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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Many studies have sought to investigate contextual influences on individual electoral behavior using aggregate data. The shortcomings of this approach are discussed, focusing on the relationship between black concentration and southern white support for George Wallace for president in 1968. Through combining aggregate and individual-level data and comparing a series of models, black concentration is found to increase white support for Wallace. Intraregional differences in the relationship between white support for Wallace and local black concentration are equalized when contextual influences at the state level are brought into the analysis. Black concentration contextual effects are independent of those of urbanization, education, or residence in Wallace's home state of Alabama. Relative primary group support for Wallace and relative issue proximity to Wallace are then shown to be the intervening variables linking contextual characteristics and electoral choice.

The reliability and stability of survey items designed to measure political attitudes are important to the study of political behavior. Several past studies have examined the reliability and stability of items measuring one construct, that of political efficacy. The results of this prior research have been contradictory, in part because of the limitations of the methodologies used. In this article, the authors employ path analysis to examine more closely the stability and reliability of the four SRC items commonly used to measure political efficacy. The American Panel Study (1956–1960), in which efficacy is measured at two points in time, is used as the data base. The authors conclude that two of the four items (NO CARE and NO SAY) seem to measure best what is meant by political efficacy. These two items are more stable and reliable than previously thought, while the other items are relatively unstable and unreliable, and they display systematic differences from each other and from the NO CARE and NO SAY items.

In the period following World War II before the declaration of martial law in the Philippines, politics and heavy demands for patronage affected the allocation of resources, the administrative process, and personnel policies in ways inimical to the interests of businessmen and technocrats. When faced with intense competition, politicians pressed to employ growing numbers of clients and protégés in local administration. Strong political machines were better able than weak machines to ignore pressures for social services benefitting largely the lower class. The level of political mobilization and size of the lower class increased expenditures on primary education, and expenditures on intermediate and secondary education grew as the percentage of the electorate that was lower class increased. To the dismay of business interests and technocrats, “wasteful” expenditures on local administration and social services were most institutionalized and difficult to cut, while expenditures on economic improvements proved more elastic.

This analysis shows, in contrast to previously published work, that a divisive primary hurts a senatorial candidate's chances for success in the general election. The relationship between divisiveness and lack of success continues to hold when incumbency and state party orientations are controlled. This relationship has an important implication regarding representation. The fact that divisive primaries do hurt strengthens the representation of weak and minor state parties in the U.S. Senate.

The problem of authority has a practical and a theoretical side. Practically, the decline of authority contributes to the crisis of legitimacy in contemporary governments and to difficulties in the practice of morality. Theoretically, authority is often confused with power, force, or coercion. Thus, it is viewed with suspicion. The thesis of this paper is that authority is not a form of power; rather, it transforms power. Like power, force, and coercion, authority is directive, but it is so in quite a different way. An examination of the concept of authority in three very different theorists – Carl Friedrich, Yves R. Simon, and Michael Polanyi – reveals that a sound concept of authority must be rooted in community as a system of shared beliefs, experiences, and traditions and in transcendent standards referred to by such beliefs, experiences, and traditions. Authority is that which directs a community to its proper end.

Since Dawson and Robinson, a dominant issue in the quantitative study of public policy has been the relative importance of socioeconomic and political variables for determining policy outcomes. It is argued here that past efforts to resolve this issue have been unsatisfactory, largely because they relied on inadequate statistical techniques, i.e., simple correlation, partial correlation, or multiple regression. Coefficients from these techniques are irrelevant for all but the most peculiar models of public policy. In general, if the researcher wishes to assess the relative importance of independent variables, it will be necessary to resort to path analysis of a formally constructed causal model. The comparison of “effects coefficients,” derived from path analysis, is offered as the preferred means of evaluating independent variables, superior to comparisons of coefficients from simple correlation, partial correlation, or multiple regression. When the effects coefficients are actually calculated for a popular model of welfare policy, socioeconomic variables appear much more important than political variables, contrary to interpretations coming from the more traditional statistical techniques.

The influence of political literature has often proved elusive to empirical political science, partly because of the subjectivity of literary response, and partly because of social science methods which are largely incapable of dealing with subjective phenomena in a satisfactory way. A distinction is made between the experimental methods of expression which focus on objective responses, and the methods of impression which focus on subjective responses. Experimental methods are then applied to interpretations of Golding's Lord of the Flies, to the effects on imagery of reading Mazlish's In Search of Nixon, and to reactions to Burdick's The Ninth Wave. An illustration is also given of the experimental study of literary response in the single case.