¹ There are a number of exceptions to this generalization, but these “theories” of conflict were developed before the decade of riots. Cf. Boulding, Kenneth E., Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (New York: Harper and Row, 1962)Google Scholar; Coleman, James S., Community Conflict (New York: The Free Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Coser, Lewis, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: The Free Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Dahrendorf, Ralf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Schelling, Thomas, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; and Rapoport, Anatol, Fights, Games, and Debates (Ann Arbor, Mich.: The University of Michigan Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

² Simmel, Georg, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations, trans, by Bendix, Reinhard and Wolff, Kurt (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Simmel, Georg, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Wolff, Kurt (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1950); and Coser, pp. 73–80Google Scholar.

³ Every author cited in the first footnote adopts this perspective.

⁴ The larger project of which this analysis is a part, the City Council Research Project, is sponsored by the Institute of Political Studies, Stanford University, and is supported by the National Science Foundation under contract GS 496 and GS 1898.

⁵ The interviews are with 435 out of a possible 490 subjects. San Francisco was not included because it has a local government which combines city and county functions and structures. All of the cities are nonpartisan.

⁶ Coser, , Functions of Social Conflict, p. 144Google Scholar; Simmel, , The Sociology of Georg Simmel, p. 397Google Scholar.

⁷ Coser, chapter 4; Simmel, , The Sociology …, p. 320Google Scholar.

⁸ Coser, p. 97.

⁹ Ibid., p. 73.

¹⁰ Ibid., Coser also states (p. 79): “Yet, frequent occasions do not necessarily eventuate in frequent conflicts. It is precisely the closeness of the relationship and the strong affective mutual attachment of the participants which may induce them to avoid further intensification of the conflict once it breaks out.”

¹¹ Coser argues: “Loosely structured groups and open societies, by allowing conflicts, institute safeguards against the type of conflict which would endanger basic consensus and thereby minimize the danger of divergences touching core values. The interdependence of antagonistic groups and the criss-crossing within such societies of conflicts, which serve to “sew the social system together by cancelling each other out, thus prevent disintegration along one primary line of cleavage,” p. 80.

¹² This is not a new idea; and it can be found in a large number of places. Peter Blau, for example, says about the same thing: “Without cross affiliations, conflicts tend to be cumulative as many involve the same split in the community, and the predominant communications within each opposition camp may lead to intense hostility and endeavors not merely to defeat the opposition but to destroy it.” Blau, Peter M., Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), p. 306Google Scholar; see also, Coleman, pp. 21–23; Dahl, Robert A., Pluralist Democracy in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1967)Google Scholar; Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 80–81Google Scholar; and Verba, Sidney, “Organizational Membership and Democratic Consensus,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 27 (August, 1965), 468–470CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ The Coser/Simmel theory was propounded for groups, not for cities, and it remains questionable whether Simmel's and Coser's ideas can be applied to the cities of this study. Their analysis is based on the qualitative character of relationships in small groups; groups which are characterized by intense, face-to-face interaction, where the relationships are personal, affective, and relatively stable. This kind of relationship is contrasted with large groups in which relationships are affectively neutral and distant and lack intensity. Although all of our cities would, on the face of it, seem to fall into the category of the large secondary association, the politically active stratum, within which conflicts are fought out, is much smaller and may have all the characteristics of a small group. Take for example a city with 30,000 people. The number of registered voters in such a city will be around twelve thousand, and in any given election one might expect a turn-out of about five to six thousand. If 5 per cent of the voters are active on a regular basis, a generous figure, that means the city will have a “politically active stratum” of about 300. Politically active people interact with great regularity, and that number is not too large to have many of the characteristics of the Coser/Simmel group.

¹⁴ For extensive empirical evidence of such a relationship between city size and social diversity, see Hadden, Jeffrey K. and Borgatta, Edgar F., American Cities: Their Social Characteristics (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Cf. Parenti, Michael, “Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification,” American Political Science Review, 61 (September, 1967), 717–726CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfinger, Raymond E., “The Development and Persistence of Ethnic Voting,” American Political Science Review, 59 (December, 1965), 896–908CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Parenti, pp. 720–23; Wood, Robert C., Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958), p. 178Google Scholar; Greer, Scott, “Catholic Voters and the Democratic Party,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 25 (Winter, 1961), 624CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lieberson, Stanley, “Suburbs and Ethnic Residential Patterns,” American Journal of Sociology, 67 (May, 1962), 673–681CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ For some empirical evidence to support this point for these cities, see Black, Gordon S., “A Theory of Political Ambition: Career Choices and the Role of Structural Incentives,” American Political Science Review, 66 (March, 1972), 147–148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Coleman describes the process of searching for allies in some detail; pp. 5–9.

¹⁹ Riker, William H. and Ordeshook, Peter C., “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting,” American Political Science Review, 62 (March, 1968), 25–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ The hypothesis about “marginal increases” in costs is supported by the data from these cities which show that there is a dramatic increase in costs as one moves from the smaller cities to the larger cities, an increase which is not a simple linear function of city size.

²¹ This is a very important part of Mancur Olson's theory of collective action. Olson, Mancur Jr.,, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Goods (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar, Schocken Books, 1968), chapter 1; see also, Buchanan, James M. and Tullock, Gordon, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 63–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), chapter 14, pp. 260–276Google Scholar; Salisbury, Robert H., “An Exchange Theory of Interest Groups,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 13 (February, 1969), 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adrian, Charles R. and Press, Charles, “Decision Costs in Coalition Formation,” American Political Science Review, 62 (June, 1968), 556–563CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² The probability of affecting the outcome is a partial function of the number of participants to the collective decision, whether those participants are individuals or groups.

²³ Downs, pp. 114–142; Davis, Otto A., Hinich, Melvin J., and Ordeshook, Peter C., “An Expository Development of a Mathematical Model of the Electoral Process,” American Political Science Review, 64 (June, 1970), 426–449CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ For an excellent review of the cross pressure theory, see Verba, , “Organizational Membership and Democratic Consensus,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 27 (August, 1965), 467–469CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ All of these arguments are cast in terms of continuous variables which are continuous in character; and although this typology is being presented for purposes of exposition, the hypotheses that have been stated must be tested independently. The purpose of the typology is to summarize what has been stated earlier; that the variables under consideration create a pattern of relationships that tend to go together, and these patterns constitute the typology.

²⁶ An example of the “pluralistic city” would be New Haven, Connecticut, studied by Dahl, Robert A. and his associates, in Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961)Google Scholar. Coleman cites numerous examples of the second type of community, the “fragmented city” in his study, Community Conflict. The best description of the “communal city” is in Wood, Robert C., Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958)Google Scholar.

²⁷ One wonders what the precise relationship might be between the number of voters and the sense one has that one's own vote counts for something. Undoubtedly, the relationship reaches a saturation point such that increases in the number of voters has no appreciable effect on one's subjective feeling of the importance of one's vote. Also, it is probably true that voters systematically overestimate the importance of their vote. See Riker and Ordeshook, pp. 38–40.

²⁸ Black, Gordon S., “Patterns of Politics in Small Democracies: An Analysis of Community Politics” (doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1970), p. 123Google Scholar.

²⁹ Cf., Heard, Alexander, The Costs of Democracy (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Alexander, Herbert E., Financing the 1960 Election (Princeton, N.J.: Citizens Research Foundation)Google Scholar; Alexander, , Financing the 1964 Election (Princeton, N.J.: Citizen's Research Foundation, 1966Google Scholar; and Alexander, , Financing the 1968 Election (Boston: Heath, 1971)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Black, , “A Theory of Political Ambition: Career Choices and the Role of Structural Incentives,” p. 148Google Scholar.