bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cohen, Marx and the Primacy Thesis
Authors: Ruben David-Hillel
Published: January 2009

As Jon Elster remarked in an earlier review, G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence ‘sets a new standard for Marxist philosophy’. In one way, the praise is too faint. Existing paradigms of continental Marxist philosophy are marred by an absence of careful definition, clear and precise argumentation, and the sort of sustained discussion that is committed to the teasing out of the intellectual difficulties of the author's own position – in short, marred by an absence of those virtues in the attainment of which the philosophy practised in Britain, the United States, and the Scandinavian countries on the whole excels. Cohen would, presumably, agree that this has nothing intrinsically to do with Marx, or Marxism, but in the main arises from the fortuitous coupling of Marxism with continental philosophical fashions. If this sounds like some sort of cultural chauvinism, it also happens to be the truth. So the ‘new’ standards for Marxist philosophy, then, are only the same standards by which it is right to judge all philosophy, wherever it is written, and which any philosophy must pass in order to be accounted good. What is perhaps less faint praise of Cohen is to say that his book is good philosophy (without the qualifying adjective ‘Marxist’). It is an ingenious and imaginative volume, in which precision and detailed attention to argument count for everything.
Market Neutrality and the Failure of Co-operatives
Authors: Miller David
Published: January 2009

Among the arguments that have featured in the recent revival of libertarian thinking is one purporting to show that a free market economy, protected by a minimal state – or even no state at all – is neutral as between capitalism and a certain form of socialism. The argument runs as follows. The market places no limits on the manner in which people may associate for purposes of economic activity. They may choose capitalist forms of organization, in which case those who become owners of capital assume a greater degree of risk and responsibility and stand to gain correspondingly higher rewards, or they may choose co-operative forms, where groups of producers supply their own capital and share the profits between them. If capitalist forms are overwhelmingly favoured, as the historical evidence shows, this reveals something about the preference structure of the population as a whole. Either the bulk of the population actively wish to avoid the risks and anxieties of capital ownership, and so willingly transfer these responsibilities to the few willing to bear them; or the efficiency of the capitalist firm is such that it can pay wages high enough to compensate the work force for their loss of autonomy in comparison with the co-operative alternative.
Finance Capital and Pressure-Group Politics in Britain
Authors: Moran Michael
Published: January 2009

The rise of pressure-group politics in Britain has stimulated a corresponding growth of academic interest in pressure groups. Some distinguished early case studies were crowned in 1965 with Beer's majestic interpretation, while the last decade saw various accounts of the constitutional significance and merits of group activity. These bursts of academic energy illuminated parts of the pressure-group universe but left others in twilight. We are well informed about the lobbying activities of manufacturing industry, of organized labour and some of the professions. By contrast, there exists hardly any systematic discussion of how the interests of financial institutions are represented in government.
Must Radicals be Marxists? Lukes on Power, Contestability and Alienation
Authors: Smith G. W.
Published: January 2009

According to Steven Lukes ‘A exercises power over B when A affects A in a manner contrary to B's interests’. Although he is not willing to contend that this general concept of power is altogether beyond reasonable dispute Lukes argues that it is the specific conceptions of power to which this more general concept gives rise when we fill in what is to count as B's interests that pose the fundamental problem for social and political science. For, although the conceptions are, to some degree, assessable in terms of their descriptive accuracy and explanatory scope, they are also ‘ineradicably evaluative’ and ‘essentially contested’. Three important ‘normatively specific conceptions of interests’, implying three corresponding conceptions of power, particularly concern him:

(1) the liberal conception, which relates men's interests to what they actually want or prefer, to their policy preferences as manifested by their political participation; (2) the reformist conception, which, deploring that not all men's wants are given equal weight within the political system, also relates their interests to what they actually want and prefer, but allows that this may be revealed in the form of deflected, submerged, or concealed wants and preferences; and (3) the radical conception, which maintains that men's wants may themselves be a product of a system which works against their interests and, in such cases, relates the latter to what men would want and prefer, were they able to make the choice.
Harold D. Lasswell's Political World: Weak Tea for Hard Times
Authors: Merelman Richard M.
Published: January 2009

I first encountered the work of Harold Lasswell in the late 1950s, when I was a barely awake undergraduate at a university whose reputation for mediocrity was richly deserved. I openedPolitics: Who Gets What, When, Howto the first paragraph: ‘The study of politics is the study of influence and the influential. The science of politics states conditions; the philosophy of politics justifies preferences. This book, restricted to political analysis, declares no preferences. It states conditions.’ I had never heard of Lasswell, for my political science courses limited themselves to subjects like Congressional seniority and Cabinet responsibility in Britain. One course discussed the law of piracy, a subject I had trouble linking to international politics in the 1950s. Some enterprising instructors occasionally discussed the balance of power, and one even assigned David Truman. But Lasswell wasterra incognitato me, as he no doubt was to most undergraduates in those years.
The Bargaining Advantages of Combining with Others
Authors: Laver Michael , Underhill John
Published: January 2009

It is well-known that power relations can exhibit a ‘one plus one equals three’ effect. Two or more units can fuse into a bloc which has more power than the component units before had between them. The most obvious example of this type of synergy (whereby the whole is greater than its constituent parts) would be three people bargaining over the distribution of a fixed kitty, and needing a simple majority to impose any outcome. The three actors can, in the long run, expect one-third of the kitty (and can be thought of as having one-third of the power). If two combine into a single bloc, they will win every time. The new bloc controls all of the power (⅓ + ⅓ → 1) and its constituent members' expectations each increase to half of the kitty. Notwithstanding this, it is by no means the case that all combinations of units into blocs increase either aggregate power or individual expectations. Some combinations can result in a loss of power, although examples of this are slightly more complex, and depend upon some formal index of power for their elucidation. Thus, in the real world of coalition politics, the government coalition which actually forms controls all of the power as a bloc, despite the fact that coalition members do not control all of the power between them if they go it alone. Conversely, two parties can sometimes lose power by combining, particularly when they face a dominant opponent not far short of an overall majority.
Soviet Interpretations of American Politics: A Case of Convergence?
Authors: Malcolm Neil
Published: January 2009

According to Western observers Soviet political scientists have been making substantial advances in recent decades in their understanding of the United States. It is often pointed out, however, that cultural distance causes special problems. Soviet authors, it is claimed, tend to create images of their object of study which are coloured by conceptions of political behaviour specific to their own society. Although this is incontestable, it is worth remarking that American and British observers of Soviet politics and ideology are not exempt from the same kind of failing.
Electoral Change and Policy Representation in Congress: Domestic Welfare Issues from 1956–1972
Authors: Stone Walter J.
Published: January 2009

Many students of the United States Congress have contended that the institution is too closely tied to the interests of members' local constituencies. While the responsiveness this charge implies may seem laudable, the localism said to exist, especially in the House, weakens national agents of representation such as the political parties. Institutional features like seniority and the norm of reciprocity are often criticized for the premium they place upon members' success in their local constituencies, and the narrow, particularistic policy which results. Those who prefer a legislature responsive to national interests lament the disproportionate influence of constituencies with well-placed representatives on the committees and subcommittees in the House, and the fragmented, ‘distributive’ character of the legislative process.
Manipulating Manipulation
Authors: Morriss Peter
Published: January 2009

In a recent article, Alan Ware argues the following:

(1) Manipulation is important to liberals because governments and law courts are justified in overriding some person's wants, when determining his interests, only when his wants have been manipulated (pp. 175, 177). (I shall call this person ‘B’.)

(2) Manipulation only occurs when some specified person (A) is both morally and causally responsible for the change in B's wants (pp. 165–6 and sec. III).

Therefore

(3) Liberals can override B's wants, when determining his interests, only when B's wants have been determined by some specified A who is both morally and causally responsible for the change in B's wants (pp. 176–7).
Abandoning Manipulation: A Response to Ware's Reply
Authors: Morriss Peter
Published: January 2009

I fear that Alan Ware's Reply to my Comment only serves to reinforce my view that his argument is mistaken. Indeed, without apparently realizing it he concedes much of what I want to claim.
Obstacles to the Establishment of Political Legitimacy in Communist Poland
Authors: Lewis Paul G.
Published: January 2009

Legitimacy may be defined as that political condition in which power-holders are able to justify their holding of power in terms other than those of the mere fact of power-holding. According to one view such justifications are increasingly tenuous due to the conditions under which the modern state has arisen and the means it employs in order to persist. Theories of legitimacy typically view power from two aspects – from that of its origins and from that of its ends. More concretely, this invariably involves, on the one hand, some discussion of the degree to which a regime of a government.can be said to rest on democratic consent and, on the other, of the extent to which the regime or government guides its actions by some notion of the common good or public interest. Neither of these focuses, in Schaar's view, are likely to provide adequate justifications for power under modern conditions: ‘criticism and hard events have done their work: both concepts have been reduced to rubble’.
The Agrarian Roots of Working-Class Radicalism: An Assessment of the Mann–Giddens Thesis
Authors: Gallie Duncan
Published: January 2009

Of the studies by British sociologists in the last decade focusing on the determinants of working-class attitudes to the class structure, those of Michael Mann and Anthony Giddens must, I think, be seen in retrospect as the most imaginative. While much effort at the time focused on what in the event turned out to be the rather minimal implications of the impact of certain variations in work and community milieux within Britain on workers' conceptions of class, Mann and Giddens took as their point of departure the well documented differences in the radicalism of the labour movements of different Western capitalist societies and sought to develop a theory that could account for them. Why should it be, they asked, that in countries such as France and Italy workers were sufficiently disenchanted with capitalist institutions to give relatively enduring support to parties that were at least formally committed to revolutionary objectives, while in countries such as Britain and the United States they gave their allegiances to parties that seemed largely to accept the existing structure of society?
Alternative Models of Interest Intermediation: The Case of France
Authors: Wilson Frank L.
Published: January 2009

In a critical review of the state of comparative politics fourteen years ago, Joseph LaPalombara noted important gaps in our information on politics even in the presumably well-researched Western democratic countries. As an illustration, he contrasted the wealth of information on American interest groups with the surprisingly few solid studies of interest groups in countries such as Britain, France, Italy or West Germany. Despite, or perhaps because of this information gap, specialists in comparative politics were prepared to make sweeping generalizations about politics in this or that foreign country that a United States specialist would never dare to make on the basis of the wealth of research data available on politics in the United States. In the years since LaPalombara's critique, few have picked up his challenge to fill these information gaps, particularly the lacunae in our knowledge of interest group politics outside the United States. This lack of information has not discouraged scholars from proposing high-flown generalizations and models on interest group-government interaction in Europe. Sometimes, as we shall see, scholars studying interest group-State interactions have thought they found what Sartori labelled ‘travelling universals’ in certain interest-group patterns existing in struggling, non-democratic Third World countries which they then assumed to be present in the modern industrial democracies of Western Europe.
O'Connor's Sectoral Model of the United States Economy: Examining Some Political Consequences
Authors: Nackenoff Carol
Published: January 2009

During the past fifteen years, several economists, historians and sociologists have propounded a sectoral model of economic growth and change in the United States. According to this analysis, as large-scale, monopolistic enterprises began to emerge in the late nineteenth century, different investment considerations and labour market requirements were also evolving. A dual economy was beginning to be formed. The large-scale capital sector, and the small-scale capital sector each had its own economic environment of conduct. Each sector tended, too, to develop its own corresponding labour market, with monopoly sector or ‘core’ firms holding out certain economic advantages for employees: money, job security, benefits, and opportunities for advancement within the firm. Thus, the work experience in these two sectors increasingly diverged. Even if the large-scale capital sector did offer economic advantages, growth tended to be capital-intensive, and the growth of employment in this sector slowed down, and then stopped by the end of the Second World War. Employment shifted to trades and services, with lower wage rates, and, of course, to the public sector, which currently employs nearly a third of the American workforce.
On the Power or Vulnerability of the British Press: A Dynamic Analysis
Authors: Miller W. L. , Brand J. , Jordan M.
Published: January 2009

The existence of fairly strong correlations between newspaper readership and socio-political variables is well known. The interesting question about these correlations is not whether they exist but why they exist. In their analysis of British political behaviour in the sixties, Butler and Stokes put forward three possible explanations.
Government and Industry in Britain
Authors: Steel David R.
Published: January 2009

For at least fifteen years, Britain's industrial problems have been close to the centre of the political stage. A serious and debilitating illness first became chronic and is now, in the eyes of some observers, terminal. The symptoms of the most prominent patients, such as British Leyland, Rolls-Royce and British Steel, are matters of widespread public diagnosis and prescription. Opinions vary widely as to the role of government both in contributing to industrial decline and in promoting industrial recovery but few would deny that dealing with the problems of industry is a task of the highest priority. Nor is it surprising that successive governments have paid a great deal of attention to this task given the role of industry in the British economy and the importance of economic success politically.
Voting Procedures: A Summary Analysis
Authors: Nurmi Hannu
Published: January 2009

Roughly two centuries ago the Marquis de Condorcet and Chevalier Jean-Charles de Borda originated a research tradition – by no means a continuous one – that over the decades has produced results casting doubt on many widely used collective decision-making procedures. The phenomenon known as the Condorcet effect or the Condorcet paradox is the well-known problem of the simple majority rule. The paradox bearing the name of Borda is less commonly known, but it also relates to a procedure that is widely used, namely the plurality principle. Either one of these paradoxes is serious enough to make these procedures suspect unless one is convinced that the situations giving rise to these paradoxical features are extremely rare. In this article we review some voting procedures that have been introduced in the literature. We aim at giving a synthesis of the assessments of procedures with respect to various criteria.
The Neighbourhood Effect: A Test of the Butler-Stokes Model
Authors: Bodman A. R.
Published: January 2009

The purpose of this brief note has been to test the behavioural postulates of the neighbourhood effect. The results do not support the construction that minority voters are converted to the majority view by local information flows. These findings suggest the model of the neighbourhood effect needs to be amended and that alternative explanations of the polarization trends need to be examined more closely.
The Political Economy of Change in Urban Budgetary Politics: A Framework for Analysis and a Case Study
Authors: Kantor Paul , David Stephen
Published: January 2009

Few events shatter confidence in widely held theory more than failure to predict colossal changes. Just such an instance has occurred in the budgetary politics of American cities. City budgeting can no longer be accurately described in terms of an incremental model that assumes stability, routine decisions and marginal adjustments in public spending and taxation. More than a decade of dramatic and largely unanticipated change – fiscal crises, illegal deficits, new groups demanding public services, severe retrenchment, emergency bail-outs and more – has surely challenged the conventional wisdom.
Interests in Political Theory
Authors: Reeve Andrew , Ware Alan
Published: January 2009

This article examines the concept of interests in politics which has been the subject of major debate in recent years. It makes two proposals: one concerns the elucidation of the concept of interests; the other concerns the relative status of an agent's perception of his or her own interests and an observer's specification of them. For brevity, statements of the form ‘x is in A's interest’ are referred to as interest-statements.
The Birth and Death of a Three-Party System: Scotland in the Seventies
Authors: Brand Jack , McLean Duncan , Miller William
Published: January 2009

In the general election of October 1974 the Scottish National Party gained 30·4 per cent of the vote in Scotland. This result and the build-up to it in the previous two elections, seemed to indicate a new pattern for Scottish voting. British and American writers had drawn attention to the decline of partisanship as a basis for voting. In Britain, the class basis of this partisanship had been dominant but now appeared to recede. Growing support for the SNP might have been an extension of this. Some went further and argued that a new issue – self-government for Scotland – had displaced class loyalties.
Empirical-Normative Distinction
Authors: Clarke Barry
Published: January 2009

The empirical–normative distinction is taken by many political scientists to be exclusive and fundamental. Yet if the distinction is deep and exclusive then any theory, or any of its components, must be either empirical or normative but not simultaneously both. If this is the case then each theoretical statement will have as its central verb either an ‘is’ or an ‘ought’ (or some equivalent) and no statement taking an ‘ought’ as its central verb will be derivable from any statement taking an ‘is’ as its central verb. Correlatively no purely descriptive statement or conjunction of such statements will warrant any normative or evaluative conclusion.
Evaluating Conflict of Interest Theory: Western European Cabinet Coalitions, 1945–80
Authors: Browne Eric C. , Gleiber Dennis W. , Mashoba Carolyn S.
Published: January 2009

More than a decade has elapsed since Robert Axelrod first published his theory of political coalitions. At the time, it represented a significant departure from existing theoretical work by defining as a major component of an actor's utility function a preference to join winning coalitions which minimize the degree of ‘conflict of interest’ among potential partners. Axelrod has defined the degree of conflict of interest in terms of the incompatibility of actor goals (e.g., policy preferences), thus deriving the expectation that forming coalitions will minimize the degree of preference disagreement among their members. Subsequent theoretical research has tended to retain this emphasis upon closely shared preferences among prospective coalition partners.
Budgeting Amidst Triple-Digit Inflation: The Case of Israel
Authors: Sharkansky Ira
Published: January 2009

Government budgets have acquired a key role in the activities of policy makers. They have also attracted a great deal of attention from political scientists. Perhaps no other feature of policy making is so completely described and analysed. For both policy makers and political scientists, the budget is the ultimate Scoreboard, showing which agencies, programmes, or groups are getting more or less of what the government has to offer.
Itinerants, Iterations and Something In-between
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: January 2009

To make the theory of games plausible as a representation of behaviour – be it economic or political or social – we must introduce some of the sense of structure and continuity that characterizes our actual lives. Real people do not pair up, play a single game and depart, never to meet again. On the contrary, much of life is made up of continuing interactions with the same small cast of characters. And that, in turn, makes some dramatic differences in the way games are played. Making an unsecured loan to an itinerant is obviously out of the question. But if it is someone who has to deal with you over and over again in a variety of contexts, then the future itself can be your hostage.
Overload, Ungovernability and Delegitimation: The Theories and the British Case
Authors: Birch Anthony H.
Published: January 2009

The concept of ‘overload’ was introduced into the vocabulary of political science in 1975, in two publications which appeared almost simultaneously in the United States and Britain. One was by Michel Crozier in a ‘report on the governability of democracies’ entitled The Crisis of Democracy; the other by Anthony King in Political Studies. Both authors took the same general line: that there had been a rapid growth in public expectations about what benefits could be provided by government in Western democracies, that many of these expectations had inevitably been disappointed, and that the result was a serious decline of public confidence in government. King summarized the development in an aphorism so striking that it deserves quotation once again: ‘Once upon a time man looked to God to order the world. Then he looked to the market. Now he looks to government’. And when things go wrong people blame ‘not “Him” or “it” but “them”.’ It was suggested by King that this development had made Britain more difficult to govern and by Crozier, more generally, that Western democracies might be moving towards a condition of ungovernability.
Interest Groups, Iron Triangles and Representative Institutions in American National Government
Authors: Gais Thomas L. , Peterson Mark A. , Walker Jack L.
Published: January 2009

President Carter will perhaps be remembered most for his perceived incompetence, an impression produced largely by his inability to forge coalitions in Congress, and by his failure as an ‘outsider’ to intervene effectively in the established policy-making processes in Washington. In his farewell address, Carter alluded to what he believed to be the source of his troubles – the fragmentation of power and decision-making exploited by influential special interests. Carter believed that he was trapped in a web of organized groups allied with well-placed congressional and bureaucratic sympathizers seeking to protect their narrowly defined interests and frustrating his own broader vision of the public good.
Legitimacy and Power in the Soviet Union Through Socialist Ritual
Authors: Lane Christel
Published: January 2009

Every political system must secure compliance with its commands on the part of the ruled; the methods applied to achieve this vary from society to society and within societies over time. One way of gaining compliance is for political elites to establish the legitimacy of the political system, of their position within it, and of the commands that are issued. Political power can be said to be legitimate when, in the words of Sternberger, it is exercised both with a consciousness on the part of the elite that it has a right to govern and with some recognition by the ruled of that right. Both this consciousness of the right to govern and its acknowledgement by the ruled is derived from some source of authorization which may change over time. This paper will focus on the conscious attempts of Soviet political elites from the early sixties onwards to change their strategy of gaining compliance by reducing reliance on coercion and strengthening political legitimacy. It will draw attention to their efforts to develop a new source of authorization and to employ a new legitimation procedure. In developing the theoretical argument the Weberian typology of legitimate rule will be employed, and this approach to the topic will be contrasted with that adopted by T. H. Rigby in two recent publications.
Dominant and Subsidiary Modes of Political Legitimation in the USSR: A Comment on Christel Lane's Article
Authors: Rigby T. H.
Published: January 2009

Perhaps we political scientists and sociologists should have left ‘legitimacy’ to the constitutional and international lawyers. Such a view is certainly suggested by the present cacophany of our definitions, taxonomies and applications of the term. When the contributors to a book on political legitimation in communist states, representing by no means the full range of scholarly views on the social and political systems of these countries, can variously characterize the political legitimation of the USSR today as dominated by ‘goal-rational’, ‘traditional’ or ‘paternalistic’ legitimation, or as a combination of ‘heteronomous-teleological’ and ‘autonomous-consensual’ or of ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ modes of legitimation, we evidently have a long way to go before our shared understandings of political legitmation could be adequate for the comparative study of political systems or for analysing political change.
Swing Time: Assessing Causes for Shifts in Congressional Elections
Authors: Rapoport Ronald B.
Published: January 2009

Most research on voting behaviour and elections has focused on cross-sectional analysis of particular elections. This technique is very useful in telling us about the influences on individual voter decision making. Less commonly research has focused on short-term electoral change, and has tried to explain specific election results with respect to one another, or in relation to long-term trends.
Values, Protest and Minority Nationalism in Wales
Authors: McAllister Ian , Mughan Anthony
Published: January 2009

Since 1945, industrial societies have experienced rapid socio-economic change. Occupational structures have altered to accommodate the new technological skills demanded by many new industries. These newer, smaller and more flexible industries have, in their turn, fostered unparalleled economic growth. Concomitantly, access to education has risen dramatically for all social groups, while the development of mass communications has enabled large amounts of information to be disseminated more rapidly to ever-increasing numbers of people. There is now persuasive and cumulative evidence to show that these profound changes have had two significant consequences for Western societies. Firstly, the values of Western mass publics have altered to place less emphasis on the material aspects of life and a greater priority on aesthetic and intellectual goals. Secondly, there has been a widespread upsurge in popular support for minority nationalist movements advocating some degree of territorial autonomy within their host state or separation from it.
Social Choice Versus Populism? An Interpretation of Riker's Political Theory
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: January 2009

William Riker is one of the most influential political scientists at present writing on the theory and practice of democracy. A quick count on my part of the Social Science Citation Index, normally a Siva of academic reputations, revealed nearly one thousand entries under Riker's name between 1971 and the beginning of 1982. Not only is his work frequently cited, it is read long after it is originally published. The Theory of Political Coalitions, probably his best known work, was published in 1962, and is still seriously discussed by those engaged in the empirical study of political coalitions. Moreover, Riker has always been anxious to show the relevance of technical work in political science to the political philosophy of democracy. His work therefore represents not simply an impressive scholarly and academic achievement, but also an important contribution to the more wide-ranging public debate about the nature and value of democracy.
The Role of Issues in Global Co-operation and Conflict
Authors: Vasquez John A. , Mansbach Richard W.
Published: January 2009

The study of global co-operation and conflict has been a central topic of enquiry in the field of international relations. Yet notwithstanding extensive work on these subjects, they are not well understood. Whenever research fails to resolve an intractable problem, it may be because the conceptualization of the dependent variable is fundamentally flawed and/or because the most critical independent variables have been ignored. The purpose of this analysis is to see if, by confronting these two problems, our ability to explain global contention can be improved.
Political Stagnation and Marxist Critique: 1968 and Beyond in Comparative East European Perspective
Authors: Shafir Michael
Published: January 2009

Specialists in communist affairs, as is well known, differ significantly in their interpretation of Soviet-type systems. Such divergence notwithstanding, numerous scholars seem to agree that under ‘real socialism’, Marxist-Leninist ideology is visibly ‘withering away’ as a meaningful category in analysing society at large or leadership groups. In the ‘Bureaucratic Leviathan’ states of the communist world, Maria Hirszowicz writes, interest in Marxism is nowadays either non-existent or very limited. In these polities there seems to be ‘a widespread belief (shared by many enlightened party members) that Marxist methodology does not have much to offer in relation to what is really important in understanding social life in communist countries’. In a similar manner, Robert F. Byrnes indicates that Marxism has lost ‘any relevance or vitality’ and adds that Marxist thought and revisions of it are far more common in France, the United States and the underdeveloped countries than in communist Eastern Europe, where the doctrine or doctrinal approaches seem to have been spurned for practical reasons. In other words, as Wayne S. Vuchinich put it, ideology ‘has been made the servant of realpolitik and thereby it… has been reduced to hollow ritualism’. The validity of such remarks is often corroborated not only by members of the overtly anti-Marxist opposition, such as Solzhenitsyn, but also by former or present-day dissidents, such as Kołakowski or Sakharov.
Housing Tenure and Party Choice in Australia, Britain and the United States
Authors: McAllister Ian
Published: January 2009

In much of the comparative literature on social structure and party choice, housing occupies an anomalous position. In Britain, its electoral consequences are undoubted, yet in other advanced industrial societies its impact is negligible. For example, in Britain Butler and Stokes go so far as to suggest that ‘housing has more to do with defining the sub-cultures of social class than all else but occupation itself’. Moreover, recent evidence has indicated that the electoral importance of housing may actually be increasing in Britain, rather than declining along with other traditional class predictors of voting. By contrast, in Australia and the United States, both societies with similarly sized home-owning and rental sectors, housing has never been advanced as a significant determinant of partisan choice.
Legitimacy and Mass Compliance: Reflections on Max Weber and Soviet-Type Societies
Authors: Pakulski Jan
Published: January 2009

It is worthwhile debating the meaning of concepts only when they start to hinder the process of inquiry. This seems to be the case with Max Weber's concepts of legitimacy and legitimate authority. They are becoming increasingly popular among students of Soviet-type societies despite the numerous problems posed by their application in a socio-political context that is so different from the one Weber had in mind. This increased popularity results in a ‘conceptual stretch’. More importantly, it increases the danger of a serious misinterpretation of socio-political processes in Soviet-type societies because, as will be argued in this article, the concept of legitimacy is not appropriate for the analysis of mass compliance in such societies. Instead, the persistence of (relatively) stable social and political order in these societies, as well as the occurrences of mass dissent, may be better accounted for in terms of ‘conditional tolerance’. In order to demonstrate the utility of this concept, and to show the problematic nature of accounts in terms of legitimacy and legitimate authority, it is necessary to start with a brief reprise of Weber's conceptual scheme.
Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies
Authors: Kitschelt Herbert P.
Published: January 2009

Since the 1960s, successive protest movements have challenged public policies, established modes of political participation and socio-economic institutions in advanced industrial democracies. Social scientists have responded by conducting case studies of such movements. Comparative analyses, particularly cross-national comparisons of social movements, however, remain rare, although opportunities abound to observe movements with similar objectives or forms of mobilization in diverse settings.
Soft Incentives and Collective Action: Participation in the Anti-Nuclear Movement
Authors: Opp Karl-Dieter
Published: January 2009

The standard explanation of collective action in modern political economy can be outlined as follows: a collective (or public) good is only an incentive for a joint contribution to its provision, if those who benefit from the good at least perceive some influence arising from their contribution, the costs of contributing being otherwise greater than the benefits derived from it; otherwise joint efforts for the provision of the collective good will not ensue. If the good itself does not stimulate collective action, contributions will nevertheless occur when selective incentives become effective. These are benefits arising from contributing and/or costs resulting from no contribution being made.
The Political Environment and Foreign Policy Opinions: British Attitudes Toward European Integration, 1972–1979
Authors: Dalton Russell J. , Duval Robert
Published: January 2009

Historically, the drive toward European integration has been in the domain of political elites. The Community was conceived and implemented by Europeanists such as Monnet and Schuman, and shaped by national leaders such as de Gaulle and Adenauer. After the Treaty of Rome established the basic framework of the Community, the details and implementation of policy were largely decided by negotiationş among officials in Brussels or between Community officials and political elites of the member nations.
Who Gets Hung in a Hung Parliament? A Game Theory Analysis of the 1987–88 British General Election
Authors: Rasmussen Jorgen S.
Published: January 2009

The arrival of the Alliance on the British political scene has complicated the party system to an extent unknown for over half a century. Elections can no longer be counted upon to produce straightforward and immediate shifts in partisan control of the government. The next election could very well produce a hung Parliament.
The Development of a Party-Orientated Electorate in England, 1832–1918
Authors: Cox Gary W.
Published: January 2009

Modern British government is government by party leaders in Cabinet. It is still the ‘Crown in Parliament’ which formally takes or authorizes every legislative or administrative action, but of the three major components of the Crown in Parliament – the Commons, the Lords, and the Sovereign – the first is now virtually unchecked. The House of Lords can only minimally delay acts of the Commons, and both the Lords and the Monarch have long since lost their ability to veto (much less initiate) legislation. Since those in the Cabinet control the agenda of the House of Commons, since the Cabinet almost invariably consists solely of the leaders of the party with a majority of seats in the Commons, and since the influence of party on voting in Parliament is very strong, the Commons itself has in essence only retained a veto over the legislative proposals of the majority party's leaders who sit in the Cabinet. As a recent essay on legislation in Britain notes, ‘today's conventional wisdom is that … Parliament has relinquished any capacity for legislative initiative it may once have possessed to the executive in its midst’.
Electoral Distortion under STV Random Sampling Procedures
Authors: Gallagher Michael , Unwin A. R.
Published: January 2009

This Note will discuss the impact of random sampling at elections conducted under the single transferable vote (STV) electoral system in multi-member constituencies in the Republic of Ireland. STV, partly because of its popularity among electoral reformers, has received considerable theoretical scrutiny. It has been given an ‘intermediate’ rating in recent assessment of a number of electoral systems, and dismissed as a ‘perverse social choice function’ because it is subject to non-monotonicity. This shortcoming is also mainly responsible for the low degree of acceptance accorded to it by Brams and Fishburn. Nurmi concludes that STV (like other multi-stage systems) performs poorly, with regard to a number of criteria, in comparison with one-stage systems like approval voting. Black complains that STV ‘is a compound of minor complexities and is difficult to remember’. Others have discussed shortcomings in STV and suggested remedies which can be implemented where the counting of votes is entirely computerized.
Local Authority Spending Cuts and Local Political Control
Authors: Duke Vic , Edgell Stephen
Published: January 2009

The aim of this Note is to examine recent local authority expenditure cuts in relation to Saunders's dual-state thesis. Saunders's model has important implications for the long-standing debates on local autonomy from central government and on the party effect in expenditure patterns. The extent to which local political control is a mediating factor in the nature and severity of spending cuts is analysed with reference to a case study of two districts in the Greater Manchester area.
A Comparative Study of Australian Parties
Authors: Epstein Leon D.
Published: January 2009

At the beginning of his book on Australian politics, David Butler tellingly contrasts an earlier American exploration with his expedition to Canberra. Familiarity with British government had initially led him to ask untranslatable questions about a separate and essentially non-comparable American system. But the same British background, he reports, made for appropriate questions in Australia even though the answers might differ from those received in Britain itself. Australian government, unlike American, could be conceived of as a variant of the Westminster model. It follows that the Canberra model is so different from Washington's that a strictly American background might likewise engender the wrong questions about Australian politics.
The Overlapping Worlds of American Federal Executives and Congressmen
Authors: Aberbach Joel D. , Rockman Bert A.
Published: January 2009

Along with other American public institutions, Congress and the federal bureaucracy have fallen upon hard times. Each has been the target of much public scorn. Among academic theorists who have compared the contemporary roles of the bureaucracy and Congress, however, Congress has received the worst evaluation by far. It has often been treated as a more or less quaintly archaic institution, structurally unable to cope with the complexities of national issues. Samuel Huntington delineates several factors which he thinks tend to insulate Congress from an effective national policy-making role. Internally, the institutionalization of Congress has created a system of leadership selection which fragments authority and rewards and reinforces provincial perspectives. Externally, with rare exceptions, electoral turn-over is limited. Thus, the intake of new blood, especially in the House, is mostly dependent upon voluntary departures or biological processes. Equally important in Huntington's view are the characteristics of the congressmen themselves. They are, as many have pointed out, essentially local politicians oriented to local rather than national problems. Their incentives lie in looking ‘homeward’ to local constituencies rather than outward to the nation. Edward Shils has described their orientations as ‘those of the small town society’, suspicious of large organization and wary of complexity. Responsiveness to local interests, not comprehension of complex national policy problems, is the sine qua non of the congressman's political survival.
Replication of Instability: Political Socialization in Northern Ireland
Authors: Russell James
Published: January 2009

The purpose of the research on which this paper is based was to investigate by social survey methods some of the political attitudes of schoolboys (aged between 8 and 16 years of age) who were living through violent years in the history of Northern Ireland. Political attitudes were studied against the social characteristics and backgrounds of a large sample of schoolboys during the fifteen months prior to the announcement of direct rule from Westminster in 1972. This paper focuses upon affect towards the Stormont Government during the last two years of its existence.
Housing, the Class Milieu and Middle-Class Conservatism
Authors: Garrahan Philip
Published: January 2009

The class composition of the local environment has been shown to affect both Conservative and Labour voters and type of housing has been strongly associated with the ties between class and party. Studies of contextual influences on individual political behaviour(s) have consistently shown the potent mediating effect of increasing levels of social homogeneity. In Britain, it has been demonstrated that the class–vote relationship is strengthened for the numerically dominant class as the social milieu becomes more homogeneous, while the political significance of housing policy is reflected in the relationship between differences in type of occupancy and class–party ties.
Personality, Ideology and World View: A Comparison of Media and Business Elites
Authors: Rothman Stanley , Lichter S. Robert
Published: January 2009

For some time we have been engaged in a large scale study of various leadership strata in the United States. Our goal is to clarify similarities and differences in background, ideology and personality among members of such strata. We are also interested in the relationship between these variables and the manner in which members of different leadership groups perceive ‘reality’. This article reports preliminary findings on two groups – leading business executives and top level journalists. Our work has been partly informed by hypotheses developed by social scientists as diverse as Max Weber, Harold Lasswell, Joseph Schumpeter, S. M. Lipset, Alvin Gouldner, Jurgen Habermas, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell and others.
Back on the Bandwagon: The Effect of Opinion Polls on Public Opinion
Authors: Marsh Catherine
Published: January 2009

The bandwagon was the caravan in a circus that carried the band, and usually took the lead in a procession. It has come to stand as a symbol for a party or a cause which is successful; we talk of people wanting to climb on to a bandwagon when their desire to be associated with the winning party or cause is strong. A ‘bandwagon effect’ is the label given by social scientists to a situation where the information about majority opinion itself causes some people to adopt the majority view for whatever reason; conversely, an ‘underdog’ effect is held to exist if the information causes some people to adopt a minority view. Processes of this kind are of theoretical interest because they affect the possibility of stable prediction in the social sciences; if the very act of predicting that one party will win an election can be a self-fulfilling prophecy then the natural scientific model of the social sciences may be compromised. Bandwagon processes are also of practical importance to pollsters, since the professional nature of their trade might also be compromised if their predictions could be shown to be interfering in political reality. These effects have therefore received a fair amount of attention in the literature. The main context studied has been the effect of exposure to an opinion poll on the general public. In this article, I shall first examine the existing evidence for poll effects of this kind, and then present and discuss a study of such effects.
Changing Patterns of Politicization and Partisanship Among Women in France
Authors: Bashevkin Sylvia B.
Published: January 2009

During the past decade, political researchers have devoted growing attention to women's political involvement and, to a somewhat lesser extent, their political attitudes in Western cultures. This interest has been a response in part to contemporary feminist movements and, more specifically, to the increasingly visible role of women as social activists, partisan elites and governmental decision makers in Western European and North American society.