What happens when there is a change in leadership in the Soviet Union? Does the period of leadership succession present unusual opportunities for domestic policy concerns to be vented? Or, are major issues on the Soviet domestic policy agenda addressed mainly after a succession of leadership is completed? Answers to such questions have a bearing on how the Soviet elite is replenished, and more generally help to improve understanding of Soviet politics. Two specialists on Soviet and East European politics, Valerie Bunce and Philip Roeder, have been drawn to different conclusions about these issues.

This analysis demonstrates that policy issues play an important role in the selection of members of Congress. We differ with the conclusion of much of the existing research on congressional elections, which indicates that policy considerations are of minor importance. We have conducted an analysis of the 1982 U.S. Senate elections, drawing on data from the CBS News/New York Times 1982 congressional poll and from 23 statewide exit polls. We demonstrate that (1) candidates behave as though they believe issues are important to voters; (2) candidates' policy positions systematically influence voters' decisions; and (3) candidates' issue positions and voters' evaluations of the president and the economy interact to provide clear patterns of policy effects on Senate election outcomes. Policy effects are substantial and systematic in Senate elections, and cannot be omitted if we are to appreciate the importance of congressional elections in the national policy-making process.

There is conventional political wisdom that high voter turnout in a U.S. presidential election advantages the majority party. Because the Democratic party has been the dominant party in recent decades, this turnout advantage is often believed to accrue to Democratic presidential candidates. In an article in the June 1980 issue of the Review, James DeNardo challenged this conventional view. Indeed, he claimed that the majority party was likely to suffer with increased turnout when the behavior of core and peripheral voters is taken into account. Harvey J. Tucker and Arnold Vedlitz take issue with DeNardo's reasoning and evidence, and DeNardo embellishes and underscores his original case.

What factors best account for the 1974 congressional election results? Were the Democratic party gains in House seats due mainly to the behavior of “strategic politicians” who sought or accepted candidacies and raised effective campaign war chests? Or were the Democratic gains due more to the impact of Watergate and the economy on voters' choices? In this Controversy, Gary C. Jacobson and Samuel Kernell defend the “strategic politicians” thesis, while Eric Uslaner and Margaret Conway stand by their more conventional accounting of the 1974 election outcome.

An ethical defense of the welfare state may, as Robert E. Goodin has argued, adumbrate the notion that responsibility to provide for “needy strangers” flows from the same source as family responsibility. But this view of the moral responsibility for protecting vulnerable people is open to challenge. In this Controversy, Jeffrey Obler takes issue on this point, and Goodin replies.

Comparative political analysts seek empirical generalizations which will hold water across systems and over a period of time. Yet, modeling important political phenomena over more than a handful of countries is still rather unusual. One focus for substantial comparative research has been the coup d'état—an irregular change of governmental leadership by force—in African countries. Scholars who have engaged in this research find they have various conceptual and methodological differences of opinion. In this Controversy, Robert Jackman and Rosemary O'Kane raise the issues in dispute. Their contentions are answered by Thomas Johnson, Pat McGowan, and Robert Slater. The exchange highlights important research issues without necessarily resolving them.

A research question of perennial interest is, “What are the exogenous variables which best account for the differential distribution of income across nations?” Better understanding of the causes of inequalities in income distribution has been sought by investigating the effects of tax policies on income allocation and growth in capitalist countries. The quantitative analyses of these matters have engendered some debate about the adequacy of data, and the sufficiency of measurement. A preliminary foray into this research vineyard by Claudio Katz, Vincent Mahler, and Michael Franz is criticized here by Ronald King and Steven Jackson. In turn, Katz, Mahler, and Franz respond.

To resolve the paradoxical finding that economic conditions and presidential popularity powerfully relate to quadrennial movement in the House vote, but explain little individual voting variation, Jacobson and Kernell have advanced their “strategic politicians” model of midterm elections. Purportedly, the early-year political environment helps determine how many of a party's strong potential contenders risk challenging incumbents; voters in turn respond to the quality of candidates before them in November, and thus indirectly reward the party favored by this early-year environment. Despite its current prominence, however, the theory does not stand up to empirical investigation. A time-series equation of midterm outcomes regressed on early-year national conditions does not fare particularly well when contrasted with comparable equations assuming direct-effects voting. Furthermore, challenger quality has only a weak influence on individual voters—subordinate, in fact, to the effects of economic attitudes and presidential evaluations.

In this research note I seek to determine whether a significantly predicting social background model for analyzing the votes of Supreme Court justices is time-bound. I argue that an affirmative result poses serious questions for past uses of such models, none of which has controlled for the possibility that time is a confounding variable. A model that significantly predicted the votes of the justices in the Court's 1903–1968 terms was constructed. Analysis with this model for two periods—from 1903 to 1935, and from 1936 to 1968—established that the model was not timeneutral. Appropriate theoretical implications are drawn.

In an article previously published in this Review I demonstrated that power-seeking, by which I mean the pursuit of social dominance, has a biochemical marker, namely, whole blood serotonin (WBS). Those individuals who are especially hard-charging and competitive have especially high WBS levels. This paper presents the results from an investigation of dynamics in the response of high WBS individuals to actual competition. My expectation—that they would exhibit special physiological activation in the face of challenge—is fully borne out by the evidence. Four hormonal indicators of activation were followed in blood samples taken during a series of social competitions. All four show distinctive patterns for the high WBS group. These results, in addition to providing new evidence on the behavior of the endocrine system in competitive settings, impressively support the view that WBS is a biological property having fundamental significance for behavioral political science.

The effects of respondent characteristics with regard to the propensity of nonvoters to report that they voted are examined by analyzing the vote validation studies conducted by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center in 1964, 1976, and 1980. Previous research has suggested that vote overreporting derives from the respondent's wish to appear to engage in socially desirable behavior. This earlier research suggests that the only respondent characteristic that is strongly related to overreporting is race; measures of socioeconomic status and of general political attitudes are said to be at most weakly related to the tendency to exaggerate voting. These earlier conclusions are incorrect. We measure the extent of overreporting for the population “at risk” of overreporting voting: those who did not actually vote. Respondents most inclined to overreport their voting are those who are highly educated, those most supportive of the regime norm of voting, and those to whom the norm of voting is most salient—the same characteristics that are related to the probability that a person actually votes. Blacks are only slightly more likely to overreport voting than whites. The pattern of relations between education and vote overreporting is opposite what would be found if those who falsely reported voting fit the typical image of the uneducated, uninvolved, “acquiescent” respondent who is concerned primarily with pleasing the interviewer.

We propose measuring group support for political parties by means of multivariate techniques that have become standard in other areas of political behavior. This approach yields improved insights into the marginal difference made by membership in each group and into the nature of a party's support coalition. As an example of this approach, we analyze the Democratic coalition since 1952. Our results differ from those of previous studies in a number of ways. Most significantly, differences with respect to the strength and timing of partisan changes lend support to Carmines and Stimson's conclusion that a realignment centering on race occurred in the mid-1960s. Our findings also indicate that the Democratic party is no longer so dependent on a few groups, as it was in the 1950s, but is now almost equally dependent on six groups.

The carryover hypothesis asserts that participants' candidate support behavior in the general election is affected by their preferences for their party's nomination. This paper examines data from activist and national sample surveys for evidence of a carryover effect in the 1980 election. There is a detectable carryover effect on voting behavior both for activists and for citizens generally. Among activists, where evidence about candidate support behaviors beyond voting is available, the effect on such activity is substantial, and increases with the effort associated with the general election activity in question.