Empirical research has demonstrated the utility of an interest group approach for the study of Soviet politics, as well as for interpreting the politics of tsarist Russia and Eastern European communist systems and the dissident movements. The flowering of group activity in Poland and Czechoslovakia at certain times and the activity of dissent movements show, however, the rudimentary character of “normal” interest groups in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Although the Soviet system has changed since Stalin's death, it remains fundamentally authoritarian in character. The use of models, such as totalitarian, authoritarian, bureaucratic, corporatist, and pluralist, hinders rather than facilitates an understanding of Soviet politics and of the place of interest groups in that system.

Soviet regional leaders were modestly successful in their attempts to add local projects to the agenda of forthcoming five-year economic plans at Party Congresses during the Brezhnev era. The volume of local demands expressed in Congress speeches steadily increased from the 24th to the 26th Congresses, as did the frequency of speaker participation in petitioning for investment. This seems to reflect the gradual legitimation of regional consultation in long-range planning and the sharpening politics of stringency of the latter Brezhnev era. While the vast majority of requests were purely provincial in scope, broader regional interests were articulated to an increasing extent at the 25th and 26th Congresses. Requests respecting agriculture were the most frequent, followed by energy and fuels, water resources, and transportation.

Since World War II, a number of advances have been made in theories of revolution and political change. One approach not yet utilized is moral development theory, which adds a normative dimension to existing structural and psychological concepts. In this paper, moral development variables are related to the positive and negative rights that modern men seek within the dominance structures in which they live. Dominance patterns may become perverted due to social change and the amoral behavior of dominant individuals. Political movements characterized by demands for positive or negative rights arise as a reaction to these perversions. Whether change is restorative, accommodative, or transformative depends upon the subsequent patterns of interaction among individuals who are amoral, allegiant, or morally mature.

The author presents a conceptualization of different forms of misperception and the theoretical linkages by which they may lead to war under certain conditions. The forms of misperception most directly relevant to war include misperceptions of the capabilities and intentions of both adversaries and third states. The theoretical linkages to war, which vary across these different forms, include the intervening variables of military overconfidence, unsuccessful strategies of coercive diplomacy or appeasement, conflict spirals and arms races, preemptive strikes, or the failure to prepare for war or to attempt to deter the adversary. Particular attention is given to conceptual and methodological problems involved in the identification of misperceptions and in the assessment of their causal impact on war.

The study of political leadership has undergone a shift of focus in recent years. Since the late 1960s, political scientists have been increasingly interested in the question of exactly how the persons identified as leaders influence the political process. Two recent studies are critically examined: Paige's, based on a systems or macrolevel approach, concerns itself mainly with leadership as a phenomenon within the context of a political system which acts upon it and upon which it impinges; Burns's, based on a sociopsychological or microlevel approach, emphasizes the interaction between leaders and followers as an engagement of persons with diverse predispositions and motivations. The authors focus on different aspects of the same general set of phenomena, but they share a common goal. Both seek a vehicle on which to move toward a general theory that explains how leadership acts as a causative phenomenon in a polity. The clarification of their differences and complimentariness offers new opportunities for further research, theoretical or descriptive.

The Club of Rome was formed to publicize the contemporary human predicament—an unprecedented social pathology which, according to founder Aurelio Peccei, “is aggravated by the interrelatedness … of everything in the human system.” The Club has commissioned and accepted nine reports, the first and most famous of which is Limits to Growth (1972). This report's “Malthusian” viewpoint and popular format identified the Club with a controversial issue evidently unacceptable to many of its members, not to mention most economists and technologists. Subsequent reports, with one exception, have progressively retreated from that initial position by denying the predicament's resistance to serial solution. Instead, reports have taken refuge in conventional liberal nostrums and blindly asserted technological optimism. The debate on the future of industrial civilization brought to the fore by Limits deserves a better fate.

Eleven recent books are surveyed in a review article which finds that there is still no up-to-date and comprehensive treatment of the interests and roles of the developing countries in the international monetary system. The rise of international commercial bank lending to developing countries has significantly altered the system by which balance-of-payments credit is offered. The International Monetary Fund has been relatively weakened, with especially serious implications for the poorest countries. Stabilization at both global and national levels has thus been impaired.