It seems a reasonable enough proposition that a president will organize his congressional relations to suit his policy goals and his personal style. Available literature supports this expectation – at least before the administration of Jimmy Carter. But, of course, recent presidents have been wise in the ways of Washington as a consequence of lengthy experience in the nation's capital. In fact, most have served in Congress. Among post-Second World War presidents, only Eisenhower before Carter lacked service on Capitol Hill (and Fred Greenstein now assures us that his political savvy was fine tuned).

So-called ‘general theory’, or ‘systems theory’, is now nearly friendless among political scientists. The charm it once held as an ordering framework for empirical research has given way to that of the economic models of the rational choice school. While the successor paradigm was self-consciously reacting against the ‘over-socialized’ conception of man underlying systems theory and political sociology in general, much of its broader appeal was founded on similar claims: the promise of a testable, empirical theory, and an aspiration to complete generality. Perhaps these two goals will turn out to be irreconcilable; there is some plausibility in the view that, in practical affairs anyway, the idea of a general empirical theory is a contradiction in terms. In this article, however, I wish to examine a problem for systems theory which is not due to this tension, one which has gone unnoticed, and which has survived the decline and fall of the research programme.

In order to understand the dynamics of contemporary government, we must consider what government does as well as why it grows. This is true whether theories seek to explain past growth or are hypotheses about future developments. Political science has a unique responsibility to address this problem, because it is the discipline for which government is central. Whereas economists and sociologists can produce models that treat political change as epiphenomenal, political scientists must identify what it is that changes when government changes.

For more than a decade, a debate has been raging among American political activists, journalists and scholars about the numerous rules changes enacted by the Democratic party since its tumultuous 1968 national convention, and the various legal changes at the state and federal levels that have also affected the Presidential nominating process. The rules changes have included the introduction of fairer practices such as written state party rules for delegate selection; proportional representation of candidates' supporters in the delegations; increased representation of women, racial minorities and young people at the convention; and measures to require nominees to respond in writing to the party platform. The legal changes include the proliferation of delegate selection primaries and the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 and its various subsequent amendments. The debate has centred around the desirability of these changes, which will here be referred to generically as ‘the reforms’, with no normative connotation intended.

This article forms part of a longer-term project dealing with the impact of public choice theories in political science. The focus here is on economic models of bureaucracy, which despite their increasing theoretical significance and influence on practical politics have heretofore been little analysed, except by their exponents. I have argued elsewhere that amongst existing public choice accounts there are two seminal works, Antony Downs's pluralist treatment in Inside Bureaucracy and William Niskanen's new right thesis in Bureaucracy and Representative Government. The central innovation of economic approaches is their stress on rational officials' attachment to budget maximization strategies. In Downs's case this is a finite maximand limited by bureaucrats' conservatism and other motivations. But in Niskanen's case budget maximization is an open-ended process, constrained only by external limits on agencies' abilities to push up their budgets. None the less, despite their disparate approaches and conclusions, both these books share four failings common to almost all other public choice work in the field:

(1) They operate with vague and ill-defined definitions of bureaucrats' utility functions.

(2) They assume that all bureaucracies are hierarchical line agencies.

For some time we have been engaged in a large scale study of various leadership strata in the United States. Our goal is to clarify similarities and differences in background, ideology and personality among members of such strata. We are also interested in the relationship between these variables and the manner in which members of different leadership groups perceive ‘reality’. This article reports preliminary findings on two groups – leading business executives and top level journalists. Our work has been partly informed by hypotheses developed by social scientists as diverse as Max Weber, Harold Lasswell, Joseph Schumpeter, S. M. Lipset, Alvin Gouldner, Jurgen Habermas, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell and others.

Coalition formation has been the subject of much theoretical and empirical work in the past decade or so. The theories that have been tested all rest, one way or another, upon assumptions about the ways in which the payoff accruing to a particular coalition is distributed among its members. Yet much less empirical work has been done on the process of payoff distribution. Thus some of the fundamental assumptions of coalition theories, at least in terms of their practical application to coalition governments, have been more scantily tested. Several theories of payoff distribution have been recently developed, however. It is the purpose of this article to test the application of these theories to the practice of coalition government in Europe.

I am sure that all of us who have been attempting to make sense of American party politics these last couple of decades welcome Professor Reiter's contribution, and look forward to the publication of his book. As I understand the argument he is making, at least four positions are possible with respect to the recent history of political parties and Presidential nominations in the United States: (1) that no changes have occurred; (2) that long-term secular trends account for all changes; (3) that party reforms account for all changes; and (4) that a combination of longer-term trends and party reforms account for changes. Perhaps in order to hold the attention of readers, Professor Reiter has chosen to contrast positions (2) and (3).

Although some scholars have argued that authoritarianism is characteristic only of the right and not of the left, persuasive reasons exist for doubting this claim. Intuitive observation of left-wing and right-wing regimes as well as radical political movements of the left and right reveals striking parallels in their styles of political engagement, their reliance upon force, their disdain for democratic ideals and practices and their violations of civil liberties. In addition, systematic inquiry into the similarities and differences between far-left and far-right radicals in the United States has been hampered by various methodological difficulties. One can list, among these, such problems as the obvious inappropriateness of the F scale (owing to its strong right-wing content) as a measure for identifying left-wing authoritarians; the difficulty of obtaining adequate samples of true believers of the extreme left and right; the self-image of the American left as a persecuted minority which, for reasons of self-interest, spuriously inflates the degree of support expressed by its members for individual rights and liberties; and the exposure of both extreme camps to the liberal democratic values dominating American political culture, which unmistakably colours their political rhetoric.

We have reason to think that a similar study conducted in some – perhaps many – European countries would reveal even greater similarities between the far left and far right than we have turned up in the United States. Unlike the United States, which has enjoyed a strong liberal democratic tradition that has served to weaken and soften the intensity of its radical movements, a number of European countries, less wedded to liberal democratic principles, have developed a more vigorous, less diluted tradition of radical politics. These nations have long had to contend with powerful extremist movements actively and significantly engaged in the political struggles of their respective nations. The radical movements of Europe have been more extreme and zealous – more unequivocally revolutionary and reactionary – than the radical movements of the United States. The sustained confrontation of these extremist movements, in our view, is likely to have intensified the authoritarian propensities of each.

In the present article, through a series of surveys in which we have tried to idenify, as best we can, supporters of the far left and far right, we have systematically compared the two camps on a variety of political and psychological characteristics. We find, in keeping with the conventional view, that the far left and the far right stand at opposite end of the familiar left–right continuum on many issues of public policy, political philosophy and personal belief. They hold sharply contrasting views on questions of law and order, foreign policy, social welfare, economic equality, racial equality, women's rights, sexual freedom, patriotism, social conventions, religion, family values and orientations towards business, labour and private enterprise.

Nevertheless, while the two camps embrace different programmatic beliefs, both are deeply estranged from certain features of American society and highly critical of what they perceive as the spiritual and moral degeneration of American institutions. Both view American society as dominated by conspiratorial forces that are working to defeat their respective ideological aims.

The degree of their alienation is intensified by the zealous and unyielding manner in which they hold their beliefs. Both camps possess an inflexible psychological and political style characterized by the tendency to view social and political affairs in crude, unambiguous and stereotypical terms. They see political life as a conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’, a struggle between good and evil played out on a battleground where compromise amounts to capitulation and the goal is total victory.

The far left and the far right also resemble each other in the way they pursue their political goals. Both are disposed to censor their opponents, to deal harshly with enemies, to sacrifice the well-being even of the innocent in order to serve a ‘higher purpose’, and to use cruel tactics if necessary to ‘persuade’ society of the wisdom of their objectives. Both tend to support (or oppose) civil liberties in a highly partisan and self-serving fashion, supporting freedom for themselves and for the groups and causes they favour while seeking to withhold it from enemies and advocates of causes they dislike.

In sum, when the views of the far left and far right are evaluated against the standard left–right ideological dimension, they can appropriately be classifled at opposite ends of the political spectrum. But when the two camps are evaluated on questions of political and psychological style, the treatment of political opponents, and the tactics that they are willing to employ to achieve their ends, the display many parallels that can rightly be labelled authoritarian.

The bandwagon was the caravan in a circus that carried the band, and usually took the lead in a procession. It has come to stand as a symbol for a party or a cause which is successful; we talk of people wanting to climb on to a bandwagon when their desire to be associated with the winning party or cause is strong. A ‘bandwagon effect’ is the label given by social scientists to a situation where the information about majority opinion itself causes some people to adopt the majority view for whatever reason; conversely, an ‘underdog’ effect is held to exist if the information causes some people to adopt a minority view. Processes of this kind are of theoretical interest because they affect the possibility of stable prediction in the social sciences; if the very act of predicting that one party will win an election can be a self-fulfilling prophecy then the natural scientific model of the social sciences may be compromised. Bandwagon processes are also of practical importance to pollsters, since the professional nature of their trade might also be compromised if their predictions could be shown to be interfering in political reality. These effects have therefore received a fair amount of attention in the literature. The main context studied has been the effect of exposure to an opinion poll on the general public. In this article, I shall first examine the existing evidence for poll effects of this kind, and then present and discuss a study of such effects.

It is possible to agree with Professor Reiter's general argument and still fault some of his data and take exception to his conclusions. There is little doubt that the original sources of the state and local parties' weakness, and of their loss of control over the presidential nominating process, preceded the party and campaign reforms of the 1970s. Reiter is not alone in arguing that the eclipse of state and local ‘king-makers’ slowly began to take effect earlier, as a result of the advent of civil service reforms, presidential primaries, electronic media, new campaign techniques and the nationalization of the electorate. The reforms are indeed only the latest chapter of a long-running saga.

The past decade has seen the growth of a considerable literature on the link between government popularity, as reflected by the proportion of the public indicating their intention to vote for the government in opinion polls, and the state of the economy, as represented by certain key variables. The work began in the early 1970s with articles by Goodhart and Bhansali, Mueller, and Kramer. It continued through the decade; some of the more recent contributions can be found in a set of readings edited by Hibbs and Fassbender. However, despite the amount and quality of this work, problems remain. Principal amongst these, as Chrystal and Alt have pointed out, is the inability to estimate a relationship which exhibits any degree of stability either over time or between researchers. Nearly all the studies have been successful in finding a significant relationship for specific time periods, but when these are extended, or when the function is used to forecast outside the original estimation period, the relationship appears to break down.

During the past decade, political researchers have devoted growing attention to women's political involvement and, to a somewhat lesser extent, their political attitudes in Western cultures. This interest has been a response in part to contemporary feminist movements and, more specifically, to the increasingly visible role of women as social activists, partisan elites and governmental decision makers in Western European and North American society.

First I would like to thank Professors Polsby and Wekkin for their thoughtful comments on my article. I am also grateful to the Editors of the Journal for providing this forum for us to exchange our views.

Professor Polsby's first comment is that I have misinterpreted his position on the causes of the current sorry state of American political parties. In reply, I shall focus on his book, which provides the most elaborate development of his thoughts on the subject. The passage he cites in his third footnote is one of at least four which seem to agree with the thrust of my argument. however, in the context of a book that is, after all, entitled Consequences of party Reform, these qualifications are peripheral indeed.

The purpose of this article is to outline some of the more important ‘images’ of the environment held in the Soviet Union. By ‘images’ of the environment I refer to the manner in which people utilize the natural environment in order to meet their biological, social or aesthetic needs, and their perception of the means for fulfilling these needs. The environment may be perceived as infinitely renewable, and thus as a resource to be exploited with minimal attention to future consequences. Or the natural environment may be perceived as a scarce commodity, a unique gift in danger of being destroyed by humankind's productive activities. Furthermore, attitudes toward the environment may vary across cultures, or within the same culture depending on age, socio-economic status, political ideology, occupation or area of residence. The environmental image maintained by a group, culture or individual has implications far beyond any immediate impact on nature. Fundamental ideas about the structuring of society, the economy and the political system are involved. Positive attitudes towards environmental protection may clash with deeply held values – faith in science and technology, a commitment to quantitative economic growth and confidence in the existing hierarchical structure of social and political power. One's environmental image, therefore, may either support the established order, or may support fundamental change.

Committee chairmen in the United States House of Representatives were often very powerful figures until the reforms of the early 1970s – as the numerous tales about those stereotyped villains, the southern Democrats, bear witness. Yet, surprisingly little explicit typologizing about leadership in congressional committees appears in the academic literature despite a growing awareness of the different goals which congressmen pursue and the variety of environments in which they operate. Just two different models of chairmen's power were developed in the context of the pre-reform Congress. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the accepted view, perhaps caricature, was that committee chairmen were autocratic, obstructionist (at least as far as liberals were concerned), conservative, possibly senile, and more than likely representative of constituencies outside the mainstream of national politics. A list of chairmen seen as fitting into this mould would include men such as ‘Judge’ Howard Smith, chairman of the Rules Committee from 1955 to 1967; his somewhat less skilful successor from 1967 to 1972, William Colmer of Mississippi; Graham Barden, the provocative chairman of the Education and Labor Committee between 1953 and 1960; and the authoritative Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee for seventeen years until 1966.

In an article published some time ago. we analysed in a systematic way the relationship between constituency marginality and turnout in British general elections between 1955 and 1970. Previous considerations of marginality had concentrated on its effect upon change in turnout from one election to the next, but we were concerned with the relationship between the absolute level of turnout in constituencies in one election and their marginality at the previous election (‘previous marginality’). We found that there was a consistent, significant, positive relationship between previous constituency marginality and turnout.

Realignment theory is a recent but flourishing sub-branch of the study of American political parties. Over the last thirty years, the original suggestions of its inventor, V. O. Key, have been elaborated and refined in several directions and through several phases, gradually being modified to take variations in historical circumstances more carefully into account. Problems of the same kind often occur, and are likely to prove even less manageable, when efforts are made to apply the theory to another political system and culture as authors from both countries (and from neither) have in recent years tried, more or less explicitly, to use it to explain developments in the British party system. Some techniques travel quite well, and some useful insights can be obtained by looking afresh at familiar patterns in the light of similar experiences elsewhere. But the differences between the two nations and states preclude any rigorous attempt to apply a theory derived from the history of one country with a view to explaining the experiences of the other.

Although research on the welfare state is fundamentally comparative and cross-national, empirical observation of the peculiarities of the American case has structured much of the thinking on the subject. Explaining variations in welfare state policy usually begins with the identification of cross-national variations in the initiation, scope or size of national social service programs such as social security, workman's compensation, unemployment insurance, national medical care and public housing. The coverage of the programs that have been established, the number of programs and the size of the benefits distributed are typically found to be smaller in the United States than in other industrialized democracies. The relative lateness of the United States' adoption of major social welfare programs, along with the low percentage of either Gross National Product or government revenue expended in social service programs, constitutes clear evidence that the welfare state is a function of more than the level of national economic development. To the extent that welfare state research devotes itself to explaining the extreme variations represented by American policy performance, its theory often derives from interpretations made of corresponding peculiarities of American popular ideology, social structure, political institutions and history. As a consequence, explaining the welfare state often depends on how one explains America.

The US House of Representatives underwent a series of reforms in the 1970s which, on paper, changed the institution in fundamental ways. Often, however, institutional inertia is able to transform important ‘paper’ changes into barely discernible actual changes. Have the reforms really led to alterations in the way Congress operates and the policies it produces? To provide a partial answer to this question, we single out one of the reforms – a change in the application of the seniority system in the selection of committee chairmen – and analyse it with an eye towards one hypothesized effect – alterations in the level of party support among key representatives. But by restricting our study in this manner, we are able to provide specific empirical facts which should be of considerable assistance in the important task of formulating more generalized conclusions about the ability of legislative reform to produce real change in the governing process.