After a virtual neglect for several decades, in the last twenty years renewed interest has been shown in a general theory of social behavior. Most of this theoretical work has depended on two main postulates. One is the functionalist (sometimes called structural-functional) approach to the explanation of social institutions, based on the assumption that the social institutions of a given society can best be understood in terms of their social functions, that is, in terms of the contributions they make to the maintenance of social systems as a whole. For lack of an established technical term, we shall call the other postulate the conformist approach to the explanation of individual behavior: it is based on the assumption that uniformities of individual behavior in a given society can best be understood in terms of certain commonly accepted social values, which most members of the society tend to internalize during their socialization process.

In early spring of 1968, French political observers found the most lively issue of debate in the question of whether or not the nation was bored as a result of the political and economic stability insured by the Gaullist regime. One noted French political scientist in contributing to this debate wrote: “What is certain is that the France of 1968 does not seem able to give itself the luxury of a political scene as passionate as that of Czechoslovakia, as dramatic as that of the United States, or as glorious as that of Vietnam. Neither the agitation of a minority of the students of a few universities, nor certain workers’ demonstrations, nor the discontent which reigns in Brittany affects seriously our political life.” In a few weeks student riots and a general strike provoked the most serious political crisis in the years of the Fifth Republic and brought France to the brink of civil war.

Until recently it has been taken more or less for granted by many students of the subject that totalitarian polities will not in the long run tolerate any form of pluralism in their power structure. Lucid and convincing arguments have been constructed to support this contention, in studies of the several historical manifestations of totalitarianism. Implicit in these speculations was the more general view that it is in the very nature of power, and especially political power, that it will not gladly suffer any rivals. In the West the very virtues of democracy have been defended precisely on the grounds that democracy tends through its procedural commitments to diffuse power, to counteract, as it were, the inherent tendency of power toward infinite selfaggrandizement.

Twentieth-Century history provides ample evidence of the variable nature of the authority of political regimes, yet contemporary social scientists devote much more attention to the potential sources of legitimate authority than to the causes and consequences of its absence. In order to understand the very different types of authority that a regime may display, and changes in its authority through time, we must be able to account for the repudiation of regimes as well as for their legitimation. Moreover, it is necessary to explain why so many regimes long remain in intermediate categories, neither fully legitimate nor fully repudiated. The purpose of this paper is to differentiate among the types of authority of a regime, to analyze differences in dynamic changes in authority, and to propose hypotheses specifying influences upon the ability of a regime's leaders to obtain support and compliance from its nominal population.

The focus of this article is upon the compliance-inducing mechanisms present in any political system. The notion of compliance relationships is central to all conceptualizations of the political system and its functions, as it is related to all political ‘primitives” such as power, influence, authority, etc. Political systems exist above all for the purpose of establishing compliance with some set of norms or values. The primary institutional form reflecting the performance of this function is government. Members of governmental institutions attempt to maintain the compliance system (a) because of the security of habits, and (b) because they share the same set of norms or values. For a number of reasons the efforts of these actors to maintain the compliance system may not be coordinated: they may or may not act ‘rationally” according to the criteria of rationality applied, but the end product of their activity is a stream of demands for compliance that is oriented toward the enhancement of a desired normative system.

Students of politics use statistical and quantitative techniques to: summarize a large body of numbers into a small collection of typical values;

confirm (and perhaps sanctify) the results of the analysis by using tests of statistical significance that help protect against sampling and measurement error;

discover what's going on in their data and expose some new relationships; and

inform their audience what's going on in the data.

The massive effort in the United States to develop the study of the Chinese Communist regime and movement began in the wake of the postwar upsurge in the development of the social sciences, particularly in the field of comparative politics. Inevitably, it has come under the controlling influence of the exciting intellectual ferment in these disciplines. With the publication of Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (1962) and Franz Schurmann's Ideology and Organization in Communist China (1966), the study of contemporary China can be said to have begun its drive to maturity.