This is an attempt to map out the wide variety of party-dominated democratic systems in the light of concern about the seeming decline of party government in the face of contemporary challenges. The object is to determine the parameters of their institutional, mobilization, and policymaking patterns that may constitute a reasonable definition of party government. With the help of qualitative attribute tables, sixteen systems are compared, including some non-European and some marginal cases. The most important variables indicating a high degree of conformity to the model, not surprisingly, turn out to be an executive-dominated parliamentary system, a bipolar, Left-Right-based party system, a degree of centralization, and considerable problem-solving capacity, even if the parties play only a limited role in policymaking.

Portraits of heroes and leaders have been among the most widely diffused and deeply cherished of all political symbols. The political functions of such portraits grow out of distinctive semiotic qualities that set the portrait apart from other types of symbols. Judging from their public reception, George Washington's portraits — and, we believe, many state portraits — have the qualities of likeness, manifestiveness, moral efficaciousness, and sacredness that traditionally were ascribed to religious icons. From these qualities the state portrait gains a special power to bridge the distances of space and time and bring a society's representative men and women to living presence for its members. By evoking loyalties and attachments not only to the persons portrayed but also to the larger collectivities that those persons represent, state portraits function as important agencies of political integration and solidarity.

This article describes and analyzes a number of complications involved in presidential image identification and assessment (including distinctions among the various categories of summit diplomacy), selected images of past presidents, the role of the media, opinion polls, and surveys of “experts” in reflecting presidential images and prestige, and more precisely the president's image as diplomat in chief. Included are a description of the fluctuation in individual president's popularity ratings as related to selected foreign relations events, a comparative table of high, low, and average popular approval ratings for recent presidents beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, a comparative table of superior presidential rankings by “experts” throughout our history, and a table, with commentary, of presidential popular rating shifts following major summit ventures of the president since 1941. This article constitutes an introductory macro-treatment of the generalized aggregate of contemporary and historical perceptions of the president as diplomat in chief.

The article first examines the ways in which Richard Neustadt's Presidential Power attempts to connect the activities of power-seeking presidents to the public ends their actions presumably further and then discusses what is problematic in these linkages. The critique focuses on the defects in Neustadt's concept of the “grain of history,” the diminished sense of public purposes revealed by the standard of “viability,” the difficulties in evaluating presidential actions with the criteria developed and the ways in which the failed linkage between the means to power and the ends served undermines Neustadt's own teaching. The paradoxical quality of Presidential Power, in which insightful analysis of the means to power is combined with unsatisfactory discussion of the purposes for which that power is to be employed, is seen as possibly rooted in Neustadt's tacit acceptance of positivist and historicist views, which are now increasingly called into question. The article contends that those concerned with the separation of the normative and the empirical begin efforts to reconnect presidential power to public purpose by going beyond the terms of Neustadt's argument and by reexamining the American Founding for what it may suggest about the intended ends of politics and the presidency.

Political ideas today are different manifestations of a common paradigm which postulates a disenchanted universe allowing no middle ground between piecemeal social engineering and revolutionary transformation. We need a new definition of political order as opposed to disenchanted social control. Order consists of a harmony of autonomous parts while control is something imposed from outside. Control over a polity requires that the cosmos be stripped of symbols (disenchantment). Political order, by contrast, is always a reflection of cosmic order. If the universe is disenchanted, political power is arbitrary. There can be freedom only when control over the symbols of legitimacy is impossible.