The apparent fact that interactive effects are more common in policy innovations taking a long time to diffuse among the states, contrary to the presumed effects of interaction, suggests the existence of alternate diffusion mechanisms. Some policies diffuse directly from a federal model, while others diffuse among states via a segmented pattern of emulations. The order of state adoption of fair employment practices legislation is compared with the adoption order for three labor policies and two civil rights policies. Fair employment practice, by this test, is identified as a civil rights policy and not as a labor policy. State minimum wage legislation is discussed as a case of federal influence in the diffusion process. A first wave of diffusion was followed by a period of federally inspired court rescission. Federal legislation in 1938 began another wave of diffusion. In a third wave of innovations, states with existing laws amended those laws by emulating the new federal legislation.

The probability that an individual's voting in a presidential election will determine the outcome being negligible, it is argued that participation is irrational if predicated on principles that are either egocentric or act-prospective. Voter participation, if rational, must rely on some over-arching principle that is (a) Sociotropic, (b) Axionomic, (c) Collective-distributive, and (d) Neutrofactual. A distinctively ethical component must be involved, such that all purely “economic,” “cost-benefit” models postulating selfish voter rationality are incoherent. The notion of “helping” to elect one's candidate is criticized and rejected unless formulated in a special way. An important pragmatic consequence of the analysis is that the idea (relied on by the two major parties) of “wasting one's vote” on a third party candidate is shown to be invalid or of more limited application than generally assumed. If a sizeable minority (e.g., college students) were educated to reject that argument, politics might be profoundly affected.

The paper addresses itself to two questions left underdeveloped in the literature on representative-constituent relations. First, what does the representative see when he or she sees a constituency? Second, what consequences do these perceptions have for his or her behavior? The paper reverses the normal Washington-oriented view of representative-constituent relations and approaches both questions by examining the representative in his or her constituency. The paper's observations are drawn from the author's travels with seventeen U.S. House members while they were working in their districts. Member perceptions of their constituency are divided into the geographical, the reelection, the primary and the personal constituencies. Attention is then given to the home style of House members. Home style is treated as an amalgam of three elements – allocation of resources, presentation of self, explanation of Washington activity. An effort is made to relate home style to the various perceived constituencies. Some observations are made relating constituency-oriented research to the existing literature on representation.

A major unexplored area in the field of international politics is the consequences of major war for members of the international system in terms of power lost or gained. This paper explores these shifts of power among neutrals, winners, and losers as a result of these wars, using a sample of 32 cases and time series analysis. The findings register unexpected but systematic patterns after major conflicts; while winners and neutrals are affected marginally by the conflict, losers' powers are at first eroded. Over the long run (15–20 years), though, the effects of the loss dissipate; losers accelerate their recovery and soon resume antebellum status. It is this phenomenon that the authors call the phoenix factor.

The authors of the American Voter concluded that the distribution of opinions on current issues was not very important for explaining the vote of the large bulk of the American electorate. Recent studies purporting to demonstrate the increasing prevalence of issue voting in the 1960s and early 1970s fail to present evidence to satisfy the criteria for issue voting upon which the conclusions of the American Voter were based. Worse yet, the evidence of these newer studies fails to satisfy even the studies' own alternative criteria for issue voting. The apparent “increases” in issue voting prove to be largely artifacts of the measures employed or misinterpretations of the evidence adduced. When it comes to translating his issue preferences into voting choices, the average voter remains as confused as ever

Many professional observers have come to the conclusion that, despite denials and technical problems whose solutions are not publicly known, Israel already has nuclear weapons or has completed all but the final steps in their fabrication. It is also widely believed that one or more Arab states will come into atomic possession within a 10 to 15 year time frame. The present analysis explores the consequences of the establishment of a regional mini-balance of terror. The central hypothesis is that apocalyptic images and doomsday visions have been accepted too readily and out of proportion to the arguments that are given, and that a stable system of mutual deterrence may be viable in the Middle East and may make a positive contribution to the process of political settlement. Problems of rationality, credibility, second-strike force survivability, escalation, tactical nuclear weapons, accidents, permissive action links, terrorism, preventive war, and the disclosure of nuclear weapons possession are discussed.

The question, “Who wins in House-Senate conferences?” has largely been answered for recent Congresses. But the question, “Why does the Senate win?” has not been adequately answered. The research reported here presents and tests some necessary conditions of a theory that provides an answer to this question. The Senate wins because it is most frequently the second acting chamber and, because it has constitutionally derived power over House decisions, giving it the capacity to get the adjustments it makes in House bills accepted in conference. In the minority of cases in which the Senate acts first, the House “wins” in conference. Unlike earlier attempts to explain conference outcomes, the theory proposed here is consistent with the overall pattern of House dominance in the legislative process.

This study of 364 leadership selections in the U.S. House from 1789 through 1977 discovered that Democrats have a higher proportion of appointed leaders than Republicans; their leaders move between posts in an ordered succession; their appointed leaders are often “removed from above” by their elected ones; and their leaders are subjected to infrequent and unsuccessful caucus challenges. Republicans rely upon election to choose their leaders; their leaders' rate of interpositional mobility is very low; their appointed leaders were never removed by their elected ones; and their leaders face the contests at the same rate as the Democrats do, but the incidence of successful challenges is much greater. They are “removed from below.”

Majority vs. minority status had little statistically significant impact upon leadership contests and what variation appeared indicated that challenges were more frequent in the majority party where the stakes are higher and the rewards are greater than in the minority. Regardless of electoral consequences, however, Republican leaders are more vulnerable to caucus defeat than Democratic ones, which lends further support to the contention that party identity is more important than party status.

Midterm congressional elections have been generally viewed as relatively sterile affairs marked by reduced turnout, party voting, and the play of politically idiosyncratic forces such as friends-and-neighbors voting. The usual reduction in the number of seats controlled by the President's party, according to the “surge and decline” thesis, simply reflects the departure of short-term forces which presumably benefited the president's party two years earlier. In this study an alternative thesis is proposed which considers midterm election outcomes within the context of the current political environment. Evaluations of the President's performance are found to be directly associated with congressional preferences over a series of midterm elections from 1946 through 1966. Moreover, controlling for party identification, persons who disapprove of the President's performance were generally more likely to vote and to cast their ballot against the President's party than were his admirers to support it. This “negative voting” bias helps to explain why the Democratic and Republican parties have performed more poorly in those midterm elections during which they occupy the White House.

Theories of the behavioral consequences of political support coincide in the prediction that political support will correlate positively with indices of conventional behavior, negatively with indices of unconventional behavior. Survey data drawn from three communities in the Federal Republic of Germany show that an index of support for the structure of political authority is negatively correlated both with an index of actual participation in aggressive political behavior and with an index of participation in conventional electoral/pressure-group politics. Since the political behavior indices are themselves positively correlated, it is useful to construct a typology which differentiates between “pure” types – no participation, participation only in conventional, participation only in aggressive – and “mixed” types – participation in conventional and moderately aggressive, participation in conventional and highly aggressive. When the relationship between political support and the political-action type index is examined, it turns out that two of the types are associated with medium political support, while four of them occur at low support. To achieve more accurate explanation of types of political behavior, a model for prediction of each action type is proposed, taking into account interaction between political support, sense of personal political influence, and belief in the efficacy of past collective political aggression. The test of the model yields positive results, suggesting that it represents a fruitful beginning toward development of a theory of behavioral consequences of political support.

This paper contributes to the substantive and methodological discussion of the issues concerning the causes of cabinet instability through analysis of data from Indian state politics. The focus of the analysis is on explaining the duration of Indian state governments in days with variables measuring the degree of fragmentation and cohesion in the party system, the composition of the cabinet, the characteristics of the opposition, and the role of ideological differences. A substantial amount of the variation in the durability of coalition governments is explained with variables that measure the degree of party system institutionalization and the extent of political opportunism, but ideological factors do not explain much of the differences in durability of governments. It is also found that none of the measures used can explain much of the variation in one-party majority governments for which, it is argued, explanations must be sought that focus on leadership skill and on relationships between leaders and factions in a dominant party.

According to Walter Dean Burnham, party realignments “result in significant transformation in the general shape of policy.” Through the analysis of House roll-call data, the New Deal realignment is examined to determine whether, in fact, a significant transformation took place and, if so, what its characteristics were. It was hypothesized that if a new political agenda emerged at that time, at least some of the stable policy dimensions which Aage Clausen finds as characterizing the modern Congress should have developed during the New Deal period. In terms of content and level of partisan voting evoked, the government management and the agricultural policy dimensions do take their modern form during the New Deal. A social welfare dimension developed but had not, by the late 1930s, taken its modern shape. It is argued that a major transformation of policy did take place and that, in the process, the ideological distance between the parties increased. This realignment, however, did not immediately change regional voting patterns within each party.

This paper concerns the relationship between voters and corrupt politicians. An explanation is suggested for why voters would discount even credible information that a candidate is corrupt. Then the results of an experiment designed to test a necessary condition in this explanation are reported. The principal implication of this exploratory study is that corrupt elected officials are immune from electoral reprisal because voters rather easily trade off the information that a candidate is corrupt in return for other things they value in the candidate.

Although the major purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to transform Chinese political culture, the way in which this transformation took place has remained unclear. This paper attempts to understand cultural transformation as a process of interaction within a semiological system, consisting of a network of communicators and a lexicon of political symbols. The pragmatic aspect of this process is the outcome of an interplay among the intentions of the elites, the masses, and the target of criticism: political circumstances during the Cultural Revolution were more benign to the cathartic and hortatory intentions of the masses and elites than to the expiatory needs of the target. The syntactic aspect of the system concerns the relationship among symbols: These were found to form a dichotomous structure divided by a taboo barrier, which elicited strong but ambivalent desires to achieve a revolutionary breakthrough. The semantic aspect of the symbolism refers to problematic dimensions of experience in Chinese political culture–the psychological repression imposed by a system of rigid social censorship, the political discrimination practiced against certain social categories, the persistence of differences in income or educational achievement in a socialist system–and suggests that these “contradictions” may be resolved by bold frontal assault.

The symbolism of Cultural Revolution polemics has now become part of Chinese political culture. Its impact seems to have been to inhibit social differentiation (particularly hierarchical), to encourage greater mass participation, and to foster more frequent and irreconcilable conflict among elites.

In Taiwan, a national elite socialized to measure the behavior of others (but not its own behavior) against extremely high standards of morality finds itself offended by the apparently immoral behavior of local electoral politicians. With reference to similar situations in other developing countries, this article describes how the attitudes of Taiwan's national elite toward the political morality of others developed and why the electoral politicians act in a manner offensive to the elite's attitudes. As a postscript, the article discusses why the national elite has checked its desire to do away with Taiwan's offensive fledgling electoral system and expanded its scope instead.

The July 17, 1973 coup serves as a case study of the nature and extent of great-power interest and involvement in Afghanistan. The dynamics of American, Soviet, and Chinese interaction are multifaceted and volatile, and imply that no one great power had outright control. Thus, this treatment concerns influence rather than control, and multilateral interaction rather than unilateral or bilateral action. The differing interests of the great powers in Afghanistan are outlined. Next, the possibility of great-power involvement in the coup is examined. Finally, the impact of the coup upon Afghanistan's relations with the three great powers is considered. Available material suggests that neither the United States nor the People's Republic of China had sufficient interest or influence to instigate the coup. Nor is there any concrete evidence that the Soviet Union played a significant role, although it did have the opportunity, influence, and interests to do so.

A time-series analysis of individual level, perceptual data disconfirms the J-curve theory of the black urban riots (i.e., that they arise because a period of progress was followed by a sharp decline) and suggests that ambiguities surrounding black people's perceptions of their economic situation probably led to the frustration that culminated in urban violence.

The methodological component of the research deals with such problems of relative deprivation-based research as: (1) the substitution of aggregate, objective-level indicators for perceptual theoretical concepts; (2) the correspondences between objective and perceptual data on both a point-by-point basis and across time-series patterns; (3) the empirical implications of failing to look at important subgroup distinctions; and (4) the crucial assumption of all forms of relative deprivation theory that future expectations of need fulfillment, especially in the period of rising satisfactions, are a function of current levels of need fulfillment. The research calls for modifications in the structure and application of relative deprivation theory in light of the findings in these areas.

In several highly mobilized Third World societies, rising levels of working-class political activism seem to have encouraged the development of political movements which are both popular and authoritarian. This popular authoritarianism melds intensive political mobilization of previously excluded social sectors with political structures which severely limit these groups' ability to affect public policy. Much of the research on popular authoritarianism has attempted to explain the phenomenon by identifying the socioeconomic determinants of popular-authoritarian electoral behavior. In an effort to clarify the relative merit of contending explanations, this study uses data from the prototypic case of Argentine Peronism to test six common hypotheses and then to construct a model which optimizes the explanatory ability of five major socioeconomic variables. The results indicate that an area's rate of industrial growth and the size of its working-class population account for more than four-fifths of the variation in Peronisi electoral behavior that can be attributed to socioeconomic variables.

This study attempts to explain post-World War II southern electoral politics by examining the party identifications of southerners between 1952 and 1972. Pronounced decreases in Democratic loyalties and increases in Independent leanings appear during this period and constitute a dealignment of the southern electorate. While interregional population exchanges have diluted Democratic strength, their effects are almost counterbalanced by the mobilization of blacks into politics. Instead, the principal source of dealignment is the generational replacement of the native white electorate. Its youngest members, who entered the electorate after World War II, have come to favor political independence increasingly in recent years. This behavior seems partially attributable to a tendency for young native whites in particular to bring their partisan loyalties into line with their attitudes and party images on racial issues. Even so, there are clear signs that the racial question is losing its place as the major determinant of the region's politics. For the future, one can expect a continuation of dealignment politics and little chance of a partisan realignment.

Political philosophers have long been exercised by the problem of political obligation. Many have tried to solve it, and others, more recently, have dismissed it as a pseudo-problem which cannot be solved and need not be posed. This essay is an attempt to clarify the problem of political obligation and to see why it is a problem. My argument, briefly, is that the traditional understanding of the problem is misleading because it fails to distinguish questions of obedience from questions of obligation. When it is properly stated the problem can be solved–in principle, at least–and I try to show what form a solution will take.