Political games and simulations are models or representations of particular political systems and their associated processes. They are techniques for reproducing in a simplified form selected aspects of one system, A, in some independent system, A′. Games and simulations have a dynamic quality produced by the complex interaction of properties in the model. This feature enables them to generate states of the system that differ radically from those present originally. The kinds of transformations that may occur between the initial and final states of a simulation or game are difficult to represent by other means, despite a diversity in modeling procedures ranging from verbal descriptions to differential equations. Because of their apparent applicability to many problems of politics, as well as their novelty, games and simulations have been developed in a variety of areas in political science. They have been used in research, instruction, and policy formation. Although the application of these techniques has been increasing, systematic evaluation of their performance is only now beginning. This essay reports one type of evaluation.

The researchers sought to structure a simulation of international politics so it would reproduce features of the political crisis that preceded the beginning of the First World War. Two separate trials or runs of the simulation were performed as a pilot project. With two runs, the data are sufficient only to illustrate what might be done in an expanded research program.

Marxism-Leninism, as the Soviet Marxist ideology is called, has never been wholly static; it has evolved over the years by a process of accretion, elimination and redefinition of dogma. But in the first post-Stalin decade, there were changes of unusual scope and significance in this sphere, accompanying and in some ways mirroring the general processes of systemic change which Stalin's death precipitated in Soviet society. This paper seeks to interpret the post-Stalin Soviet ideological changes, especially as they bear upon the politics of world revolution. In doing so, it attacks the broader theoretical problem of what goes on in radical political movements and their ideologies as these movements settle down and accommodate themselves to the existing world. For some such tendency appears to be involved in the Soviet case.

The year 1956 was the watershed of post-Stalin ideological change in the U.S.S.R. In the Central Committee's report to the Twentieth Party Congress—the first congress held after Stalin's death—Nikita Khrushchev announced a series of doctrinal innovations affecting particularly the line of Communist Marxism on international relations and the further development of the world Communist revolution. One was the revision of the Leninist thesis on the inevitability of periodic wars under imperialism. On the ground that the world-wide forces for peace were now unprecedentedly strong, it was proclaimed that wars, while still possible, were no longer fatally inevitable even though “imperialism” continued to exist in large areas. Not only could the antagonistic socio-economic systems peacefully coexist; they could and should actively cooperate in the maintenance of peaceful relations. At the same time, coexistence was a competitive process, economics being the principal arena of competition.

This paper attempts to comment empirically upon certain assumptions about the relationship between social background patterns and attitudinal patterns in elite analysis. All political systems are more or less stratified and their elites constitute that minority of participating actors which plays a strategic role in public policy making. As the incumbents of such key positions they have a far greater influence than the masses in structuring and giving expression to political relationships and policy outputs at various levels of authoritative decision making. They wield this influence by virtue of their exceptional access to political information and positions and their consequently highly disproportionate control over public policy making and communication processes which relate society to polity and governors to governed.

Usually exceeding no more than about five percent of the members of a political community, such elites not only know a good deal more about the internal workings of the pertinent system than do the rest of its members, but they can do a good deal more to give shape and content to general input demands and supports, as well as to formal governmental rulings at the national or sub-national level. Therefore, their behavior patterns represent a crucial dimension of behavior patterns in a political system, providing important clues to characteristics making it like or unlike other systems.

Over the last few decades political scientists have shown an understandable interest in material brought into relief by neighboring disciplines. A concern with enriching the field of political science by drawing on sociological, economic, and psychological data has led to efforts to accommodate findings derived from study in areas in which men are subjected to non-political pressures—the constraints of society, the economy, and ultimately their own physical and psychological nature. As the conventional academic boundaries are crossed, knowledge of distinctively political matters, it has been hoped, will become richer as well as more precise. This essay seeks to clarify the promise and limits of two non-political approaches to an understanding of politics, namely those which are represented by two types of psychology, and to take account of their bearings on normative political thought.

Traditionally, normative political thought has been concerned with the analysis and understanding of the ends of political action: it has been an attempt to present and elucidate them. Setting specific points of view in a larger context, it has tended to be discursive and Utopian, speculatively enlarging the realm of public possibilities and common choices. More recently, it has been concerned with presenting models designed to assimilate empirically validated propositions about political behavior. To these concerns, various forms of non-political thought have always made their distinctive contributions.

A recent article in this Review has drawn attention to the inadequacies in our knowledge of how great social movements arise. On the Negro protest movement there are many hypotheses but few attempts to relate them to differences in individual behavior. Considerable confusion also exists in the variety of explanatory terms involved. James A. Geschwinder lists five hypotheses that focus variously on economic conditions and the psychological meaning given them. They are the Vulgar Marxist hypothesis—that Negro dissatisfaction results from a progressive deterioration in the social and economic position of the race; the Rising Expectations hypothesis—that Negro expectations are rising more rapidly than their fulfillment; the Sophisticated Marxist hypothesis or the Relative Deprivation hypothesis—that Negro perceptions of white life have led to dissatisfaction with their own rate of improvement; the Rise and Drop hypothesis—that improvement in conditions followed by a sharp drop is responsible; and the Status Inconsistency hypothesis—that a group possessing status attributes ranked differently on various status hierarchies of a society will be dissatisfied and prone to rebellion.

This paper will suggest that theory based on variations in the structure of intergroup relations can go some way toward integrating the different kinds of explanation that have been advanced. A more general aspiration is to draw attention to one set of terms that might be useful in the long overdue development of a genuinely comparative study of social movements such as the Negro movement. The broad hypothesis arising from—but by no means fully tested by—an examination of several individual and contextual variables is that proximity to the dominant white culture increases the likelihood of protest involvement. The analysis will give a priority to structural considerations, but will also suggest something about intervening psychological variables.