The concepts of “party” and “party system” may be obscuring the nature of early national political culture. The presence of a modern party ethos before the 1830s seems to be taken for granted, as are assumptions regarding the alleged benefits of party. Historians have not yet demonstrated, however, the many dimensions of institutionalized party behavior. Focus is recommended on three observable elements of party (after Sorauf): as organization, in office, in the electorate. Studies of party self-consciousness developing over the entire 1789–1840 period are necessary in various political units. Evidence is inconclusive, but weighs on balance against a first party system of Federalists and Republicans (1790s–1820s). While relatively stable elite coalitions and even mass cleavage patterns perhaps developed at staggered intervals in different arenas, especially during the war crisis period of 1809–1816, the norms of party did not take root and pervade the polity. The era to the 1820s was transitional, a deferential-participant phase of mixed political culture roughly comparable to England's after 1832. Theories relating party to democratization, national integration, and political development, should be reconsidered.

The middle-class character of the leadership of American reform movements has been well established. While leaders of the progressive movement in early twentieth-century America also conform to this pattern, the nature of the voting base of support for progressivism has not yet been established. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine whether or not middle-class voters supported progressive candidates at the polls; and secondarily, to test the relative strength of cultural factors (i.e., ethnicity and religion) versus class considerations as determinants of voting behavior in the early twentieth century. The results demonstrate that, at least in the key progressive state of Wisconsin, middle-class voters failed to support progressive candidates in either general or primary elections; to the contrary, they provided the bulwark of support for conservative opponents of reform. Using bi-variate and partial correlational analysis, the paper also shows that ethnocultural factors remained as the most powerful determinant of voter choice among urban voters in general elections, but that class considerations often proved more influential in motivating voters in primary election contests.

A recent note by Robert Butterworth is critical of William Riker's size principle on several important grounds. There is, however, an important omission in his analysis which this present essay aims to correct. The author goes on to tie assertions about coalition structure in n-person zero-sum games to a solution theory for such games. In the appendix to this essay the general five-person game, of which Butterworth's game is a special case, is considered in some detail. The effect, with one reasonable solution theory, is a favorable appraisal of the size principle.

Various analysts have noted that the decision to vote in mass elections is difficult to justify from the standpoint of an expected utility maximization model. Put simply, the probability that a citizen's vote will affect the outcome is so small that the expected gains from voting are outweighed by the costs in time and effort. Such analyses treat rational behavior as synonymous with expected utility maximization. In this paper we show that an alternative criterion for decision making under uncertainty, minimax regret, specifies voting under quite general conditions. Both two and three candidate plurality elections are considered. Interestingly, a minimax regret decision maker never votes for his second choice in a three candidate election, whereas expected utility maximizers clearly may. Thus, the model proposed has implications for candidate choice as well as turnout.

Five voting paradoxes are examined under procedures which determine social choice from voters' preference rankings. The most extreme forms of each paradox are identified, and their potential practical significance is assessed using randomly generated voter preference profiles.

The first paradox arises when the winner under sequential-elimination simple-majority voting is less preferred by every voter than some other alternative. The fifth paradox occurs when one alternative has a simple majority over every other alternative and one or more of the simple-majority losers beats the winner on the basis of every point-total method that assigns more points to a first-place vote than to a second-place vote, more points to a second-place vote than to a third-place vote, and so forth.

The other three paradoxes are solely concerned with point-total procedures. They include cases in which the standard point-total winner becomes a loser when original losers are removed, and in which different truncated point-total procedures (which count only first-place votes, or only first-place and second-place votes, and so forth) yield different winners.

The computer simulation data suggest that the more extreme forms of the paradoxes are exceedingly unlikely to arise in practice.

This article belongs in the area of what Karl Jaspers calls “existential elucidation.” It is concerned less with political ideals than with the relationship of the person to those ideals and to the realities that often contradict them.

During recent centuries political activity has been increasingly governed by the confidence that history is under human control. The tragedies and disappointments of the twentieth century, however, cast serious doubt on this confidence. Thus it is incumbent on us to reconsider man's whole stance in relation to history. The core of the article is the definition of an alternative stance, which I call “civility.”

The clue to civility was provided by Plato when he suggested, in The Republic, that although the ideal city probably could not be realized in history, its form might be reproduced here and there in the souls of individuals. In pursuance of this clue, civility is defined, on the one hand, as partial detachment from action, and from the ideological preoccupations frequently accompanying action, and, on the other hand, as concentration on governance of the self. Although such governance entails historical independence, it does not set one apart from others; on the contrary, its fundamental principle is openess to the totality of the human.

Implicit in Dahrendorf's Society and Democracy in Germany and explicit in Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy are respectively a liberal and a radical model of democratic development. Neither of these models adequately accounts for the experience of Sweden, a remarkably successful “late developer.” Although Swedish industrialization proceeded with little public ownership of the means of production, with limited welfare programs until the 1930s, and above all with restricted military expenditure—all factors Dahrendorf implies are crucial for democratic development—it did not produce the traditional liberal infrastructure of bourgeois entrepreneurs nor a vigorous open market society. Similarly only three of Moore's five preconditions for democracy obtained in Sweden: a balance between monarchy and aristocracy, the weakening of the landed aristocracy, and the prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against the workers and peasants. There was no thorough shift toward commercial agriculture and, most important, there was no revolutionary break with the past. Consequently, one has to evolve a radical liberal model of development which states the conditions for the emergence of democracy in Sweden without revolution. This model contains implications for the further modernization of American politics.

The research reported in this article involved tests of a model by which voting decisions can be explained and predicted. Data for the tests came from surveys conducted in five presidential elections by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. Predictions made in terms of the model show it to be a good basis both for predicting the division of the vote and for predicting the votes of individual voters. Extensive analyses of incorrect predictions suggest them to be in great part the sort of errors one would expect, were voters arriving at their voting decisions in the manner described by the model. The validity of the model has implications of importance for practical politics, political history, and political theory.

Understanding of the phenomenon of political protest has been inhibited by the view that protest is fundamentally extraordinary or unconventional in character and that those who use it do so because they lack the resources to employ more conventional means of political expression. This article challenges this unqualified view by examining survey data based on black and white samples from the city of Milwaukee which relate to racial attitudes toward protest, the social characteristics of protest participants, and to the uses and organization of protest in the two racial communities. The analysis reveals widespread support for protest in the black community in contrast to the general antipathy found among whites. Both black and white protesters are found to be socioeconomically better-off than nonprotesters in their respective racial communities, but a variety of indicators suggest that black protesters are more integrated and typical members of their community than white protesters are of theirs. Data on the uses and organization of protest show that it has become an institutionalized feature of the black pursuit of urban politics in Milwaukee in contrast to its generally ad hoc and less frequent role for whites.

We may conclude from all this that protest represents a widely accepted, integral part of black politics in the city, while for whites protest is indeed unconventional, a violation of dominant social norms. This conclusion is used as a basis for speculating on the relationship of protest participation to the possession of social resources and on the capacity of social resources to offset the costs incurred in the form of social disapproval for violating white norms against protest behavior.

This is a study of the relationship between partisan preference and social integration in natural work groups in several automobile plants. The basic finding is that the number of work group friends increases from the Democratic to the Republican end of a standard party identification scale. Since the political context of the study sample is heavily Democratic, attention is focused on the fact that Republicans in this environment are political deviants. It is suggested that friendship integration is a function of perceived deviance in that deviating from group norms leads to social insecurity, cognitive dissonance, and a need for opinion evaluation, all of which motivate affiliative behavior. Several hypotheses are deduced from this proposition. The first is that Republicans have less political contact in nonwork contexts, but more in the work group, than Democrats do. Second, the relationship between partisanship and friendship integration should be greater for members of social groups in which the pro-Democratic norm is stronger than for those in which this norm is weaker. Third, strength of identification with the norm-bearing group ought to be positively related to friendship integration among deviants, since identification would make the group's norms more salient and increase the deviant's discomfort. Fourth, political deviants should tend to choose each other as friends to a greater extent than political conformers do. Finally, since friendship alliances apparently serve a protective function for political deviants, it is hypothesized that among deviants (but not among conformers), friendship integration should be related to political participation. All the hypotheses are supported. The results are interpreted in terms of the critical function of social support for political deviants in pluralist societies. Since pressures for conformity are strong, it is important to understand the ways in which minorities deal with them. Friendships in work groups, ostensibly nonpolitical, therefore have important political functions.

This paper utilizes the 1956–58–60 SRC panel study to examine the degree to which Americans hold attitudes on issues of public policy. The conclusions reject the thesis that only 20 to 30 per cent of the American public have true attitudes and that the remainder either refuse to take a position or respond randomly. The nonattitude thesis is rejected on the basis of: (1) a conceptualization of attitudes which allows for variation in responses through time without necessarily indicating the absence of attitudes or their random fluctuation; (2) an evaluation of the major statement of the nonattitude thesis; (3) a probability model for measuring attitudes in a panel study based on the assumption of twin samples, i.e., a sample of the population at one point in time, and a sample of the individual's attitude through time; and (4) the application of the probability model, leading to the conclusion that the number of individuals with attitudes has been severely underestimated. The implications of that finding are drawn for the relation of responses to attitudes and for democratic elitism.

In 1959 a number of progressive Democratic congressmen organized the Democratic Study Group (DSG) as a vehicle for countering certain conservative biases then present in the decision-making process in the House of Representatives. This paper presents brief descriptions of the difficulties faced by these congressmen in their efforts to pass more “liberal” legislation and of the organization and activities of the DSG. The analytical focus is on an assessment of DSG success in developing an effective communication network as a means of achieving its policy goals. The central hypothesis is that this communication network has had an impact on the voting behavior of DSG members. Roll-call data from the 84th through the 91st Congress are examined to ascertain whether longitudinal patterns in the voting of DSG members, non-southern non-DSG Democrats, southern Democrats, and Republicans tend to confirm or deny this hypothesis.

Most measures of party competition were designed for the United States or other two-party systems. The measure proposed here is intended for multiparty as well as two-party systems. It is a formalization of the notion of uncertainty: election outcomes are competitive to the degree we are uncertain who will win. By ascertaining through survey research the degree of party loyalty over time, one can calculate the chances of alternative outcomes in hypothetical replications of any given election. Since the chance that a losing party might have won is one measure of the importance of that party, this approach to party competition also provides a precise indicator of the number of parties in the system (i.e., whether it is two-party, three party, etc.). The method is applied here to data on Canadian federal elections in 1965 and 1968.

This research note offers a partial model of decision making in the Soviet Union cast in terms of the level of conflict intensity within the political system, the identity of the major participants, and the corresponding mode of decision-making behavior. It also deals with the rationalization of decision making in the post-Stalin era and the role of interest groups in policy formation.

Recognizing the multifunctional nature of decisions made within politicized bureaucratic structures, the model outlines three levels of conflict intensity and decision-making behavior:

(1) Analytic conflict occurs over maximizing (technical) decisions and elicits a decision-making style described as research and persuasion. The most influential actors are specialists and technicians.

(2) Organizational conflict occurs over mixed maximizing and integrative decisions and calls forth a combination of analytic and bargaining techniques. Key actors are institutionalized interest groups.

(3) Systemic political conflict is associated with integrative (political) decisions reached either through informal high-level bargaining or voting within higher party bodies. The most important actors are leadership factions and interest groups with political resources.

In The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson shows how the activities of various political organizations can be fruitfully analyzed using the theory of collective goods. Several of Olson's major conclusions concern the relationship between the size of a group and its ability to provide its members with collective benefits. He concludes that as group size increases, the amount of collective benefits provided will become increasingly suboptimal, and that the absolute amount of collective benefits provided will decrease. This paper shows that Olson's conclusion concerning the relationship between group size and the absolute amount of collective benefits provided is not generally true. Within the framework of analysis used by Olson, it is demonstrated that the relationship is determined by the interaction between two effects, an “income” effect which may cause the level of benefits provided to increase as group size increases, and a “congestion” effect which may cause the level of benefits to decrease as group size increases. The final result is that for “inclusive” collective goods the relationship is an increasing one, while for “exclusive” goods it is a decreasing one. Some implications of this result for the use of the theory of collective goods in studying political processes are discussed.