A generally accepted interpretation of American politics today is associated with the “theory of electoral accountability.” The salient features of this theory are well known. The thesis was initially shaped in Schumpeter's classic work on democracy, and since has been elaborated by a generation of scholars. The elaboration, especially where grounded in empirical studies, has established (1) that the public, being largely apathetic about political matters and in any case ill-informed regarding public issues, cannot provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the maintenance of democratic procedures; (2) that a liberal political and social elite are committed to the preservation of democratic forms, at least more committed than the average citizen; therefore, (3) what maintains the democratic tradition is not extensive public participation in political policy-making, but, instead, competition among elites whose behavior is regulated by periodic review procedures. Competition among elites and review by citizens of political leaders are provided by elections. Thus elections hold political leaders accountable to non-leaders.

Writers associated with this general position have recently come under scholarly attack. The critique, directed at the first two assertions, can be reviewed briefly: although true that the public is not well-informed politically and is not actively engaged in political life, this is not to be attributed to the inherent traits of citizens so much as to the structure of political opportunities in the United States. Moreover, although true that research has detected among political leaders a greater commitment to democratic procedures than is the case for the ordinary citizen, this commitment is to procedures in which only the leaders participate.

“To have mastered ‘theory’ and ‘method’ is to have become a conscious thinker, a man at work and aware of the assumptions and implications of whatever he is about. To be mastered by ‘method’ or ‘theory’ is simply to be kept from working.” The sentence applies nicely to the present plight of political science. The profession as a whole oscillates between two unsound extremes. At the one end a large majority of political scientists qualify as pure and simple unconscious thinkers. At the other end a sophisticated minority qualify as overconscious thinkers, in the sense that their standards of method and theory are drawn from the physical, “paradigmatic” sciences.

The wide gap between the unconscious and the overconscious thinker is concealed by the growing sophistication of statistical and research techniques. Most of the literature introduced by the title “Methods” (in the social, behavioral or political sciences) actually deals with survey techniques and social statistics, and has little if anything to share with the crucial concern of “methodology,” which is a concern with the logical structure and procedure of scientific enquiry. In a very crucial sense there is no methodology without logos, without thinking about thinking. And if a firm distinction is drawn—as it should be—between methodology and technique, the latter is no substitute for the former. One may be a wonderful researcher and manipulator of data, and yet remain an unconscious thinker.

Africa's postindependence leaders are under enormous pressure. They must assume such new functions as the conduct of foreign relations and military defense and must expand developmental activities greatly, all at a time of falling world commodity prices, population explosion, and increasing indifference to foreign aid on the part of the wealthier countries. Local African expectations are rising, even though such requisites for satisfying these aspirations as capital, skills, and initiative remain in short supply. Nationwide linkages and a national identity must be built in the face of quickening ethnic anxieties and inward-lookingness. The functional benefits offered by a continued non-African presence must be secured without causing deep-seated popular frustrations; such frustrations could clearly jeopardize the regime's legitimacy should they become too extreme. The need for schools, hospitals, and welfare activities are juxtaposed against such pressing requirements as the development of power facilities, irrigation schemes, road networks, and industries. The choices are difficult and the demands heavy. No wonder Aristide Zolberg remarks that the “governments with the lowest load capability have assumed the heaviest burdens.”

If these restrictions of international environment and resources did not impose sufficient constraints upon governments as they attempt to cope with developmental needs, their flexibility of movement is further constricted by the pulls of ideology. African countries, fresh from an encounter with powerful, privileged European states, carry over a wide range of liberal commitments into the postindependence period. They are naturally determined to continue the struggle against any remaining manifestations of colonialism on the continent—white settler oligarchies, neocolonialist military and economic arrangements, or politically-inspired alignments with powers outside of Africa. Their leaders proclaim both nationalist and pan-Africanist objectives and call simultaneously for a leveling egalitarianism and rapid economic growth. The extent to which they can reconcile these somewhat overlapping, and even conflicting, goals with the compelling claims implicit in nation-building remains a crucial question with broad implications for regime stability.

In many ways the study of political groups from a theoretical point of view can be said not to have progressed much beyond the conceptions of Arthur F. Bentley. There have been countless studies of political groups, to be sure, but it seems most have been little more than the collection and presentation of ad hoc facts obtained from the testing of ad hoc hypotheses, the concepts of “group” and of “group behavior” having been little altered in the process.

Much of the difficulty no doubt stems from Bentley's strict empiricism and the interpretation given his position by most social scientists who have aspired to translate him. When Bentley said that we know nothing of ideas and feelings but only of activity, he was merely reminding the social scientist to remain close to the operations of the phenomena he was studying. Activity, or behavior, can be worked with and studied directly, but it is questionable whether or not the same can be said of ideas and feelings. Scientific progress, Bentley would say, can be made only if one deals with what is visible and replicable. Critics as well as followers of Bentley, however, have interpreted him to mean that such matters as subjectivity are outside the pale of science, since subjectivity is presumed to be private, idiosyncratic, and nonreplicable.

Why do some men embrace society's values while others reject them? Is conformity a general trait, more uniformly manifested by some people than by others? What social or psychological forces lie behind the tendency to conform or deviate?

Although these questions obviously have significance for the conduct of political life, they have received far less attention from political scientists than from scholars in other disciplines such as psychology and sociology. In view of current challenges to the legitimacy of existing political institutions, the mounting debate over the acceptable limits of protest, and the growing disdain for democratic decision-processes shown by some segments of the population, the need for political scientists to understand the nature and sources of conformity and deviation has become, if anything, more urgent. We hope, in the present paper, to explore the psychological—and to some extent the social and political—meaning of conformity and deviation as reflected in citizen responses to political beliefs. To that end we shall review briefly the present state of psychological theory and research on conformity behavior; suggest, in light of our own research findings, some ways in which current psychological explanations might be modified and extended to account for conformity and deviation within the mass public; and furnish data that might help to explain why individuals who have different personality characteristics and who occupy different roles in the society are likely to accept or reject political norms.

The study of politics in “developing” countries has tended to focus on the less formal organs of government, such as political parties, the military, the bureaucracy, and even the educational system. National legislatures have often been ignored or rated of little significance in the political processes of these states. This practice contrasts markedly with the attention paid to legislatures in Western states. The most obvious explanation for it is that legislatures in new states tend to have little influence. Important decisions and shifts in power are usually made or recorded elsewhere in the political system.

The Bunge, or National Assembly, of Tanzania is no exception to this general phenomenon. Nevertheless, an examination of the role of M.P.'s in Tanzania can be illuminating. The Bunge contains most of the major political leaders and has, at least constitutionally, broad authority. As a consequence, if the Assembly is to be only a weak political body, then informal norms limiting the powers of the M.P.'s role must exist. Moreover, these norms should prescribe authority relationships between the legislature and other policy shaping bodies in the political system, particularly the Party. Thus, an analysis of the roles of these men can provide important insights not only into the functions of the Bunge, but also into the elite political culture of Tanzania and the pattern of politics which this culture supports.

Angry protests against racial discrimination were a prominent part of American public life during the 1960's. The decade opened with the sit-ins and freedom rides, continued through Birmingham, Selma, and the March on Washington, and closed with protests in hundreds of American cities, often punctuated by rioting and violence. During this troubled decade the rhetoric of protest became increasingly demanding, blanket charges of pervasive white racism and hostility were more common, and some blacks began to actively discourage whites from participating either in protest demonstrations or civil rights organizations. Nothing better symbolized the changing mood and style of black protest in America than recent changes in the movement's dominant symbols. Demonstrators who once shouted “freedom” as their rallying cry now were shouting “black power”—a much more provocative, challenging slogan.

The larger and more diverse a political movement's constituency, the more vague and imprecise its unifying symbols and rallying cries are likely to be. A slogan like black power has no sharply defined meaning; it may excite many different emotions and may motivate individuals to express their loyalty or take action for almost contradictory reasons. As soon as Adam Clayton Powell and Stokely Carmichael began to use the phrase in 1966 it set off an acrimonious debate among black leaders over its true meaning. Initially it was a blunt and threatening battle cry meant to symbolize a break with the past tactics of the civil rights movement.

Lyndon B. Johnson

With tenacious regularity over the last two and a half decades the Gallup Poll has posed to its cross-section samples of the American public the following query, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way (the incumbent) is handling his job as President?” The responses to this curious question form an index known as “Presidential popularity.” According to Richard Neustadt, the index is “widely taken to approximate reality” in Washington and reports about its behavior are “very widely read” there, including, the quotation above would suggest, the highest circles.

Plotted over time, the index forms probably the longest continuous trend line in polling history. This study seeks to analyze the behavior of this line for the period from the beginning of the Truman administration in 1945 to the end of the Johnson administration in January 1969 during which time the popularity question was asked some 300 times.

Four variables are used as predictors of a President's popularity. These include a measure of the length of time the incumbent has been in office as well as variables which attempt to estimate the influence on his rating of major international events, economic slump and war. To assess the independent impact of each of these variables as they interact in association with Presidential popularity, multiple regression analysis is used as the basic analytic technique.

In recent years there has emerged in this country a radical questioning and rejection of established political institutions unparalleled since the Civil War in its intensity and scope. One objective indicator of this trend since World War II is the marked rise in voluntary renunciation of American citizenship, an act which represents the formal and final estrangement of the individual from his former political ties. Available evidence suggests that estrangement from the polity is also widespread in countries throughout the world as fundamental questions are being raised about the legitimacy of political institutions and political leadership.

Attitudes toward the political system have long been a concern of political scientists. Major orienting theories of the political system suggest that citizen support plays a crucial role in determining the structure and processes of political systems. Almond and Verba, for example, use the concept “civic culture” to refer to a complex mix of attitudes and behaviors considered to be conducive to democratic government. Easton underscores the fundamental importance of attitudes for system stability, focusing especially on “diffuse support” as a prerequisite for the integration of political systems. He suggests that “(w)here the input of support falls below [a certain] minimum, the persistence of any kind of system will be endangered. A system will finally succumb unless it adopts measures to cope with the stress.”

The conversion of these general theoretical ideas into systematic empirical theory requires further rigorous and comprehensive analyses of types of citizen support and the development of empirical indicators for this domain.

The basic institutions of modern democracy were established at a very early stage in the transformation that societies have undergone since feudalism. In their establishment, forms that had developed even before feudalism, in Greece and Rome, were copied. Thus the institutions are very old ones indeed.

When the age of these political institutions is compared to that of economic institutions, the contrast is sharp and striking. As society has become more and more rationalized, economic transactions have mirrored this ever-increasing rationality, with increasing technical sophistication, and increasing abstraction. The best indicator of this is in the role of money. From barter economies to modern economies in which bank-deposit money and credit account for most transactions, the development of economic mechanisms for effecting exchange has been very great. Yet the development of political institutions, and of mechanisms for effective political authority, has been far less great.

In this paper, I want to explore the similarities and differences between political power and the embodiment of economic power or value, that is, money. A careful examination of the differences will suggest which of the differences are intrinsic to the differing natures of economic and political transactions, and which are accidental. This will then allow raising questions about what kinds of innovations in political institutions might be feasible, and might allow these institutions to develop more compatibility with the technical and economic changes that occur with such rapidity in modern society.

Spatial models of party competition constitute a recent and incrementally developing literature which seeks to explore the relationships between citizens' decisions and candidates' strategies. Despite the mathematical and deductive rigor of this approach, it is only now that political scientists can begin to see the incorporation of those considerations which less formal analyses identify as salient, and perhaps crucial, features of election contests.

One such consideration concerns the candidates' objectives. Specifically, spatial analysis often confuses the distinction between candidates who maximize votes and candidates who maximize plurality. Downs and Garvey, for example, assume explicitly that candidates maximize votes, though plurality maximization is clearly the assumption which Garvey actually employs, while Downs frequently assumes that vote maximization, plurality maximization, and the goal of winning are equivalent. Downs, nevertheless, attempts to disentangle these objectives, observing that plurality maximization is the appropriate objective for candidates in a single-member district, while vote maximization is appropriate in proportional representation systems with many parties. All subsequent spatial analysis research, however, assumes either implicitly or explicitly that candidates maximize plurality. If Downs is correct, therefore, this research may not be relevant for a general understanding of electoral competition in diverse constitutional or historical circumstances. The question then is whether those strategies that maximize votes differ from those strategies that maximize plurality.

Theoretical discussions of civil disobedience on ethical and political grounds received special attention in this country during the Nuremberg trials, the security and loyalty controversies of the 1950's and the pre-arms control years of nuclear power. A fourth wave of interest formed after the early civil rights protests and a fifth is appearing to consider dissent from national policies on the Vietnam War. In this paper civil disobedience is viewed from a trough between the fourth and most recent wave. The phenomenon is interpreted with selected ideas from the study of political obligation and unconventional dissent. The essay first assesses recent American analysis of civil disobedience to determine what the criteria should be to distinguish it from other forms of political action and to discover its political ethics. Secondly, there is an attempt to answer the question: Is there any appreciable service that carefully defined civil disobedience might perform in American democratic thought? The complete enterprise is provoked by a need to examine new strategies for democratic citizenship in a time when the deficiencies of American political life are becoming known to increasing numbers and varieties of people instead of remaining the preserve of enlightened elites.

Political efficacy, the belief that the ruled in a political system have some capacity for exercising influence over the rulers, has been studied extensively by political researchers. A selected bibliography compiled by Easton and Dennis in early 1967 contains some thirty books and articles which have dealt in one way or another with political efficacy and its correlates. And this bibliography could be updated considerably.

Substantial theoretic import has been attributed to political efficacy. Easton and Dennis consider the SRC sense of political efficacy construct to be an important determinant of the persistence of democratic regimes. They argue that beliefs in political efficacy provide “a reservoir of diffuse support upon which the system can automatically draw in normal times, when members may feel that their capacity to manipulate the environment is not living up to their expectations, and in special periods of stress, when popular participation may appear to be pure illusion or when political outputs fail to measure up to insistent demands,” A related construct, termed “subjective competence” by Almond and Verba, is based on different indicators but interpreted as substantively equivalent to the SRC construct. On the basis of their analysis of the Five-Nation data, Almond and Verba arrive at the general conclusion that “the self-confident [subjectively competent] citizen appears to be the democratic citizen.” The concept of political competence, as formulated by Barnes, subsumes political efficacy under the aegis of an individual attribute consisting of “political skills plus the sense of efficacy necessary for effective political action.” Barnes contends that high levels of political competence dispose individuals to prefer democratic styles of leadership, while low levels dispose individuals to prefer authoritarian styles. On these grounds, he concludes that relatively high levels of political competence are a necessary condition of political democracy.

The basic social relations of peasant life are directly related to an environment characterized by extreme scarcity. The major factor of productive wealth in agriculture is land, to which the peasant has little or no free access. Labor—his own, and that of his family members—is available to the peasant, but this relatively unproductive factor must be applied to land in order to generate wealth. Few other outlets for productive labor employment are available to him. When the peasant is able to combine land and labor in a wealth-generating endeavor, his productivity is likely to be extremely low, due to limiting factors such as technology, capital, marketing information, and credit. All of these life aspects combine to hold down the peasant's income and preclude savings. He is, in a word, poor.

Furthermore, the peasant is powerless against many threats which abound in his environment. There are disease, accident, and death, among the natural threats. There are violence, exploitation, and injustice at the hands of the powerful, among the human threats. The peasant knows that this environmental constellation is dangerous. He also knows that there is relatively little he can do about his situation, and, accordingly, his culture often features themes of vulnerability, calamity, and misfortune. As George Foster has neatly summarized if, the outlook this situation engenders in the peasant is the “Image of the Limited Good.”

A fundamental controversy in political theory from ancient times until the present concerns the rationality of political actors, what it is, if it exists at all, and whether or not humans display it in politics. Many political scientists are impatient with this controversy because it remains open after so much (apparently futile) discussion. But they ought not be. The problem of rationality is necessarily imbedded in even the simplest kinds of political research, where, if overlooked, it can occasion misinterpretation and even outright error.

Suppose, for example, in an investigation of legislators one uses the notion of party loyalty as an independent variable to explain behavior. This notion seems simple and straightforward enough and not, therefore, likely to involve one in philosophical controversy. But in fact party loyalty can be interpreted in a variety of ways and the choice among them necessarily involves a choice on one side of the controversy over rationality. Loyalty can be thought of, for example, as a truly independent variable, as a product of political socialization, as an expression of affect, and hence as an essentially irrational motive. On the other hand, it may be thought of as itself dependent on bargains rationally satisfying the preferences of legislators. Such bargains may be either short term or long term so that a legislator's manifest party loyalty may result from a series of advantageous bargains with party leaders on particular bills or from an implied bargain with them on career advantage.

“Suit yourself.”

—American colloquialism

Currently fashionable modes of political analysis deserve acclaim today for at least two reasons: they provide opportunities for participating in a pleasurable if strenuous activity (regardless of the value of the end results) and they effectively come to terms with the surface facts of political reality. Our posterity, too, may find it easy to esteem the contemporary products of the profession of political science should it ever look back and see how an affection for craftsmanship is combined with the ability to please. Moreover, the reward system of the profession should appear as having been nicely designed to promote the present display of talent, ingenuity, variety, and success. There is evidence, in any case, that the prevailing inclination to work hard and to develop ever more powerful analytical tools is welcomed and reinforced within the discipline. All would seem to be well.

Yet doubts continue to be expressed today even by those who govern the profession and engage in what Thomas Kuhn has called normal science. Partially, there is a petulant resentment among older practitioners, scholars who are made fretful and irritable by the entrepreneurial opportunism of the nouveau riche, by the feeling that mindless industriousness rather than scholarly contemplation is now rewarded by tenure as well as by space in journals, time on panels, positions on editorial boards, and cash for projects. It does not pain me, however, to disregard the indictment that comes from this source—not because I suspect its patrician origins but because I believe it is blind to the underlying impulse of empiricism, because it ignores the subversive, liberating thrust of empirical science.

A current concern in the theory of political development is the relationship between political democracy and economic and social variables. Various writers have hypothesized, for example, that the development of democratic political institutions is related to increasing levels of education, communications, and urbanization. Daniel Lerner has developed this argument further in stating that a developmental sequence occurs with increasing urbanization leading in turn to higher levels of education, communications development, and finally political development. This theory has been tested and corroborated in research which employed statistical causal modeling methods on contemporary data gathered over a large number of nations. The purpose of this paper is to test the adequacy of Lerner's model with data gathered over time in a single nation, which presents a research situation more congruent with the actual temporal processes of political development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine several specific kinds of nonrandom measurement errors and to note their implications for causal model construction. In doing so, my secondary purpose is to sensitize the reader to the crucial importance of making one's assumptions fully explicit and to the advantages of a causal models approach to measurement errors. It is well known that the presence of even random measurement errors can produce serious distortions in our estimates, particularly whenever one is attempting to assess the relative contributions of intercorrelated independent variables. Nevertheless, common practice is to utilize what Duncan refers to as the naive approach to the presence of measurement errors: that of acknowledging the existence of measurement errors, and even discussing possible sources of such errors, while completely ignoring them in the analysis stage of the research process. That is, measured values are inserted directly into causal models as though they adequately reflect the true values. It can easily be shown that such a practice, while leading to important simplifications, can readily lead one astray. In particular, it may blind the analyst to searching for alternative plausible explanations that allow for measurement error.

There have been a number of very recent papers in the sociological literature, some of which will be briefly summarized since they may not be familiar to the reader. For the most part, these papers have dealt rather systematically with ways to handle random measurement errors, whereas nonrandom errors have been dealt with only incidentally and much less carefully.

Through the Looking Glass

It is not hard to find reasons why Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship has had such widespread influence. Its approach, that of comparative, historical sociology, seeks clues to the present in the past, and Moore demonstrates mastery of a wide range of historical materials. Yet I feel that the book is ultimately unsatisfactory, for it is marred by a lack of respect for its own sources of information and by contradictions and non-sequiturs at critical points in the argument.

In this critique I shall first examine the general thesis of the book and then turn to the case studies which Moore uses to support his arguments. I shall also attempt to account for the sharp contrasts in the quality of scholarship which characterize the study, and will attribute them to Moore's preconceived ideological assumptions about the nature of the good society.

The fundamental process of politics is the aggregation of citizens' preferences into a collective—a social—choice. We develop, interpret, and explain non-technically in this expository essay the definitions, assumptions, and theorems of a mathematical model of one aggregative mechanism—the electoral process. This mechanism is conceptualized here as a multidimensional model of spatial competition in which competition consists of candidates affecting turnout and the electorate's perception of each candidate's positions, and in which the social choice is a policy package which the victorious candidate advocates.

This approach, inaugurated by Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy, and falling under the general rubric “spatial models of party competition,” has been scrutinized, criticized, and reformulated. To clarify the accomplishments of this formulation we identify and discuss in section 2 the general democratic problem of ascertaining a social preference. We review critically in section 3 the definitions and assumptions of our model. We consider in sections 4 and 5 the logic of a competitive electoral equilibrium. We assume in section 4 that the electorate's preferences can be summarized and represented by a single function; the analysis in section 5 pertains to competition between two organizational structures or two opposed ideologies (i.e., when two functions are required to summarize and represent the electorate's preference). Finally, we suggest in section 6 a conceptualization of electoral processes which facilitates extending and empirically testing our model.