As World War II drew to a close, the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition—Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill—assembled at Yalta to ponder the future. Already, sharp clashes at the conference table over the future fate of Poland and Eastern Europe cast a sombre spell over the proceedings. But the necessities of the alliance still served to suppress differences and to emphasize a search for consensus. At a tripartite dinner meeting on 8 February 1945, President Roosevelt, ever hopeful, described the relations of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States “as that of a family” and spoke of a future in which their common objectives would be “to give to every man, woman, and child on this earth the possibility of security and well-being.” Marshal Stalin, perhaps more realistic, “remarked that it was not so difficult to keep unity in time of war since there was a joint aim to defeat the common enemy which was clear to everyone. … the difficult task came after the war when diverse interests tended to divide the allies.” Nevertheless, he expressed himself as “confident that the present alliance would meet this test also and that it was our duty to see that it would, and that our relations in peacetime should be as strong as they had been in war.” Prime Minister Churchill somewhat grandiloquently spoke of “standing on the crest of a hill with the glories of future possibilities stretching before us.

This article describes some results of a successful attempt to assess and refine a causal model of the general conditions of several forms of civil strife, using cross-sectional analyses of data collected for 114 polities. The theoretical argument, which is discussed in detail elsewhere, stipulates a set of variables said to determine the likelihood and magnitude of civil strife. Considerable effort was given here to devising indices that represent the theoretical variables more closely than the readily-available aggregate indices often used in quantitative cross-national research. One consequence is an unusually high degree of statistical explanation: measures of five independent variables jointly account for two-thirds of the variance among nations in magnitude of civil strife (R = .80, R2 = .64).

It should be noted at the outset that this study does not attempt to isolate the set of conditions that leads specifically to “revolution,” nor to assess the social or political impact of any given act of strife except as that impact is reflected in measures of “magnitude” of strife. The relevance of this kind of research to the classic concern of political scholarship with revolution is its attempt at identification and systematic analysis of conditions that dispose men to strife generally, revolution included.

This article considers the social and political factors that influence the stability/instability of the political system and attempts to measure some of these factors in the political systems of Latin America.

The frequent resort to protest activity by relatively powerless groups in recent American politics suggests that protest represents an important aspect of minority group and low income group politics. At the same time that Negro civil rights strategists have recognized the problem of using protest as a meaningful political instrument, groups associated with the “war on poverty” have increasingly received publicity for protest activity. Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, for example, continues to receive invitations to help organize low income communities because of its ability to mobilize poor people around the tactic of protest. The riots which dominated urban affairs in the summer of 1967 appear not to have diminished the dependence of some groups on protest as a mode of political activity.

This article provides a theoretical perspective on protest activity as a political resource. The discussion is concentrated on the limitations inherent in protest which occur because of the need of protest leaders to appeal to four constituencies at the same time. As the concept of protest is developed here, it will be argued that protest leaders must nurture and sustain an organization comprised of people with whom they may or may not share common values. They must articulate goals and choose strategies so as to maximize their public exposure through communications media. They must maximize the impact of third parties in the political conflict. Finally, they must try to maximize chances of success among those capable of granting goals.

Several different models of local political party organization can be found in the accumulating studies of American local politics. One model is typified by the research of Forthal, Gosnell, Kent, and Salter, and presents a picture of the party organization as attracting and disciplining workers through material incentives, non-ideological in its appeals, and oriented toward obtaining votes for securing or maintaining the party in political control of the government. An alternative model has been described in more recent research by Wilson, Hirschfield, and Carney. They portray the party activist as being more ideologically oriented, responding to ideological rather than material incentives, and seeking governmental reform or improved governmental services. Changes in the environment have been identified as the causal forces for this change in political party organizational style. For example, Greenstein points out that urban party machines developed to provide required services for which demand was generated by rapid urbanization, disorganized governmental structures, and the needs of recent immigrants. The research describing the material-incentive-motivated political machines was produced primarily during the 1920's and 1930's when the need for accommodation to urban problems of the type described existed to a greater degree than at present.

The social characteristics of the activists as well as the political style of the two types of party organizations described in the professional and amateur models also differ. The professional model presents a party organization whose members are male, oriented toward material rewards or a career in government, and exhibit little concern for issues.

The years 1964 and 1967 stand as two crucial landmarks in the democratic development of India's political systems both at the center and in the several states. In the three years since Nehru's death in May, 1964, Indian politics entered fully into a major test of legitimacy. Since 1964, the national leadership of the Indian National Congress has three times demonstrated its ability to handle smoothly the first stage of India's process of legitimizing democratic political authority—that of transferring power from a charismatic leader to his successors within the dominant party. After the 1967 General Elections, Indian politics moved to a second stage to confront the problems of transferring power from the previously dominant Congress to diverse parties and party coalitions in more than half the Indian states.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications for party development in India of the ways in which power has been transferred from the Congress to multi-group coalitions in the three north Indian states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab. Specifically, I am concerned with the structural characteristics of the developing party systems in the three states; with the roles played in the systems by parties, factions, and individuals; and with the impact of the ways in which the systems function upon government formation and stability. I will argue that north Indian political parties operate in systems in which inter-party ideological divisions are less decisive in the formation and breakup of governments than intra-party divisions.

Despite the legal norm of universal adult citizenship in the United States, and thus the legitimacy of participation by all strata of society, the actual level of political involvement in local communities is not high and differs greatly from group to group. Our task here is to spell out some of the conditions of group membership which contribute to local political involvement. Our broader purpose is to argue the need to re-expand the theoretical framework for analysis of political participation and thus to correct the present imbalanced focus upon participation as an individual act.

Thus we shall examine some structural, rather than psychological, conditions of local political involvement. In this we shall occasionally use some measures previously reported in other studies and conventionally regarded as tapping psychological attributes of individuals; but these we shall regard as defining sets of role-expectations or as locating categories of persons placed within a certain range of normative obligations; and, more importantly, we shall systematically compare the net effect (upon local political involvement) of such variables with that of the more conventionally defined structural variables.

Most students of American politics traditionally have argued that it is desirable that legislative apportionment systems conform as closely as possible to an ideal of numerical equality, and that it is desirable that major political parties actively compete for elective office. Admittedly this argument has been in large part only implicit, but, since most theoretical argument in political science has been implicit, this does not imply that apportionment or party competition have not been considered to be important by students of politics. Indeed several recent articles in professional journals have been published which seem to derive at least a portion of their appeal and raison d'être from a “demonstration” that students of politics have been guilty of the sin of credulity by holding these implicit beliefs.

The tone of much of this work is aptly expressed by the title of a popularizing article by David Brady and Douglas Edmonds, “One Man, One Vote—So What?” Brady and Edmonds—after some extensive, but, unfornately not very discriminating statistical computations—concluded “that the whole Pandora's box of evil consequences which supposedly result from malapportionment—from right-to-work laws to not spending enough on school children—really has little to do with malapportionment.” Although somewhat more cautious in his approach, Thomas R. Dye reached the similar conclusion that “on the whole, the policy choices of malapportioned legislatures are not noticeably different from policy choices of well-apportioned legislatures.”

This is a study of the budget success of state administrative agencies. Although a number of recent studies provide valuable information about environmental influences on state and local government expenditures, relatively little is known about the factors that affect the budgets of individual administrative units. Existing studies typically focus on the state as the unit of analysis, and report findings about the correlates of state (or state plus local) government expenditures in total and by the major fields of education, highways, public welfare, health, hospitals et al. The United States Bureau of the Census provides an invaluable service for this scholarship by collecting state and local government data and ordering it into categories that permit state-to-state comparisons. When political scientists and economists rely exclusively on Census Bureau publications, however, they preclude an attack on certain aspects of the expenditure process. In order to report data by the comparable fields of education, highways, public welfare etc., the Bureau of the Census rearranges the expenditures made by individual state agencies. As a result we know little about the factors that affect the budgets of individual agencies. And because it is the agency's budget that is the focus of budget-making, we have no systematic information about many of the influences that might affect government expenditures. Chief among the unknowns are the influence of each agency's budget request in the expenditure process, and the support given to the agencies by the governor.

This paper is a study of the backgrounds of the members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The purpose of its first part is to present and interpret certain quantitative material concerning the background characteristics of the members of the Central Committee. The conclusion elaborates premises regarding the function of co-optation in the higher Party organs and suggests possible relationships of this function to the education and career experiences of the Central Committee membership as discussed in the first part. To pursue an ideal study of this type, we recognize that extensive interviews and depth exploration of the sociological histories of the members would be desirable. In the case of the Soviet political elite such a course is obviously not possible at the present time. Nevertheless, sufficient data exist to make a modest beginning toward what we hope will help to lay a foundation for more extensive analysis of elites in the Soviet system in the future.

Two basic assumptions underlie our interest in the backgrounds of the Soviet political elite. First, and more important for this paper, is the premise that persons are co-opted into the Central Committee primarily, though not exclusively, as a result of the group associations they have made during the courses of their careers. These associations are largely career associations, and most of the members become part of the elite of important functional groups before they become members of the Party elite. Educational backgrounds, age, Party status, role associations, occupation, and other factors all converge to influence the development of the careers of the members.

Systematic empirical research into the process of political leadership recruitment has made substantial progress since World War II with emphasis given to those who occupy formal positions of authority within the political system, specifically, legislators and party activists. Generally such studies have been concerned with delineating (a) who the leaders are, (b) how and why they are where they are, and (c) the variables affecting (a) and (b).

The most ambitious recent studies, in the sense that they try to deal systematically with all three aspects of recruitment, are those by Samuel J. Eldersveld, Austin Ranney, and Henry Valen. Their research, and the examples cited of other scholarship, have yielded a substantial number of propositions. Three which lend themselves to testing with data we have gathered on the recruitment of candidates for the Canadian House of Commons, 1945–65, are:

1) The status of individuals recruited by a party in part is a function of the party's competitive positions. (Key, Snowiss).

2) The status of individuals recruited by a party varies with the party's position on an ideological continuum (Eldersveld, Ranney, Marvick and Nixon, Valen).

3) Relative urbanism and the degree of industrialization of communities affect recruitment patterns (Rokkan and Valen, Valen, Snowiss). In the present instance there should be a positive relationship between urbanism and the mean status of candidates.

In testing these propositions we will compare, whenever such comparisons appear appropriate, the data for Canadian parliamentary candidates with findings from some of the previously cited studies and also indicate how, in Canada, multi-partyism is related to the status of recruited candidates.

Many empirical investigations in the behavioral sciences today aim at tracing the causes of variations in some key dependent variable. The search for satisfying causal explanations is difficult because of the complexity of social phenomena, the crudeness of the measures of many important variables, and the prevalence of simultaneous cause and effect relations among variables. Although these difficulties remain, a number of important methodological contributions have clarified the conditions under which causal inferences can be made from non-experimental data. In particular the Simon-Blalock technique has recently gained considerable attention, and has been profitably used by a number of political scientists in their research. Examination of some of these applications does, however, reveal the need for a better understanding of the purposes and limitations of the technique. This paper reviews two studies: (1) the re-analysis of the Miller-Stokes data by Cnudde and McCrone, and (2) the analysis of the determinants of Negro political participation in the South by Matthews and Prothro. We shall argue that both these applications have two faults: (1) a failure to distinguish conclusions from assumptions, and (2) an inadequate correspondence between the assumptions made in constructing the mathematical models and our prior knowledge about the phenomena being studied. In addition, we shall use the first study to illustrate a principle of general importance in causal analysis: the investigator should check the possibility that different causal mechanisms occur in different subgroups of his data. And we shall use the second study to illustrate the difficulty of separating the effects of two highly correlated independent variables.

In Toward a Mathematics of Politics I presented a model of reciprocal interaction between information media and the opinions held by members of the community. It is the purpose of this note to apply a somewhat simplified version of this model to the specific problem of censorship. Testable hypotheses will be deduced and implications which may be of importance for policy will be suggested.

Suppose the population of the country are arrayed on some issue dimension. It makes little difference for our present purposes what the dimension itself represents. It might, for example, indicate the degree of nudity of pictures of women in men's magazines or the strength with which the views of Castro are supported. Let us suppose that the distribution along this issue dimension declines at one, end, as shown in Figure 1. Note that the remainder of the distribution can be any shape; in fact, I have drawn in three dashed lines for three possible distributions. If we assume, not unreasonably, that most people who are in the business of producing public information seek to maximize readership, then we would anticipate that in a competitive market the information media would be spread over the possible positions in this line in much the same pattern as the population. Put more bluntly, the managers of such organizations as Time, Newsweek, and CBS go where the customers are.