Economic development has consequences for many aspects of social life. Some of these social consequences, in turn, have an impact on a nation's political life. Studies of social mobilization, for example, have demonstrated that economic development is associated with sharp increases in the general level of political participation. These studies report strong relationships between aggregate socio-economic measures such as per capita income, median level of education, and percentage of the population in urban areas, on one hand, and aggregate measures of political participation, such as voting turnout, on the other. Simultaneously, scholars conducting surveys of individual political participation consistently have reported that an individual's social status, education, and organizational memberships strongly affect the likelihood of his engaging in various types of political activities.

In spite of the consistency of both sets of findings across many studies and although the findings appear frequently in analysis of political stability, democracy, and even strategies of political growth, we know little about the connections between social structure and political participation. With few exceptions the literature on individual participation is notable for low level generalizations (the better educated citizen talks about politics more regularly), and the absence of systematic and comprehensive theory. While the literature on the growth of national political participation has been more elaborate theoretically, the dependence on aggregate measures has made it difficult to determine empirically how these macro social changes structure individuals' life experiences in ways which alter their political behavior.

When in the early thirties Harold Lasswell declared that “political symbols and practices are so intimately intertwined with the larger array of symbols and practices in culture that it is necessary to extend the scope of political investigation to include the fundamental features of the culture setting”, he was very much a voice in the wilderness. Today Lasswell's words have almost become commonplace in the vocabulary of political science. In this, as in many other current concerns, Lasswell's early work has rightly been judged seminal. It substantially contributed towards the prolific expansion of the academic boundaries of political enquiry within the last three decades, in particular to the growth of interest in psychological and sociological approaches. Increasingly students of political behavior in both ‘established’ and ‘emergent’ nations have come to realize that purely formal and legalistic conceptual frameworks are inadequate to provide meaningful answers to such problems as persistence and change, socialization, political cohesion, and the complex bases of political authority and legitimacy. This realization, though it has made political science a more rather than less problematical undertaking, nonetheless has had the result of adding new dimensions or perspectives to its analytical vision. Indeed, in the course of this development the very notion of the political has undergone a profound re-appraisal.

The word ideology points to a black box. As a philosopher puts it, ideology “signifies at the same time truth and error, universality and particularity, wisdom and ignorance.” Likewise, for the political scientist the term ideology points to a cluster concept, i.e., belongs to the concepts that bracket a variety of complex phenomena about which one tries to generalize; and the growing popularity of the term has been matched, if anything, by its growing obscurity. All in all, one is entitled to wonder whether there is any point in using “ideology” for scholarly purposes. And my specific question will be whether there is a technical meaning, or meanings, of “ideology” which constitute a necessary tool of enquiry for a science of politics.

Discussions about ideology generally fall into two broad domains, namely, ideology in knowledge and/or ideology in politics. With respect to the first area of inquiry the question is whether, and to what extent, man's knowledge is ideologically conditioned or distorted. With respect to the second area of enquiry the question is whether ideology is an essential feature of politics and, if so, what does it explain. In the first case “ideology” is contrasted with “truth,” science and valid knowledge in general; whereas in the second case we are not concerned with the truth-value but with the functional value, so to speak, of ideology. In the first sense by saying ideology we actually mean ideological doctrine (and equivalents), whereas in the second sense we ultimately point to an ideological mentality (also called, hereinafter, ideologism).

Theories of the economic causes of war are at least as old as capitalism, and have in recent years appeared in myriad forms. Around the turn of the last century J. A. Hobson and Lenin developed their famous arguments about the economic driving forces behind imperialist expansion; American opponents of their country's entry into World War I blamed the lobbying of munitions makers; more recently we have had C. Wright Mills and the New Left. The assertions of these theorists are not always susceptible to scientific examination, but to supplement them there have in the past few years been a number of sound and well-documented studies locating in the national economy the groups that benefit most from military expenditures. Such studies show very effectively which industries, and which states, gain disproportionately from defense spending and hence develop some special interest in maintaining or increasing those expenditures. One need not accept Marxist or other extreme positions on the causes of war to find such information relevant to identifying political pressure groups that must be countered or compensated in any effort to reduce the level of military spending.

A question closely related to “Who benefits from defense spending?” is, of course, “Who pays for it?”; but curiously this second problem has received very little attention. Nothing comes free, and defense is no exception. In this paper we shall examine some evidence about what segments of the economy and society sacrifice disproportionately when defense spending rises.

Scholars interested in theorizing about political representation in terms relevant to democratic governance in mid-twentieth century America find themselves in a quandary. We are surrounded by functioning representative institutions, or at least by institutions formally described as representative. Individuals who presumably “represent” other citizens govern some 90 thousand different political units—they sit on school and special district boards, on township and city councils, on county directorates, on state and national assemblies, and so forth. But the flourishing activity of representation has not yet been matched by a sustained effort to explain what makes the representational process tick.

Despite the proliferation of representative governments over the past century, theory about representation has not moved much beyond the eighteenth-century formulation of Edmund Burke. Certainly most empirical research has been cast in the Burkean vocabulary. But in order to think in novel ways about representative government in the twentieth-century, we may have to admit that present conceptions guiding empirical research are obsolete. This in turn means that the spell of Burke's vocabulary over scientific work on representation must be broken.

To look afresh at representation, it is necessary to be sensitive to the unresolved tension between the two main currents of contemporary thinking about representational relationships. On the one hand, representation is treated as a relationship between any one individual, the represented, and another individual, the representative—an inter-individual relationship. On the other hand, representatives are treated as a group, brought together in the assembly, to represent the interest of the community as a whole—an inter-group relationship. Most theoretical formulations since Burke are cast in one or the other of these terms.

All leaders are also led; in innumerable cases, the master is the slave of his slaves. Said one of the greatest German party leaders referring to his followers: “I am their leader, therefore I must follow them.”

Georg Simmer

Political scientists studying Congress have shown the same disinclination for the study of individual leaders as that of the profession as a whole. Whatever the reasons for avoiding an analysis of social and political processes from the perspective of an individual—and there are several good ones—it is difficult to ignore, if not discount, the extreme emphasis placed on personalities by experienced participants and observers of the congressional process. One may decide, with Fenno, to underplay references to specific individuals in an effort “to show how much generalization is possible short of a heavy reliance on personality data.” But the fact remains that those closest to the legislative process do see it in terms of individuals and personalities; more important, much can be learned, as evidenced by Huitt's work, by focusing on individual legislators and the contexts within which they function. Whether it is Lyndon Johnson as Senate Majority Leader searching for the man who is the “key” to a particular bill, the differences between a Rayburn and a McCormack, or the skill of a Judge Smith, the individual looms large on Capitol Hill.

Political scientists interested in non-Communist systems have paid considerable attention to demands (expressions of opinion that an authoritative allocation with regard to particular subject matters should or should not be made by those responsible for doing so) coming from the intra-societal (domestic) environments of these political systems. The importance of intra-societal demands, including citizen demands, for non-Communist systems is well established. Researchers interested in the Soviet political system have paid relatively little attention to intra-societal demands, especially demands coming from those whom David Easton would call citizen gatekeepers, i.e., citizens who convert their wants into demands by articulating them.

The reasons for the neglect of research in this area are obvious enough. Quite apart from the problem of gathering useful data, there exists the question of whether demands from the intra-societal environment, and in particular citizen demands, are really important for a “totalitarian” system. Nothing like the politically autonomous interest groups of the Western democracies exist in the Soviet Union. Whatever demands come from the intra-societal environment are therefore largely grassroots demands from the populace, and there is reason to doubt that Soviet authorities feel compelled to heed such demands when formulating policy. Lenin's assertion that the Party is the vanguard of the proletariat was clearly a rejection of the idea that the masses should direct the Party. His successors have continued to assert that the Party leads the masses, and not the masses the Party.

The complex relationship between a deputy's Parliamentary voting record and his behavior in electoral politics in his constituency has rarely been traced in French political studies in a precise quantitative manner. One would like to contrast the extent to which both the deputy's Parliamentary voting record and his choices regarding coalitions in local politics depend upon his personal ideology with the extent to which the same behavior depends upon the political characteristics of his constituency. Even though ideological cleavages may exist across constituencies themselves, finding behavioral outcomes related to constituency characteristics could suggest that the deputy is motivated by his desire to be reelected.

Studies that attempt a systematic analysis of deputies' behavior are few, despite Lerner's early exploration of the relationship between constituency characteristics and voting on the European Defense Community (EDC) issue. Recently, MacRae, in his volume on Fourth Republic Parliaments, has clearly emphasized the primacy of ideology, particularly with respect to the voting patterns that resulted in unstable governments. More specifically, MacRae gives an ideological interpretation to his finding that intra-party voting divisions can be accounted for by issue-related scales.

MacRae also tries to relate Parliamentary behavior to analyses of voting behavior in the constituencies. In general, however, his analysis, relegated to one brief chapter dealing with “Assembly Votes and the Constituencies,” appears to have been incomplete.

A major dilemma for majority decision-making occurs when the summation of transitive individual preference orderings results in an intransitive social ordering. The problems posed by this phenomenon, which is known as the paradox of voting, can be seen in the following standard example.

Suppose there are three individuals, one with each of the following preference orders of three alternatives: ABC, BCA, CAB. Under majority rule, A would defeat B, B would defeat C, and C would defeat A, so there is no majority winner.

Most voting procedures, of course, yield a unique result whether or not the paradox occurs. But from this example it is apparent that when the paradox does occur, a majority of the voters prefer an alternative other than the one which is selected. Moreover, if a typical voting procedure is used, which of the alternatives is selected depends on the order in which the alternatives are voted on. Clearly these results have important implications, whether one is concerned with normative questions about majority rule or with the practical politics of legislative decision-making.

In the burgeoning literature on the voting paradox, surely one of the most impressive and well-known findings is Black's and Arrow's demonstration that the paradox cannot occur if the set of individual preference orderings is single-peaked. Since single-peakedness implies that the individuals and alternatives can be arrayed on a single dimension, their finding has a meaningful substantive interpretation. Namely, complete agreement on a dimension for judging the alternatives ensures that majority voting will yield a transitive social ordering of the alternatives.

This paper proposes and tests a modest theory of voting defection, the act of voting contrary to party identification. The relevance of voting defection to popular control of government is clear. Except for the infrequent elections that Key calls “critical,” the identification of people with their parties is very stable over time. The percentage of Democrats and Republicans in the electorate changed only slightly in the four presidential elections from 1952 to 1964. Short term shifts in public attitudes, then, are reflected not in shifts in the distribution of party identification, but in the degree that people vote in accordance with their identification. When they are disenchanted with the President, defection will be high among members of the opposition party and low among members of the party in office. In 1952 people were weary of the Korean War; this weariness was apparent in the massive numbers of Democrats who thought Eisenhower a man capable of ending the conflict and who backed up their convictions with Republican votes. In short, in the rate of defection we have a mirror that reflects popular discontent with the politics of the President. My present concern is to explore some personal attributes of the voters who make up this critical electorate, to augment the propositions surrounding party identification with one explanation of why it is that people vote contrary to their party allegiance.

The analyst of campaign strategy in American elections is usually confronted by the apparent impossibility of demonstrating that campaign behavior actually matters. Although candidates possess numerous options in strategy and tactics, it is clear that incumbent members of the majority party (commonly joint phenomena) usually win and opposition candidates of the minority party usually lose. Lewis Froman has even argued that “ … the behavior of the candidates during the campaign is one of the least influential factors in determining electoral outcomes.

The effects, if any, of campaign behavior are the residue to be examined after the partisan distribution of the electorate, the nature of the times, the power of incumbency and any number of variables beyond the ready control of the candidates themselves have been employed to explain or predict the popular vote distribution. The perceived general ineffectiveness of candidate strategy and tactics is usually explained by the low public saliency of the typical election contest, in which most voters are unlikely to be aware even of the names of the candidates, much less their policy positions or, presumably, any other of their behaviors.

But this circumstance may change when “ordinary” election contests are connected to contests of much higher saliency, especially that for the Presidency. It is at this time, at least, when the strategic decisions and behaviors of certain classes of candidates may attract the attention of voters otherwise preoccupied with that more dramatic battle for power.

In an article published in the December 30, 1967 issue of the Dutch weekly magazine Vrij Nederland, Mr. Frans Grosfeld suggested the following modification of the procedure of parliamentary representation of political parties. Instead of the conventional method of allocating to each party a number of representatives proportional to the number of votes cast for the party, he proposed to allocate a number of representatives which is proportional to the square of the number of votes. Thus, when there are n parties and when p1, …, pn are the proportions of the total number of votes obtained by these parties, the idea is to allocate a fraction qi of the representatives to the ith party determined by

Mr. Grosfeld made this suggestion for the Dutch political system, because in his view n is so large and even the largest pi belongs to a minority party, so that on many occasions several months of negotiations were necessary to obtain a coalition cabinet of one form or another. By squaring the pi's one obtains much larger relative differences between the larger and the smaller parties, and one party or a pair of politically related parties then has a much better chance of obtaining a parliamentary majority. Also, the system (1.1) provides an incentive for parties to merge, which contributes to a reduction of the degree to which the country is politically divided. This system should be contrasted with another system which is applied on a rather large scale, viz., that of declining any seat to those parties whose pi is less than a pre-assigned fraction θ (for example, θ = .03).