bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Some Thoughts on the Relation of Political Theory to Anthropology
Authors: Friedrich Carl J. , Horwitz Morton
Published: May 2006

The study of developing areas has, in recent years, caused political science and theory to be increasingly aware of realities of non-Western government and politics. Comparative politics and its theory no longer, therefore, can avoid utilizing the results of the research of anthropologists and ethnologists in a way comparable to the use of historical data if they wish to be comprehensively empirical. Since the political theorist will not, as a rule, be able to become a practising anthropologist, the basic problem of such cooperation turns upon whether the investigating anthropologist asks the crucial, the basic questions in the first place. A broad survey of their reports and writings, such as the Human Relations Area Files afford, shows that this is by no means generally the case. Nor is this easy to achieve, for political scientists and anthropologists differ in their objectives. It has been suggested that the anthropologist is primarily interested in diversity, in how many ways something could be done, whereas for the political scientist and theorist such divergencies are important mainly as they lead to political insight and verifiable generalization.

The utility of the writings of anthropologists for the political scientist is seriously impeded by the over-simplified and misleading understanding of the nature of power and authority held by many of them.
Decision Costs in Coalition Formation
Authors: Adrian Charles R. , Press Charles
Published: May 2006

Choices made in coalition formation are costly to participants, complex, and difficult to measure with precision because observable coalitions are multi-person, non-zero-sum games. At least eight decision costs are included in the process. The purpose of this paper is to identify them and to examine their usefulness in explaining coalition formation. Decisions include: (1) information costs, (2) responsibility costs, (3) intergame costs, (4) costs of division of payoffs, (5) dissonance costs (6) inertia costs, (7) time costs, and (8) persuasion costs.

Coalition building is an essential aspect of decision making within any political system. Whether one is studying the behavior of a municipal planning commission, a committee or sub-committee of a legislative body, the United Nations Security Council, or any other decision-making institution in which more than one person is involved in reaching a decision, the essential problem is often one of establishing a winning coalition within the entire group membership. A winning coalition is any portion of the group that can decide to do or not to do something that is on the agenda of the group and over which it has competent authority. The requirements of what constitutes a winning coalition are determined by the formal and informal rules of the game. Most commonly, one of the rules is that a winning coalition must consist of one-half the members of the group plus one and this assumption is made for purposes of this paper. The size of the coalition needed is important for individual and coalition strategies, but it is not important conceptually. That is, the problems involved in securing a winning coalition on the United States Supreme Court when only four votes are needed in order to agree to hear a case affects the strategy of the members of the court, but is of no theoretical importance to coalition formation.
Centralization in Hawaii: Retrospect and Prospect
Authors: Meller Norman
Published: May 2006

The Hawaiian Islands, in Mark Twain's words “the loveliest fleet of Islands that lies anchored in any ocean,” offer more than a vista of sub-tropical splendor to the student of government. Hawaii presents also an extreme of centralized administration probably unequaled in any state on the mainland. The century prior to annexation by the United States saw the major islands of the Hawaiian archipelago come under the jurisdiction of a single government which rapidly underwent a metamorphosis from stone-age, native absolutism, through restricted constitutional monarchy, to the status of independent republic. “Adjustment rather than reorganization defines the change in government necessary when Hawaii entered the Union as a Territory.” Allowed by Congress almost all the powers of a state, and wide discretion in erecting its own local structure, the Territory chose to continue the concentrated administration which had characterized government throughout the century of independent rule. Only within the last few years has this centralization been shaken by the introduction of challenging centrifugal forces. Today, Hawaii affords the prospect of an ocean-girt test tube in which can be observed the interplay of these new formative forces with the old causative factors of centripetal tendency; the end product may be a decentralized administration more on the model of the mainland.
Safe Seats, Seniority, and Power in Congress
Authors: Wolfinger Raymond E. , Heifetz Joan
Published: May 2006

The president's difficulties in inducing Congress to pass his legislative program are usually ascribed to the different constituencies of the two institutions. This difference would make for disharmony under any circumstances, but it is said to be particularly important because the seniority system bestows the most power on congressmen whose constituencies are most unlike the president's. His policy commitments are responses to the needs of a heterogeneous, industrialized, urban society. The occupants of the most influential congressional positions come from districts that re-elect them regardless of national political trends. The representative from such a district “views with alarm the great issues that sweep the nation and threaten to disrupt the familiar and comfortable politics of his district,” which is usually characterized as a rural backwater.

Both political parties are described this way. Because the Democrats have controlled Congress for all but four of the past 36 years, most illustrations of this thesis are drawn from conflicts between Democratic presidents and Democratic congresses. More specifically, the focus of attention is usually on the refusal of southern Democratic congressional leaders to support presidential legislative requests.
The 1914 Case
Authors: Holsti Ole R.
Published: May 2006

This paper will employ techniques of content analysis to examine some features of top-level communications between national policy makers during a momentous period of stress. It is concerned with the effects of stress upon: (1) the manner in which decision-makers perceive time as a factor in their formulation of policy; (2) the contrasting ways in which they view policy alternatives for their own nations, for their allies, and for their adversaries; and (3) the flow of communications among them.

Specifically, the following hypotheses will be tested with data from the 1914 crisis leading up to the Great War in Europe:

Hypothesis 1. As stress increases in a crisis situation:

(a) time will be perceived as an increasingly salient factor in decision-making.

(b) decision-makers will become increasingly concerned with the immediate rather than the distant future.
The Stability of Coalitions on Roll Calls in the House of Representatives
Authors: Riker William H. , Niemi Donald
Published: May 2006

In some recent discussions of roll calls in Congress a model of interacting blocs has often been adopted and to a considerable degree verified. This model assumes the existence of several fairly cohesive blocs along with, perhaps, some unattached members. Furthermore, it is assumed that some of these blocs are fairly consistently opposed on roll calls, while others ally now with one side, now with the other. This model is attractive, not only because it accords with the usage of journalists, but also because it seems to provide a rational explanation of what sometimes appears to be the almost random confusion of Congressional voting behavior. As the evidence here presented suggests, however, this model is somewhat too neat and requires modification to account for shifting alliances over (often relatively short periods of) time. In a trial, reasoning from the assumptions of this model, we attempted to pick out those blocs and members who shifted from side to side. We were, however, unable to do so except in a few instances, largely, we believe, because the model as heretofore developed is static.
American Government, 1933–1963: Fission and Confusion in Theory and Research
Authors: Lowi Theodore J.
Published: May 2006

In a revolutionary century political science as a discipline has been transformed along with its subject matter. In no more than a generation the discipline has gone through at least three theoretical ages, from a naive Jeffersonianism to a mongrelized Madisonianism to a kind of liberal Burkeanism. It has been going through still another transformation in methodology. The failure of one democratic institution after another has bred uncertainty, and uncertainty has encouraged a vast expansion of the apparatus of inquiry. Even if all the questions might be found in the Great Books, the quest is new—for conditions rather than truths, for degrees rather than absolutes.
Ideological Correlates of Right Wing Political Alienation in Mexico
Authors: Johnson Kenneth F.
Published: May 2006

Evaluations of single-party democracy in Mexico have yielded a substantial literature from the researches of contemporary scholars. Their primary subjects of treatment have been the institutionalized agents of moderation and compromise that have made Mexico one of Latin America's more stable political systems. In prosecuting these studies, however, only scant attention has been given to political groups outside the officially sanctioned “revolutionary famity” of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The PRI has maintained a virtual monopoly of elective and appointive offices since 1929 and traditionally has been thought of as affiliating to itself the only politically relevant groups in Mexico.

Modern Mexican political life has always had its “out groups” and splinter parties. Mostly, they have come and gone, leaving little or no impact upon the political system which they have attempted to influence. Howard Cline has contended that opposition groups in Mexico find it impossible to woo the electorate away from the PRI and thus feel forced to adopt demagoguery and other extreme postures which serve only to reduce their popular appeal.
Work Life and Political Attitudes: A Study of Manual Workers
Authors: Lipsitz Lewis
Published: May 2006

For centuries men have speculated about the human consequences of work. Slowly, a considerable body of information has begun to accumulate concerning the relationships between people's jobs and other aspects of their lives. Investigators have pointed out the connections between certain types of jobs and certain personality disorders, job satisfaction, productivity, attitudes toward union and management, social relations on the job, leisure activities, and other things. Extending such findings, this study concludes that a particular job situation can have important effects on a man's political outlook.

Political studies have long classified individuals according to occupation, yet there have been extremely few efforts to penetrate within specific occupational categories to discover the causal triggers of occupational attitude differences.
The “Intensity” Problem and Democratic Theory
Authors: Kendall Willmoore , Carey George W.
Published: May 2006

Dinner is over. Mr. and Mrs. Jones and Mr. and Mrs. Smith are having coffee. The question arises: What shall we do this evening? Play bridge? Go to the movies? Listen to some chamber music from the local FM station? Sit and chat? Each, in due course, expresses a “preference” among these four alternatives but with this difference: Mr. and Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Smith, though each has a preference, “don't much care.” Their preferences are “mild” or “marginal.” Not so Mr. Smith. His preference is “strong.” He is tired, couldn't possibly get his mind on bridge, or muster the energies for going out to a movie. He has listened to chamber music all afternoon while working on an architectural problem, and couldn't bear any more. If the group does anything other than sit and chat, he at least will do it grudgingly. He “cares enormously” which alternative is chosen.

Now: which is the “correct” choice among the four alternatives? Which, “distributive justice” to one side, is the choice most likely to preserve good relations among the members of the group? Some theorists, it would seem, find these two questions easy to answer. Mr. Smith ought to have his way, and good relations are likely to be endangered if he does not; and these answers are equally valid whether the other three all prefer the same thing or prefer different things. Since, for the latter, the choice is a matter of indifference, it is both “more fair” and “more expedient” (less likely to lead to a quarrel) for the group to do what Mr. Smith prefers to do.
A Functional Analysis of Defense Department Decision-Making in the McNamara Administration
Authors: Hammond Paul Y.
Published: May 2006

In 1961 the Defense Department, under a new Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, began a major management revolution, based on a set of methods and techniques which came to be called a programming, planning, and budgeting system (PPBS). Few, if any, of the techniques were new. Their revolutionary impact depended upon (1) the high degree of development or sophistication to which some of them (e.g., cost and program analysis) had been driven, and (2) the relatively high degree of integration achieved in the new “system,” so that, for example, decisions about current operations can be taken in the light of their effect on programs four or five years in the future, and decisions about future goals can be taken with their implications for present operations specified.

In August, 1965, President Johnson announced his plans to develop comparable management systems in other executive departments. The progress of this effort has been uneven. But it is clear that PPBS is going to be with us for a while. This article is an attempt to assess its effect on the bureaucratic politics of the Defense Department.
The Structure of Political Conflict in the New States of Tropical Africa
Authors: Zolberg Aristide R.
Published: May 2006

Having assumed the burden of understanding political life in two-and-a-half dozen unruly countries, political scientists who study the new states of tropical Africa must leap with assurance where angels fear to tread. We have borrowed, adapted, or invented an array of frameworks designed to guide perceptions of disparate events, and Africa is now uniformly viewed through the best lenses of contemporary comparative politics with a focus on political modernization, development and integration. Unfortunately, it appears that when we rely exclusively on these tools in order to accomplish our task, the aspects of political life which we, as well as non-specialists, see most clearly with the naked eye of informed common sense, remain beyond the range of our scientific vision. In our pursuit of scientific progress, we have learned to discern such forms as regular patterns of behavior which constitute structures and institutions; but the most salient characteristic of political life in Africa is that it constitutes an almost institutionless arena with conflict and disorder as its most prominent features.

In recent years, almost every new African state has experienced more or less successful military or civilian coups, insurrections, mutinies, severe riots, and significant political assassinations. Some of them appear to be permanently on the brink of disintegration into several new political units. With little regard for the comfort of social scientists, the incidence of conflict and disorder appears unrelated to such variables as type of colonial experience, size, number of parties, absolute level or rate of economic and social development, as well as to the overall characteristics of regimes. The downfall of what was widely regarded as the continent's most promising democracy in January, 1966, was followed in February by the demise of what many thought to be the continent's harshest authoritarian regime.
Participation, Education, and Political Competence: Evidence From a Sample of Italian Socialists
Authors: Barnes Samuel H.
Published: May 2006

Participation is one of the crises of political modernization. Along with the political awakening of masses of people has come the necessity of absorbing them meaningfully into the political system. The almost universally low levels of formal education and political competence contribute to the difficulties of mobilization. The most advanced polities are still seeking ways of making democratic participation effective; modernizing polities find the task even more formidable. This article examines the relationships among participation, education, and political competence in a sample of members of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).

Although Italy is an advanced polity, in average education and industrialization it lags behind the world leaders in Europe and North America; and in some respects patterns of participation likewise reflect a transitional stage. The PSI is probably the only democratic Socialist party of the classic Marxian type left in Western Europe. It is devoted to the democratic mobilization of the industrial and agricultural masses. But it also contains a substantial middle-class element, and thus provides an opportunity to study the relationship between participation and political competence for persons of different levels of formal education.

There can be little doubt that differences in formal education have political consequences. The evidence is compelling that persons of high education participate more, are more knowledgeable, feel more efficacious, and exhibit greater sensitivity to the ideological dimensions of politics. Evidence from a sample of members of the PSI reinforces and refines these findings.
Representative Bureaucracy: A Reassessment
Authors: Subramaniam V.
Published: May 2006

The term “representative bureaucracy” was first given currency in 1949 through Donald Kingsley's book with the same title and since then it has gained popularity through the discussions of a few American political scientists and British sociologists. The underlying concept, however, is still subject to some confusion owing in part to its normative overtones. This paper attempts, in the first place, to analyse some important sources of confusion and, secondly, to show the practical difficulties in the realization of a representative bureaucracy by comparing the social backgrounds of civil servants in different countries.
The Impact of Universal Suffrage: A Comparison of Popular and Property Voting
Authors: Vines Kenneth N. , Glick Henry Robert
Published: May 2006

The attainment of universal suffrage over various forms of voting restrictions has been one of the major accomplishments in the development of modern democratic institutions. Struggles for the vote have had to overcome restrictions based on factors such as sex, race and tenure of property. While gaps in the exercise of the franchise still remain, formal restrictions on voting in the United States have been largely removed.

However, an important question, largely uninvestigated, concerns the “costs” of the universal franchise in terms of the quality of government and its impact upon policy decisions. Do the disadvantages of universal suffrage offset advantages said to be gained, particularly in Western nations, such as increased legitimization of decisions and stability of regimes? Many of the past and present opponents of the extension of voting have argued that the poor results to be expected from the impact of universal suffrage far outweigh the advantages. Clearly, the problem of “costs” is important, for it is a crucial element in the argument over democracy and the vote.
Factions and Coalitions in One-Party Japan: An Interpretation Based on the Theory of Games
Authors: Leiserson Michael
Published: May 2006

In constitutional form and in practice, the Japanese national government is parliamentary. Authority is centered in the Diet, and power is held by the parties in the Diet. Unlike the pre-war system, for example, the Diet parties really do choose the Prime Ministers.

The post-war party system changed fundamentally in 1955, when the non-socialist parties combined and formed the mammoth Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP). Since its formation in 1955, the LDP has always had a safe majority in both Houses of the Diet. But, from its beginning as a union of several political streams to the present, the LDP has been made up of several rather stable factions. These factions are the key actors in the biennial election of the party president, who naturally becomes the Prime Minister. As a general rule, votes in a party presidential election are on straight lines. So a Prime Minister is chosen by a coalition of LDP factions which controls a majority of votes at the party convention. Furthermore, the factions present nominees for Cabinet posts, and Ministers are chosen from among these nominees. Cabinet posts become rewards for the factions which voted for the Prime Minister, inducements to opposing factions to enter the Prime Minister's coalition, and buffers to soften or weaken the opposition of hostile factions. In short, the struggle over top political leadership in Japan—the president and the top officials of the ruling party, the Prime Minister, and other Cabinet members—is waged by the LDP factions. (The struggle over policy, on the other hand, is waged by other actors, within the framework established by the outcome of the factions' struggle over leadership.) And because of the wide range of opinion within the LDP, the outcomes of the factions' struggle over top political leadership are very important for Japan. A switch from an Ishibashi to a Kishi, or from a Kishi to an Ikeda, is certainly as significant as, say, the replacement of a Laniel by a Mendès-France.
Soviet Elite Participatory Attitudes in the Post-Stalin Period
Authors: Lodge Milton
Published: May 2006

This paper, part of a larger study, is a comparative analysis of five Soviet elites—the central Party apparatchicki, and four specialist elites: the central economic bureaucrats, the military, the literary intelligentsia, and the legal profession. By content analyzing representative periodicals for each elite, data are collected on elite attitudes toward participation in the political system. The overall goal is to gain a measure of the direction and scope of Soviet elite attitudinal change since Stalin; more specifically, (1) to measure the extent to which the elites perceive themselves as participants in the policy-making process, (2) to determine whether the elites perceive their participatory role as expanding over time, and (3) to demark changing patterns of Partyspecialist elite relations from 1952–65.

To ground this study in a theoretical framework, analytical categories and hypotheses—derived in part from Brzezinski and Huntington's Political Power: USA/USSR—are formulated to test the perceived extent of elite participation in the Soviet political process. Synoptically, models of political systems may be built by reducing to essentials the mode of interaction between the regime and society. A key variable in analyzing this interaction between superstructure and base is the role and efficacy of societal groups in influencing policy formation and implementation. Following this tack a descriptive continuum may be set up for classifying political systems. At one end of the continuum are ideological systems (e.g., the USSR), at the other “instrumental” systems (e.g., the United States). In instrumental systems the relationship between the political and social system is characterized by “access and interaction.”
Political Socialization and the High School Civics Curriculum in the United States
Authors: Langton Kenneth P. , Jennings M. Kent
Published: May 2006

Attempts to map the political development of individuals inevitably become involved with the relative contribution of different socialization agencies throughout the life cycle. Research has focused to a large extent on the family and to a much lesser degree on other agents such as the educational system. At the secondary school level very little has been done to examine systematically the selected aspects of the total school environment. To gain some insight into the role of the formal school environment, this paper will explore the relationship between the civics curriculum and political attitudes and behavior in American high schools.

A number of studies, recently fortified by data from Gabriel Almond and Sidney's Verba's five-nation study, stress the crucial role played by formal education in the political socialization process.

[None of the other variables] compares with the educational variable in the extent to which it seems to determine political attitudes. The uneducated man or the man with limited education is a different political actor from the man who has achieved a high level of education.1

Such conclusions would not have greatly surprised the founders of the American republic, for they stressed the importance of education to the success of democratic and republican government. Starting from its early days the educational system incorporated civic training. Textbooks exposing threats to the new republic were being used in American schools by the 1790's. By 1915, the term “civics” became associated with high school courses which emphasized the study of political institutions and citizenship training.2
A Salience Dimension of Politics for the Study of Political Culture
Authors: Czudnowski Moshe M.
Published: May 2006

The present trend in the comparative study of politics is a departure from the country-by-country approach and a search for analytical models based on dimensions common to all political systems. This trend is in part based on the assumption that the construction of new concepts and conceptual frameworks for comparative politics would provide the starting point for a general empirical theory of political systems. One of the new concepts which has become common currency is “political culture.” Originally proposed by Almond in 1956 and developed by Almond and Verba in The Civic Culture, the concept of political culture refers to patterns of politically relevant orientations of a cognitive, evaluative and expressive sort. It is intended to provide a researchable connecting link between the psychological tendencies of individuals and groups and the structural-functional characteristics of political systems, and to translate such concepts as “historical heritage” or “national character” into sets of cultural components more amenable to measurement and comparison across nations.

The study of political culture thus involves comparisons between the orientations of social groups towards specific political objects, between those of particular groups towards different objects, and between patterns of orientations and patterns of behavior. From a methodological viewpoint, all empirical political research is comparative research; we must therefore expect to encounter the problem of the comparability of political data, and in particular, the problem of equivalence of meaning, in all areas of political study. In the comparison of cultural data across nations the requirements of equivalence of meaning are probably more difficult to meet than in any other area. Generally speaking, there are two possible sources of differences in meaning in cross-cultural data: (a) cultural differences of a non-political nature, such as language, education or the degree of frankness or “openness” of personal opinions, and (b) cultural differences of a political nature.
Cross-National Dimensions of Political Competence
Authors: Muller Edward N.
Published: May 2006

Political efficacy, the belief that the ruled in a political system have some capacity for exercising influence over the rulers, has been studied extensively by political researchers. A selected bibliography compiled by Easton and Dennis in early 1967 contains some thirty books and articles which have dealt in one way or another with political efficacy and its correlates. And this bibliography could be updated considerably.

Substantial theoretic import has been attributed to political efficacy. Easton and Dennis consider the SRC sense of political efficacy construct to be an important determinant of the persistence of democratic regimes. They argue that beliefs in political efficacy provide “a reservoir of diffuse support upon which the system can automatically draw in normal times, when members may feel that their capacity to manipulate the environment is not living up to their expectations, and in special periods of stress, when popular participation may appear to be pure illusion or when political outputs fail to measure up to insistent demands,” A related construct, termed “subjective competence” by Almond and Verba, is based on different indicators but interpreted as substantively equivalent to the SRC construct. On the basis of their analysis of the Five-Nation data, Almond and Verba arrive at the general conclusion that “the self-confident [subjectively competent] citizen appears to be the democratic citizen.” The concept of political competence, as formulated by Barnes, subsumes political efficacy under the aegis of an individual attribute consisting of “political skills plus the sense of efficacy necessary for effective political action.” Barnes contends that high levels of political competence dispose individuals to prefer democratic styles of leadership, while low levels dispose individuals to prefer authoritarian styles. On these grounds, he concludes that relatively high levels of political competence are a necessary condition of political democracy.
A Theory of Professionalization in Politics
Authors: Black Gordon S.
Published: May 2006

Professionalization, in customary usage, refers to the assimilation of the standards and values prevalent in a given profession. Every profession, including politics, tends to have some set or sets of values that are widely held and which define what it means to be a “professional” within that field. These values are important because they affect the likelihood that the individual will achieve success in his profession. If the values are widely held, those that deviate from them are likely to be sanctioned by their colleagues, and people who fail to maintain the minimal standards of their profession are not likely to obtain professional advancement. Those who do behave according to the dominant values of their profession, however, are likely to be accorded the status of “professional” in the eyes of their colleagues, and that designation will contribute to the success of their careers.

In the profession of politics, as in other professions, there is seldom one set of standards and values that prevails in all places at all times. These normative elements are likely to vary from political system to political system, to vary within a political system, and to vary within the profession of politics over time. In a highly centralized local political organization, for example, the achievement and maintenance of a position is likely to depend upon such values as deference and loyalty to the leaders of the political hierarchy.
Amateurs and Peofessionals: A Study of Delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention
Authors: Soule John W. , Clarke James W.
Published: May 2006

Several years ago James Q. Wilson studied the members of the three amateur Democratic clubs in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He intended his study, by his own admission, to be interesting rather than theoretical, but we have found its theoretical portions to be intriguing. The amateur politicians studies by Wilson primarily concentrated their energies in local politics, although their ambitions extended far beyond local campaigns and issues. Indeed, they expressed a clear desire to alter fundamentally the character of the American party system and, accordingly, all governing institutions.

Wilson's task of identifying and characterizing the political motives and tactics of amateur Democrats was facilitated by the existence of political clubs. He had only to identify the clubs he wished to study and survey their members. Future researchers were left the responsibility of identifying similar political motives and tactics in less well-defined groups. We attempted to do this for a sample of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 1968, and, following Wilson's criteria, we were successful in identifying a substantial proportion of amateur Democrats.

The amateur Democrat described by Wilson was not set apart from the more conventional party activitsts by his liberalism, his age, education or class. He was not a dilettante or an inept practitioner of politics, nor did he regard politics as an avocation or hobby. Rather the amateur found politics intrinsically interesting because it expressed a conception of the public interest. The political world was perceived in terms of policies and principles which were consistent with the amateur's theory of deomocracy.
The Myth of the Tradition
Authors: Gunnell John G.
Published: May 2006

Leo Strauss's epic rendition of the history of Western political philosophy has been a principal factor in the establishment and perpetuation of the myth of the tradition or the belief that the conventional series of classic works from Plato to Nietzsche represents the development of modern political ideas and constitutes the core of an inherited pattern of thought which, in turn, provides the basic context for interpreting particular texts. Much of the scholarly commentary on the history of political philosophy has been directed toward a critique of contemporary political thought and action, and the idea of the tradition has served as a vehicle for this historical etiology. In Strauss's argument, the concept of the tradition plays a strategic rhetorical function, but the myth of the tradition in its various forms has become a pervasive regulative assumption in both teaching and research.
Transaction Flows in the International System
Authors: Brams Steven J.
Published: May 2006

When we speak of aninternational system, we start with the presumption that there is something habitual and regular about the behavior of the nations that constitute it. Unfortunately, the concept of an international system has had a singularly hollow ring in the works of many scholars who have employed the term. It is frequently compared to an incredibly complicated watch or thermostat, or alternatively it is defined so abstractly that it would appear to have no specific empirical referents—and therefore practically everything in one way or another would qualify as a “system.”

The abstract and shadowy significance of the concept in international relations studies has retarded its usefulness for exploring the regularities that underlie the interactions of nations. More than ever before, however, the actions of nations have multiple reverberations on each other and can be ascribed meaning only within the context of the relations of many nations with each other. Because the configuration of inter-nation relations has become increasingly complex, it has become more and more difficult to trace out these relations and determine what structure, if any, there is in the “system.”

We shall see later that any definition of a system is arbitrary to the extent that its inclusion and exclusion rules are arbitrary. If we can specify the simplifying assumptions which create this arbitrariness, however, then the problematic cases included or excluded in a system or component subsystems can usually be identified and explained. This approach seems preferable to positing systems criteria that are either ambiguous or non-operational, enriching the vocabulary but not the analysis.
The Child'S Acquisition of Regime Norms: Political Efficacy
Authors: Easton David , Dennis Jack
Published: May 2006

In its broadest conception, a political system is a means through which the wants of the members of a society are converted into binding decisions. To sustain a conversion process of this sort a society must provide a relatively stable context for political interaction, a set of ground rules for participating in all parts of the political process. We may describe this context variously as a constitutional order, a set of fundamental rules, or customary procedures for settling differences. But however this context is defined, it usually includes three elements: some minimal constraints on the general goals of its members, rules or norms governing behavior, and structures of authority through which the members of the system act in making and implementing political outputs. To these goals, norms and structures we may give the traditional name “political regime” or constitutional order in the broadest, nonlegal sense of the phrase.

We may hypothesize that if a political system is to persist, one of its major tasks is to provide for the input of at least a minimal level of support for a regime of some kind. A political system that proved unable to sustain a regime, that is, some relatively ordered and stable way of converting inputs into outputs, could not avoid collapsing. Each time a dispute arose it would have to seek to agree on means for settling differences at the same time as it sought to bring about a settlement of the substance of the issue, a virtually impossible combination of tasks for a society to engage in continuously.
Some Comments on Russett's “Discovering Voting Groups in the United Nations”
Authors: Mueller John E.
Published: May 2006

Factor analysis, a statistical technique of growing popularity in political science, has recently found application in the June, 1966 issue of this Review in an attempt to identify U.N. voting blocs. The hand is that of Professor Bruce M. Russett, the author of a number of outstanding contributions toward the systematic and quantitative study of international relations. The following paragraphs are designed to be cautionary in nature, not destructive, and endeavor to suggest: 1) that factor analysis has questionable value as a tool for the study of complex phenomena; 2) that even if acceptable as a tool, it has peculiar faults when applied to U.N. bloc voting; and 3) that even if acceptable as a tool for the study of bloc voting in the U.N., an application somewhat different from the one chosen by Professor Russett might have been more profitable. In the process it will be argued that the procedures of the sort profferred by Professor Arend Lijphart for determining U.N. voting blocs are preferable.

1. If appealing in its seeming promise to make order of disorder and sense of nonsense, factor analysis proves to be exasperating in practice. For while it is true, that, as Professor Russett has noted elsewhere, “the method is completely objective” in the sense that the decision as to which variables are to “load” on which factors is made entirely by the impartial machinery, the criteria which the machinery applies in arriving at this decision are manipulated by the operator—and depending on these criteria, the outcome can vary widely. Thus factor analysis can generate not one, but a number—in fact an infinite number—of solutions to the same problem. In choosing among these solutions the one most likely to represent truth (if that is what one is interested in), the analyst is commonly urged to select the solution which makes the most “sense”—in other words to embrace the objective solution which is most subjectively appealing. Therefore, one can get out of factor analysis almost whatever one wants to get.
British Foreign Policy and the Party System
Authors: Northedge F. S.
Published: May 2006

It is a paradox of British politics that, while party discipline is such that no government has to depend on Opposition support in order to pursue the foreign policy of its choice, this very fact has been one reason for the normal consensus on questions of foreign policy between the two front benches. The greater the prospects of Opposition leaders forming the next government the greater the discipline they tend to exert over their ranks, and the more international realities are imposed upon the kind of fantasy-thinking to which a party denied power for many years is especially prone. These tendencies have been notable in British politics since the war; they are likely to continue, given that the Labour Party can control the forces of disruption unleashed by its recent defeat. In the five general elections since the wartime Coalition Government foreign policy issues have not merely occupied a minor role; they have been regarded by party leaders, though not always by the rank and file, as though they were primarily questions of personal qualifications for conducting policies the main outlines of which were not in dispute. At the general election in the autumn of 1959, although disagreements between Government and Opposition had undoubtedly grown since the quiet accords of 1955, the campaign turned, if on international issues at all, on the eligibility of Right or Left to represent the country in negotiations in which the likely British position was largely agreed on both sides. The Leader of the Opposition recognised that this was so, although his explanation for it was that Ministers had been forced to accept Labour's policy recommendations.
Mentoring in Political Life: The Case of Willy Brandt
Authors: Kellerman Barbara
Published: May 2006

Mentoring relationships have a qualitative impact on the transition from early to middle adulthood, as well as on adult life itself. This paper proposes that the exploration of the role of mentors in the lives of political leaders will produce suggestive results. The study is a case history which examines the mentor in the early and later life of the adult male, here Willy Brandt. Brandt had two mentors: Julius Leber and Ernst Reuter. Reuter is briefly discussed but we focus here on the first of these, Leber, a prominent Social Democrat during the Weimar era and a legendary member of the German resistance. The essay describes the origins, nature and termination of the Brandt-Leber relationship. The influence of the mentor on the mentee transcended the period of their actual interaction and, as the paper procedes to demonstrate, the intensity of the relationship ensured that Brandt's self-image as Leber's heir continued to affect both professional and ideological choices.
Decision-Rules and Individual Values in Constitutional Choice
Authors: Rae Douglas W.
Published: May 2006

Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: “How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?” Only if participation is limited to one man does this question become trivial. And this choice ofdecision-rulesmay seem only a little less important than the choice of rules in a world so largely governed by committees, councils, conventions, and legislatures. This paper is about the consequences of these rules for individual values.

Both the oral and written traditions of political theory have generally confined the search for optimal (or “best”) decision-rules to three alternatives. Therule of consensustells us that all direct participants must agree on a policy which is to be imposed.Majority-ruletells us that more than half must concur in a policy if it is to be imposed. And therule of individual initiative(as we may call it), holds that a policy is imposed when any single participant approves of it. These three decision-rules—“everyone,” “most of us,” and “anyone”—are terribly important, but they cannot be said to exhaust the available alternatives.

The list of alternatives is just as long as a committee's roster. Only for a committee of three would ‘consensus,’ ‘majority’ and ‘individual initiative’ exhaust the possibilities. In a committee of n members, we have n possible rules. Let the decision-rule be a minimum number of individuals (k) required to impose a policy.
Comparing Political Regions: The Case of California
Authors: Wolfinger Raymond E. , Greenstein Fred I.
Published: May 2006

One of the more fertile sources of data for systematic comparative political studies is in the regional differences that abound within political systems. When such differences are large and politically significant, explaining them becomes intriguing and important, especially if their causes cannot be found in the more familiar classes of socioeconomic variables.

Our purpose here is to present a preliminary analysis of a widely discussed intrasystem political difference—that between Northern and Southern California. This regional split has received particularly wide attention since the 1964 Republican primary, when Senator Goldwater's landslide majority in the South overcame his resounding defeat in the San Francisco Bay Area and insured his presidential nomination. Attempts to explain this pronounced regional variation have generated propositions about the political consequences of those social and economic conditions thought to be characteristic of Southern California. Since that area's most striking feature is its continuous rapid growth and economic development, many writers have been led to speculate that anxieties resulting from such changes lead to ultraconservative political preferences. These propositions are of considerable interest to students of politics, since neither economic growth nor its presumed attitudinal consequence is unique to Southern California, nor, for that matter, to the United States. AVe will examine various explanations for California's regional variation, with special emphasis on propositions about economic growth. Our data are from the 1960 Census, 1964 and 1968 election returns, and a series of statewide sample surveys conducted during the 1964 campaigns.
Party Choice and Support for Demagogues: An Experimental Examination
Authors: Jaros Dean , Mason Gene L.
Published: May 2006

The relationship of parties to democracy and to political stability has concerned scholars for years. Extant party systems have almost continually been under attack by reformers bent on achieving various objectives, among them greater party responsibility, greater honesty, and greater efficiency of governmental operation. But party systems have not suffered from a lack of defenders: reformers have often been engaged in vigorous debate. Such controversy, apart from the merits of the arguments on either side, focuses attention on a number of interesting empirical propositions about parties in democratic systems. These propositions, unfortunately, have not often been put to rigorous systematic test.

For example, defenders of the American party system in particular point out that an important function of parties is the guiding of social conflict into moderate, non-revolutionary modes of expression. Attempts at reform, goes the argument, should be considered as to whether they might interfere with this beneficial function. Citizens are viewed as having inherent tendencies to perform destabilizing political acts or to vote for extremist political figures. Somehow, we are told, these citizens are restrained from indulging these immoderate predispositions by the party system. In a sense, the argument continues, parties save the great unwashed from themselves; all democrats should be thankful that they do and appreciate them for this service.