This article uses newly available British time-series data to analyze dynamic interrelationships among Labour vote intentions, perceptions that the Labour leader would make the best prime minister, and Labour party identification. Error-correction models reveal that best prime minister perceptions and party identification have important short- and long-run influences on vote intentions. Tests of rival models indicate that personal economic expectations outperform other economic evaluations in the vote intention and party identification analyses. National retrospective judgments perform well in analyses of best prime minister perceptions, and emotional reactions to economic conditions significantly influence these perceptions as well as party identification.

A critical review essay of A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, focusing on his attempt to ground radical egalitarian democracy on a social contract. Rawls tries to construct a new theory of justice with the help of the old state of nature theorists. The reviewer investigates whether this effort is successful and whether Rawls possesses an adequate understanding of the philosophers from whom he draws his inspiration.

Does media choice cause polarization, or merely reflect it? We investigate a critical aspect of this puzzle: How partisan media contribute to attitude polarization among different groups of media consumers. We implement a new experimental design, called the Preference-Incorporating Choice and Assignment (PICA) design, that incorporates both free choice and forced exposure. We estimate jointly the degree of polarization caused by selective exposure and the persuasive effect of partisan media. Our design also enables us to conduct sensitivity analyses accounting for discrepancies between stated preferences and actual choice, a potential source of bias ignored in previous studies using similar designs. We find that partisan media can polarize both its regular consumers and inadvertent audiences who would otherwise not consume it, but ideologically opposing media potentially also can ameliorate the existing polarization between consumers. Taken together, these results deepen our understanding of when and how media polarize individuals.

Innovation can be defined as “… the generation, acceptance, and implementation of new ideas, processes, products, or services.” We mean here an activity, process, service, or idea that is new to an American city. We do not restrict it to mean only the first appearance ever of something new (i.e., an invention) or only the first use by one among a set of social actors. We are concerned neither with the diffusion of innovation nor with internal stages in the adoption process, but rather with the characteristics of cities that have successfully implemented innovations in federally financed public housing. We focus on three aspects of community innovation: (1) the presence or absence of a federally financed public housing program in the city, (2) the speed of innovation of such a program, and (3) the level of output or performance of this innovation activity.

Most of the studies of innovation have used as units of analysis either individuals or organizations, and little attention has been given to innovation in community systems, although community systems are continually introducing new ideas, activities, processes, and services. For example, the form of government may be changed from a mayor-council to a city-manager type. In fact, two studies of such innovations were carried out prior to World War II, but these were primarily concerned with describing the rate of diffusion of this social invention among American cities, not with characteristics of innovating cities. The addition of a new planning department to the city administration or a decision to fluoridate its water system are community innovations as we have defined the term, But innovations are not limited to actions of city government, although these may be the most frequently observed types of innovations.

Using aggregate, survey, and in-depth elite interview data from Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, I demonstrate that the “mechanical” effect of the Spanish electoral law is as strong as that of many single-member constituency systems. But the “distal” effect of the electoral law on the party system is shown to be complex and multifaceted, not direct and deterministic. The perceptions, calculations, strategies, and behavior of party elites play a crucial intervening role between the electoral law and the overall shape of the party system.

Although there has been considerable work on voting patterns in the United Nations, almost none of it has contributed cumulatively to existing theories of international relations. Methodological problems or a descriptive intent have often stood in the way of such advancement. For example, the main findings of Thomas Hovet, Jr.'s Bloc Politics in the United Nations, the most comprehensive work to date, are based on trends in the voting cohesion of regional and caucusing groups in the Assembly and time-series data on how often these groups vote with the majority.

I analyze the finite-voter version of the Groseclose and Snyder vote-buying model. I identify how the optimal coalition size varies with the underlying preference parameters; derive necessary and sufficient conditions for minimal majority and universal coalitions to form; and show that the necessary condition for minimal majorities found in Groseclose and Snyder is incorrect.

This paper examines three arguments about the impact of military regimes on social change (i.e., economic growth and social reform) in Third-World countries. The first asserts that military governments are progressive; the second claims that they are conservative or reactionary; while the third states that the impact of military regimes on social change varies by level of development. An analysis of covariance model is specified and used first to reanalyze data previously examined by Nordlinger. The results provide no support for any of the three hypotheses, but limitations of the data prevent this from being a convincing test. The model is therefore tested with a second set of data covering 77 politically independent countries of the Third World for the decade 1960 to 1970. Again, the estimates are inconsistent with all three hypotheses and suggest instead that military regimes have no unique effects on social change, regardless of societal type. The paper concludes that the civilian-military government distinction is of little use in the explanation of social change.

The empirical findings on whether or not legislators vote strategically are mixed. This is at least partly due to the fact that to establish any hypothesis on strategic voting, legislators' preferences need to be known, and these are typically private data. I show that under complete information, if decision making is by the amendment procedure and if the agenda is set endogenously, then sophisticated (strategic) voting over the resulting agenda is observationally equivalent to sincere voting. The voting strategies, however, are sophisticated. This fact has direct implications for empirical work on sophisticated voting.

Contemporary debates over liberal political theory should encourage renewed investigation of the common good, and it is appropriate to begin by interrogating Aristotle's account. Aristotle argues that injustice stands in the way of the common good. Injustice is motivated by both overgrasping for scarce external goods, such as money, honor, and power, and by excessive desires. Aristotle argues that the common good requires a reorientation away from external goods to satisfying activities that do not diminish in the sharing. He sketches an analogical account of familial and political relationships that leads us to wonder what the political conditions are for the common good. Reflecting on these conditions not only points to the strict limits of the common good but also speaks to both sides in debates over liberal theory.

The purpose of this paper is to reformulate the linkage between interparty competition and welfare policies in the American states. Specifically, it is hypothesized that this linkage should be substantially greater among states with strong, effective legislatures than among states with weak, ineffective legislative systems. When legislative effectiveness was defined in terms of professionalism and welfare effort was assessed by seven specific measures, it was found that the link between party competition and welfare expenditures was indeed stronger among states with effective, as opposed to ineffective, legislative systems. Further, when controls were introduced for several socioeconomic factors, the linkage continued to be stronger among states with professional legislatures. It is concluded, consequently, that the influence of party competition on state welfare policies is mediated by the differential effectiveness of state legislatures.

Methods to allocate seats in proportional representation systems are investigated in terms of underlying common-sense properties. Important among these are concepts of stability, coalition encouragement and schism encouragement. In addition, a new concept of uniformity is introduced which seems inherent in the very idea of the word “method, ” and it is shown that this concept is essentially equivalent to a previously investigated property called consistency. These and other criteria are shown to uniquely determine certain methods. In particular, the Jefferson method (incorrectly credited to d'Hondt) and the Quota method are given characterizations which commend them as the principal candidates for use in PR systems.

Political action has affected postwar income distribution in the United States mainly through policy-induced variations in macroeconomic activity and government transfer benefits in proportion to total income. We present a small dynamic model of the connections among the partisan balance of power, macroeconomic fluctuations, transfer spending trends, and income distribution outcomes. The model is based on the premise that the parties have different distributional goals, and it is designed to identify how shifts in party control of the presidency and the strength of the parties in Congress have affected the distribution of after-tax, after-transfer income by influencing cyclical economic performance and the flow of resources to transfer programs. We therefore extend the “partisan theory” of macroeconomic policy to the domain of income distribution outcomes.

What combination of forces elects a President? Each electoral decision releases a flood of interpretive comment about the conditions, circumstances, and causes which have influenced the result. A very great assortment of factors is examined and varying estimates are made of the responsibility of each for the outcome. Certainly, interpretations of the most recent presidential contest have shown the variety of ideas Americans bring to the analysis of their national elections. Mr. Eisenhower's victory has been attributed to the satisfactions engendered by national prosperity; to the anxieties raised by the threat of war; to the moods of racial, ethnic, or other groupings in the population; to the personal attractiveness of the winning candidate; to the conservative temper of the electorate; to the impact of various issues; to changing party loyalties; to the growth of suburbia; to the progress of an electoral cycle; to events and strategems of the nominating conventions and the campaign; to the influence of the press and of the other mass media. The list could be revised or lengthened in many ways.

We investigate the dynamics of superpower rivalry. Participants in policy debates within each state use information about expected future threats and economic costs to influence other policy actors, and this process of sophisticated reaction links the security policies of these two states into a single rivalry system. Analysis of vector autoregression models of U.S. and Soviet military expenditures and diplomatic hostility and U.S. gross national product supports the hypothesis that these policies approximate the behavior of unitary rational states capable of forming rational expectations of each other's future behavior. The dynamic response of this system to a wide range of exogenous shocks (or innovations) reveals the underlying stability of this rivalry system. The military expenditures of both states exhibit a cyclical response to innovations, with a shorter U.S. cycle. This lack of synchronization creates several problems for analysis and for policy change.

This is an attempt to sketch in very rough form what seem to me some of the central concepts and problems of organization theory. In the first section I have tried to define the field of organization theory and to indicate with some care what justification there is for regarding it as a distinct area of theory, related to, but by no means identical with, the theory of small groups and the theory of social institutions. The comments in the second section on subject-matter areas simply spell out the implications, many of them perhaps obvious, of the central argument of the first section.

This paper is concerned with all kinds of organizations, and not simply with those that fall within the area of public administration. This definition of the scope of organization theory reflects my own conviction that there are a great many things that can be said about organizations in general, without specification of the particular kind of organization under consideration. Moreover, even if we were interested solely in governmental organizations, I believe that a great deal can be learned from the comparison of their characteristics with those of other kinds of organizations, and from attempts to explain the similarities and differences that are found. Neither of these statements denies the existence of numerous and important phenomena that are peculiar to governmental organizations or the need for theory in public administration to deal with these phenomena.

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.

An interest in the roles, functions, contributions, and dangers of leadership in popular regimes is not, of course, new among observers of political life. This has, in fact, been an ancient and enduring interest of political theorists. It is possible, however, to distinguish—at least in a rough way—two different streams of thought: one consisting of writers sympathetic to popular rule, the other consisting of anti-democratic writers.

It has always been obvious to practical and theoretical observers alike that even where leaders are chosen by the people, they might convert a democracy into an oligarchy or a despotism. From ancient times, as everyone knows, anti-democratic writers have contended that popular governments were unlikely to provide leaders with wisdom and virtue, and insisted on the natural affinity between the people and the despot. These ancient challenges by anti-democratic writers were, I think, made more formidable in the course of the last hundred years by critics—sometimes ex-democrats turned authoritarian when their Utopian hopes encountered the ugly realities of political life—who, like Pareto, Michels, and Mosca, contended that popular rule is not only undesirable but also, as they tried to show, impossible. The failure of popular regimes to emerge, or, if they did emerge to survive, in Russia, Italy, Germany, and Spain could not be met merely by frequent assertions of democratic rhetoric.

Fortunately, alongside this stream of anti-democratic thought and experience there has always been the other. Aware both of their critics and of the real life problems of popular rule, writers sympathetic to democracy have emphasized the need for wisdom, virtue, and self-restraint not only among the general body of citizens but among leaders as well.

Jurisdictions are the defining characteristics of committee systems, and they are central in any discussions about the U. S. Congress; yet we know little about them. Where do committee property rights come from? Are they rigid? Are they flexible? I introduce a distinction between statutory jurisdictions (which are written in the House and Senate Rules) and common law jurisdictions (which emerge through bill referral precedents). Turf is gained through common law advances, not through formal rules changes (like the “reforms” passed by the House in 1946, 1974, and 1980). Jurisdictional change is ongoing and incremental. The analysis draws on an examination of hearings held by the House Commerce Committee from 1947 through 1990.