This study reports the codification of basic authority characteristics of 336 national political systems (polities) that functioned in 91 nation-states between 1800 and 1971. In form the typical 19th-century polity was an autocracy with minimal functions. Its 20th-century counterpart was either an activist plural democracy or an activist autocracy. The incidence of system-transforming political change has been equally high and pervasive in both European and Third-world polities, but greater in the 20th century than the 19th. The data are used to test three hypotheses that attribute the persistence and adaptability of political systems to their authority characteristics. “Institutionalization” arguments about the stability-enhancing effects of complexity and directiveness receive no consistent support. Conventional beliefs about the greater durability of democracies vs. autocracies vs. anocracies (uninstitutionalized polities) are confirmed only in Europe in the 20th century. The most durable historical and Afro-Asian polities have been either autocratic or anocratic. The data generally support the hypothesis that “pure” political systems—consistently democratic or consistently autocratic—are more durable than systems of mixed authority characteristics. Long-term trends in political “development” and their determinants are discussed in the light of the findings.

Starting with nineteenth-century jurisprudence, this essay traces the changing perceptions of the nature and role of groups in politics as affected in turn by scientific reformism, classic pluralism, and descriptive science orientations to the study of politics. The work of Laski and Bentley is highlighted.

The essay contends that political science has not grown by scientific study laid upon scientific study, but rather by a process of gradual encroachment of ideas in which basic premises, questions, and terms shifted without adequate examination. It is argued that this change is not properly portrayed as a trend from abstract legal metaphysics to ever more sophisticated approximations of reality. The forgotten contributions of past orientations are stressed, and the reasons that Bentley was ignored in his day discussed.

More specifically, the study concludes that the process of accretion of ideas was of some benefit to political science as a discipline, but the heritage left by this process was negative in two important respects: the neglect of a dynamic in favor of a static perspective, and the divorce of normative theory from empirical research on American politics.

Immediately prior to the 1970 parliamentary election in the Republic of South Africa, 462 white voters in Cape Town were questioned about their demographic backgrounds, voting intentions, and political attitudes. The study showed that ethnicity is the major determinant of party vote: Afrikaners vote for the National Party, the English-speaking for the United Party. SES-related factors predict party identification only insofar as they covary with ethnicity. While a liberalization of political attitudes with rising SES can be observed, this has no bearing on electoral behavior. Party vote is not related to ideological or issue orientations, but is related to the intensity of the voter's identification with his own ethnic group and with white South Africans in general. Voters tend to react positively or negatively to the NP, with the UP serving chiefly as a vehicle for protest votes against the government. The slight drop in NP support in 1970 was due to a key group of abstainers who—while basically Nat supporters—were more liberal than those who said they would vote for the NP. It is “Ambiguous Afrikaners” (those who are changing to an “English” identity), and only some of those, who are defecting completely from their traditional political allegiance. They represent the one sign of potential change in South Africa's uniquely stable political system.

This paper argues for a conceptualization of political theory based upon a jurisprudential model of reasoning, rather than the more commonly accepted model of logical demonstration. The purpose of political theorizing is to persuade and convince, not to prove; consequently it is a form of argument necessarily directed at a particular audience or audiences. Hobbes is examined as a theorist who directed his argument at those audiences which were politically most significant. This paper explores that aspect of Hobbes's theory which was intended to persuade his Puritan audience. Hobbes attempted to persuade the Puritans by presenting his argument in a manner subtly similar to the style of reasoning they were familiar with in religious terms. This interpretation is supported by a comparison of the arguments of Hobbes and Calvin. This analysis of Hobbes is intended to illustrate both a general view of the nature of political theorizing, and the advantages of adopting an historical method in examining past political theorists.

The political incorporation and municipal segregation of classes and status groups in the metropolis tend to divorce fiscal resources from public needs and to create and perpetuate inequality among urban residents in the United States. An investigation of data collected for a large number of metropolitan areas in 1960 reveals a number of variables associated with inequality in the distribution of fiscal resources among municipalities in metropolitan areas. The level of income inequality among municipal governments in metropolitan areas varies directly with: location in the South; age, size and density of the metropolis; nonwhite concentration; family income inequality; residential segregation among social classes; housing segregation by quality; and governmental fragmentation. The data provide support for the argument that governmental inequality occupies a central position in the urban stratification system.

The widely accepted expectation achievement approach to conflict, which views conflict primarily as a response to relative deprivation, has recently been challenged by proponents of a political process approach, the central features of which are mobilization of power resources and the struggle for power. Here a power balance model of conflict is developed which incorporates the core concepts from both approaches. In this model the difference in power resources between the contending parties is used as the central independent variable. Relative deprivation, utility of reaching the goal and expectancy of success are introduced as intervening variables to relate the effects from changes in the balance of power between the parties to the probability of manifest conflict between them.

According to the power balance model of conflict different types of relative deprivation (aspirational, decremental and progressive) will be differently correlated with the probability of conflict. The overall correlation between relative deprivation and conflict is expected to be insignificant. Situations where the difference in power resources between two parties is decreasing are seen as most conducive to conflict. When the power resources of an already weaker party are decreasing, the probability of conflict is assumed to be lower than when the weaker party is gaining power resources.

The purpose of this paper is to specify the conditions in which parents influence the party identification and certain issue attitudes of their adolescent children (recent high school graduates). The nature and extent of the parent-adolescent attitude correspondence is first established. Next, parental as opposed to environmental explanations for this correspondence are considered. Finally, the effects on parental influence of family interaction, political interest, issue salience to the parent, and accuracy of the adolescent's perception of the parental attitude are analyzed. Issue salience and perceptual accuracy are found to have strong effects; the other variables have lesser or no effect. When issue salience and perceptual accuracy are held constant in a multivariate equation, the beta weights indicating the influence of the parent attitude on the attitude of the adolescent are very similar for all issues and party identification. It is concluded that idiosyncratic variations in successful parent-child attitude transmission can be explained by a general equation.

In this paper one party leadership strategy with respect to the committee system of the House is examined. Building on several relatively clear concepts such as compliance, quality of assignment, expectation, scarcity, and exchange, a very elementary, yet explicit, theory is constructed. It is shown that the leaders pursue a strategy of accommodation. The leaders increase the number of positions on those committees prized by the members in order to guarantee a steady supply of resources to gain leverage with the members. But a steady increase in the supply of positions reduces the scarcity of positions and hence their value to the leaders. Thus, a consequence of the strategy is the need periodically to reorganize or make adjustments in the committee system.

Ethnic groups argue that a certain proportion of administrative positions should be filled by their members. This concern assumes that a bureaucrat applies to his tasks the values and interests of his social background. Evidence from Zambia, a country in which ethnic and regional differences have been highly politicized, suggests that this assumption lacks empirical support. The fundamental guidelines that appear to shape administrative behavior in Zambia are the calculations of what must be done to achieve individual career advancement. Administrators are, in addition, constrained from pursuing parochial interests by the range of authority and discretion attached to their particular positions.

Although bureaucrats do not appear to provide ideal representatives for ethnic interests, the ethnic composition of the most visible echelons of the government is of critical political significance. This is particularly evident in a country like Zambia where ethnically defined groups are contending for positions in the new postcolonial society. The symbols of power can be as important as power itself.

Recent studies of regional economic development of the Soviet Union have suggested that since 1958, Soviet union republics have become less equal in their levels of industrialization, share of investments, and living standards. This paper assesses the degree to which equality of social and cultural development characterizes Soviet ethnic groups and union republics. Drawing aggregate data chiefly from the 1926, 1959, and 1970 Soviet censuses, the analysis shows that: (1) relative variation (inequality) in the sociocultural development of Soviet nationalities has declined continuously and markedly over time on measures of education and occupational structure, but that large inter-nationality disparities remain in the development of skilled manpower; (2) inter-nationality variation in family role structures has been slower to decline than differences in education and appears to follow a curvilinear pattern: for a time during the Soviet era, inter-nationality differences increased but have been followed recently by significant declines. Furthermore, it is shown that (3) on the average the sociocultural development of union republic populations well exceeds the development of the indigenous nationalities in these republics.

The choice among measures of relationship has increasingly become a matter of the interpretation of their intermediate values. Interpretations are important, but a prior question is the statistic's implicit model of a relationship—what it considers a perfect relationship, and what it considers a null relationship. A family of models based on combinations of certain maximum- and null-value conditions is analyzed in this paper. The distinction between the models can be used to shed light on the stakes involved in the choice among dichotomous variable measures as well as that among familiar ordinal statistics.

The models are ordered in terms of their leniency, and the coefficients based on each model are specified. An empirical analysis shows that the different measures are positively correlated, but those measures based on different models can differ sharply from one another. Statistics based on the same model covary regardless of differences in their interpretations. Since different models are intended to measure different concepts, multiple coefficients can allow investigators to examine their data in greater detail. Several political examples of the use of multiple models are provided.

This note reports the results of an initial exploration into the significance of the social environments (“contexts”) in which people live in the shaping of their individual political behavior. Many scholars have argued that social scientists should pay more serious attention to contextual variables when they go about constructing social theories. But there have been few systematic efforts to demonstrate empirically the overall importance of contextual variables as predictors of individual behaviors, especially relative to the importance of personal (“individual”) predictors. Here the relative potency of two sets of predictors—one individual and one contextual—is investigated for a sample of British voters by means of a well-known multivariate search strategy, “tree analysis.” The results suggest that contextual variables have little to add to explanations of voting behavior based on individual variables—at least for these data.

Current political debate over the flaws and the fate of the American liberal tradition mirrors closely the critiques of the Progressive period. A number of those thinkers—theorists of “social control,” exemplified by Ward and Ross—took aim not at the liberal-utilitarian conception of the ends of politics but rather at the notion that these goods would be produced by the politics of laissez-faire. A second body of critics—here termed “communitarians” and including Cooley, Royce, Croly, DuBois, and Dewey—leveled a more fundamental indictment: liberal individualism left men's needs for human sympathy, shared meanings and loyalties, and common effort unfulfilled. But the difficulties of the communitarian theorists, the range of associations on which they pinned their hopes and their fundamental ambivalence concerning politics demonstrate how little in the way of ideological or social-structural reinforcement the environment provided for one who would apply the insights of Burke or Hegel or Tönnies in America. Modern political criticism has resurrected the themes of the Progressive period, but even such bridge-builders as Dahl and McWilliams have not been sufficiently attentive to interrelationships among the persisting critiques of liberalism and to the shape ameliorative communities might assume.

This essay introduces the reader to the contemporary literature on gender roles and feminine behavior, including the major concepts, empirical findings, and social thought which have implications for political behavior and research. Gender roles as they relate to the psychology and activity of men and women, and their systemic cultural, economic, and legal ramifications provide an explanation and a basis for understanding political behavior, including recurrent women's protest movements. Contemporary writing contributes to building a non-androcentric and accurate body of knowledge regarding political woman, and it calls into question the ideology of the biological determinism of political activity. The literature surveyed has potential usefulness for public policy: an expansion of democracy is viable with the discernment and removal of barriers which hinder substantial proportions of women from achieving political leadership and hence participating in authoritative decision making and value allocation. A bibliography of major references is appended.