The paper attempts, through an examination of Thucydides' treatment of a significant problem, to illustrate the character of an older approach to the understanding of politics and to argue, implicitly, for the validity of that approach. The approach in question is shaped by the thoughts that the barriers standing in the way of a “scientific” approach to politics are much greater than today is sometimes assumed and that there is no more direct path to the removal of those barriers than the painstaking elaboration and subsequent refinement of the assumptions which shape and frame our view of the issues of politics. Thucydides' “history” is seen as intended to facilitate such an elaboration and refinement; his treatment of Athenian imperialism is accordingly presented in various stages, which first appeal to the prejudices with which the reader is likely to approach the work and then lead him gradually, through an examination of these, to Thucydides' own understanding, which is much more heterodox than is ordinarily supposed.

Career mobility is conceptualized in terms of the amount and bias of organizational, occupational, vertical and geographical movement. An operational measure is offered for the amount of mobility (not the bias) which permits comparative generalizations to be made about officials based on simple sampling procedures. For illustrative purposes, the amount of organizational mobility is measured for two samples of federal officials: David T. Stanley's sample (N = 557) of higher civil servants and a sample (N = 300) of foreign affairs officials. Several dichotomous background variables are included for both samples of officials including: age, rank, and education. Varying background characteristics is found to make only a small mobility difference for higher civil servants and a much greater difference for foreign affairs officials. Several speculations are offered to explain the political significance of the empirical findings, and a comparative typology of career mobility is developed.

Rules changes in the Democratic party have substantially altered one of the fundamental institutions of American politics. This article is an effort to assess some of the effects of the new rules on the selection of delegates to the Democratic National Convention on the strategic environment faced by presidential candidates. The article outlines the basic aspects of those rule changes, describes the problems involved in the implementation of the rules, and attempts to evaluate some of the consequences faced by the presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern in the context of the California primary of 1972.

This paper examines certain major demographic bases of ethnic identity change among the mass populations of the non-Russian nationalities of the USSR. Ethnic identity is defined here as an individual's affective attachment to certain core symbols of his nationality group: the group name and its historic language. The hypotheses tested concern the impact of social mobilization, contact with Russians, and traditional religion on ethnic identity change. The levels of Russification of 46 indigenous nationalities whose official national homelands have Autonomous Oblast status or higher are examined on the basis of 1959 Soviet census materials. By use of regression analysis it is shown that: (a) social mobilization is strongly conducive to the Russification of non-Russian nationalities residing in their official areas; (b) exposure to Russians is conducive to the Russification of both mobilized and unmobilized local populations, but the Russification effect of exposure to Russians is much smaller for the unmobilized than for the mobilized populations; (c) even where exposure to Russians is extensive and enduring, both socially mobilized and unmobilized Muslim ethnic groups are much less likely to be Russified than non-Muslims; it is proposed that a Muslim ethnic ideology mediates between the dynamic demographic influences on Russification and the actual manifestation of Russification.

This study was conducted to test the frequently made assertion that primary elections are divisive among party activists who participate in primary and subsequent general election campaigns. Analysis of data collected from 209 campaign workers personally identified by five candidates in two vigorously contested races for Congress in Iowa's First District indicated that the activists were an elite group on whom the primary had a divisive impact that was particularly notable among those who supported candidates who lost the primary. The alienation felt by many respondents who worked for losers in both parties adversely affected their general party support, voting, and the willingness to perform the many conventional activities necessary to a general election campaign, but it did not appear to have a substantial influence on the general election. Generally, those who defected were less experienced and less strongly identified with their parties than those who remained active. Moreover, most of the antagonism may be limited to the single general election; eighty per cent of all participants in the study expected to be as active or more active in future campaigns.

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of the terms “virtue,” “obligation,” and “politics,” a project suggested by similar analyses currently underway in the field of ethics. The essence of the study is the contrast between politics understood in terms of virtue (as by Plato, Aristotle, and, in a way, Rousseau) and politics understood in terms of obligation (as by Hobbes, Locke, John Rawls and, in a way, Rousseau). The paper argues that obligation and virtue form the center of two separate languages or paradigms for the formulation and discussion of basic political questions, and discusses the theoretical grounds for the neglect of the language of virtue by the greater part of modern political thought. This discussion, while pointing to the possible weaknesses of the language of virtue, also serves to indicate (directly and by contrast) the limitations of the language of obligation as a way of understanding politics.

The relationship of social class to partisan choice in the United States has declined during the postwar years. Through an analysis of presidential election surveys conducted by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan from 1948 through 1968, it is demonstrated that this decline is largely a result of generational change. Strong relationships between class and partisan choice persist among older voters, but among younger voters these relationships are weak. A time-series cohort analysis provides considerable support for an historically based generational explanation for age-group differences and permits examination of one process through which partisan realignments may occur.

It is often asserted that state legislatures are characterized by low membership stability, attributed to low career commitment on the part of individual legislators. Such assertions are usually based on the high proportion of first-term members in most legislatures, even though the available data on this subject are limited and contradictory. Two better measures of career commitment and membership stability are: (a) the number of incumbents seeking reelection, and (b) average prior legislative service. Data for these variables are presented for 20 sessions of the Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin legislatures. The data show a gradual but substantial decline in the number of first-term legislators and a gradual but substantial increase in membership stability. The computation of such data is an essential first step in documenting the causes and consequences of membership stability.

The purpose of this article is to assess the effect of the winner-take-all feature of the Electoral College on the allocation of resources by candidates to the states in a presidential campaign. Conceptualizing the campaign as a two-person zero-sum infinite game, it is found that the main effect of this feature is to induce candidates to allocate campaign resources roughly in proportion to the 3/2's power of the electoral votes of each state, which creates a peculiar bias that makes voters living in the largest states as much as three times as attractive campaign targets as voters living in the smallest states. Empirically, it is shown that the 3/2's rule explains quite well the time allocations of presidential and vice-presidential candidates in the 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972 campaigns; for presidential campaigns in 1976 and 1980, optimal allocations are indicated for all fifty states and the District of Columbia. A comparison with optimal allocations under a system of direct popular-vote election of the president reveals that such a system would be less susceptible to manipulative strategies than the Electoral College as well as being compatible with the egalitarian principle of “one man, one vote.”

This essay ascertains some general conditions for equivalence and nonequivalence among six election objectives: 01, maximizing expected plurality; 02, maximizing proportion of expected vote; 02, maximizing expected vote; 04, maximizing probability that plurality exceeds some level; 05, maximizing probability that proportion of vote exceeds some level; 06, maximizing probability that vote exceeds some level. The major findings are these: (1) 01, 02, and 03 are equivalent if the election is zero-sum-like in expected vote; (2) 01 and 02 are equivalent if competition is strongly symmetric. A necessary condition for this equivalence is also presented for 2-candidate elections: (3) 01 and 04 are equivalent, as are 03 and 06, if the candidate's forecasting error is independent of all strategies; (4) 01 and 04 are equivalent for two-candidate elections, and for n-candidate elections 02 and 05 are equivalent, as are 03 and 06, if the distribution of a candidate's forecasting error is multivariate normal, and if the level of plurality, proportion, or vote to be exceeded is the minimax value of the election game under 01, 02, or 03; (5) findings of equivalence and nonequivalence depend upon the definition of equivalence (findings 1 and 2 rely upon an election with all candidates at equilibrium strategies, while findings 3 and 4 do not); (6) equivalence and nonequivalence among election objectives may be sensitive to the candidate's attitude toward risk, i.e., to the functional form of his utility function in pluraliy, vote proportion, or vote; election objectives depend on information, competitive environment, and constitutional arrangements. Hence, statements of preference for alternative election systems, laws, and reforms perforce entail reasonable theoretical expectations about the way in which these systems, laws, and reforms affect the candidates' campaign objectives, as well as about equivalence and nonequivalence among these objectives.

The argument of this essay is that Talmon and Popper are mistaken in their suggestion that speculation about human affairs is governed by an inexorable logic of political consequences: that there exist certain broad perspectives or ‘paradigms” that impel men willy-nilly to pathological extremes in their political views, apart from intention or historical circumstance.

I seek to demonstrate that the general perspective which informed the thought of Helvétius—unquestionably one of the most manipulative of thinkers in his conception of politics—was simply the framework of early-modern science, as it was understood in France. It was the same philosophy which served his unequivocally libertarian contemporaries, such as Voltaire and Diderot, as well as their predecessors. Helvétius' political conclusions resulted, not from pathological attitudes or doctrines, but rather from his attempt to resolve a problem engendered within the new science, a fundamental dilemma in French thinking concerning the relationship of the individual to society and the state.

This study of the House Public Works committee examines the relationship between membership goals and the degree of party conflict, identifies conditions of party conflict and cooperation, and links party conflict and cooperation to policies adopted by the House.

Party conflict is the Public Works committee's most striking behavioral characteristic. This party conflict stems from (a) the issues processed by the committee and (b) the partisan program orientations of committee members. Beyond these initial sources of party conflict on Public Works, there is a norm of partisanship adopted by each of the parties on the committee in order to achieve an extra measure of party cohesion. Public Works committee party conflict is, to be sure, often modified by shared interests cutting across party lines. Committee party cooperation stems, however, not from widespread shared interests but, instead, from a fundamental distrust between the parties respecting the allocation of federal largesse. To preclude porkbarreling, Congress has adopted fixed allocation formulas for distributing the boodle on programs likely to involve a majority in each party, thereby constraining the parties on the committee to cooperate on such proposals.

Whether Public Works is united or divided when reporting legislation, the House of Representatives will typically adopt its proposals. This success of the Public Works committee is attributable to a mixture of anticipation and influence.