Many professional observers have come to the conclusion that, despite denials and technical problems whose solutions are not publicly known, Israel already has nuclear weapons or has completed all but the final steps in their fabrication. It is also widely believed that one or more Arab states will come into atomic possession within a 10 to 15 year time frame. The present analysis explores the consequences of the establishment of a regional mini-balance of terror. The central hypothesis is that apocalyptic images and doomsday visions have been accepted too readily and out of proportion to the arguments that are given, and that a stable system of mutual deterrence may be viable in the Middle East and may make a positive contribution to the process of political settlement. Problems of rationality, credibility, second-strike force survivability, escalation, tactical nuclear weapons, accidents, permissive action links, terrorism, preventive war, and the disclosure of nuclear weapons possession are discussed.

It has been argued by Mancur Olson and others that Karl Marx's theory of revolution is logically defective in that front its premises one cannot draw Marx's conclusion that workers will unite to revolt against capitalism. Workers who might wish for large social changes are confronted with a collective action problem that Marx fails to appreciate—so runs the criticism. The critics are assuming that Marx is reasoning from a Hobbesian premise to the effect that insofar as they are rational, individuals act always to fulfill narrowly self-interested goals. This article denies the assumption. In particular it is urged that to make sense of Marx's optimistic hopes about the likely outcome of successful majoritarian working-class revolution, one must attribute to him a secular faith that most people are disposed to play fair with others. This disposition is relatively weak and only sporadically effective in determining behavior, but in the right revolutionary circumstances, Marx hopes, it might play a considerably greater role in this respect. (A circumstance on which Marx places great weight is material abundance.) Being optimistic about the future, Marx cannot be as cynical about human motivation in the present as commentators often take him to be.

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.

Robert H. Jackson died more than a decade ago, and his departure from the Supreme Court marked the end of an era in American judicial politics, since he left behind as a minority those remaining of the colleagues who had joined with him to compose the so-called Roosevelt Court. He was still very much alive when I interviewed him shortly after the Steel Seizure decision in 1952, and subsequently when the initial stages of the present research were designed and carried out. His unanticipated and fatal heart attack had two incidental consequences that are relevant here: it fixed an unavoidable natural closure for the data—his activities-that I was studying, and at the same time imposed an insurmountable foreclosure upon one of my research ambitions. For the best way to validate generalizations about a man's attitudinal predispositions and belief systems is to check them as predictions against his future behavior; social scientists understandably repose lesser confidence in findings about hypotheses that can be validated only statistically, and then only by retrospective testing. Perhaps it was an error, therefore, not to have switched from Jackson to some other justice as a subject; but even one who chose a younger justice (such as Arthur Goldberg) might have guessed wrongly about his tenure, and Jackson's career did offer several unusual advantages—for reasons that will be explained shortly—which it seemed important to exploit.

Although democratic governance imposes temporal constraints, the timing of government policy making activities such as bill initiation is still poorly understood. This holds especially under coalition governments, in which government bills need to find approval by a partner party in parliament. We propose a dynamic temporal perspective in which ministers do not know whether they face a cooperative or competitive partner at the beginning of a term, but they learn this over time and use their agenda control to time further bill initiation in response. A circular regression analysis using data on more than 25,000 government bills from 11 parliamentary democracies over 30 years supports this temporal perspective, showing that ministers initiate bills later in the term when their previous bills have experienced greater scrutiny. Ministers further delay bill initiation when coalition parties’ incentives to deviate from compromise increase and when they have less power to constrain their bills’ scrutiny.

How much do the political values of politicians endure throughout their careers? And how might the endurance be explained? This paper uses a unique longitudinal data set to examine the persistence of political values among national politicians: members of the British House of Commons, who completed Rokeach-type value ranking instruments during 1971–73 and again 40 years later in 2012–16. The findings show remarkable stability and provide strong support for the persistence hypothesis which predicts that politicians develop crystallized value systems by their early thirties and largely maintain those values into retirement. This is consistent with the view that rapid changes in aggregate party ideologies have more to do with new views among new waves of recruits than with conversions among old members.

In my article, “Separation-of-Power Games in the Positive Theory of Congress and Courts” (Segal 1997) I compared the theoretical and empirical validity of the separation-of-powers model and the judicial attitudinal model as applied to U.S. Supreme Court decision making. I found that the preferences of the justices often fell inside the set of irreversible decisions, and that even when the preferences fell outside the set, the justices, with the exception of Earl Warren, showed little evidence of constraint. I concluded, consistent with the attitudinal model, that the justices overwhelmingly engaged in rationally sincere behavior.

Tim Groseclose and Sara Schiavoni (1998), whom I thank for their efforts, have alerted me to two errors in my calculation of the set of irreversible decisions. First, I used the formula 2CC-G (where CC = the conference committee and G = the gatekeeper) for calculating indifference points in the constraint set rather than 2G-CC. Second, I implicitly allowed Congress to pass legislation that would be vetoed and could not be overridden. Correcting this error changes the optimal behavior of the conference committee, which will not propose legislation that can be vetoed but cannot be overriden, and the gatekeepers, who must consider the conference committee's actions.

In this note I replicate the study using the corrected data and find first that the sets of irreversible decisions are a bit broader than I had originally found. This means that fewer justices could be constrained by Congress than I had originally concluded.

The American criminal legal system is an important site of political socialization: scholars have shown that criminal legal contact reduces turnout and that criminalization pushes people away from public institutions more broadly. Despite this burgeoning literature, few analyses directly investigate the causal effect of lower-level police contact on voter turnout. To do so, we leverage individual-level administrative ticketing data from Hillsborough County, Florida. We show that traffic stops materially decrease participation for Black and non-Black residents alike, and we also find temporal variation in the effect for Black voters. Although stops reduce turnout more for Black voters in the short term, they are less demobilizing over a longer time horizon. Although even low-level contacts with the police can reduce political participation across the board, our results point to a unique process of political socialization vis-à-vis the carceral state for Black Americans.

Recent work by party scholars reveals a widening gap between the normative ideals we set out for political parties and the empirical evidence that reveals their deep and perhaps insurmountable shortcomings in realizing these ideals. This disjunction invites us to consider the perspective of David Hume, who offers a theory of the value and proper function of parties that is resilient to the pessimistic findings of recent empirical scholarship. I analyze Hume's writings to show that the psychological experience of party informs the opinions by which governments can be considered legitimate. Hume thus invites us to consider the essential role parties might play in securing legitimacy as that ideal is practiced or understood by citizens, independent of the ideal understandings of legitimacy currently being articulated by theorists. My analysis contributes to both recent party scholarship and to our understanding of the role of parties in Hume's theory of allegiance.

The future government of Italy portends a challenge of enormous magnitude for the Catholic Church. Subject as it has been to periodic attacks for reactionism, the Church has been hard pressed to throw off the stigma of its association with Franco in Spain and its willingness to deal with Mussolini's Fascist régime. In the light of these accusations, coupled with rather widespread doubt whether church orthodoxy is compatible with political democracy, it seems altogether appropriate to examine the political theories of one of the leading exponents of liberal Catholicism—Don Luigi Sturzo.

A little over twenty years ago, foreign correspondents, eagerly seeking a label for the “mystery man of Italian politics,” referred to him as a clerical socialist. If the term “clerical socialism” is synonymous with Christian socialism, such a characterization might be a proper one for this Sicilian priest. Certainly Sturzo was a champion of the Christian socialist movement which urged the correction of economic injustices but decried the materialism of the Marxists. He approved of the Guild of St. Mathew's sympathy for the unionism and socialism of the nineties and the Roman Catholic Social Guild. The latter found its incentive in the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum and the “scholastic traditions in restraint of usury and economic injustice.” Both of these organizations were associated with Christian socialism. But, although Christian socialism and clerical socialism have occasionally been placed in the same category, the latter is too ambiguous a term to permit a precise classification.

The experience of modern totalitarian regimes suggests that they are not likely to perish through internal revolt unless that occurs at a time when the totalitarian regime is in mortal danger from an external challenge, as in the marginal Italian case, or these the totalitarian movement in power is about to undertake decisive measures to turn the country into a totalitarian system, as in the case of the counter-revolution against Peron in Argentina. Other than that, and even considering the succession crises, modern totalitarian regimes have shown themselves capable of maintaining their totalitarian character in spite of domestic and foreign opposition. More recently it has been argued (e.g., by I. Deutscher, Russia: What Next) that modern totalitarian regimes, if not overthrown by external forces, will nevertheless in the end be quietly and inevitably transformed into more democratic states by the subtler but irresistible influence of rationality inherent in the bureaucratic and managerial apparatus that no modern state can do without. This proposition will be developed more fully and given critical consideration in subsequent pages in order to test whether rationality, regarded in this context as a certain mode of thought and behavior induced by the requirements of modern industrialized and bureaucratized societies, is in fact incompatible with modern totalitarianism.

“Suit yourself.”

—American colloquialism

Currently fashionable modes of political analysis deserve acclaim today for at least two reasons: they provide opportunities for participating in a pleasurable if strenuous activity (regardless of the value of the end results) and they effectively come to terms with the surface facts of political reality. Our posterity, too, may find it easy to esteem the contemporary products of the profession of political science should it ever look back and see how an affection for craftsmanship is combined with the ability to please. Moreover, the reward system of the profession should appear as having been nicely designed to promote the present display of talent, ingenuity, variety, and success. There is evidence, in any case, that the prevailing inclination to work hard and to develop ever more powerful analytical tools is welcomed and reinforced within the discipline. All would seem to be well.

Yet doubts continue to be expressed today even by those who govern the profession and engage in what Thomas Kuhn has called normal science. Partially, there is a petulant resentment among older practitioners, scholars who are made fretful and irritable by the entrepreneurial opportunism of the nouveau riche, by the feeling that mindless industriousness rather than scholarly contemplation is now rewarded by tenure as well as by space in journals, time on panels, positions on editorial boards, and cash for projects. It does not pain me, however, to disregard the indictment that comes from this source—not because I suspect its patrician origins but because I believe it is blind to the underlying impulse of empiricism, because it ignores the subversive, liberating thrust of empirical science.

Attempts to establish a “morphology of civilizations” seem to continue in spite of dire warnings from scholars. Indeed, while rejecting Toynbee and Sorokin with one hand, many a scholar has beckoned with the other to adventurous young men to leave the barren tracts of specialization and re-enter the broad panoramic fields of Weltgeschichte. Current interest in “comparative feudal institutions” illustrates the case in point.

The notion that “feudalism” is a “form of society,” especially a “stage in development,” can be traced back to Marxist historiography, and from there back to eighteenth century French thinkers. But instead of becoming thoroughly discredited, the notion has recently led to new thinking on the subject which may turn out to be fruitful. In Feudalism in History for example, Rushton Coulborn, has combined eight separate papers on feudalism in various parts of the world by different historians, with his own critical and synthetic studies. Though he fails to find even one “fully developed” feudal society according to his own definition—a not unexpected result—his study contains an amazing amount of suggestive analysis.

His suggestions are particularly valuable in the construction of “working models” or “ideal types” as research tools. Even when we remain safely within our own “fields,” if we are to go beyond highly specialized fact-gathering and at the same time avoid “presentisi subjectivism,” we will need such tools.

The earliest attempts at a theoretical understanding of politics occur in the city-states of ancient Greece. Women had no place in the politics of those cities. However, the Greek tragedians and philosophers raised questions about the fundamental assumptions underlying political life by introducing women into their writings. Thus, women appear in some Greek tragedies as a counter to the male sense of political efficacy—the sense that men can create through speech and ignore the facts of physical creation entailed in the process of reproduction. A discussion of two tragedies, The Seven Against Thebes and the Antigone, suggests how the failure of male political leaders to acknowledge the demands of the physical and that which is different brings on tragedy. The Socratic response in the Republic is to overcome tragedy by making the male and the female the same. Aristotle attempts to incorporate sexual difference in the theoretical framework of hierarchy. Finally, there is a brief consideration of the role of the pre-Socratic philosophers in setting the agenda for the Greeks' confrontation with the problems of incorporating difference into the political community.

How are decisions made in Soviet cities? Who are the municipal decision makers? What kinds of decisions do they make? Is there a Soviet urban political system? This article attempts to answer these questions by focusing on four aspects of decision making in Soviet cities: budget formulation, the planning process, housing construction and allocation, and the staffing of key municipal posts.

Urban autonomy has increased in the past decade, but Soviet municipalities are very much restricted in their decision making. Superior Party and governmental authorities continue to dominate the decision-making process and any decision made by municipal authorities can be vetoed by superior Party and governmental organs.

Soviet municipal decision making is now being influenced by three tendencies: municipal administrators are acquiring more influence in municipal government and administration; the educational qualifications and professional expertise of city Party members are rising; ad hoc citizen and group interest articulation may be developing. Comparisons between Soviet and North American urban decision-making models are useful and valid, although they require an improved methodology and much more Soviet data.

Theorists of widely different persuasions are making serious efforts to understand difference and to bring the concerns and ideals of others within the reach of intellectual and political visions. Yet this attention to difference continues to be examined almost entirely through precise, rigorous, and sophisticated theoretical language. This is only appropriate if we presume that this language, the language-of-theory, is able to represent—and serve as the master interpreter of—all ideas and ideals, all senses of self and politics. I believe that this presumption is deeply flawed. Theoretical language passes over and distorts the differences it would understand. Theory more attentive to difference needs to gain access to the meanings that circulate within different lives, especially as reflected in literary writing of those who, themselves, speak and write from sites of difference.