This paper investigates the proposition that rapid urbanization produces significant changes in the kinds, volume, and intensity of demand making aimed at local and national governments, leading to political system “overload” and pressure for major shifts in resource allocation. Drawing upon data gathered among low-income migrants to Mexico City and other Latin American cities, the paper analyzes the process through which objective needs are converted into demands upon government. The findings indicate that there are often major lags in the process of demand creation among cityward migrants, and that many kinds of felt needs are viewed by migrants as needs to be satisfied primarily through individual rather than governmental action.

Data are presented on the incidence of demand making among the migrant population and the substantive nature of the demands they make upon government. Strategies used in attempting to influence government decisions are described, and the attitudes and perceptions underlying the migrant's preference among alternative strategies are analyzed. The long-term propensity of migrants and their offspring to engage in demand making with regard to broad social and economic issues rather than individual or community-related needs is assessed.

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.

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.

This paper utilizes the 1956–58–60 SRC panel study to examine the degree to which Americans hold attitudes on issues of public policy. The conclusions reject the thesis that only 20 to 30 per cent of the American public have true attitudes and that the remainder either refuse to take a position or respond randomly. The nonattitude thesis is rejected on the basis of: (1) a conceptualization of attitudes which allows for variation in responses through time without necessarily indicating the absence of attitudes or their random fluctuation; (2) an evaluation of the major statement of the nonattitude thesis; (3) a probability model for measuring attitudes in a panel study based on the assumption of twin samples, i.e., a sample of the population at one point in time, and a sample of the individual's attitude through time; and (4) the application of the probability model, leading to the conclusion that the number of individuals with attitudes has been severely underestimated. The implications of that finding are drawn for the relation of responses to attitudes and for democratic elitism.

Philippine data are presented which indicate that a contradiction exists between changes induced partly through capital accumulation by the indigenous elite and foreign investment, and both increased political factionalism and declining voting participation. While national elites become more powerful through capital accumulation, local political machines confront structural changes weakening their power. More specialized patron-client structures diminish local elites' ability both to deliver votes to national patrons and to stimulate electoral participation. Growth of the middle class in a stagnant economy increases competition for lucrative local political office Factions proliferate and with the increased concentration of private income, become more dependent on national patronage resources. Unable to meet rising patronage demands, the government resorts to extensive deficit spending which stimulates inflation and further undermines economic growth. The national elite's economic activities thus undermines its authority base as the state becomes increasingly less able to provide security to individuals dislocated by changes generating profit for the elite.

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 paper is addressed to three tasks and the analysis operates at three levels. First, there is an attempt to specify an analytic approach to Marxist-Leninist sociopolitical systems that integrates regime and sociocultural units. This approach rests on a structural conception of political culture, a conception that stresses the informal adaptive quality of political culture, and that includes behavioral as well as attitudinal patterns. The second task consists of analyzing the paradoxical character of development in Soviet-type systems; development that simultaneously reinforces and undermines traditional-peasant political cultures at the community, regime, and elite levels. Finally, this pattern of development is examined in the context of a single Soviet-type regime and society, the Romanian.

In 1959 a number of progressive Democratic congressmen organized the Democratic Study Group (DSG) as a vehicle for countering certain conservative biases then present in the decision-making process in the House of Representatives. This paper presents brief descriptions of the difficulties faced by these congressmen in their efforts to pass more “liberal” legislation and of the organization and activities of the DSG. The analytical focus is on an assessment of DSG success in developing an effective communication network as a means of achieving its policy goals. The central hypothesis is that this communication network has had an impact on the voting behavior of DSG members. Roll-call data from the 84th through the 91st Congress are examined to ascertain whether longitudinal patterns in the voting of DSG members, non-southern non-DSG Democrats, southern Democrats, and Republicans tend to confirm or deny this hypothesis.

This paper compares the research on the determinants of domestic policy outcomes, primarily in American state governments, with similar research in the area of foreign policy. Using seven foreign policy measures, it then tests a hypothesis based on Cutright's cross-national analysis of social insurance programs, that political representativeness is more important in accounting for policy outcomes among developed than among undeveloped nations. Finally, it suggests what implications the reported findings may have on empirical democratic theory.