A case can be made that non-ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a classic example of “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.” After all, the ERA had received overwhelming support in both houses of Congress, passing by a vote of 354 to 23 in the House and 84 to 8 in the Senate. Both major political parties had repeatedly supported the ERA in their national party platforms; not until 1980 did one party (the Republican) adopt a stance of neutrality. Every President from Truman to Carter had endorsed the amendment. And, by the end of the campaign for state ratification, more than 450 organizations with a total membership of over 50 million were on record in support of the ERA. While the amendment was before Congress in 1970-72, lobbying for the ERA was heavy and well-organized, and no countervailing forces were ever mobilized in any effective way. In view of this broad base of political and public support for the amendment, and little visible opposition, a reasonable prognosis in 1972 was that it would be ratified by the required 38 states long before the original deadline of March 22, 1979, set by Congress.

However, the ratification process was far more complex than either political observers or amendment supporters recognized initially. Although an intensive lobbying effort had been waged to push the amendment through Congress, supporters naively believed that it would be quickly ratified in the absence of pre-existing state groups poised to press for passage and without major allocation of national organizations' resources.

British politics are more fun today, at least for the political scientist, than at any time since the Second World War. The British two-party system, that seemingly immutable product of the “first past the post” electoral system, Britain's social structure and the enduring party identifications of Britain's voters, shows every sign of breaking up–not slowly and gradually, but with something approaching Mount St. Helen's force. A political party that did not exist a year ago, the Social Democrats, is now, in alliance with the liberals, sweeping all before it electorally. This short article tries to give some account of what is going on–and why.

The present upheaval is taking place both down below, among voters, and up above, among members of Parliament and other prominent politicians. Let us begin with the voters.

Common to both political folk wisdom and political science is the idea that the mid-term congressional election is a referendum on the performance of the current administration. The more popular a president and the more successful his policies, the better his party does at the midterm. The president's party almost invariably loses some congressional seats in off-year elections (since the Civil War the president's party has added House seats only once—in 1934—though it occasionally picks up Senate seats). But the extent of its losses varies widely (from one to 56 House seats in postwar midterms), depending, so the theory goes, on how the electorate rates the administration's performance.

The 1982 congressional elections will, in this view, be a referendum on President Reagan's administration and in particular on his economic policies, which have been the focus of political attention since inauguration day. If this is true, then economic conditions prevalent through the spring of 1982 (a potentially devastating combination of deep recession, high unemployment, and high interest rates) and Reagan's shaky support in the polls (less than 50 percent approving his performance in all Gallup surveys during the first four months of 1982), portend a Republican disaster of major proportions in the fall.

Remarkably, almost no one is seriously predicting anything of the kind. And it may indeed be a mistake to bet on enormous Republican losses—partly, we will argue, because they are not widely anticipated.

Political scientists are only now, and dimly, beginning to recognize that something called “political risk analysis” (PRA) is very much in vogue in the corporate and banking communities of this country. Any attempt to assess this uncommon development should begin with this question: Why would any banker or corporate manager wish to spend hard cash on anything political scientists might have to say about places overseas where banks and multinational corporations lend or invest their capital? After all, the profession is not exactly distinguished by its ability to make accurate forecasts. Indeed, Sartori has argued that political scientists ought to eschew forecasting entirely in that they are best able to explain what happened as opposed to what may come to pass.

Sartori's assertion of course would make historians of us all—and burden us with the historian's smug claim that, if the history examined is too recent, the immediacy of events will distort our vision and bias our judgments. Thus, rather than try to foretell where, say, Germany will move politically next year we should expend (more!) of our resources to establish once and for all what really caused Weimar to collapse and Hitler to come to power.

This is not the stuff of political risk analysis. Growing interest in this activity is little based on broad analyses of the past or on long-term forecasts of future events. The potential consumers of political assessments are intelligent, harried bankers and corporate managers who are pressed to make relatively short-term decisions that affect the viability of enterprise and investment-and, equally important, careers-in professions where tenure is unknown.

In 1972 it appeared that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would be ratified quickly. Support was forthcoming from a vast array of political leaders, such as President Nixon, past presidents, governors and legislators. Both major parties made the amendment part of their platforms and did so again in 1976. An impressive list of private organizations, including the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women and many labor organizations, supported the amendment. Opposition was confined to groups of limited political effectiveness, such as the John Birch Society, George Wallace's American Independent Party and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).

During the years immediately following congressional approval of the ERA in 1972, the American public strongly favored the amendment (see Table 1). In 1974, three Americans favored the ERA for every one who opposed it. Support for the ERA continued at a ratio of about two to one throughout the early ratification years. Support was widespread among all demographic groups. In 1975-76, the Gallup Poll found that even within groups where opposition to the ERA was strongest a majority supported ratification. Specifically, persons with low incomes favored it 53 percent to 31 percent and those living in small towns supported it 54 percent to 29 percent.

Only in 1980—eight years after the ERA was submitted to the states for ratification—did support dip down to its lowest level. This represented a second phase for the ERA—the 1980 presidential campaign-during which the amendment was transformed by candidate Ronald Reagan into a partisan issue and removed from the Republican platform.

Ostensibly, “The Man of Iron” is a film about a successful strike, the culmination of ten years of hope and struggle, an act of solidarity among workers who have understood that the only guarantee of their material well-being and their freedom is the union, an autonomous power of their own. It is a film about a strike and, midway, director Andrzej Wajda turns it into a classical flick, a banal love story seen so many times before, with scenes of a train station, wrapped in blue mist, where a mother takes her child, wrapped in red blankets, away from the intruding repression. One enters the climate of Gorky's Mother, of “Adelein 31,” of “Norma Jean.”

Several Polish and French reviewers did not like this sentimental injection of private life, accusing the film of formal inconsistency, but I find the formalism of the strike film as profoundly ironic as the event itself: the strike of workers against the society where the working class was supposed to hold power, the strike against a party which claimed to represent them turned out to be just a strike like other strikes of workers against the power of capital and the state.

And the ending–one of the endings–is equally romantic: the hero and his woman reunited after she is freed from prison by the victory of strikers, the protagonist in the closing monologue turning to the generation of his father to report the accomplishment of the task.

In the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan and the advent of the Reagan Administration, cooperation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union seems to have diminished, particularly in the area of arms control. Nuclear non-proliferation is the oldest area of Soviet-American cooperation in arms control, dating back to the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the 1950s. But the fact that the two countries have a common interest does not mean that there is necessarily an equal interest or that it can survive the current tension.

Some analysts argue that the Soviet Union has more at risk from proliferation than does the United States. For example, many of the potential new entrants to nuclear weapons status–India, Pakistan, Korea, Taiwan, Iraq–are countries geographically close to the Soviet Union and distant from the United States. Thus, it could be argued that the Soviet Union has more to fear than we do, and from the zero-sum perspective of U.S.-Soviet hostility, further proliferation may hurt the Soviet Union more than the United States. To judge whether this is a sensible basis for policy, or whether cooperative action is a better basis requires a closer look at the skeptical arguments.

Incumbent politicians are understandably nervous when electoral rules are altered. In the case of the U.S. House of Representatives, members are well aware that a change in decade is accompanied by the near certainty that their own district lines will be redrawn. These incumbents know that changes resulting from the reallocation of congressional seats among states and the shift of population within states could have a shattering effect on their careers: their districts could be eliminated; they could be thrown into a district with another House incumbent; their district lines could be radically redrawn, destroying their traditional bases of support.

Incumbents' unease is transformed into serious worry by one additional fact: de jure control of redistricting is out of their hands. State legislatures and governors, the Justice Department (for those states falling under the Voting Rights Act) and ultimately the courts determine the fate of incumbents.

Of course, the ostensible purpose of congressional redistricting in accordance with the decennial census is to ensure that congressional representation reflects the changes in the geographical distribution of the nation's population and thus to ensure that the members of the House from each state represent approximately the same number of citizens. Putting that principle into practice creates opportunities for the parties to increase their strength in the House but it also causes tremendous uncertainty among incumbents.

Looking at political science research on the effects of redistricting on the fortunes of incumbents, one might wonder why they worry. In 1972 I reported findings of my study on incumbents who lost their elections after redistricting.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is not the first failed attempt to amend the U.S. Constitution to make the political power of women more equal to that of men. Nor was the first failure connected with the so-called Women's Suffrage Amendment which was ratified in 1920. Rather, it occurred 50 years and four successful amendments earlier. Despite the determined efforts of a small group of women, the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the right of all male citizens to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” but left out women altogether.

It would be foolhardy to draw neat parallels between the experiences of activist women at two times as different as 1870 and the present. Nonetheless, it can be an instructive exercise.

Americans have always been suspicious of elites, and criticism leveled at the leadership of the ERA reflects that attitude. It would be unlikely, however, for a mass movement to be the propelling force behind a constitutional amendment. Looking back at the struggle over the Fifteenth Amendment, we see that a small band of educated, upper-middle-class women fought for the inclusion of women. That those women were perceived as an elite does seem to have hurt their cause. Similarly, the ERA's chances may have been damaged by a perception that its chief proponents were not typical American women.

Yet, the political culture of the time is clearly of greatest importance in determining an amendment's passage. In 1870 the barriers to acceptance of women as leaders were so great that even communicating their views was no easy task for the early suffragettes. The culture was resistant to women “speaking out.”

Like all of their recent predecessors, senior officials of the Reagan administration have spoken both frequently and with enthusiasm of their intention to save large amounts of taxpayers' money while making the federal government more responsive and dramatically increasing agency productivity. All of this is to be done by shaping up the federal bureaucracy.

The main activity which has emerged so far has been to implement a hiring freeze, to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy through firings and furloughs, and to advocate a barely specified form of cabinet governance. While these actions may save money in the short run, they will not improve the actual functioning of the federal bureaucracy.

Indeed, ideas emerging from presidential appointees frequently tend to be irrelevant for one simple reason: most secretaries, assistant secretaries and even deputy assistant secretaries know very little about federal bureaucracy when they come to Washington and subsequently spend a remarkably small portion of their time learning about it—a fact that in itself is one of the major obstacles to improving the management of the federal government.

Few secretaries, assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries in any administration can resist the call of endless meetings with their counterparts from the states, other federal agencies or the big interest groups. Even more compelling for them is the siren call of travel to Paris, Peoria, and sundry places east and west to spread both enlightenment and the gospel of their administration and to revel in the attention automatically granted many visiting federal officials.