The relationship between the traditional social organization of India, based on the principle of hierarchy, and the newly introduced democratic institutions and procedures, based on the principle of equality, has been a subject of diverse interpretations. The more significant of these interpretations are that the social organization has subsumed the new political system, and that the various units of social organization, namely, castes, have developed voluntary bodies or caste associations of their own in order to enter into an operative relationship with the new political system. The latter interpretation also implies that the democratic political socialization in India has been taking place by means of the caste associations. This study takes a hard look at such interpretations and points out that the internal cohesion of the social organization materially alters when it moves away from its primary social concerns—ritual, pollution, and endogamy—to nontraditional concerns. This change is reflected in the fact that highly fragmented decision-making processes of castes in nontraditional matters often lead to their substantial vote against candidates of their own castes. Such political differentiation within castes has occurred before the advent of certain caste associations, and in some cases despite them. These and other assertions are substantiated through data collected in a rural and an urban community where fieldwork designed to understand their political dynamics extended over a number of years.

Swings in district vote for Congress are conditioned by many factors. An attempt is made here to apportion the variance in the partisan distribution of votes for U. S. representative among three levels of influence—national, state, and district—measuring the degree of nationalization, regionalization, and localization of voting. Previous attempts have defined “nationalization” of voting as the degree to which district interelection differences are numerically identical. Here this concept is defined in a two-stage regression model as the degree to which districts behave as if these differences were caused by the same factors. In contrast to previous research, national factors are found to be responsible for more than 50 per cent of the variance in local vote, with state and district forces accounting for 19 per cent and 26 per cent, respectively. Several analytic uses for this measure are suggested and illustrated.

It is a relatively common occurrence in American politics for state electorates to divide their partisan majorities between different parties, depending on the office contest. Observations concerning these divergent aggregate patterns are usually accompanied by speculation that the theoretical propositions on individual voting behavior, developed and tested in the context of presidential voting, hold less relevance for voting in statewide contests. Evidence presented in this paper does not bear out that view of state elections. The candidate incumbency context of state elections is introduced as an aid in predicting the partisan direction of split-ticket voting at the state level. Setting respondents in various conflict situations with respect to (1) basic party loyalties, (2) net assessments of presidential candidates, and (3) incumbent partisanship yields reasonably accurate specification of split-ticket voting patterns in gubernatorial, senatorial, and presidential contests; it also suggests at least one source of disparate partisan majorities among state electorates.

The Nebraska nonpartisan legislature serves as a control setting for testing several hypotheses about the impact of party and constituency on voting behavior in legislative bodies. Specifically, in light of the data obtained from a setting where party identification is present but party leadership and organization are absent, the following hypotheses are examined: that political parties are important in structuring voting behavior because of the influence of party leaders and organization; that party is important because party identification is a surrogate for sets of beliefs and attitudes that distinguish members of one party from another; or that party is important because party differences reflect different constituency bases of the party. In a roll-call analysis of five sessions utilizing Guttman-scaling and regression techniques, it was found that in the absence of party leadership and organization, voting is highly unstructured. Further, dimensions of voting that were found are largely unexplainable in terms of standard party and constituency variables. Thus, party identification and constituency influence appear to be insufficient cues for the organization of legislative voting behavior, in the absence of party leadership.

This study examines in a comparative foreign policy framework the relationship between bilateral foreign aid allocations and pairwise voting agreements between developed and developing nations in the UN General Assembly. The foreign aid donors considered include the United States, the Soviet “bloc,” and the twelve other UN members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. Two different measures of aid allocations in two three-year periods (1962–1964 and 1965–1967) are correlated with two different measures of the percentage of agreements in the UN between each aid donor and its aid recipients, with both indices calculated on the basis of all roll calls taken in the 1963 and 1966 General Assemblies.

In general, the results of the analysis were found to be consistent with the hypothesized positive association between aid and votes only in the case of the United States. For many of the remaining donors the association was found to be negative rather than positive, suggesting either that enemies are rewarded more than friends, or, alternatively, that there is little relationship of substantive interest between aid and votes for most donor countries. Even in the case of the U.S., however, which of the two variables should be considered a cause and which a consequence remains unresolved.

This paper examines the committee assignment process for Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Unlike previous studies of committee assignments, this paper employs data on the requests for assignments submitted by members to the Committee on Committees. The theoretical perspective employed is one in which all the participants in the process are rational actors who have goals they want to achieve and who choose among alternative courses of action on the basis of which alternative is most likely to lead to the achievement of those goals. We argue that the allocation of committee assignments affects the goals of all the participants in the process, and thus we consider the choices of actors in the process in terms of their goals; specifically the goals of re-election, influence within the House, and good public policy.

After first considering the process from the point of view of the member making requests, we show that the member's requests are related to the type of district he represents, and that the number of requests he makes is related to such considerations as whether he is a freshman, whether he faces competition from a member from his state, and whether there is a vacancy from his state on his most preferred committee.

The process is also considered from the point of view of the members making the assignments. Decisions on assignments are found to be affected by seniority (where success in getting requested committees is inversely related to seniority), margin of election (where members from marginal districts are more successful), and region (where southerners are less successful than members from other regions).

This study, based on the two-wave questionnaire data collected from legislative candidates in Iowa, attempts to test the “congratulation-rationalization effect,” a highly provocative hypothesis that John Kingdon formulated regarding politicians' beliefs about voters. The hypothesis asserts that winning candidates tend to develop complimentary beliefs about voters while losing candidates tend to develop beliefs deprecating to voters. The results of analysis indicate, however, no significant difference between winners and losers in terms of the direction and magnitude of changes in their beliefs about voters, suggesting that the hypothesis is invalid. When the hypothesis is reformulated in terms of “dissonance states” rather than “election outcomes,” the evidence is strongly supportive. Among winners, those who perceive a high degree of dissonance more than those who perceive little dissonance tend to change their beliefs about voters in a favorable direction. Conversely, among losers, those who perceive a high degree of dissonance more than those who perceive little dissonance tend to change their beliefs in an unfavorable direction. Therefore, the “congratulation-rationalization” hypothesis can be sustained only if cast in direct dissonance terms.

This study examines the assertions of urban scholars that the spatial arrangement of urban populations is important in determining the amount of conflict displayed within American cities. The article analyzes the spatial distribution of class groups within 18 cities and the degree of voting solidarity and conflict displayed within segregated and integrated sections of each community. Data were gathered from precinct voting returns for several local referenda in each city to test the following hypotheses: (1) The residential distribution of social-class groups will significantly influence the degree of electoral cohesion these groups display; (2) The spatial distribution of class groups will significantly influence the amount of electoral disagreement between class groups. The study found that communities that displayed segregated class groups had a high degree of class electoral solidarity. Within cities that manifested spatially integrated class groups, however, the electoral cohesion of each class was low. A social-class group located in an area of a city possessing wide class dissimilarity was not likely to vote in agreement with other groups of the same class located elsewhere in the city. The findings of this article suggest that location may be one of the sources of urban political conflicts.

This paper offers a critique and a reformulation of Brian Fry and Richard Winters's policy output study published in this Review June, 1970. Fry and Winters focused on the redistributive impact of public policy in the states. After devising a “redistribution ratio” that involves allocating state revenue burdens and expenditure benefits to families across income classes, they developed a model to explain the variance of this ratio from state to state. In contrast to the findings of many earlier policy output studies, they hypothesized that political variables would have more explanatory power than socioeconomic variables.

Unfortunately some methodological shortcomings detract from the potential value of the Fry and Winters study. In this paper, alternative methodologies are used to reformulate a redistribution ratio for each state, and the recalculated ratios are found to vary significantly from those obtained by Fry and Winters.

The shortcomings of the Fry and Winters explanatory model are discussed. Despite these shortcomings, however, the regression analysis employed by Fry and Winters is repeated using the reformulated redistribution ratios in order to test the impact of this reformulation. Again the results obtained in this paper vary substantially from those of Fry and Winters.

The market is a decentralized system that can bring about efficient economic decisions. This paper examines whether social choice mechanisms can duplicate this success in the political arena. The famed Arrow result tells us centralized systems cannot achieve efficient, nondictatorial outcomes unless they rely on cardinal preferences. With decentralization, efficiency comes to require something more: the truthful revelation of preferences. Schemes that elicit honest preferences are derived here. By their very structure they are shown to lead to inefficient outcomes. This negative result leads to the question whether the validity of the initial analogy continues. Market-based standards of performance may be innappropriate for investigations of political phenomena.

The concept of shape is considered in abstract terms drawing on approaches outside the electoral districting literature. The concept is broken down into a series of four divergences from “compactness” relating to “elongation,” “indentation,” “separation,” and “puncturedness.” Given this conceptual framework, the use of shape measures in electoral districting is reconsidered and a new shape measure is proposed. This assesses the indentation of a district shape and is based on the internal angles within the shape. It is suggested that this measure may be particularly relevant to the evaluation of proposed new districting patterns. The technique is illustrated using proposed new Congressional Districts for Iowa.

Recent quantitative studies vastly understate the political conflicts and policy choices that are embedded in the budgetary process. The reason for this lies in the way these quantitative studies have organized budgetary data. Thus far the units of analysis have been federal agencies, the administrative categories of government. The “striking regularities” that have been reported reflect—quite accurately—the great stability of the administrative structure of government. However, these categories do not describe the intense competition between programs and policies that takes place within the framework. We argue, further, that the entire metaphor of an inert bureaucratic machine doing this year essentially what it did last year is erroneous. Rather, priority setting in the federal bureaucracy more resembles the market situation of nineteenth century capitalism where aggressive “policy entrepreneurs,” unequal in talent and resources, struggle to build and sustain support for their programs. The competition between policies is both reflected in and promoted by the budgetary process. By shifting the units of analysis to programs and transforming these data so that programs of different size are commensurate, we develop an index that reflects the relative growth and decay of programs as they compete for budgetary resources.