Analysis of national election surveys from 1956 to 1968 reveals significant changes in the voters' perceptions of issues and the major parties. There has been a considerable increase in the correlation of party identification and opinion on six major issues, relating to social welfare, racial integration, and foreign aid. Voters are more prone to see a difference between the parties on these issues and are increasingly likely to identify the Democratic party as favorable to federal governmental action. These findings contrast with those of The American Voter and similar studies. The reasons for the changes cannot be found in demographic factors, as tested by controls for age cohorts, education, region, and race. More probably the explanation lies in strictly political factors. A particularly important event was the presidential campaign of 1964, in which ideological differences between the parties were deliberately emphasized. The electorate responded to this campaign by becoming more ideologically aware, and its learning appears to have persisted through the 1968 election. This finding suggests that past conclusions about the low ideological awareness of the electorate were specific to the Eisenhower era, and that the issue content of the vote will vary with the stimuli provided by the general political environment.

The importance of issues in deciding elections changes from one election to the next. As Key has shown, the issues of the role of the federal government in social life helped create the New Deal Democratic majority. In contrast, issues had only a marginal impact on the apolitical elections of the 1950s. Converse's technique of normal vote analysis reveals that issues were again highly related to the vote in 1968. This was particularly true of attitudes toward Vietnam, urban unrest and race, social welfare, and Johnson's performance as president.

Yet, even in an election in which issues appear important, some can have very different consequences for popular control of policy than others. On some issues, the electorate exercises no effective constraints on leaders' policy choices. On others (e.g., the escalation in Vietnam), the electorate permits leaders a wide array of options when a policy is adopted and passes a retrospective judgment on such choices in subsequent elections. Finally, on still other issues, the public may limit the options of leaders at the time a policy is adopted. The paper suggests the stringent conditions necessary for this type of popular control to exist.

People have three ways of responding to neighborhood problems: leaving (exit), political action (voice), and doing nothing (passivity). The model assumes: 1. Voice is more likely to ameliorate neighborhood problems than exit or passivity; exit, in fact, can make things worse, 2. Rational behavior on the part of residents, coupled with constraints that limit options: status, race, the responsiveness of government and the nature of the problems. Survey data on one city are combined with census data differentiating neighborhood types. Voice is characteristic of suburban areas among high and low status whites; exit is characteristic of white urban areas. Among ghetto blacks—whose exit options are severely constrained—voice is most characteristic. Problems faced by blacks and whites living in the city are similar, while their adaptations are different.

While significant progress has been made in establishing a legal barrier to the further spread of nuclear weapons, some important nations are withholding approval of this Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Political factors are very significant, but agreement is made even more difficult by persistent ambiguities in technological forecasts of “how far we or they are from the bomb.” The time-lag for any crash weapon programs will not remain as extended as one might hope, because civilian technology itself is drawing states ever closer to de facto military capabilities. Yet the length of this time-lag may be crucial to the maintenance of peace if political crises emerge. Since scientists offer widely varying estimates on such time-lags, a graphical formulation is offered to reduce ambiguity. In the end, the effectiveness of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards under the NPT may depend more on their symbolic and political impact than on their technology.

Although the term “ideology” is ubiquitous in modern political discourse, it is used in diverse and usually ambiguous ways which limit its value as an analytical concept. The main ambiguity arises from the fact that, as most writers use it, the concept of ideology does not provide criteria for distinguishing ideological thought from nonideological thought. Lacking this power to make concrete discriminations, the concept fails to achieve empirical relevance. This paper attempts to remedy that deficiency and save the concept of ideology for the explanation of politics.

The problem of conceptualization is approached by viewing ideology primarily as a cultural phenomenon. As such, it is argued, ideology has characteristics that distinguish it from other symbol systems. Of special importance in this regard is the identification of basic differentia between ideology on the one hand, and myth and Utopia (with which ideology is often confused) on the other. The features of ideology identified in this comparative analysis are then discussed in fuller detail with a view to understanding (1) the significance of ideology in politics, and (2) the way in which the concept of ideology can help us to understand politics, insofar as politics involves ideology.

Observers of city politics have often stated that political leadership—usually mayoral leadership—is a crucial ingredient in a city's ability to deal with its problems. And studies of successful leaders in urban systems have led to the formulation of a model of the “political entrepreneur” who is adept at accumulating political resources and pyramiding them to gain increased influence. Based on four years of observation of politics in Oakland, California, this study suggests that successful mayoral leadership and resource-pyramiding may be limited by governmental structure, the personality of the mayor, and the nature of the political system.

In Oakland, fragmented institutional authority and the council-manager form of government have created obstacles for elected officials. A privately oriented, “nonpolitical” mayor has avoided publicity and has tended to underutilize, rather than pyramid, his resources. Finally, in an amorphous political system characterized by a lack of group and party activity, a mayor is denied both information and support. By examining the ways in which the performance of Oakland's mayor diverges from a model of political leadership, we can identify some of the factors that support or limit such leadership.

This research note analyzes a key premise of the thesis of “institutional imbalance” in less developed nations, the idea that administrative modernity promotes overparticipation in the performance of political and governmental functions. Judgmental data on fifty-seven Latin American, Asian, and African nations suggest that level of administrative development is highly correlated with overparticipation, but in precisely the opposite direction from that predicted in the literature— that is, the relationship is negative. This finding indicates the necessity of reconsidering some of the conventional wisdom of comparative administration.

After a brief discussion of the existing literature and a description of the data set, the paper compares the role of four international institutions in two-party disputes in terms of (1) participant behavior and characteristics, (2) relationships between participants, and (3) characteristics of the disputes and institutional responses. The major purpose of the comparison is to assess various middle-range theoretical ideas that have been suggested by scholars and to determine whether the differences on the variables are a function of structural (PCIJ and ICJ versus League and UN) or historical (PCIJ and League versus ICJ and UN) variations. A final section of the paper presents a scheme for further research on the role of international institutions in the international bargaining process.

We propose a simple game-theory model of single-member plurality electoral systems, two parties with unequal resources being the players. Strategies consist of allocations of resources among the n contests, and a party's payoff is the number of contests to which it has assigned more resources than the other party. Mixed strategies exist which are asymptotically optimal as n increases. Identifying a party's proportion of total resources with its total vote proportion, we predict that the swing ratio, or marginal seat proportion per vote proportion, is 2. This compares to empirical findings which range between 2 and 4, and to the hitherto unexplained cube law, which predicts 3. We suggest that the strategic problem modeled by this game accounts for the major part of the swing ratio effect. Factors which vary from system to system, such as proportion of hard-core support attached to parties, may amplify this effect.

In this paper problems of social choice in general, and political choice in particular, are considered in light of uncertainty. The space of social alternatives in this formulation includes not only pure social states, but lotteries or probability distributions over those states as well. In the context of candidate strategy selection in a spatial model of political choice, candidate strategy sets are represented by pure strategies—points in the space of alternatives—and ambiguous strategies—lotteries over those points. Questions about optimal strategy choice and the equilibrium properties of these choices are then entertained. Duncan Black's theorem about the dominance of the median preference is generalized, and further contingencies in which the theorem is false are specified. The substantive foci of these results are: (1) the conditions in which seekers of political office will rationally choose to appear equivocal in their policy intentions; and (2) the role of institutional structure in defining equilibrium.

Cluster-bloc analysis is a useful method of examining the voting records of a legislature, in order to find what subgroups of members regularly vote together. Agreement scores are calculated for every legislator with every other legislator. Then when a group is found to have all its members in high agreement with each other they are referred to as a cluster bloc. These groups, which are discovered empirically, are not necessarily the same as the formal caucus groups. So far each researcher has had to use his own judgment as to what constitutes “high agreement,” but it can be shown that the cutoff points can be established statistically, against the null hypothesis of random voting. Since each score can be tested for significance, it is possible to use statistically based indices of cohesion for the legislature or any specified subgroup and indices of adhesion between the various subgroups. Examples are given for the African group in the UN General Assembly.