bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Registration and Voting: Putting First Things First
Authors: Kelley Stanley , Ayres Richard E. , Bowen William G. 
Published: May 2006

In their book Non-Voting, published in 1924, Charles E. Merriam and Harold F. Gosnell reported that many persons otherwise eligible to vote had been disfranchised by Chicago's registration requirements. Their data showed that “there were three times as many adult citizens who could not vote because they had failed to register as there were registered voters who had failed to vote in the particular election” and that “entirely different reasons [for not voting] were emphasized by those who were not registered than by those who were registered but did not vote …” Their observation can hardly be said to have been influential. Until very recently most students of voting have paid little attention to the temporally prior act of registration.Failure to do so has had important consequences. It has made it easy to discount unduly the significance of political influences on the size and composition of electorates; easy to argue unrealistically about the value of efforts to increase the turnout of voters; and easy to be puzzled about some aspects of the behavior of voters.
An Attempt to Simulate the Outbreak of World War I
Authors: Hermann Charles F. , Hermann Margaret G. 
Published: May 2006

Political games and simulations are models or representations of particular political systems and their associated processes. They are techniques for reproducing in a simplified form selected aspects of one system, A, in some independent system, A′. Games and simulations have a dynamic quality produced by the complex interaction of properties in the model. This feature enables them to generate states of the system that differ radically from those present originally. The kinds of transformations that may occur between the initial and final states of a simulation or game are difficult to represent by other means, despite a diversity in modeling procedures ranging from verbal descriptions to differential equations. Because of their apparent applicability to many problems of politics, as well as their novelty, games and simulations have been developed in a variety of areas in political science. They have been used in research, instruction, and policy formation. Although the application of these techniques has been increasing, systematic evaluation of their performance is only now beginning. This essay reports one type of evaluation.The researchers sought to structure a simulation of international politics so it would reproduce features of the political crisis that preceded the beginning of the First World War. Two separate trials or runs of the simulation were performed as a pilot project. With two runs, the data are sufficient only to illustrate what might be done in an expanded research program.
Further Reflections on “The Elitist Theory of Democracy”
Authors: Dahl Robert A. 
Published: May 2006

An interest in the roles, functions, contributions, and dangers of leadership in popular regimes is not, of course, new among observers of political life. This has, in fact, been an ancient and enduring interest of political theorists. It is possible, however, to distinguish—at least in a rough way—two different streams of thought: one consisting of writers sympathetic to popular rule, the other consisting of anti-democratic writers.It has always been obvious to practical and theoretical observers alike that even where leaders are chosen by the people, they might convert a democracy into an oligarchy or a despotism. From ancient times, as everyone knows, anti-democratic writers have contended that popular governments were unlikely to provide leaders with wisdom and virtue, and insisted on the natural affinity between the people and the despot. These ancient challenges by anti-democratic writers were, I think, made more formidable in the course of the last hundred years by critics—sometimes ex-democrats turned authoritarian when their Utopian hopes encountered the ugly realities of political life—who, like Pareto, Michels, and Mosca, contended that popular rule is not only undesirable but also, as they tried to show, impossible. The failure of popular regimes to emerge, or, if they did emerge to survive, in Russia, Italy, Germany, and Spain could not be met merely by frequent assertions of democratic rhetoric.Fortunately, alongside this stream of anti-democratic thought and experience there has always been the other. Aware both of their critics and of the real life problems of popular rule, writers sympathetic to democracy have emphasized the need for wisdom, virtue, and self-restraint not only among the general body of citizens but among leaders as well.
Discovering Voting Groups in the United Nations
Authors: Russett Bruce M. 
Published: May 2006

The discussion of voting groups or blocs within the United Nations General Assembly has long been a popular pastime. It is, of course, merely a special case of a wider concern with groups and coalitions in all aspects of international politics. With the apparent loosening of the early postwar bipolarity it is increasingly important to discern the number, composition, and relative strength of whatever coalitions of nations may emerge from the present seemingly transitional period.Voting groups in the General Assembly provide a relevant datum, though hardly the only one, for an effort to identify these groups. The United Nations gives no perfect image of broader international politics; due to the one-nation one-vote principle and to the fact that it is not a world government with authority to enforce its decisions, power relationships within the Assembly are not the same as in other arenas, such as functional or geographic ones. It might well be argued that because of the majority-rule principle the smaller and poorer states have an incentive to band together in the UN that they do not have elsewhere. Thus the discovery of a “bloc” of underdeveloped countries in the UN proves nothing about the cohesion of that “bloc” in other contexts. Yet votes in the General Assembly do provide a unique set of data where many national governments commit themselves simultaneously and publicly on a wide variety of major issues.
Teaching with Inter-Nation Simulation and Case Studies
Authors: Robinson James A. , Anderson Lee F. , Hermann Margaret G. , Snyder Richard C. 
Published: May 2006

“Simulation” and “case studies” are supplementary teaching aids available for university courses in political science and international relations. The newer technique, simulation, has been used at several universities to augment instruction in international relations, foreign policy making, national security policy, urban politics, and political parties and elections. In fields other than political science, similar techniques abound. The number of business games or simulations exceeds 100, and less numerous games exist for educational administration, legislatures, career choices, and diplomacy, to name a few. Case studies also supplement a wide range of politics courses, including introduction to American government, public administration, party organization, legislative processes, and public law. The case method is the hallmark of schools of law and schools of business, and it is now emulated in teaching the history of science and in training in research methodology in sociology.Different types of simulations and cases and their uses have been described and discussed elsewhere. Evaluation of games and cases as supplementary instructional aids has almost invariably been impressionistic. The consumers of these teaching methods have reported their personal experiences with them and have advanced claims for and criticisms of them, but they have undertaken little empirical research to determine whether the claims for particular simulations or cases are valid or to compare the actual effects of alternative methods. Moreover, the Ford Foundation expended thousands of dollars to induce business schools to try business games, but their investment in evaluating the success or failure of this innovation extended to convening a conference to discuss the subject, not to carrying out research on it.
Emotional Experiences in Political Groups: The Case of the McCarthy Phenomenon
Authors: Brown Steven R. , Ellithorp John D. 
Published: May 2006

In many ways the study of political groups from a theoretical point of view can be said not to have progressed much beyond the conceptions of Arthur F. Bentley. There have been countless studies of political groups, to be sure, but it seems most have been little more than the collection and presentation ofad hocfacts obtained from the testing ofad hoc hypotheses, the concepts of “group” and of “group behavior” having been little altered in the process.Much of the difficulty no doubt stems from Bentley's strict empiricism and the interpretation given his position by most social scientists who have aspired to translate him. When Bentley said that we know nothing of ideas and feelings but only of activity, he was merely reminding the social scientist to remain close to the operations of the phenomena he was studying. Activity, or behavior, can be worked with and studied directly, but it is questionable whether or not the same can be said of ideas and feelings. Scientific progress, Bentley would say, can be made only if one deals with what is visible and replicable. Critics as well as followers of Bentley, however, have interpreted him to mean that such matters as subjectivity are outside the pale of science, since subjectivity is presumed to be private, idiosyncratic, and nonreplicable.
The Stochastic Process of Alliance Formation Behavior
Authors: Li Richard P. Y. , Thompson William R. 
Published: May 2006

This article attempts to examine alliance formation behavior as a stochastic process amenable to systems interpretation. We test two hypotheses linking the systems characteristics of bipolar distribution/tightly knit bloc structure to serial dependence and stability of alliance formation behavior and multipolar distribution/loosely knit bloc structure to randomness and process instability.For testing these hypotheses, we have introduced a modeling strategy whereby identification of serial dependence and parameter estimation are accomplished by means of stochastic difference equations and time series autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions, and systems interpretation is facilitated by employing its continuous analogue in differential equation form.We analyze data on three sets of observations corresponding to three distinct periods of international relations: 1815–1914, 1919–1939, 1945–1965. The results do confirm the proposed hypotheses revealing randomness and instability of alliance formation behavior in the multipolar/loosely knit periods of 1815–1914 and 1919–1939 and serial dependence and stability in the bipolar/tightly knit 1945–1965 period. Finally, we consider the implications of these results for the earlier findings, the balance of power model, and the probability of war.
Participation, Political Structure, and Concurrence
Authors: Hansen Susan Blackall 
Published: May 2006

Under what circumstances do citizens in a democracy influence their leaders? This paper uses an index of citizen-leader agreement on community problems to examine the effects of political factors on linkage. This index, termed concurrence, was based on parallel questions on community problems asked of citizens, government heads, and other local leaders sampled in sixty-four smaller American communities.Concurrence was significantly higher in communities with high levels of citizen participation, contested elections, partisan ballots, and active political parties. Regression analysis showed that while voting rates had the largest direct impact on concurrence, participation had more impact when salient electoral alternatives were available. Partisan, contested elections also were associated with higher concurrence between leaders and persons of low socioeconomic status. Political factors also affected concurrence rates in both consensual and nonconsensual communities.Alternative explanations for these findings (popular control of leaders, leaders' efforts to influence citizens or manipulate participation) are considered. Since concurrence scores of nonelected local leaders were also higher in participant communities with contested elections, it is suggested that political factors may affect citizen-leader agreement by facilitating communication between leaders and citizens, as well as by aiding electoral accountability.
Promise and Performance: A Dynamic Model of Presidential Popularity
Authors: Ostrom Charles W. , Simon Dennis M. 
Published: May 2006

The growth of public opinion measurement in the last 40 years has added a new dimension to the study of presidential behavior. Not only have public evaluations become more newsworthy, but the importance of public support as a resource and determinant of political survival has been enhanced. Recent scholarship on the presidency has documented the value of public support, attempted to identify its major determinants, and speculated about the manner in which presidents might influence these evaluations.This research is designed to integrate these concerns into a single model and thereby to examine the interdependence between public support as a product of citizen decisions and as a political resource. First, a characterization of the citizen as an evaluator of the president is developed and used to construct an equation of presidential approval. Next, we develop an equation that explains presidential effectiveness in the legislative arena and illustrates the operation of public support as a presidential resource. The public support and legislative effectiveness equations are specified as a simultaneous equation system, estimated, and evaluated. The results of the model are then used to expand the conventional wisdom about the determinants of public support, to examine the consequences of the reciprocal relationship between public support and legislative success, and to generate ex post forecasts of President Reagan's support from 1981 through 1983.
American Voter Turnout in Comparative Perspective
Authors: Powell G. Bingham 
Published: May 2006

Despite relatively favorable citizen attitudes, voter turnout in American national elections is far below the average of 80% of the eligible electorate that votes in other industrialized democracies. The American institutional setting—particularly the party system and the registration laws—severely inhibits voter turnout, and probably also accounts for the unusual degree to which education and other socioeconomic resources are directly linked to voting participation in the United States.Using a combination of aggregate and comparative survey data, the present analysis suggests that in comparative perspective, turnout in the United States is advantaged about 5% by political attitudes, but disadvantaged 13% by the party system and institutional factors, and up to 14% by the registration laws. The experience of other democracies suggests that encouraging voter participation would contribute to channeling discontent through the electoral process. Even a significantly expanded American electorate would be more interested and involved in political activity than are present voters in most other democracies.
The Paradox of Not Voting for Oneself
Authors: Tullock Gordon 
Published: May 2006

In most states it is permitted to write in the names on the ballot, and these write-in candidates can win if they assemble enough votes. Thus, in all elections in which I might conceivably participate, there are at least three candidates: the Republicans, the Democrats, and my own favorite candidate for president—Gordon Tullock. Indeed, using the notation of the Ferejohn and Fiorina article, assuming that we are talking about 1972, I would find k having a value of about .001. Under the circumstances, if I understand the article correctly, I should always vote, and the vote should always take the form of writing in my own name. Further, as far as I can see, this advice can be generalized. Everyone who would really like to be president should vote and write in his own name, because the minimum regret that they produce for three-candidate elections is also correct for the elections in which there are 30 million candidates. The only problem here is that it would, of course, amount to participating in a lottery, and my possible gain from writing in my own name might turn out to be less than the cost of writing it in. Granted that people are willing to buy lottery tickets, even when the various states offering them take very substantial rakeoffs, I do not imagine this would be much of a disadvantage.This same conclusion could have been deduced from the Casstevens article, which Ferejohn and Fiorina quite properly criticize as being mathematically incorrect.
Parties as Utility Maximizers
Authors: Wittman Donald A. 
Published: May 2006

The article introduces two models of political party decision making. Both models assume that the parties are solely interested in policy and that winning the election is just a means to that end. In one, the parties are competitive, while in the other the parties collude. The main result, in either case, is that the parties tend to be unresponsive to the interests of the voters.The models are analyzed in an intransitive case (an election concerned only with income distribution) and a transitive one (an election where all political attitudes can be put on a left-right continuum), and under the assumptions of perfect and imperfect information.With perfect information the intransitive case results in the parties ending up with all the income; while in the single peaked case neither party will have a position to the left (right) of the left (right) party's most preferred position whatever the attitudes of the voters.Finally it is shown that it is rational for the parties to collude and present similar platforms.
Conflict, Power and Relative Deprivation
Authors: Korpi Walter 
Published: May 2006

The widely accepted expectation achievement approach to conflict, which views conflict primarily as a response to relative deprivation, has recently been challenged by proponents of a political process approach, the central features of which are mobilization of power resources and the struggle for power. Here a power balance model of conflict is developed which incorporates the core concepts from both approaches. In this model the difference in power resources between the contending parties is used as the central independent variable. Relative deprivation, utility of reaching the goal and expectancy of success are introduced as intervening variables to relate the effects from changes in the balance of power between the parties to the probability of manifest conflict between them.According to the power balance model of conflict different types of relative deprivation (aspirational, decremental and progressive) will be differently correlated with the probability of conflict. The overall correlation between relative deprivation and conflict is expected to be insignificant. Situations where the difference in power resources between two parties is decreasing are seen as most conducive to conflict. When the power resources of an already weaker party are decreasing, the probability of conflict is assumed to be lower than when the weaker party is gaining power resources.
The Performance of Rational Voter Models in Recent Presidential Elections
Authors: Foster Carroll B. 
Published: May 2006

In An Economic Theory of Democracy, Downs hypothesized that rational, utility-maximizing citizens would calculate the benefits from voting (as opposed to abstaining altogether) and then vote if this expected benefit exceeded voting cost. This hypothesis is logically derived from economic principles of rational behavior, but is counterintuitive: even if the utility increment is plausibly large, the probability of casting a pivotal, tie-breaking vote in any sizable polity is minute. Hence the expected benefit will be less than the time cost of voting, and no rational person will vote. Nevertheless, a number of statistical studies have found that voter turnout does respond to differences in the probability of casting a decisive vote, even though that probability may be small.This article uses data gathered at the state level from the 1968, 1972, 1976, and 1980 general elections to reestimate the relationship between voter turnout and the probable closeness of the election. Pooled data Least Squares Dummy Variable (LSDV) regressions are used whenever preliminary tests indicate that such pooling is permissible. The empirical results suggest that the relationship between closeness and turnout is weak, unstable, or nonexistent in all of the models tested.
On derivability
Authors: Quine W. V. 
Published: May 2006

1. The notion of derivability. Italic capitals, with or without subscripts, will be used as variables. They are to take as values some manner of elements which may for the present be left undetermined. Now let us consider abstractly the notion of the derivability of an element X from one or more specified elements by a series of steps of a specified kind. This involves reference to two conditions upon elements. One of these conditions, expressible by some statement form containing a single free variable, determines the elements from which X is said to be derivable. The other condition, expressed say by a statement form containing k + 1 free variables, determines the kind of steps by which the derivation is to proceed; it is the condition which any elements Z1, … Zk, Y must fulfill if progress from Zi, …, Zk to Y is to constitute a step of derivation in the intended sense. Supposing “f(Y)” supplanted by the first of these statement forms, whatever it may be, and “g(Z1, …, Zk, Y)” supplanted by the other, let us adopt the form of notationto express derivability of X in the suggested sense. The meaning of (1) can be formulated more accurately as follows:(i) There are elements Y1 to Ym (for some m) such that Ym = X and, for each i≦m, either f(Yi) or else there are numbers j1 to Ym, each less than i, for which g(Yj1, …, Yjk, Yi).(Variable subscripts are to be understood, here and throughout the paper, as referring only to positive integers.)The notion (1) is illustrated in the ancestral R* of a relation R;1 for,Another illustration is afforded by metamathematics. Suppose our elements are the expressions used in some formal system; suppose we have defined “Post(Y)”, meaning that Y is a postulate of that system; and suppose we have defined “Inf(ZI, …, Zk, Y)” (for some fixed k large enough for all purposes of the system in question), meaning that Y proceeds from Z1, …, Zk by one application of one or another of the rules of inference of the system. Thenwould mean that X is a theorem of the system.