters. There are, of course, many dimensions to that perception, because redistricting has many effects. This articles focuses on the impact of boundary changes on the partisan composition of seats. In order to do this, it will be necessary to specify what the expected partisan effects of redistricting are and how they can be measured. Thus, I first explain how the impact of redistricting will vary with the strategy of particular plans and then explore some techniques for measuring the partisan impact of boundary changes. I conclude with a detailed analysis of the most important congressional redistricting in 1982—the Burton plan in California.
Ideology, Party, and Voting in the U.S. Congress, 1959–1980
Authors: Poole Keith T. , Daniels R. Steven
Published: May 2006

Current methods of roll-call analysis have practical as well as theoretical shortcomings. We propose here a method based on a spatial theory of voting that overcomes these problems. We apply metric multidimensional unfolding to interest-group ratings of members of Congress in order to obtain a Euclidean spatial configuration of congressmen. Each roll-call vote is then mapped into the configuration of members in a way consistent with spatial theory. Based on 190,000 ratings issued from 1959 to 1980, our empirical analysis demonstrates that a single liberal-conservative dimension accounts for more than 80% of the variance in the ratings. A second dimension, associated with party unity, accounts for 7% of the variance. Approximately 86% of all roll-call voting for the 22 years of our study is consistent with a simple one-dimensional spatial model. The votes that best fit the liberal-conservative dimension are drawn from the government management, social welfare, and foreign policy areas. The votes that best fit the two-dimensional configurations are drawn from the agricultural area.
War Making and State Making: Governmental Expenditures, Tax Revenues, and Global Wars
Authors: Rasler Karen A. , Thompson William R.
Published: May 2006

Addressing the disputed relationship between war and the expansion of governmental expenditures and revenues, Box-Tiao intervention models are applied to a number of British (1700-1980), United States (1792-1980), French (1815-1979), and Japanese (1878-1980) spending and taxation series. Distinguishing between global and interstate wars, the more intensive and extensive bouts of warfare (global wars) tend to bring about abrupt, permanent impacts in contrast to the temporary changes associated with most interstate wars. The observed displacements are reflected in both war-related and nonwar-related types of expenditure and are also observed before 1900. Although our findings are not universally applicable and are subject to various other qualifications, they may be interpreted, in general, as reinforcing the need for an appreciation of the persistent centrality of war, especially global war, in the discontinuous growth and expansion of the modern state.
Party Goals and Government Performance in Parliamentary Democracies
Authors: Strom Kaare
Published: May 2006

From assumptions of parties as rational actors, this study develops four measures of government performance: duration, mode of resignation, subsequent alternation, and electoral success. These measures are used in a test of competing hypotheses concerning minority government performance in parliamentary democracies. Minority governments are conventionally portrayed as poor performers, but tests of this proposition have been seriously limited. An alternative hypothesis depicts minority governments as rational cabinet solutions without significant performance liabilities. These hypotheses are tested against an extensive cross-national data set including 323 postwar governments in 15 parliamentary democracies. The conventional wisdom about minority governments is not supported by the evidence. In some respects, minority governments are clearly superior to majority coalitions. Moreover, minority government formation may enhance systemic responsiveness and accountability. The findings support the explanation of minority governments as rational cabinet solutions.
An Adaptive Model of Bureaucratic Politics
Authors: Bendor Jonathan , Moe Terry M.
Published: May 2006

In this article we outline a new framework for the formal analysis of bureaucratic politics. It departs from standard neoclassical approaches, notably those of Niskanen (1971) and Peltzman (1976), in several important respects. First our approach explicitly models a system of three-way interaction among bureaus, politicians, and interest groups. Second, it allows for institutional features of each type of participant. Third, it is a model of dynamic process. Fourth, participants make choices adoptively rather than optimizing. Fifth, participants are only minimally informed.

The result is a dynamic model of adaptive behavior, very much in the spirit of Simon's (1947) behavioral tradition, that offers a new perspective on political control, bureaucratic power, and the “intelligence of democracy.”
Thought Reform and Cultural Revolution: An Analysis of the Symbolism of Chinese Polemics
Authors: Dittmer Lowell
Published: May 2006

Although the major purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to transform Chinese political culture, the way in which this transformation took place has remained unclear. This paper attempts to understand cultural transformation as a process of interaction within a semiological system, consisting of a network of communicators and a lexicon of political symbols. The pragmatic aspect of this process is the outcome of an interplay among the intentions of the elites, the masses, and the target of criticism: political circumstances during the Cultural Revolution were more benign to the cathartic and hortatory intentions of the masses and elites than to the expiatory needs of the target. The syntactic aspect of the system concerns the relationship among symbols: These were found to form a dichotomous structure divided by a taboo barrier, which elicited strong but ambivalent desires to achieve a revolutionary breakthrough. The semantic aspect of the symbolism refers to problematic dimensions of experience in Chinese political culture–the psychological repression imposed by a system of rigid social censorship, the political discrimination practiced against certain social categories, the persistence of differences in income or educational achievement in a socialist system–and suggests that these “contradictions” may be resolved by bold frontal assault.

The symbolism of Cultural Revolution polemics has now become part of Chinese political culture. Its impact seems to have been to inhibit social differentiation (particularly hierarchical), to encourage greater mass participation, and to foster more frequent and irreconcilable conflict among elites.
What Is Political Obligation?
Authors: Dagger Richard K.
Published: May 2006

Political philosophers have long been exercised by the problem of political obligation. Many have tried to solve it, and others, more recently, have dismissed it as a pseudo-problem which cannot be solved and need not be posed. This essay is an attempt to clarify the problem of political obligation and to see why it is a problem. My argument, briefly, is that the traditional understanding of the problem is misleading because it fails to distinguish questions of obedience from questions of obligation. When it is properly stated the problem can be solved–in principle, at least–and I try to show what form a solution will take.
Political Statistics for the United States: Observations on Some Major Data Sources
Authors: Tufte Edward R.
Published: May 2006

Thirteen major data sources for the study of American politics are examined with regard to their conceptual orientation, error structure, and inferential utility. A great deal of ephemera and measurement without theory is discovered. Few of the documents contain any serious discussion of error structure, although some do report “standard errors” based on naive sampling models. In addition to suggestions for improving the compilation of political statistics, recommendations for a basic minimum library of data sources for American politics are made:The Almanac of American Politicsand theStatistical Abstract of the United States, followed by theGuide to U.S. Elections.
Presidential Coattails and Midterm Losses in State Legislative Elections
Authors: Campbell James E.
Published: May 2006

The president's party consistently loses partisan control of state legislatures in midterm elections, a pattern similar to the loss of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in midterms. This study examines presidential coattails as a possible explanation of these losses. Aggregate state legislative election outcomes between 1944 and 1984 in 41 states are examined. The analysis indicates that the president's party gains seats in presidential elections in proportion to the presidential vote in a state, and subsequently loses seats in midterm elections also in proportion to the prior presidential vote in the state. The presidential coattail and the midterm repercussion effects are evident even when gubernatorial coattail effects are introduced, but are fairly modest in states lacking competitive parties.
Party Identification, Party Choice, and Voting Stability: The Weimar Case
Authors: Shively W. Phillips
Published: May 2006

The stability of voting for subsets of the Weimar population distinguished by sex, religion, and urban-rural residence is estimated: (1) by means of ecological regression, for the period 1924–1928; (2) by an examination of net changes, for the period 1928–1933.

The major conclusion is that party identification was not an important factor in the Weimar Republic. Instead, voting seems to have been channeled largely by social and economic structures. Subsidiary conclusions are that uneven distribution of information affected the stability of voting and that most of the Nazi gains from 1928 to 1933 apparently did not come disproportionately from among previous nonvoters.
Political Mobility and the Soviet Political Process: A Partial Test of Two Models
Authors: Stewart Philip D. , Arnett Robert L. , Ebert William T. , McPhail Raymond E. , Rich Terrence L. , Schopmeyer Craig E.
Published: May 2006

This article provides a partial test of the rational-technical model and of the patronage model of political mobility in the Soviet Communist Party. Two major hypotheses are examined: 1) the greater the number of patron client ties acquired by regional Party secretaries, the greater the probability of their upward mobility, and 2) the better the economic performance of the regions for which secretaries are responsible, the greater the probability of their upward mobility. Multiple regression analysis indicates only very weak support for these hypotheses for the 1955–1968 period in the RSFSR. Considerably greater support for the hypotheses is found when the following variables are controlled: level of economic development, political regime, and Party cohort. Changes in the level of policy conflict within the central elite are found to account for much of the variation over time in the explanatory power of the two models.
Legal Mobilization: The Neglected Role of the Law in the Political System
Authors: Zemans Frances Kahn
Published: May 2006

This article argues thai the role of the law in the political system has been construed much too narrowly. A review of the political science literature demonstrates an interest in the law that is largely confined to the making of new laws, social change, and social control. That view implies an acceptance of the legal profession's distinction between public and private law as a reasonable guide for political scientists in the study of law.

A more interactive view of the law is presented, characterizing legal mobilization (invoking legal norms) as a form of political activity by which the citizenry uses public authority on its own behalf. Further, the legal system, structured to consider cases and controversies on an individual basis, provides access to government authority unencumbered by the limits of collective action. This form of public power, although contingent, is widely dispersed.

Consideration of the factors that influence legal mobilization is important not only to understanding who uses the law, but also as predictors to the implementation of public policy; with very few exceptions, the enforcement of the laws depends upon individual citizens to initiate the legal process. By virtue of this dependence, an aggregation of individual citizens acting largely in their own interests strongly influences the form and extent of the implementation of public policy and thereby the allocation of power and authority.
Rulers and the Ruled: Patterned Inequality and the Onset of Mass Political Violence
Authors: Midlarsky Manus I.
Published: May 2006

The theory of patterned inequality between rulers and ruled provides a valuable analytic approach to the relationship between inequality and political violence. Under conditions of a bifurcated pattern of inequality, the probability of political violence is likely to be greater than under a more generalized inequality typically measured by the Gini index. A strong systematic relationship between patterned inequality in Latin American landholdings and deaths from political violence was discovered using the exponential distribution as a model for the lower portion of the land distribution and the log-exponential for the upper. This degree of association was far stronger than that found between the Gini index of land inequality in Latin America and deaths from political violence. Evidence supporting the theory was also found in an analysis of Middle Eastern landholdings.
Freshman Committee Assignments and Re-election in the United States House of Representatives
Authors: Bullock Charles S.
Published: May 2006

Two students of the committee assignment process, Nicholas Masters and Charles Clapp, as well as some congressmen, assert that the most crucial factor in filling committee vacancies is whether the appointment will enhance the recipient's chance of re-election. This statement is tested using data for Republican and Northern Democratic freshmen elected to the House between 1947 and 1967.

The freshmen are grouped on the basis of assumptions about which assignment or assignments should help them win re-election. When narrowly elected and safe freshmen are compared, there is no evidence that the former more frequently receive assignments likely to facilitate re-election. Thus there is no support for the Masters-Clapp proposition.

Investigation further reveals that even those freshmen from marginal districts who are awarded “good” appointments are not re-elected significantly more often than are comparable newcomers having less favorable assignments. Committee assignments therefore seem relatively unimportant in determining whether a congressman wins a sophomore term. Indeed, more than 70 per cent of the freshmen who triumphed in hotly contested races to reach the House are returned. When these incumbents are defeated it is typically as a result of nation-wide forces over which they exercise little if any control.

The implications of this research are that congressmen have a greater range of alternatives than is often thought. Even the narrowly elected novice is relatively free to seek appointment to committees for reasons other than constituency service or promotion. Largely symbolic activities are available through which concern for the district and its problems and needs can be demonstrated, thereby freeing much of the congressman's time and attention to pursue other less parochial goals.
The Impact of Taxes on Growth and Distribution in Developed Capitalist Countries: A Cross-National Study
Authors: Katz Claudio J. , Mahler Vincent A. , Franz Michael G.
Published: May 2006

Has the scope of public planning in contemporary capitalist economies promoted or hindered economic growth and income distribution? We explore this question by assessing the impact of various mechanisms for raising government revenues on investment, growth, and income distribution in 22 developed market economy countries. The article considers whether growth and distribution are affected differently by governments' relative reliance on personal and corporate income taxes, social security contributions, property taxes, and sales and value added taxes, or by the relative progressivity of tax mechanisms. Our findings lend support to the assertion that fiscal instruments (especially personal income taxes) can be used successfully to achieve greater income equality. On the other hand, these findings run counter to the conventional notion that an automatic trade-off exists between an active public sector and a dynamic, expanding economy: although there is surely some tension between the economic goals of growth and equality, it is not at all clear that they are necessarily incompatible or that government can contribute only to the latter.
The Social Context of Political Change: Durability, Volatility, and Social Influence
Authors: Huckfeldt R. Robert
Published: May 2006

This article translates several explanations for contextual effects upon politics into mathematical, dynamic representations. These representations are used to consider several questions. Under what circumstances does the social context lead to durability and volatility in mass political preferences? Do different specifications of contextual influence lead to different conclusions regarding its dynamic consequences? Does the social context have different dynamic implications for individual preference and for the aggregate preferences of the population as a whole? These questions are not addressed by gathering and analyzing data, but rather by examining the deductive consequences of the various explanations for contextual influence.
Winning May Not Be Everything, But It's More than We Thought: Presidential Party Activists in 1980
Authors: Stone Walter J. , Abramowitz Alan I.
Published: May 2006

Recent studies of party activists in the United States have shown an influx of issue-oriented activists into the presidential nominating process since the 1960s. These new activists are described as dogmatic ideologues more interested in promoting their issue concerns than in nominating an electable candidate. Based on our survey of 17,628 delegates attending party conventions in 11 states during the 1980 Democratic and Republican presidential nomination campaigns, we show that activists in both parties weighed electability more heavily than ideology in choosing a party nominee. This finding is in sharp contrast to a strong preference among these same activists for ideological purity over electability when they are presented with questions, typical of past studies, that pose the trade-off only in very general and abstract terms. A partial replication using data from the CPS survey of delegates to the 1972 Democratic national convention supports our findings and leads us to assert that previous studies have underestimated the concern of contemporary party activists with winning.
The Dynamics of Party Identification
Authors: Franklin Charles H. , Jackson John E.
Published: May 2006

This article presents a model of individuals' party identification that contrasts with previous models. Past models, with the few recent exceptions noted, assume a hierarchical relationship either from identification to other aspects of political behavior, such as the perception and evaluation of issues and candidates, or from these behaviors to party identifications. The model discussed here places party within a dynamic concept of the electoral process and tests several hypotheses about factors producing changes in identifications. The first factor, consistent with the spatial-type issue voting models, estimates the effects of the relative proximity of each party to the individual's own policy preferences. Second, we examine the effect of the actual voting decision on subsequent identifications, with the expectation that if votes differ from previous identifications, there is a resulting shift in partisanship. Finally, we examine the hypothesis that identifications become less susceptible to change as people age and accumulate political experience. When combined with other research, the results indicate a model of the electoral process in which party identifications are both influenced by circumstances specific to each election and influence other behaviors. This nonrecursive model has a number of implications for the development and evolution of individual and aggregate partisanship. These implications are discussed at the end of the article.
Popular Control of Public Policy: A Normal Vote Analysis of the 1968 Election
Authors: Boyd Richard W.
Published: May 2006

The importance of issues in deciding elections changes from one election to the next. As Key has shown, the issues of the role of the federal government in social life helped create the New Deal Democratic majority. In contrast, issues had only a marginal impact on the apolitical elections of the 1950s. Converse's technique of normal vote analysis reveals that issues were again highly related to the vote in 1968. This was particularly true of attitudes toward Vietnam, urban unrest and race, social welfare, and Johnson's performance as president.

Yet, even in an election in which issues appear important, some can have very different consequences for popular control of policy than others. On some issues, the electorate exercises no effective constraints on leaders' policy choices. On others (e.g., the escalation in Vietnam), the electorate permits leaders a wide array of options when a policy is adopted and passes a retrospective judgment on such choices in subsequent elections. Finally, on still other issues, the public may limit the options of leaders at the time a policy is adopted. The paper suggests the stringent conditions necessary for this type of popular control to exist.
One Soul at a Time: Political Science and Political Reform
Authors: Huntington Samuel P.
Published: May 2006

Political scientists want to do good. They want to expand knowledge about political life, but also they wish to use knowledge for political reform. Usually this means desiring to promote “democratization.” Historically democracy and political science have tended to develop together. In modest ways political science can contribute to the emergence of democracy. Political reform succeeds best if it occurs incrementally, in the spirit of “one soul at a time.”
American Political Science, Liberalism, and the Invention of Political Theory
Authors: Gunnell John G.
Published: May 2006

The contemporary estrangement of political theory from political science is in large measure the product of a quarrel that originated in the challenge to the values of U.S. political science initiated by émigré scholars during the 1940s. The behavioral revolution was in an important respect a conservative rebellion in defense of the values of liberalism and related notions of science, relativism, and historical progress that had traditionally informed the discipline. This controversy in the context of political science fundamentally structured the discourse of academic political theory and the contemporary constitution of the field both as a division of political science and as a wider interdisciplinary enterprise.
The Levels of Conceptualization: False Measures of Ideological Sophistication
Authors: Smith Eric R. A. N.
Published: May 2006

The “level of conceptualization” index, introduced by Campbell et al. (1960), is commonly used to measure ideological awareness and sophistication among the electorate. Unfortunately, the validity and reliability of the original measure were never sufficiently examined. This article examines the level of conceptualization measures of Field and Anderson (1969) and Nie, Verba and Petrocik (1976). It reaches two major conclusions: (1) the measures under examination are neither reliable nor valid measures of the level of conceptualization construct; and (2) the measures reflect the rhetoric of contemporary political discourse rather than the actual process of political evaluation. These conclusions call into doubt the validity and reliability of the original measure of The American Voter.
The Paradox of Vote Trading: Effects of Decision Rules and Voting Strategies on Externalities
Authors: Uslaner Eric M. , Davis J. Ronnie
Published: May 2006

In an article, “The Paradox of Vote Trading,” (APSR 67 [December, 1973]) William H. Riker and Steven J. Brams have argued that systematic logrolling among all members of a legislature produces a paradox: While each trade is individually rational, the effects of externalities offset the potential gains from exchanging votes and each voter finds himself worse off than he would have been by voting sincerely. We extend the results of Riker and Brams to a unanimity decision rule and find that a paradox of vote trading holds for that decision rule as well as for simple majority rule. Under a unanimity rule, however, trades which would be collectively rational (i.e., which would produce a Pareto optimal result) are not individually rational; the non-trader is the beneficiary under such a decision rule. Finally, we pose the question Riker and Brams suggested: Is the paradox of vote trading inescapable? Except under very restrictive conditions, we find that it is. However, given certain assumptions about the distributions of individual utilities, we present proofs of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the Pareto optimality of vote trading and argue that in actual legislative situations, when vote trading is Pareto optimal, learning behavior should serve to extricate the members from the paradox of vote trading.
Evaluation of a Presidential Election Game
Authors: Owen Guillermo
Published: May 2006

The Shapley value of the presidential election “game” is approximated by the method of multilinear extensions; the likely error in this approximation is computed by studying the error in the electoral college game. A comparison with the Banzhaf ratio is also given. The several biases inherent in the electoral system are analyzed from a mathematical point of view. It is shown that the system incorporates a strong bias in favor of the larger states, and a small bias in favor of the smallest states.
Crises and Sequences in Collective Theory Development
Authors: Holt Robert T. , Turner John E.
Published: May 2006

Since 1954, the Committee on Comparative Politics has provided leadership in the comparative field, and one of its central objectives has been to construct a theory of political development. The books in the series that were published in the 1960s lacked rigorous design, although they did provide data and low-level generalizations which could be used in the theory-building task. This essay focuses primarily on Crises and Sequences in Political Development, which is authored solely by Committee members and reports on the results of their theoretical work thus far. The Committee takes the “intuitive empirical generalization” approach to theory development—in contrast with systematic empirical generalization and the analytic-deductive procedure. It is unlikely, however, that the Committee's approach will lead to the formulation of a coherent set of interrelated propositions within which empirical phenomena can be explained. But the Committee's work is not atypical of the theoretical literature in political science, which reflects the reward structure of the discipline. The building of powerful theories will be facilitated when emphasis is placed on the development of clearly falsifiable propositions rather than on the development of loose conceptual frameworks.
Networks and Groups in Southeast Asia: Some Observations on the Group Theory of Politics
Authors: Landé Carl H.
Published: May 2006

The paper describes a “dyadic” type of political structure which, it is argued, is a necessary supplement to class and interest group models for the analysis of informal political structure in contemporary Southeast Asia, and probably in other developing areas.

Various types of simple and complex dyadic structures are described. The paper then examines four Southeast Asian polities, of different degrees of political development, with attention to the manner in which they combine group and dyadic structures. The examples are the Kalinga, a pagan ethnolinguistic group of Northern Luzon; the Tausug, a Muslim group of the Sulu archipelago; the traditional Thai monarchy; and the present Republic of the Philippines. In each case the effects of structure upon the operation of the system are explored. The paper concludes with a set of paired propositions concerning the characteristics of “trait associations” and “personal followings.”
The Impact of Party on Voting Behavior in a Nonpartisan Legislature
Authors: Welch Susan , Carlson Eric H.
Published: May 2006

The Nebraska nonpartisan legislature serves as a control setting for testing several hypotheses about the impact of party and constituency on voting behavior in legislative bodies. Specifically, in light of the data obtained from a setting where party identification is present but party leadership and organization are absent, the following hypotheses are examined: that political parties are important in structuring voting behavior because of the influence of party leaders and organization; that party is important because party identification is a surrogate for sets of beliefs and attitudes that distinguish members of one party from another; or that party is important because party differences reflect different constituency bases of the party. In a roll-call analysis of five sessions utilizing Guttman-scaling and regression techniques, it was found that in the absence of party leadership and organization, voting is highly unstructured. Further, dimensions of voting that were found are largely unexplainable in terms of standard party and constituency variables. Thus, party identification and constituency influence appear to be insufficient cues for the organization of legislative voting behavior, in the absence of party leadership.
Voting Systems, Honest Preferences and Pareto Optimality
Authors: Zeckhauser Richard
Published: May 2006

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.