The growth of the public sector in recent years has been accompanied by both centralization and decentralization. More important than any such shifts of power or function between levels of government, however, has been the emergence of new arenas of mutual influence among levels of government. In this way recent developments in intergovernmental relations are adding a new dimension to the national system of representation. That the federal division of powers should serve a representative function is entirely in accord with the original design. A look at this design in the light of the theory of its founders helps one perceive this distinctive purpose. Then as now American federalism was primarily an instrument of national democracy. Current American experience with this aspect of intergovernmental relations, moreover, suggests questions for comparative study of the contemporary welfare state.

After the drastic relaxation of voter registration requirements in the 1960s, do present state laws keep people away from the polls? More specifically, which provisions have how much effect on what kinds of people? We have answered these questions with data from the Current Population Survey conducted by the Census Bureau in November 1972.

State registration laws reduced turnout in the 1972 presidential election by about nine percentage points. The impact of the laws was heaviest in the South and on less educated people of both races. Early deadlines for registration and limited registration office hours were the biggest impediments to turnout.

Contrary to expectations, changing these requirements would not substantially alter the character of the electorate. The voting population would be faintly less affluent and educated; the biggest difference would be a matter of one or two percentage points. In strictly political terms, the change would be even fainter–a gain for the Democrats of less than half a percent.

Several studies in recent years have examined the question of mass issue voting in the United States and have found that people vote more frequently on the basis of policy questions than has heretofore been thought. It would seem to be useful for the study of comparative politics to explore mass policy voting in other democratic countries. The colored immigration issue in Britain is a particularly appropriate one to examine because of the controversy surrounding its impact on voting behavior, especially in the 1970 election. Are the policy preferences of the electorate related to their voting behavior? This question is examined longitudinally through a secondary analysis of the Butler-Stokes election surveys of 1964,1966, and 1970 for England.

After utilizing controls for a large number of variables, one finds that theimmigration issue had no significant impact on electoral behavior in 1964 and 1966. In the 1970 election, however, the Conservatives gained an estimated increment of 6.7 percent in votes because many people perceived them to be the party more likely to keep immigrants out and voted in accordance with that perception. This impact can be attributed to Enoch Powell's associating the Conservative party with restrictive immigration control in the public mind.

Despite their prominence in political affairs, values have rarely been studied through survey research. This article offers groundwork for quantitative investigations of politicians' values by describing the development, administration and assessment of a ranking technique in the British House of Commons. It uses tape-recorded interviews which suggest that values are intelligible components of politicians' belief systems and help identify difficulties in conceptualizing and measuring them. The ranking instrument employed to measure values demonstrates its adequacy by reproducing familiar cleavages between political camps, distinguishing ideological party factions and generating data related to themes MPs put forward when discussing institutions and policy problems.

Many students of citizen participation claim that one solution to the problem of political inequality in liberal democracies lies in the establishment of direct participatory channels in decentralized socioeconomic and political institutions similar to those found in Yugoslavia. Others argue that the availability of participatory channels in the workplace leads to the domination of these channels by a technocratic elite. Still other students of participation in Yugoslavia claim that participatory channels are dominated by the political elite, the League of Communists.

In this paper, we examine this set of conflicting hypotheses by using data which come from an extensive survey of participatory activities in four Yugoslav republics. Our findings are consistent with the interpretation that workers' councils open channels for a more technocratically oriented participation. When it comes to other kinds of activity, affiliation with the League is more important than socioeconomic or professional status in determining who participates. But because League members come disproportionately from upper-status groups, there is not a marked difference in the extent to which membership in workers' councils and participation in other kinds of activity are biased in favor of the advantaged segments of Yugoslav society. In each case, but for different reasons, it is the upper-status citizen who is likely to be active.

This article attempts to fill two gaps in the literature on individual party choice. First, it deals with hitherto unanswered questions about relationships between social cleavages and party choice in Israel. Second, the article attempts to overcome methodological problems arising in the multivariate analysis of multiparty systems by utilizing Goodman's method of log-linear contingency table analysis. In the sample, occupation is not as strongly related to party choice as is a nonhierarchical dimension of economic position, sector of the economy. Ethnicity is modestly related to party choice, but hypotheses that the relationship is affected by place of birth, age, or other variables are disconfirmed. Hypotheses that the relationship between religiosity and party choice is affected by economic position are also disconfirmed. The advantages of using log linear contingency table analysis are demonstrated.

Eric Voegelin's evaluation of politics is grounded in the symbols and experiences which illumine man's participation in the process of reality. The trail of symbols and equivalent experiences whic constitute history provides the fundamental criteria by which the language of politics is to be evaluated. The central philosophical symbol is the Between (metaxy), coined by Plato. It indicates that human existence is a tension between the poles of the divine height and the cosmic depth. Politics and its language must acknowledge the limitations of this tension: that the human perspective is always from within reality. Existentially, man is a participant, not an observer looking at non-metric reality from the “outside.” The existential balance of the open psyche is the product of a perpetual struggle against the tendency to distortions. Such distortions can arise when one or other aspect of reality is allowed to absorb the whole, and individual thinkers attempt to abolish the tension by replacing it with a system which provides the “solution” to the mystery of reality.

Leo Strauss's epic rendition of the history of Western political philosophy has been a principal factor in the establishment and perpetuation of the myth of the tradition or the belief that the conventional series of classic works from Plato to Nietzsche represents the development of modern political ideas and constitutes the core of an inherited pattern of thought which, in turn, provides the basic context for interpreting particular texts. Much of the scholarly commentary on the history of political philosophy has been directed toward a critique of contemporary political thought and action, and the idea of the tradition has served as a vehicle for this historical etiology. In Strauss's argument, the concept of the tradition plays a strategic rhetorical function, but the myth of the tradition in its various forms has become a pervasive regulative assumption in both teaching and research.

The seventeenth-century conflict between patriarchal and liberal political thought grew out of a shift in views on the nature of man and society. Sir Robert Filmer insisted that the king ruled absolutely, the divinely ordained father of his people. Sidney, Tyrrell, and Locke grounded political power in an act of consent on the part of free-born individuals.

To what extent did these changing beliefs about human nature also bring about new perspectives on the nature, role and status of women? While this aspect of political theory has usually remained unexplored, it was an important critical weapon in the battle between patriarchal and liberal thought. Patriarchal theorists, relying on the Book of Genesis, could assign women to an appropriately subordinate place in family and society. Consent theories, though, as Filmer noted, depended for consistency on the inclusion of women (as well as children) in the formation of civil society. Early liberal writers including Tyrrell and Sidney were unwilling, then, to abandon patriarchal theory in all its forms and insisted that the consent of the “promiscuous multitude” of women and children was unnecessary. John Locke never specifically dealt with the role of women in the formation of society. Thus, he seemed to have escaped some of the difficulties of finding a place for women consistent with both traditional views of female status and newer views of human nature. Where Locke did speak directly about women, he often departed from traditional views in favor of an individualist approach. Examples of this may be found in his comments on marriage, education and in his discussion of female preaching.

This article critically examines the commonly held proposition that Madison advocated separation of powers as a means of thwarting majority rule, or, conversely, of protecting identifiable minority interests. Rather, Madison's chief purpose in advancing the doctrine of separation of powers–one which was shared by the majority of his contemporaries–was to prevent governmental tyranny whose characteristic feature was seen as arbitrary and capricious rule resulting in government of men, not of laws. Many modern critics' analyses of the Madisonian model (most notably, Burns, Dahl, and advocates of a responsible party system) are seriously deficient because they fail to take into account this dimension of the model. Madison's writings, principally in The Federalist, as well as his remarks at the Philadelphia convention, clearly indicate that one of his central concerns was simultaneously to provide for protection against governmental tyranny and to guarantee popular control of government. This article examines in some detail certain critical aspects of this endeavor.

This paper looks at representativeness in terms of policy dimensions. As previous studies also have demonstrated, the analysis provides evidence that the level of policy agreement varies across policy domains. The policy linkage is weak on questions of taxation and government administration. Only on contemporary liberalism does the level of policy agreement begin to meet the standards of representational theory. The occurrence of elections is found to be a particularly important determinant of legislative voting vis-à-vis constituency preferences. California senators, elected for four-year terms, are undeniably unrepresentative to direct opinion during the first three years of their terms; representativeness increases dramatically during the final year. Senators facing the possibility of having their reelection fortunes adversely affected by a presidential campaign are particularly attuned to district opinion during the final year of their terms. Assemblymen, who are elected for two-year terms, are attuned to the wishes of their constituencies throughout their terms. As the Founding Fathers believed, the frequency of elections conditions representatives' loyalty to the preferences of the represented.

Systematic testing of Downsian voter rationality is accomplished using a computer simulation technique on the 1964 SRC voting survey. The simulation tests both the hypotheses predicting whether an individual will vote and for whom an individual will vote. To evaluate the results of the tests we develop a statistic analogous to Pearson's r. This statistic measures the percentage improvement over a random guess technique. Utilizing this statistic, Downs explains 68.5 percent of the unexplained variance in the voters' choices of party. Three alternative interpretations of the turnout decision are then considered, each premised on a different notion of how the costs of voting are distributed among the voters. Here we use an Engel Curve technique to develop the turnout decision and explain 92 percent of the variance. The importance of the various elements of the Downsian theory are evaluated and, in contrast to some recent conjectures, the probability of making a difference on the outcome of the election is shown to have an effect on the turnout decision. Finally, to determine the viability of the results, the SRC “6 factor” model is developed in an analogous fashion and used to predict both turnout and direction of vote.