Various attempts have been made in recent years to analyze judicial decisions in selected areas of law as functions of controlling facts. At least two of these attempts have relied on systems of simultaneous equations. In both endeavors the assumption was made that the combination of facts on which the decisions depend is linear. In the absence of any clear indication of a nonlinear combination, as well as in view of the significant results that were obtained on the basis of a linear model, the initial approach was justified. The use of high speed digital computers has made it possible, however, to explore the existence of nonlinear relationships where the original assumption of linear relationships was made. The important feature in detecting nonlinear relationships is not primarily the greater accuracy of the results—the linear model has provided acceptable approximations—but the acquisition of new insights into how different facts combine in influencing judicial decisions.

It is the purpose of this paper first to review the linear model, and then to show how it can be extended to a nonlinear model—in general terms as well as in the form of an actual application. Finally, limitations and implications of the nonlinear model will be indicated.

One way of acquiring insight into the processes of political development in Latin America is to compare the countries of the area systematically in terms of the “degree of development” which each can be said to have attained. Ideally, such an enterprise can lead to the understanding of the past history of the “more developed” countries by reference to the present problems of the “less developed” while an understanding of the problems confronting the more developed countries can make possible a glimpse into the future of those now less developed. Isolation of the factors responsible for a state's being more or less developed can moreover prove instructive for the understanding of the relations between political and socioeconomic phenomena.

Perhaps most important, such comparisons provide the means for holding constant effects attributable to characteristics shared by all, or nearly all, of the Latin American countries. Thus it can be argued with much plausibility that military intervention in politics, say, derives from elements in the Hispanic tradition. Yet it is clear that the frequency of military intervention varies from country to country, even where they share equally in that tradidition. Thus one is forced to go beyond the “Hispanic tradition” thesis with which the investigation might otherwise have come to rest.

In the present article I will be concerned with the problem of the relation of political development to socioeconomic development in the Latin American context. For reasons that will become apparent below, I will not at this point attempt a rigorous analysis of the concept of political development, which has already been the subject of a large and rapidly growing literature.

Systematic empirical research into the process of political leadership recruitment has made substantial progress since World War II with emphasis given to those who occupy formal positions of authority within the political system, specifically, legislators and party activists. Generally such studies have been concerned with delineating (a) who the leaders are, (b) how and why they are where they are, and (c) the variables affecting (a) and (b).

The most ambitious recent studies, in the sense that they try to deal systematically with all three aspects of recruitment, are those by Samuel J. Eldersveld, Austin Ranney, and Henry Valen. Their research, and the examples cited of other scholarship, have yielded a substantial number of propositions. Three which lend themselves to testing with data we have gathered on the recruitment of candidates for the Canadian House of Commons, 1945–65, are:

1) The status of individuals recruited by a party in part is a function of the party's competitive positions. (Key, Snowiss).

2) The status of individuals recruited by a party varies with the party's position on an ideological continuum (Eldersveld, Ranney, Marvick and Nixon, Valen).

3) Relative urbanism and the degree of industrialization of communities affect recruitment patterns (Rokkan and Valen, Valen, Snowiss). In the present instance there should be a positive relationship between urbanism and the mean status of candidates.

In testing these propositions we will compare, whenever such comparisons appear appropriate, the data for Canadian parliamentary candidates with findings from some of the previously cited studies and also indicate how, in Canada, multi-partyism is related to the status of recruited candidates.

Most people who study politics are in general agreement, it seems to me, on at least two propositions. First, we agree that for a political system to be viable, for it to succeed in performing tasks of authoritative resource allocation, problem solving, conflict settlement, and so on, in behalf of a population of any substantial size, it must be institutionalized. That is to say, organizations must be created and sustained that are specialized to political activity.1 Otherwise, the political system is likely to be unstable, weak, and incapable of servicing the demands or protecting the interests of its constituent groups. Secondly, it is generally agreed that for a political system to be in some sense free and democratic, means must be found for institutionalizing representativeness with all the diversity that this implies, and for legitimizing yet at the same time containing political opposition within the system.2

Our growing interest in both of these propositions, and in the problems to which they point, can begin to suggest the importance of studying one of the very few extant examples of a highly specialized political institution which over the long run has succeeded in representing a large number of diverse constituents, and in legitimizing, expressing, and containing political opposition within a complex political system—namely, the U.S. House of Representatives.

The focus of my attention here will be first of all descriptive, drawing together disparate strands—some of which already exist in the literature3—in an attempt to show in what sense we may regard the House as an institutionalized organ of government. Not all the necessary work has been done on this rather difficult descriptive problem, as I shall indicate. Secondly, I shall offer a number of speculative observations about causes, consequences, and possible lessons to be draw from the institutionalization of the House.

In understanding the political development of the pre-adult one of the central questions hinges on the relative and differentiated contributions of various socializing agents. The question undoubtedly proves more difficult as one traverses a range of polities from those where life and learning are almost completely wrapped up in the immediate and extended family to those which are highly complex social organisms and in which the socialization agents are extremely varied. To gain some purchase on the role of one socializing agent in our own complex society, this paper will take up the specific question of the transmission of certain values from parent to child as observed in late adolescence. After noting parent-child relationships for a variety of political values, attention will be turned to some aspects of family structure which conceivably affect the transmission flows.

I. Assessing the Family's Impact: “Foremost among agencies of socialization into politics is the family.” So begins Herbert Hyman's discussion of the sources of political learning.1 Hyman explicitly recognized the importance of other agents, but he was neither the first nor the last observer to stress the preeminent position of the family. This viewpoint relies heavily on both the direct and indirect role of the family in shaping the basic orientations of offspring. Whether the child is conscious or unaware of the impact, whether the process is role-modelling or overt transmission, whether the values are political and directly usable or “nonpolitical” but transferable, and whether what is passed on lies in the cognitive or affective realm, it has been argued that the family is of paramount importance.

For nearly two centuries, the mere mention of the “state of nature” was sufficient to provoke a controversy. Did the writer intend an historical reference or was he employing a fictional concept as a means of presenting an a priori ethical argument? The question, at least in so far as it applies to John Locke, has never been satisfactorily answered—although it has frequently been brushed aside as unimportant. Yet, many of the “contradictions” which seem to characterize Locke's political thought might be resolved if only we could be certain of the meaning he attributed to the state of nature.

Lacking that certainty, we are left to choose from among the various meanings others have associated with Locke's use of the concept. First, it is charged that, if Locke did intend his portrait of the state of nature to serve as an historical account of the origins of government, it is bad history. Most political societies did not begin as Locke suggests. As one writer puts it “history and sociology lend but little support to this theory of free men entering into a compact and so creating a political group.” Secondly, if the state of nature is but a fiction abstracted from history, that in itself may be grounds for rejecting its usefulness as a concept. Marx, for example, is critical of the ‘state of nature’ approach to politics because it assumes in an abstract fashion precisely what must be proven by reference to concrete historical facts.

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.

Many empirical investigations in the behavioral sciences today aim at tracing the causes of variations in some key dependent variable. The search for satisfying causal explanations is difficult because of the complexity of social phenomena, the crudeness of the measures of many important variables, and the prevalence of simultaneous cause and effect relations among variables. Although these difficulties remain, a number of important methodological contributions have clarified the conditions under which causal inferences can be made from non-experimental data. In particular the Simon-Blalock technique has recently gained considerable attention, and has been profitably used by a number of political scientists in their research. Examination of some of these applications does, however, reveal the need for a better understanding of the purposes and limitations of the technique. This paper reviews two studies: (1) the re-analysis of the Miller-Stokes data by Cnudde and McCrone, and (2) the analysis of the determinants of Negro political participation in the South by Matthews and Prothro. We shall argue that both these applications have two faults: (1) a failure to distinguish conclusions from assumptions, and (2) an inadequate correspondence between the assumptions made in constructing the mathematical models and our prior knowledge about the phenomena being studied. In addition, we shall use the first study to illustrate a principle of general importance in causal analysis: the investigator should check the possibility that different causal mechanisms occur in different subgroups of his data. And we shall use the second study to illustrate the difficulty of separating the effects of two highly correlated independent variables.

In Toward a Mathematics of Politics I presented a model of reciprocal interaction between information media and the opinions held by members of the community. It is the purpose of this note to apply a somewhat simplified version of this model to the specific problem of censorship. Testable hypotheses will be deduced and implications which may be of importance for policy will be suggested.

Suppose the population of the country are arrayed on some issue dimension. It makes little difference for our present purposes what the dimension itself represents. It might, for example, indicate the degree of nudity of pictures of women in men's magazines or the strength with which the views of Castro are supported. Let us suppose that the distribution along this issue dimension declines at one, end, as shown in Figure 1. Note that the remainder of the distribution can be any shape; in fact, I have drawn in three dashed lines for three possible distributions. If we assume, not unreasonably, that most people who are in the business of producing public information seek to maximize readership, then we would anticipate that in a competitive market the information media would be spread over the possible positions in this line in much the same pattern as the population. Put more bluntly, the managers of such organizations as Time, Newsweek, and CBS go where the customers are.

Perhaps the most dramatic finding of recent research on the political socialization of children is that youngsters appear to be overwhelmingly favorably disposed toward political objects which cross their vision. Officers and institutions of government are regarded as benevolent, worthy, competent, serving and powerful. The implications of such findings are striking indeed. Childhood political dispositions may represent the roots of later patriotism; we may be observing the building of basic regime-level supportive values at a very young age.

These findings are by no means new; in fact, they might be classified as part of the conventional wisdom of the discipline. Moreover, they are extremely well documented, and the study of childhood political socialization has advanced to consider far more than basic regime-level norms. Despite all this, however, there are still many empirical questions to be asked about such norms. Perhaps the recent assertion that the political scientist's model of socialization is “static and homogeneous” is particularly apropos here. Consider two closely related characteristics of the appropriate literature: 1) the “positive image” which children have about politics and political figures has been synthesized from data gathered largely in the United States and to some extent in urban, industrialized communities within the United States; and 2) empirical explanation of the favorable disposition which children manifest has not progressed very far. Though there may be hypotheses about how children get this way, there has been little systematic testing of the relationships between variables.

The past decade has witnessed a rapid, but uneven, growth in comparative studies. While certain types of political systems have received the lion's share of attention, others have remained backwaters of comparative research, experiencing little or no development in the application of comparative techniques. The comparative study of communist states, until recently, fell into the latter category—relatively neglected and certainly not enjoying the reputation and prestige of work with newly emerging nations or Western political systems.

Now this state of affairs is undergoing a change, or at least the promise of one. In the past several years, the possibility of developing comparative techniques in the study of communist political systems has become the object of growing interest and has provoked not a little discussion and debate.1 The opportunities and the problems that face this field—especially in developing empirically oriented comparative analysis—are the subject of the present article.

The purpose of this paper is to explore United Nations delegate attitudes toward the major organs of the United Nations, i.e., the Security Council, General Assembly, Economic and Social Council, Secretariat, International Court of Justice, and the General and Main Committees of the General Assembly. In respect to these organs, the study probes “delegate satisfactions” concerning voting procedures, membership arrangements, and general role and past performance; “delegate perceptions” in respect to present and future importance and the probability of changes occurring in respect to membership arrangements; and “delegate desires” in respect to modifying roles and powers. The study also attempts to ascertain if delegate attitude patterns can be related to “predictors” generated from attributes of the delegates' home states. That is, is it possible to predict delegate attitudes from information about their home states?

The potential importance of delegate attitudes in respect to the United Nations will be treated in detail later in the paper. Here, suffice it to say that delegates make decisions, relay information, give advice, and engage in other types of activities which allow them to help shape the institutions in which they operate. Because this is the case, it is assumed that the discovery of attitudinal patterns and the relationship of these patterns to various other indices is a potentially fruitful line of inquiry, which may facilitate an understanding of, and provide a basis for predictions about, the political processes of the United Nations.

The objective of this essay is to present a simple decision-theoretic model of individual rational voting in a single-member district, using the simple-majority single-ballot system of election, and to derive the following theorem from the model: The rational voter votes for the candidate (party) associated with the outcome he (the voter) most prefers.

The model and theorem may interest students of voting for at least two reasons. First, the theorem contradicts the classical argument that “there is one eventuality in a multiparty system that does not arise in a two-party system: a rational voter may at times vote for a party other than the one he most prefers.” The theorem asserts, by contrast, that what is true for the two-party case is also true for the multi-party case. Thus, the model and theorem sharply differ from the classical theory of party systems. The ramifications of this conflict may affect some conventional views about the decline of third parties, the differences between two-party and multi-party systems, as well as (perhaps) other topics.

When a field of study begins to develop more rigorous methods, well-defined concepts, and greater emphasis on systematic comparison, it is well on the way to becoming a science. In the past decade or so, these traits have become increasingly evident in the study of comparative politics and international politics. But the development of sharper methodology and conceptual sophistication on the part of individual researchers is not quite sufficient. One of the earmarks of a healthy scientific discipline is the extent to which each set of findings may be compared to and combined with the results of earlier investigations; in short, research must become cumulative. Certain obstacles still inhibit us, among which might be counted: disagreement as to the precise boundaries of comparative and international politics; highly disparate theoretical frameworks; lack of consensus regarding the specification and measurement of key variables; and insufficient data storage and retrieval arrangements. Another difficulty has been in the absence of a generally agreed delineation of our empirical domains: What are the political entities whose attributes and relationships must concern us? More simply, we have not yet defined our population, and until the population is defined, we know neither the domain about which we seek to generalize, nor the criteria for selecting a sample from that population.

Although this is hardly the most pressing issue facing our two fields, and while a successful delineation of our population is far from a sufficient condition for the growth of a scientific discipline, it does strike us as a necessary precondition.

This paper attempts to examine carefully the problem of determining a numerical measure which reflects the quality of the population apportionment in a legislative body. We desire a single index, an index which takes advantage of the available population data, and an index which is readily understood. It should be said that we are not concerned with the much more difficult problem of legislative districting—actually drawing district boundaries on a map—but concentrate our attention only on the quality of apportionment in the particular, but important, sense of population equality.

In order to accomplish this purpose I review a number of increasingly complex possibilities and eventually arrive at a measure which superficially seems somewhat esoteric, but which turns out ultimately to be easily interpretable.

It will be convenient to proceed heuristically with the development by carrying along a small concrete example. For this purpose, consider the six congressional districts of Connecticut.