The institution of elections is a significant feature of most present day political systems and is one of the most widely used of all of the political inventions of mankind. Rose and Mossawir have recently remarked that, “Elections are among the most ubiquitous of contemporary political institutions, and voting is the single act of political participation undertaken by a majority of adults in a majority of the nations in the world today.” The importance of elections is especially high in democratic systems. Both earlier and more contemporary discussions of the concept of democracy have employed elections as a primary definiendum and requisite feature of democracy. Indeed, if any single institution serves as popular democracy's sine qua non, it is that of elections.

The general argument that elections are “those most essential events in the democratic process” is often posed from the perspective of the importance of the functions they perform in the political system. The most widely remarked of these functions is to provide a mechanism by which the great mass of members of the system are able to choose their leaders—thus giving majority approval to the exercise of leadership. This is important both from the standpoint of solving the problem of legitimate leadership succession and as a means of potential relief from abuses or inadequacies of a present set of rulers. Secondly, elections may serve as an indication of public choice among government policies—although this function is probably less frequently performed than once was thought to be the case. In referenda, the function is direct; but even in the elections of candidates for public office there is on occasion a question of public decision among the broader aspects of policy programs. Furthermore, belief by future candidates in the possibility that voters may reject them at the next election because of their policies may lead them to anticipate public feeling, thus allowing indirect influence of elections upon policy formation. The latter may operate even in the absence of more direct control by the electorate. A third central function of elections is legitimation of a regime. An election serves as a device of public endorsement—or occasionally, of repudiation—of the system of government.

It has been said that technological and economic development lead ultimately to the decline of communal conflict, and that the emergence of new kinds of socio-economic roles and identities undercuts the organizational bases upon which communal (that is, “racial,” “ethnic,” “religious,” or “tribal”) politics rests. In the past decade, several scholars working in culturally plural societies have challenged this conventional view. They have suggested that communalism may in fact be a persistent feature of social change, and that the dichotomous traditionmodernity models which have often guided our empirical investigations have obscured this theoretical alternative and thereby produced false expectations concerning the direction of change. This paper attempts to synthesize the various elements of this emerging theoretical perspective through the formulation of several propositions which link modernization to communalism. While our discussion will draw primarily upon the Nigerian experience for illustrative material, the propositions are intended to be applicable across societies.

“Communalism,” in this paper, refers to the political assertiveness of groups which have three distinguishing characteristics: first, their membership is comprised of persons who share in a common culture and identity and, to use Karl Deutsch's term, a “complementarity of communication;” second, they encompass the full range of demographic (age and sex) divisions within the wider society and provide “for a network of groups and institutions extending throughout the individual's entire life cycle;” and, third, like the wider society in which they exist, they tend to be differentiated by wealth, status, and power.

The act of voting in legislative and judicial bodies is one of the most widespread and valuable sources of information available to political analysts. When individuals make structured choices within some known institutional constraints, there is opportunity for the generation of data concerning how issues are collectively defined within an institution, the relative position of each actor with regard to every other actor, and the identification of blocs of actors which are more or less persistent from one issue to another over time. With proper techniques of analysis, we should be able not only to generalize about behavior within a given voting body but also to make general statements about the voting process.

Cumulative studies of voting can be undertaken, however, only on the basis of some paradigm of the voting process—that is, some consensus on how voting as an act of political commitment is to be viewed. Such a paradigm not only should provide a viewpoint for the study of voting but should also suggest an orientation to the more general political phenomenon of which voting is an example—that is, actors making mutually exclusive choices in response to a series of questions, issues, candidates, etc. That such an agreed-upon viewpoint—not to mention a model that gives the viewpoint a precise focus—does not exist is obvious from the uses which have been made of voting data. Despite the ubiquity of such data and the many different kinds of analyses that have been performed on them, there is no model available that logically interrelates (1) systemic characteristics of voting bodies, (2) individual characteristics of their members, and (3) relational characteristics between pairs of members in such a way as to yield operational measures of voting behavior that are comparative in nature.

Stanley Rothman is laboring under a series of misapprehensions. What appears to give them some minimal coherence is evidently the curious conviction that in criticizing Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy he must cope with the work of a disillusioned former fellow-traveller. In discussing my alleged fundamental assumptions, toward the end of his essay, Rothman asserts:

Upon reflection I think I am entitled to take this as a compliment to my efforts at critical detachment. In my books on the Soviet Union I must have restrained my hostility to the point where my critic could succeed in discovering what he takes to be evidence of enthusiasm. At any rate, his discovery is a completely original one!

After this discovery Rothman goes on to attribute ideas to me that he probably got from reading the works of my very good friend, Herbert Marcuse. For example, so far as I remember, I have never used the expression “non-repressive society,” which has become in a way Professor's Marcuse's trade-mark. (“Less repressive” is quite another expression, which I do use.) Nor did I use the expression “free non-repressive society,” preferring to say “free and rational society,” on the page cited by Rothman in this same paragraph. Indeed, to continue examining this passage as an example of Rothman's criticism, I have never been sanguine about “revolutions in the third world as embodying hope for the future” of mankind, much as such revolutions against American attempts to prop up various forms of political landlordism do seem to me justified. But perhaps Rothman is simply mixed up, because I doubt very much that either Marcuse or I would ever speak about “the goal of a compulsionless society!”

Compared with the recent substantial strides in presidential election analysis, research on congressional elections has only begun. The majority of studies have been cast within the presidential-election context, with the relationship between the presidential and congressional vote the phenomenon to be explained. The present attention to presidential contests is understandable because of the inherent interest in such races in a presidential-centered political system and because reliable survey data have been limited to nationwide samples, severely restricting analysis on a state or district basis. And yet without some comparable advances at the congressional level, we cannot assess bases of electoral support nor the numerous assumptions of behavior in Congress as linked to this support, nor attempt a theory of voting behavior that does not consider voting at the subpresidential level. Put simply, the state of research is such that we have only begun to identify and measure the key variables affecting congressional voting outcomes. It is this basic task to which recent research in the field has been directed.

Consider as the core phenomenon for explanation the sharp fluctuations over time in the partisan division of the vote for Senator and Representative. Since studies of voting behavior indicate the stability of party loyalties over time, evidence of sharp shifts in voting outcomes suggest factors other than party cues influencing the vote decision. Among the lines of inquiry opened, studies by Cummings, Press, and Hinckley, following the work of Key, have utilized aggregate election statistics to measure the substantial impact of the presidential vote on House election outcomes.

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.

A “general will” is a philosophical and psychological contradiction in terms; will is a conception understandable, if at all, only in terms of individual actions. The problem cannot be glossed over by attempting to reduce the general will—as did T. H. Green—to a “common ego,” or to an analogical forerunner of Kant's pure practical reason. Why, then, did Rousseau make so unviable an idea the center of his political theory, and why has that idea continued to receive serious attention?

The general will has continued to be taken seriously because it is an attempted (though not explicit) amalgam of two extremely important traditions of political thought, which may be called, roughly, ancient “cohesiveness” and modern “voluntarism.” Political thought since the 17th century has been characterized, among other things, by voluntarism, by an emphasis on the assent of individuals as the standard of political legitimacy. One certainly finds this in many of the most important thinkers between Hobbes and Kant; and even Hegel, while scarcely an “atomistic individualist” or a contractarian, explicitly argued that while “in the states of antiquity the subjective end simply coincided with the state's will,” in modern times “we make claims for private judgment, private willing, and private conscience.” When a political decision is to be made, Hegel continued, “an ‘I will’ must be pronounced by man himself.” This “I will,” he thought, must have an “appropriate objective existence” in the person of a monarch; “in a well-organized monarchy, the objective aspect belongs to law alone, and the monarch's part is merely to set to the law the subjective ‘I will’.” If even Hegel allows this voluntarist turn in his own non-contractarian theory, it goes without saying that all of social contract theory can be seen as the supreme example of voluntaristic ideas.

When military officers are either sitting in the governmental saddle or have one foot securely in the stirrup, is it likely that such military controlled governments will pursue policies of socio-economic change and reform? What are the officer-politicians' motivations in reacting to the possibilities of such modernizing changes? Under what conditions are their motivations likely to vary? This essay attempts to answer these questions with regard to the contemporary non-western states. And in making the attempt, I believe that the analysis falls squarely within the purview of certain recent changes that are taking place in the study of comparative politics. These changes may be most broadly depicted as a movement away from that aspect of behavioralism that has focused exclusively upon “inputs,” and away from that dimension of “scientism” that has focused upon abstract concepts at the expense of empirical analysis. The change can also be described (in an overly facile manner) as a movement toward the politics in political science and the government in comparative politics.

As is evidenced in LaPalombara's call for “parsimony” in the selection of problems, we should choose problems for analysis that are blatantly political and of obvious contemporary relevance. In approximately half of the contemporary non-western states military officers either occupy the topmost seats of government themselves or they have a marked influence upon the civilian incumbents. And when this fact is placed alongside the potential of most contemporary governments to influence the pace and direction of social and economic change, this essay's central concern fulfills LaPalombara's criterion.

One of the current controversies within international relations deals with the “stability” of bipolar as opposed to multipolar stratifications of world power. Morton Kaplan, in codifying the views of classical balance of power theorists, advances the view that multipolar systems are more stable than bipolar systems. Kenneth Waltz, sagely pointing to the relatively peaceful international arena since World War II, argues that a bipolar distribution of power can guarantee world stability. Many a priori arguments have been presented to buttress the Kaplan and Waltz hypotheses. In one of the most elaborate such formulations, the “interaction opportunity” hypothesis of Karl Deutsch and J. David Singer, the presence of stabilizing crosscutting alliances is postulated to be most likely within multipolar systems, which in turn are a function of the number of major powers and members of a system. In an attempt to bring the two opposing strands of theory into a larger framework, Richard Rosecrance more recently has suggested that bipolarity and multipolarity may each have their peculiar costs and benefits. Bipolarity, according to Rosecrance, is distinguished by (1) an absence of “peripheries,” such as areas for colonial expansion or neutral powers to woo; (2) all international behavior is highly politicized; (3) there are many crises; (4) changes in power confrontations are either significant or trivial, with no intervening shades of gray; (5) each pole is dominated by major powers highly motivated to expand their domains, willing even to incur brinksmanlike situations and hostility spirals; (6) no detente is possible. Multipolarity, on the other hand, is hypothesized to have (1) more interaction opportunities and thus less preoccupation (or obsession) with any one set of states; (2) fewer arms races; (3) more international conflicts; (4) the outcomes of international conflicts are harder to predict in advance; (5) changes in power confrontations have ambiguous consequences for the overall distribution of power. Rosecrance, therefore, urges a “bi-multipolar” arrangement that would combine the best features of both alternatives. The empirical questions and intriguing hypotheses so eloquently raised by Kaplan, Waltz, Deutsch, Singer, and Rosecrance have remained largely unexamined, however.

Debate over representation has been a continuing part of the Western political tradition at least since the writings of Hobbes. Recently, Hanna Pitkin, using the tools of linguistic analysis, has clarified, if not resolved, the debate by examining the disparate uses of the term in both political and non-political discourse. In order to elucidate the issues, she discussed such different forms of representation as formal representation, descriptive representation, substantive representation and interest representation. In this paper I will utilize the distinctions she has developed as a framework for analyzing the process of representation within the community action program of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) during its initial formative period (1964-1966) in the cities of Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City.

I will argue that 1) the manner of selecting representatives of the poor (formal representation) was a function of the political resources of competing interests in the city; 2) the orientations (interest representativeness) of the formal representatives affected their influence (actual representation); 3) the influence (actual representation) of the formal representatives affected the level of intra-neighborhood conflict, which in turn affected the representatives' orientations (interest representation); 4) the character of the actual and interest representation was affected by the type of formal representation; and 5) the social characteristics of the representatives (descriptive representation) influenced the character of actual and interest representation.

Innovation can be defined as “… the generation, acceptance, and implementation of new ideas, processes, products, or services.” We mean here an activity, process, service, or idea that is new to an American city. We do not restrict it to mean only the first appearance ever of something new (i.e., an invention) or only the first use by one among a set of social actors. We are concerned neither with the diffusion of innovation nor with internal stages in the adoption process, but rather with the characteristics of cities that have successfully implemented innovations in federally financed public housing. We focus on three aspects of community innovation: (1) the presence or absence of a federally financed public housing program in the city, (2) the speed of innovation of such a program, and (3) the level of output or performance of this innovation activity.

Most of the studies of innovation have used as units of analysis either individuals or organizations, and little attention has been given to innovation in community systems, although community systems are continually introducing new ideas, activities, processes, and services. For example, the form of government may be changed from a mayor-council to a city-manager type. In fact, two studies of such innovations were carried out prior to World War II, but these were primarily concerned with describing the rate of diffusion of this social invention among American cities, not with characteristics of innovating cities. The addition of a new planning department to the city administration or a decision to fluoridate its water system are community innovations as we have defined the term, But innovations are not limited to actions of city government, although these may be the most frequently observed types of innovations.

Representation is a matter of linkage. In this paper it is argued that a useful handle can be gained on the problem of identifying and measuring representational relationships empirically by viewing representation as a type of support linkage between members of political systems and the authorities.

To conceive representation as a type of support linkage is to direct attention primarily to the represented rather than the representative. Representational relationships have functional significance for political systems particularly because they are linkages which involve members' satisfaction-dissatisfaction with the behavior of the political authorities—linkages which reflect the degree to which members feel that the performance of the authorities “stands for” or “re-presents” their own interests; and this performance satisfaction-dissatisfaction presumably makes a contribution to more general support for the political system. In contrast to legitimacy sentiments, which are independent of immediate outputs from political authorities, members' perceptions of representational linkages between themselves and the authorities depend on their affective responses to outputs, encompassing not only instrumental performance satisfactions, but (and most commonly among the membership in general) symbolic performance satisfactions as well.

This paper reports an exploratory investigation of a construct for measuring sense of representation. The sample consists of a group of students enrolled at the University of Iowa—including, in order to ensure adequate variation on the support scales, a number of students arrested for participating in a protest demonstration against the presence of Marine recruiters on the University of Iowa campus.

The story of a presidential election year is in many ways the story of the actions and interactions of those considered as possible candidates for their nation's highest office. If this is true in the abstract, it certainly was true in the election of 1968. The political headlines of 1968 were captured by those who ran for the nominations of their parties, those who pondered over whether or not to run, those who chose to pull out of the race or were struck down during the campaign, those who raised a third party banner, and those who resisted suggestions to run outside the two-party structure. While 1968 may have been unusual in the extent to which many prospective candidates dominated the political scene, every presidential election is, in its own way, highlighted by those considered for the office of President.

The political scientist has shown scholarly interest in the candidates. His interest, however, has been selective in its focus—mainly concentrating on the two actual party nominees and not the larger set of possible presidential candidates. Research in electoral behavior has detailed the popular image of the nominees in terms of the public's reactions to their record and experience, personal qualities, and party affiliation. Furthermore, attitudes toward the nominees have been shown to constitute a major short-term influence on the vote. Yet attitudes toward other candidates have been surveyed only to ascertain the behavior of those people who favored someone other than the ultimate nominees.

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.

A comparatively new line of research in political science involves the systematic investigation of political, social, and economic factors important in the formation of public policy. So far, such research has yielded temptingly persuasive evidence that political variables exert little or no independent influence on policy outcomes; that policy outcomes are governed overwhelmingly by socio-economic factors. Stated more succinctly, these findings have raised the question: Does politics make a difference in the policy formation process?

We suggest in the following analysis that these prior findings have been the result of the examination of a measure of public policy in which the influence of the political system is likely to be negligible, that is levels of public revenues and expenditures. To examine this proposition empirically, our study shifts attention to the allocation of the burdens and benefits of state revenue and expenditure policies across income classes. In redirecting analysis to allocations rather than levels of state revenues and expenditures, we focus on a province we believe to be more predictably political.

We have taken as our dependent variable the net redistributive impact of revenues and expenditures as represented by the ratio of expenditure benefits to revenue burdens for the three lowest income classes in each state. The major hypothesis of our study is that, in regard to the allocation of the burdens and benefits of state government revenues and expenditures, political variables will have a stronger influence on policy outcomes than will socio-economic variables.

Any middle-aged member of the political science guild in a retrospective mood might ponder a question: “What ever happened to direct democracy?” In our halcyon student days the textbooks discussed the direct democracy trinity—initiative, referendum, and recall—described their mechanics and variations, explained their origin in the Progressive Era, told us that the United States, Australia, and Switzerland were leading practitioners of direct democracy, cited a few eccentric referenda, gave the standard pro and con arguments, and essayed some judgments of the relative merits of direct and representative democracy. Latter day collegians may pass through the portals innocent of the existence of the institutions of direct government. Half of the American government texts never mention the subject; the others allocate a paragraph or a page for a casual mention or a barebones explanation of the mechanics.

A similar trend has occurred in the literature. Before 1921, every volume of this Review had items on the referendum, five in one volume. Subsequently there have been only seven articles, all but two prior to World War II. “The Initiative and Referendum in Graustark” has ceased to be a fashionable dissertation topic, only four in the last thirty years. All but two of the published monographs antedate World War II.

Electoral victories and defeats occur repeatedly. This is especially true in democratic political systems where key governmental roles are filled through periodic elections. The attitude of defeated candidates toward the regime norms directly affects the system stability, because disaffected by defeat, these candidates may withdraw their support for the regime and may also translate such disaffection into radical political action. Despite the potential threat the defeated electoral candidates can pose to democratic stability, their political attitudes have rarely been investigated systematically in political science literature. Do defeated candidates exhibit an attitude toward the democratic rules and norms governing electoral competition significantly different from that of winning candidates? Do defeated candidates become politically less active after the election than they were before? Under what conditions do they become disaffected with the democratic rules and norms? This paper attempts, first, to compare the political attitudes of both winning and losing candidates, and second, to explore the variables which might account for differences in such attitudes.

The data used in this paper are derived from a larger study of political recruitment in Oregon. Structured interviews were conducted with both winning and losing candidates who ran for the Oregon House of Representatives in the 1966 election. The samples were interviewed at three different times: before and after the primary, and after the general election. This research strategy permits us to analyze the effect of the outcome of the election on the attitudes of the candidates. Data were collected on the candidates' degree of support for the democratic rules of competition, their expected changes in political activity as a result of participation in the election, their career ambitions, and the perceived reward-cost, i.e., the material and psychological gains or losses which accrue to the candidates as a direct result of their participation in the election.

Research emphasizing the correlates of state policy outputs and the performance of particular institutions has overshadowed the role of the citizenry in the drama of state politics. One question of basic concern is the relevance of state government and politics for the inhabitants of a state. At the level of public policy and institutional performance the answer to this is factual and straightforward. The nature, amount, distribution, and to some extent the quality of a state's services and policies can be specified. Since states perform most of the traditional functions of governmental units and since these functions affect the fortunes of the citizens, state politics has an obvious, tangible, objective relevance for a state's inhabitants. At another level, however, the answer is not so clear-cut. Here we are dealing with the idea of what is subjectively relevant. Large numbers of people apparently pass their lives being touched by political institutions in a variety of ways without becoming particularly interested in or involved with these institutions. Other people become intensely, purposively related to these same institutions. Still others fall along a continuum between these two poles. If substantial variations exist in the general salience of politics, there is little reason to doubt that the same conditions may be found in particular subsets of political matters. In the case at hand this subset consists of the cluster of institutions, actors, and processes known as state political systems.

The manifest purpose of the roll call analysis described in this paper is that of demonstrating the existence of two policy dimensions in Congressional voting: economic and welfare. Support is sought for two propositions:

I. Each of the two dimensions appears in both the House and the Senate in each of six Congresses, the 83rd through the 88th, 1953–1964;

II. Roll call voting on the economic policy dimension is more heavily influenced by partisan differences while welfare policy voting is more subject to constituency constraints.

The second proposition is significant as an attempt to distinguish between a policy dimension on which partisan differences appear to be responsible for the greater part of the voting variation, and a policy dimension on which constituency factors have a substantial impact. This bears upon the more general concern with distinguishing those party differences in voting behavior which are a function of an independent partisan factor from those which may be attributed to any number of factors correlated with partisan affiliation. This problem will be viewed from different analytic perspectives, including an analysis of the effects of intra-party and inter-party personnel turnover on the policy positions taken by representatives of the same constituency.

Political science, by whatever definition of the discipline one might want to adopt, traditionally has been concerned with public opinion and participation on significant policy questions. Although the literature has become too vast for a complete enumeration of the varied contexts in which this research has been conducted, one issue that might rank high on a list of priorities for study—and yet has received somewhat less emphasis than other topics—is the subject of public attitudes toward war.

Perhaps this relative neglect has been promoted by a lack of opportunities for direct public participation in foreign policy decisions. Unlike most domestic issues, controversies over world problems have been relatively insulated from popular influence. Hence, research on the development of international conflict usually has devoted more attention to the statements and behavior of national leaders or key influentials than to public sentiments regarding war.

In recent years, however, the bitter debate generated by the war in Vietnam has stimulated mounting interest in popular attitudes concerning military action. The controversy has provoked both an unusual display of public disagreement about the war and a desire for basic changes in the policy-making process. Many persons not only have registered strong disapproval of American involvement in the Vietnam war, but they also have expressed an acute sense of frustration about their inability to affect the conduct of international relations. As a result, growing demands have emerged to permit expanded public access to critical decisions and to create increasingly democratic methods of formulating foreign policy.