This paper is both a criticism and extension of a small existing literature on procedural norms and tolerance which has been influential in several interpretations of American politics but which suffers from both conceptual and empirical shortcomings.

The existing literature concludes that tolerance is not widely distributed in the American mass public: unpopular groups such as Communists or atheists would not be allowed political activity by most Americans despite supposed acceptance by all of the principle of minority rights. The literature suggests that hostile attitudes towards the issue or group involved prevents application of the tolerant general norm in specific instances.

By failing to adequately measure or control for either issue orientation or general norms, however, the existing literature risks misrepresenting the actual extent and character of tolerance. This study discusses the weaknesses of the existing literature, describes how such weaknesses can be eliminated, and reports data which modify and expand the findings of past research for an updated set of issues, groups, and political acts.

This paper presents an evolutionary-biological perspective on the stratification of political authority, power, and influence. The rudiments and relevance of a biobehavioral approach are indicated, particularly in regard to study of the behavior of subhuman primate species. Dominance-deference behavior patterns in four species—rhesus macaques, savanna baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees—are described and compared, followed by discussion of some stratification concepts that have been derived from primate studies and applied to human societies. The possible continuing influence on man's behavior of his evolutionary history is considered through discussion of a zoologist's attempt to reconstruct it, and through tentative reinterpretations of social psychological conceptions of leader-follower relationships and dispositions to obey authority figures. Finally, it is suggested that the modern conception of political authority per se as contingent and contrived may be empirically untenable, and, if so, that certain implications may follow concerning theories of political obligation and constitutionalism.

A large and growing proportion of Americans claims to be neither Republican nor Democratic, and partisan independence is most wide-spread among young adults. A time-series cohort analysis of eleven surveys conducted by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan between 1952 and 1974 strongly suggests that the low level of partisan identification among young adults results largely from fundamental differences between their socialization and that of their elders. The overall decline in party identification results largely from generational change. High levels of partisan identification persist among persons who entered the electorate before World War II, but among those who entered the electorate more recently levels of identification are low. The analysis strongly suggests that overall levels of party identification will continue to decline, and permits examination of one process by which party loyalties among mass electorates gradually are transformed.

Presidential prestige or popularity has often been cited as an important source of presidential influence in Congress. It has not been empirically and systematically demonstrated, however, that such a relationship exists. This study examines a variety of relationships between presidential prestige and presidential support in the U.S. House of Representatives. The relationships between overall national presidential popularity on the one hand and overall, domestic, and foreign policy presidential support in the House as a whole and among various groups of congressmen on the other are generally weak. Consistently strong relationships are found between presidential prestige among Democratic party identifiers and presidential support among Democratic congressmen. Similar relationships are found between presidential prestige among the more partisan Republican party identifiers and the presidential support by Republican congressmen. Explanations for these findings are presented, and the findings are related to broader questions of American politics.

Studies attempting to predict public expenditures using political variables have generally incorrectly assumed that political, like socioeconomic, variables function as determinants of policy levels and types. If one assumes, however, that the function of the political process in representative government is to translate citizens' demands for various levels of services as accurately as possible, then political variables must be conceptualized as mediating in character. In the absence of knowledge of whether public services are being oversupplied or undersupplied in relation to citizen demands, the effects of political variables can therefore, be better tested by moving beyond single-equation regression models.

An alternative method for examining impacts of political variables is presented by integrating them with conventional theories of political representation. This leads to a concept of “translation error,” and ways of examining relationships between this concept and political variables are explicated. Finally, the greater theoretical utility of this reformulation for the study of public policy is examined, and empirical studies which indicate its validity are cited.

This article explores the extent to which Shanghai City, and its subordinate units, have been politically independent of higher authorities in the Chinese government. Evidence from the ‘fifties and early’ sixties suggests increasing managerial and cultural independence at the city level. Evidence from the early Cultural Revolution however suggests conceptual problems in the connection of usual notions of “autonomy” with substantive issue areas, and in their connection with local and central patterns of factions. The slow reconstruction of a local Party hierarchy in Shanghai was paralleled by a decentralization of some commercial and industrial decisions. Shanghai's role as a model in Party rebuilding increased the fully national role of the city's top leadership. Analysis of autonomy, power, or dependence in administrative units is affected when strong local leaders acquire national ambitions. Suggestions are made about the characteristics of an organization these words might describe.

The paper is an examination of the relationship between Marx's theory of communism and his theory of revolution in the early writings. Avineri's claim that the Paris Manuscripts contain a two stage theory of future society is critically evaluated. It is argued that by crude communism Marx meant an incorrect theory of communism and not a description of the next stage of society. Confusion results from taking Marx's discussion of two stages in the Critique of the Gotha Program and reading the more sophisticated analysis of the later works back into the early writings. A discussion of the relationship between revolutionary theory and practice as formulated in the early writing is offered in order to substantiate the claim that Marx never thought that socialist society had to pass through the stage of crude communism.

Right-wing and Left-wing attitudes toward the cold war are strikingly similar because in some cases the anti-communist is himself an ex-communist. This is particularly true of James Burnham, a former disciple of Leon Trotsky and presently the diplomatic columnist of William F. Buckley's National Review. Burnham's writings have had profound influence in America, especially at the time of the outbreak of the Korean War when officials in Washington saw in his books both an answer to “containment” and the first theoretical formulation of the new policy of “liberation-rollback.”

Burnham's own views on the cold war, however, have undergone a number of significant changes and revisions. At different times in his career he has offered four different and often contradictory interpretations of communism: (a) first, the Soviet Union as a “managerial” state that marks the end of Trotsky's dream of “permanent revolution”; (b) next, communism as the latest expression of Machiavellianism that augers the eclipse of liberal democracy and seemingly the inevitability of Stalin; (c) then, during the early cold war period, managerialism and Machiavellianism are dropped and Soviet behavior is now attributed to a Marxist Weltanschauung that replaces power politics with ideological determinism; (d) finally, Burnham criticizes Kennan, Morgenthau, and Lippmann for failing to adopt a “dialectical” viewpoint in order to understand the “dual” nature of the Soviet Union-an ironic reinvocation of Trotsky's earlier message to the Old Left.

The article attempts a critical analysis both of Burnham's shifting perspectives and of the ethical dilemmas in his political thought. It may also be read as a chapter in the intellectual history of the cold war.

The Watergate controversies and especially the recent decision in Richard M. Nixon versus the United States on July 24, 1974 have again raised in the United States the problem of the political limits to judicial policy making and the need to strike a new balance among the three branches of government for preserving and maintaining a democratic policy. In this paper, which is based on largely primary judicial, political, and academic German sources up to the year 1972, the development of jurisprudence of the West German Federal Constitutional Court is analyzed and discussed, particularly the Court's experience with judicial review. The article is geared toward the student of comparative constitutionalism and comparative government, offering possible lessons to the United States and other Common Law constitutional courts. Less concerned with the practical work of the Court, except for brief comments on actual performance, the paper focuses on such problems as past and present German approval and disapproval of the notion of judicial review, the often erudite disputation on the merits of constitutional—especially “creative”—jurisprudence; the discussion on the political limits of judicial review; and trends in particular philosophical positions of the Court in contemporary West Germany.

The analysis of military regimes, as opposed to military coups, has attracted comparatively little attention. This paper examines whether the political, military, and economic performance of systems which have experienced a military regime differs from the performance of systems which have not. The comparison between the performance of these two types of system is then used to examine the validity of the occurrence of a military regime as an indicator of instability. The population consists of all independent countries of the world. The time span examined is 1961–70. The comparison is made across a number of political, military, and economic variables. The basic comparison is elaborated by introducing controls for GNP, area, number of coups, and duration of the military regime. While the controls show a number of variations, the main summary finding is that it is easy to differentiate military and non-military regime systems in political terms, but not in military and economic terms. This finding seriously questions the utility of the occurrence of a military regime as an indicator of instability.

Procedures for empirical tests of political theory should be designed to evaluate the success of the specific prediction being tested. This paper introduces; (1) a formal language, termed “prediction logic,” for stating an important class of predictions, including predictions that imply there will be relatively few cases in certain cells of a cross-classification; (2) a population measure, (“del”), that indicates the degree of success achieved by a statement in the language; (3) partial measures for the multivariate case; (4) bivariate statistical inference methods when the data arise from a sample rather than a population, both for an a priori prediction statement and for a statement selected post hoc. A number of well-known measures of “association” are measures for specific prediction logic statements. Research applications are indicated through the use of contingency tables appearing in APSR articles by Eulau and Eyestone, Goldberg, Muller, Riker and Zavoina, Rosenthal, Sawyer and MacRae, Sickles, Wolfinger and Field, and Wolfinger and Heifetz.

Agenda building is the process through which demands of various groups in a population are translated into issues which vie for the attention of decision makers (formal agenda) and/or the public (public agenda). This paper presents three models for the comparative study of agenda building. The outside initiative model describes groups with minimal prior access to decision makers, who must consequently first expand their issues to a public agenda before they can hope to reach the formal agenda. The mobilization model accounts for issues which are placed on the formal agenda by political leaders, who subsequently attempt to expand these issues to the public agenda to obtain the support required for implementation. The inside access model refers to leaders, or to those having close contact with these leaders, who seek to place issues on the formal agenda directly, and for whom expansion to the public agenda is both unnecessary and undesirable.

Propositions are stated about intergroup variation in patterns of agenda building within societies; about variations in success rates for different strategies and probabilities of occurrence for the three models in different types of societies; and about characteristics of the agenda-building process which hold in all three models and in any social setting.

Bacon's New Atlantis presents a picture of human life governed by the new science to be produced by his reformation of the arts and sciences. Unlike his successor Hobbes, who forged a link between modern science and a certain, demonstrable doctrine of political rule, Bacon made no claim to found or present a political science. The reason for this is shown by an analysis of the political teaching of the New Atlantis. Bacon's political teaching is indirect, but it is the core of his comprehensive account of science and man. According to Bacon, the end of science is fully disclosed by political wisdom, and that wisdom shows the perfection of science to reverse the moral superiority of moderation over excess. The full meaning of Bacon's scientific utopia consists in a new stance toward the traditional problems of political philosophy.

Stephen Salkever in this Review (“Virtue, Obligation and Politics,” APSR 68 [March, 1974]) discusses two paradigms of politics: one based on the concept of virtue (ancient political philosophy), the other resting on obligation (modern political thought). We analyze the meaning and significance of these two paradigms in terms of the cognitive-developmental moral psychology common to Lawrence Kohlberg, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. We first present the cognitive-developmental theory and its empirical findings. We then demonstrate that the politics of obligation falls within the virtue paradigm as a necessary stage in the development of virtue, which involves placing Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls within our developmental scheme. Finally, we explore the nature of understanding moral principles from within the cognitive-developmental perspective. In all this, we agree with Salkever's basic assumption that any account of political good (public as opposed to private) must be based on moral psychology, i.e., it must deal with the question of “What is good for the most inclusive of all publics, the human species?” We go two steps beyond Salkever, however, by showing the significance of the question, and by providing an answer to it (both of which bear upon the understanding of morality). An underlying purpose of our research is to present and to promote the political relevance and significance of moral psychology in general and cognitive development in particular.