The National Security Council, created by the National Security Act of 1947, is the instrument through which the President obtains the collective advice of the appropriate officials of the executive branch concerning the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security. An outline of the genesis of this new governmental agency will indicate in part its present rôle.

Even before World War II, a few far-sighted men were seeking for a means of correlating our foreign policy with our military and economic capabilities. During the war, as military operations began to have an increasing political and economic effect, the pressure for such a correlation increased. It became apparent that the conduct of the war involved more than a purely military campaign to defeat the enemy's armed forces. Questions arose of war aims, of occupational policies, of relations with governments-in-exile and former enemy states, of the postwar international situation with its implications for our security, and of complicated international machinery.

The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) is one of the three major groupings—the Social Democrats, the Socialists and the Communists—that have cultivated the ground to the left of center (i.e., to the left of the ruling Christian Democrats) in Italian politics since World War II. As recently as 1951, the PSI appeared to be inextricably linked with the Communists; but the Socialists have gradually worked themselves around to the position, early in 1962, of openly supporting a Left-Center coalition government still headed by the Christian Democrats. This drastic alteration in the Italian political spectrum has created new possibilities for Italy's political development. It has already permitted the long-awaited “opening to the Left”—as a basic alternative to governments dependent on the Center-Right—under which Italy will be ruled by a coalition of Christian Democrats, Republicans, and Social Democrats, with the PSI offering its support in Parliament in exchange for a bold program of economic planning and social reform. But some Socialists see a further possibility: the so-called “Socialist alternative.” They hope for the possible development of the PSI into a second major party in a two-party system which would absorb the great bulk of the Italian electorate, with the exception of minor extremist fringes to the right and left. To be sure, the success of the “opening to the Left” and the eventual emergence of a “Socialist alternative” both depend on the continued supremacy of the more progressive factions within the ranks of the Christian Democratic Party.

This study is based on a survey conducted by the author in a rural community in Egypt (a) to determine how mass media messages reach the population, (b) to identify opinion leaders, and (c) to assess the relation between mass media exposure and political awareness.

The data from this survey were used to test the two-step flow of communications hypothesis of Lazarsfeld and colleagues and to compare the effects of the mass media and opinion leaders on the public. Analysis of the data did not support the two-step flow of communications hypothesis; instead it was noted that the greater the exposure to the mass media, the more direct is the flow of communications.

Opinion leaders reached a smaller and less educated section of the population and were found to be the elected and official representatives of the village organizations rather than shopkeepers, teachers, and clergy. Finally, it was found that opinion leaders were specialized, each conveying policy information relevant to his role in the community. The flow of communications was found to be functional and organized rather than casual and haphazard as is usually the case in transmitting non-functional information.

The last part of this article deals with the relation between exposure to the mass media and political awareness. Indices were constructed to give each respondent a score on the degree of exposure to the mass media and another on his level of political awareness. Analysis showed that mass media exposure and political awareness are directly related (r = .53). It was also found that those who had direct access to the mass media were more sensitized to political news than those who had no such access, thus underlining the politicization role of the mass media.

Finally, the article compares the degree of correlation between mass media exposure and political awareness with similar correlations obtained in rural areas in Latin America.

The idea that international politics can be a theoretical science logically homeomorphic to theoretical physics finds its most perspicuous recent expression in a methodological falsificationist program for its realization. But the program is a syllabus of epistemological errors which, upon detailed examination, collapses into incoherence. This article gives particular attention to three aspects of the program: the principle of interdependent deduction, the falsifiability criterion and the critical testing policy. Despite the systematic and resolute efforts on the part of its adherents to fix a methodological grammar for international studies, the program of methodological falsificationism is revealed to be: essentially a complete failure. The main source of the difficulty is located in the failure to appreciate the role of metaphysics in the sciences which, contrary to the standard positivist-empiricist view, constitutes the driving force behind scientific discoveries. Since a monistic metaphysics, however, may be neither possible nor desirable for the social and political sciences, a deconstructive metaphysical program is recommended. The final conclusion that vastly increased attention needs to be given to ontological and metaphysical issues seems completely warranted.

In this study of lobbyists' techniques and perceptions of the legislative process, the impact of several aspects of the legislative environment is examined, including group competition and the use of issues by candidates in presidential campaigns. Data from a sample of lobbyists indicates that nonconflictual issues are treated differently by lobbyists and the Congress from issues involving group conflict. Similarly, issues used in presidential campaigns are treated differently from those developed outside them. Finally, group size is shown to be a further influence on lobbyists' techniques in dealing with Congress.

Professor Hibbs's article presents an ingenious model wherein political support of the government depends on “cumulative discounted relative performance.” Specifically, “the worse (better) the performance of the prior government, the higher (lower) will be the initial support of the new government… (G)overnments following bad acts by the opposition are likely to enjoy greater initial support than governments following good acts.”

This is a reasonable hypothesis, and it may well be correct. However, Hibbs offers no evidence of its correctness other than the overall performance of his model, and he reports no consideration, let alone rejection, of alternative hypotheses. Instead he assumes that the discounted past performance affects the new government's support with the opposite sign but with the same slope. Pursuit of Hibbs's illustrative example shows that the assumption is far from trivial, and that it produces some startling results.

Most scholars, following Rousseau himself, have had little to say about what Rousseau calls “the desire to extend our being.” Yet the concept is foundational to his political philosophy. Though less compelling a formulation (and deliberately so) than Plato's “eros” or Nietzsche's “will to power,” “the desire to extend our being” is comparable to these in its strength and reach, and hence in its power to unlock the full meaning of Rousseau's thought. My purpose in this paper is to uncover Rousseau's view of the meaning and significance of this desire; its pervasive influence on moral and political life; and the means through which it can and cannot, and should and should not, be fulfilled.

Political campaigns increasingly conduct experiments to learn how to persuade voters. Little research has considered the implications of this trend for elections or democracy. To probe these implications, we analyze a unique archive of 146 advertising experiments conducted by US campaigns in 2018 and 2020 using the platform Swayable. This archive includes 617 advertisements produced by 51 campaigns and tested with over 500,000 respondents. Importantly, we analyze the complete archive, avoiding publication bias. We find small but meaningful variation in the persuasive effects of advertisements. In addition, we find that common theories about what makes advertising persuasive have limited and context-dependent power to predict persuasiveness. These findings indicate that experiments can compound money’s influence in elections: it is difficult to predict ex ante which ads persuade, experiments help campaigns do so, but the gains from these findings principally accrue to campaigns well-financed enough to deploy these ads at scale.

Existing research finds that leaders develop international reputations based on their past behavior on the international stage. We argue that leaders’ domestic choices can also influence their international reputations, perhaps as much as their past foreign policy decisions do. Using formal theory and intuitive argumentation, we develop an overarching framework to predict how much any domestic choice will affect a leader’s international reputation. We theorize that certain domestic choices can inform expectations about future international crisis behavior based on the extent to which (1) the costs at stake are similar to those of an international crisis and (2) the domestic issue is salient relative to foreign policy. We use conjoint experiments and other evidence to show that many domestic choices have significant international reputational effects. There is some evidence that the reputational effect of certain domestic choices may equal that of fighting in a previous international crisis.

The role of domestic public opinion is an important topic in research on international negotiations, yet we know little about how exactly it manifests itself. We focus on government rhetoric during negotiations and develop a conceptual distinction between implicit and explicit manifestations of public opinion. Drawing on a database of video recordings of negotiations of the Council of the European Union and a quantitative text analysis of government speeches, we find that public opinion matters implicitly, with the exact pattern depending on governments’ stance toward the EU. Pro-EU governments are responsive to public opinion in their support for compromises and attempts to stall negotiations, whereas Euroskeptic governments tend to remain silent when confronted with a public positively disposed toward the EU. Our results show that although governments implicitly represent public opinion, they do not systematically invoke their voters explicitly, suggesting the public matters but in different ways than often assumed.

Highlighting the strength of “partyism” in many democracies, recent scholarship pays keen attention to increasing hostility and distrust among citizens across party lines, known as affective polarization. By combining a conjoint analysis with decision-making games such as dictator and trust games, we design a novel survey experiment to systematically estimate and compare the strength of the partisan divide relative to other social divides across 25 European democracies. This design also allows us to investigate how the two components of affective polarization, in-group favoritism and out-group derogation, are moderated by the way parties interact with each other. We first find dominance of the partisan divide compared to other social divides that constitute traditional cleavages such as social class and religion. Second, we show that affective polarization in Europe is not primarily driven by out-group animus. Finally, we demonstrate that coalition partnership lessens affective polarization by reducing both in-group and out-group biases.

A common generalization about the distribution of power in the American political system states that it is fragmented and decentralized. In accordance with this view, the making of public policy decisions can be explained largely in terms of the continuous interaction, competitive or cooperative, among many diverse semi-autonomous centers of power, some governmental, others non-governmental. Each power-holding unit—individual or group, private or public—is a discrete, describable entity existing within a plural political universe. It must be perceived and understood not in isolation but as one unit in a larger system of interrelated parts. Within such a network, multiple role-playing, group cross-pressures, and institutional rivalry must be considered normal. This paper is an attempt to apply the generally pluralistic viewpoint so expressed to a much neglected political institution, the President's Cabinet, and to the power relationships involving an individual Cabinet member.

This study was undertaken to test the relations between two basic observations which have appeared in the literature of political behavior. First, party identification has been found to be a major factor not only in determining votes but also in shaping ideology. Party appears to serve a “standard-setting” function for its adherents, especially on questions that are most clearly “party-related,” and resultant ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans have been found independently of such demographic factors as socioeconomic status. The second observation stems from studies in the field of stratification that have yielded an explanatory proposition in political analysis: a shift in party affiliation tends to follow a shift in class identification, as indicated by the tendency of suburban America to vote Republican.

Nature seldom allows us to get what we wish without paying her price. This truism is commonly illustrated by the delicate balance in animal life which often cannot be disturbed to satisfy man's wants (e.g., for fox hunting) without demanding of man in return (e.g., by increases in the rabbit population and in crop damage).

The several civil service systems in this country also illustrate this bittersweet combination of intended and unintended consequences. The argument here will not go to the extreme of one observer, in whose judgment the United States Civil Service Commission was the single greatest obstacle to the successful waging of World War II. Rather, the focus here will be upon several characteristics of our civil service systems that have as presumably unintended consequences an increase in the burdens of managing work. For the most part, the analysis of management problems will derive from the research literature dealing with behavior in organizations, a field of study presently seething with activity.

The heart of Rousseau's thought, as he himself declared, is the claim that society (especially bourgeois society), while necessary now to man's preservation, corrupts the life it fosters. What, then, is this corruption? What, in Rousseau's view, is the problem of bourgeois society? The corruption, I argue, is disunity of soul, through which men lose the fullness of existence they seek by nature. Unity of soul, which is natural, is lost in society through the contradiction of personal dependence: using others entails serving them. Thus modern or bourgeois society, which builds on this contradiction by deriving men's sociability from their selfishness, necessarily divides their souls. There can be no psychic unity in society without true social unity. (Hence Rousseau's analysis of unity is also his defense of justice.) Psychic and social unity are more or less attainable in the just state through patriotism and virtue (“morality”), but perfect psychic unity is possible only beyond society and morality.

Of all the fields of political science where quantitative methods have been developed over the past generation, probably the one where scholarly understanding has been most enriched has been that of mass voting behavior. But while we know vastly more about this behavior on the individual and aggregate level than we did a quarter-century ago, there are still large territories on the map which are blank, or in which exploration has only very recently begun. There remain a number of doubtful areas in which issues of methodology and of substantive interpretation are still very much open to systematic inquiry.

One such area is that associated with the interrelation of socio-economic correlates of the vote. That is, there is a real question as to whether such independent or predisposing variables should be conceptualized as making mutually independent or, alternatively, interdependent contributions to the prediction of voting patterns. The normal practice in research involving multiple correlation of aggregate voting behavior with a set of independent variables has been to assume implicitly that the relationship of these variables is additive (i.e., non-interactive) and that the appropriate theoretical representation is of the general form y = b + m1x1 + m2x2 … + mnxn. Such an assumption seems plausible so far as individual voting for American major parties and their candidates is concerned. Thus, for example, the authors of the MIT 1960 simulation study found strong evidence that predispositional factors summate, i.e., are indeed additive in character.