There are times when the issues we analyze as scholars suddenly become front-page news. This has happened to me with the increase of ethnic protests in the Soviet Union. Balts, Armenians, and others, are in the news daily and commentators are debating what their demands mean for the future of the Gorbachev program. What indeed?

I shall venture an analysis, but with a disclaimer that much is uncertain due to the fluidity of events and the continuing lack of comprehensive information from the Soviet political scene. Part of what I say may be dated by the time this is printed.

Gorbachev has called the nationalities problem “the most fundamental, vital issue of our society.” Even though the multiethnic dimension of Soviet politics has now become more apparent, it has always been there. Non-Russians make up half of the Soviet population and most live in their traditional homelands currently constituting federal subunits of the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” It is quite natural that their political role becomes more prominent in the course of a program emphasizing democratization; it is also natural that their views can differ from those of the center (Rothschild, 1981). Those commentators who depict the nationalities as spoilers endangering Gorbachev's reforms seem to think that democratization is possible without the participation of all segments of society.

Events in the non-Russian republics of the USSR can be properly analyzed only within the context of political change at the center of power in Moscow.

“National wars against the imperial powers are not only possible and probable; they are inevitable, progressive, and revolutionary”

V. I. Lenin.

“It is obvious that the use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy”

M. S. Gorbachev.

The rhetoric of the leadership of the world's most powerful Marxist state has changed over the last seventy years. The more recent oratory is warmly welcomed in Western circles, especially when accompanied by specific pledges of unilateral military force reductions. But what if Marxist nations, irrespective of particular leaders or styles of leadership, possess a political culture and bureaucratic organization which mandates a persistent militarism? Perhaps there are limits to the demilitarization of socialist nations—limits which are not reciprocal to any behavior of Western capitalist nations, but which arise from the structure of socialist institutions. Put more broadly, do political, economic, and social systems change because leaders want them to?

Marxists typically argue exactly this point, using capitalism as their example. The maintenance of a large military establishment undergirds the modern capitalist economy. According to this argument, if it were not for the prop provided by military spending, advanced capitalism would fall victim to its most pervasive internal “contradiction”—underconsumption. In order to absorb “surplus capital” capitalist governments must increase spending; they cannot spend on welfare functions without undermining work incentive, so they spend on the military instead (Baran and Sweezy, 1968;Melman, 1972). This spending not only uses up surplus capital, but also provides capitalist states with the wherewithal to support imperialism.

When turnout fell to a near-historic low in 1988, the two sources of government statistics suggested opposite reasons. One is that fewer and fewer people are registered to vote, and the other that registered voters are going to the polls less and less.

According to the figures supplied by state election officials who tally up county registration totals and record election returns, voting by registered voters is down 15 percentage points since 1960: 85.4% voted that year, but only 70.5% in 1988. By contrast, the U.S. Census reported that 86.2% of registered voters cast ballots in 1988, down only 4.8 percentage points since 1968 (when the Census postelection sample surveys of both registration and voting were first undertaken) (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1989). The 1988 result confirmed the earlier Census summary conclusion for the presidential elections between 1968-80 that registered voters “overwhelmingly go to the polls” (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1984a).

The Census surveys show that falling registration is the more important cause of declining turnout: the level slipped from 74.3% in 1968 to 66.6% in 1988, or 7.7 percentage points. Adjusting that result downward by about 10% to correct for the tendency by some respondents to tell the Census interviewers they are registered when they are not, the 1988 level of registration was 59%. State data, by contrast, show a much higher registration level: 70.9% in 1988, off only 4.5 percentage points since 1960.

We frequently discuss consultants, in what we might call their “causal role” in the political process—the consequences or effects of political consulting. I would like to turn to the other side, that is to look at consultants as an effect rather than a cause. This connects the rise of political consultants with the decline of the political party.

If you think about the role of consultants in contemporary politics you can't separate consultants from the other pieces of the new politics in the United States: media, polling, direct mail and all the other factors that have formed and transformed American politics. This is part of the on-going transformation of American politics that is related, in turn, to the long-term decay, decline, and collapse of party organization in much of the United States. Political consultants have penetrated all of American politics. In upstate New York where I live there are towns that I haven't even heard of where consultants are working. They may be in the dairy business in off years. Why have consultants penetrated even the political boondocks in America? The obvious reason is that party organization throughout the United States has reached a state of total decay and collapse.

New thinking (novoye myshleniye) is the foreign policy component of Gorbachev's systemic reforms, which include the more familiar perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). These three elements of reform are integral and mutually supportive: new thinking in foreign policy contributes to the restructuring of the Soviet economy, and domestic economic reform and political openness influence the implementation and direction of Soviet foreign policy. Therefore, new thinking in foreign policy must be understood in the larger context of Mikhail Gorbachev's vision of the Soviet future, rather than merely as a revision of certain aspects of Soviet international behavior.

As with perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev has had a difficult time translating “new thinking” into new policy. Internal political resistance, systemic inertia, and ideological obstacles have hampered the implementation of all Gorbachev's reforms, but the implementation of “new thinking” in foreign policy has encountered the additional obstacle of a skeptical international audience that must be convinced by Soviet deeds that new thinking is more than declaratory policy. The problem for Gorbachev is that he must simultaneously convince the world that his new thinking is, in fact, “new,” and his comrades that new thinking is consistent with the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism.

After four years in power, Gorbachev is beginning to face the ideological, political, and economic inconsistencies and contradictions of perestroika, glasnost, and new thinking. It is now clear, for example, that perestroika of the economy will not result from bureaucratic restructuring but must include a fundamental change in the role of the market in pricing, allocation, and production decisions.

I want to begin by reading you a quotation which was point eight of a fourteen point memo on campaign strategy:

“More and more-over seek out and discover men in every district, make acquaintance with them, solicit them, make them promises, take care that they canvass for you in their neighborhood and become as it were candidates for themselves for your city.”

Lee Atwater to George Bush? No, it's Quintos Cicero advising his brother, M. P. Cicero. So, campaign consulting did not start forty years ago in California.

A major reason—if not the only reason—for having campaign consultants is that political parties basically failed to do their job in a changing technological and social environment.

The first trend is the tremendous growth of campaign consulting during the past 20 years. In 1967, the American Association of Political Consultants was formed in New York City by Cliff White, Joe Napolitan, and myself. It has been in operation for 21 years. Enormous changes in political campaigns have occurred within those 21 years. At that time, the American Association of Political Consultants had 30 or 40 members. Over the years, however, there has been a geometric growth in the organization's membership. Today, the AAPC has 800 members and represents about 400 firms. But that statistic is really insignificant because hundreds of persons who are not members of the AAPC are doing business as campaign consultants today. An estimated 12,000 people in America earn part or most of their living on political campaign consulting. That trend will likely continue.

Reform has been an important theme within the United Nations during the decade of the 1980s. That decade has witnessed both the continuation of efforts towards structural reform initiated over thirty years ago as well as the beginning of a rather different species of reform, movement towards reshaping the relationships between men and women within societies whose governments make up official members of the world organization. The latter is reflected most recently in the Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement for Women to the Year 2000 (FLS), the set of guidelines approved by consensus by 159 government delegates at the 1985 UN World Conference on the UN Decade for Women in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985. Though not designated a “reform program,” the FLS contains a set of recommendations which if implemented could contribute to the reform or reshaping of the sex-gender system that characterizes the relations of men and women in public and private institutions within societies throughout the world. In this respect, it is interesting that three prominent American women politicians played key roles in traditional UN reform and with respect to the adoption of the FLS at Nairobi: Maureen Reagan, who headed the U.S. delegation to Nairobi and subsequently served as U.S. Representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women; Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the first American woman to hold the position of U.S./UN Ambassador; and Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, Republican Senator from Kansas, the only woman member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

American politics seems constantly surprising even to many of its most attentive domestic observers. It seems nearly unfathomable to many of their foreign counterparts. Is there something about American politics which really is distinct, even unique, in world perspective? Something which implies that this politics can be understood only in terms of the peculiar characteristics of the larger political system in which it occurs? Something which justifies the old term for such nearly untranslatable peculiarity—something “exceptional”?

If there is an exceptionalism to American politics, it must by definition be found in one or more of three areas. It must be found in the public attitudes at the base of that politics, especially in what people want from politics or in how they think about the process of politicking. It must be found in the key organizations in the middle of that politics, those which link individual citizens to the institutions of government, especially political parties and interest groups. And/or it must be found at the very top in those institutions of government themselves, in distinctive conformations or distinctive operation.

To anticipate the analysis here: I believe that the array of American national institutions of government qualifies as exceptional. I am sure that the key arrangement structuring the nature and behavior of our parties qualifies. And I suspect that a peculiar and wide-spread attitude toward politics is additionally distinctive, though I am least confident about this.

A great opportunity, coupled with a strong moral obligation to accept it, confronts political science: to give major attention to the separation of powers between the President and the Congress in the Constitution of the United States. The critical scrutiny of a growing number of public persons reminds us that this separation was attacked by the redoubtable Charles H. McIlwain as posing a danger to constitutional government itself.

Mcllwain on the Separation of Powers

“Among all the modern fallacies that have obscured the true teachings of constitutional history, few are worse than the extreme doctrine of the separation of powers and the indiscriminate use of the phrase ‘checks and balances.’” When representative assemblies took over from kings, “they assumed a power and a responsibility that had always been concentrated and undivided.” McIlwain rejected the separation of powers in favor of the limitation of powers. “The true safeguards of liberty against arbitrary government are the ancient legal limitation and the modern political responsibility” or “full political responsibility … to the whole people.” The latter is “utterly incompatible with any extended system of checks and balances.”

McIlwain could find no “good precedents” in history for “this dissipation of government” which has “worked disaster ever since it was adopted.” He feared that if the dissipation of government developed much further it would precipitate a reaction that might sweep away “every protection of any sort, legal as well as political, to leave the individual naked and unprotected against the ever-present danger of arbitrary government.”

University courses that include statistics and computers intimidate many students. Fear diminished somewhat with the advent of the microcomputer, a physically unimposing box over which users feel they have a fighting chance compared to large and distant mainframes. Now that increasing numbers of students own microcomputers, their sense of control and familiarity is even greater.

The proliferation of computers has been accompanied by the development of low cost student oriented versions of word processing packages, spreadsheets, data base management programs, and statistics packages. There are probably a greater number of student statistics packages than any other category of software. For approximately the cost of a text book (or less) students can purchase functional tools complete with manuals. The sense of student mastery of computing encouraged by the micro is further enhanced by student ownership of the software being used.

Often student computer programs are partially disabled versions of commercially available software. In the case of statistics packages this may mean that the numbers of variables and/or observations that can be handled have been lessened, the variety of statistical techniques reduced, or the manual made less complete. For many uses, especially education, such restrictions are not severe. Some of the packages discussed below would have been considered powerful and full featured programs only a few years ago, and several are better than packages currently sold as full featured software for $200. Nearly all offer standard descriptive statistics, ANOVA, correlation and multiple regression, scatter plots, crosstabs, and rich varieties of transform tools.

I would like to address the question of whether having consultants opens up or closes up the political system. I am principally interested in the election of women and minority candidates. I work now for a firm where half of our candidates are women, which is a very high proportion. On the one hand consultants reinforce incumbency because there is such a strong relationship between money and being able to hire a consultant. By the same token I think that consultants have opened up the process of running for election.

Recruitment of Candidates

When everyone talks about the decline of parties that means there are alternative routes to power, there are alternative routes to the skills that you need to get elected, and there are alternative routes to information. This has caused a major breakdown in political machines. Consultants are also aware of the different traits that can make people electable. Consultants first understood that there are certain districts where women candidates run better than male candidates, where women start out ahead because of the demographics of those districts. That is something that a male-dominated machine, for example, might resist but a consultant would relish and approach pragmatically. You also see outsiders with personal resources who have the most access to an alternative way of entering the system. The Wisconsin Democratic Senate race is a prime example of what can happen when a candidate with tremendous personal resources can hire a team and become a front-runner against people who have been running and elected for a long time.

The patterns of international power established in 1945, which pitted the United States and the Soviet Union against one another in a global competition for power and influence, seem to be dissolving. Though the two countries are still the dominant military powers, they no longer dominate the international landscape as they did only a few years ago. As occurred in the United States more than a decade ago, the Soviet leadership has begun to recognize the objective limitations placed on its ability to control global events (Izyumov and Kortunov, 1988). Evidence of this can be seen in developments in Soviet policy on arms reductions, the Soviet withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the encouragement given client states to resolve conflicts in Cambodia and Angola, and the apparent permitting (even encouraging) of greater autonomy among subject nationalities in Eastern Europe and the USSR itself.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev explains this policy shift in terms of “new political thinking” that recognizes the realities of global interdependence and the potentially disastrous implications for the human race of global problems such as nuclear warfare or growing ecological damage (Gorbachev, 1986a, pp. 18–19, 55, 64). Gorbachev and other Soviet political leaders have relegated class warfare, the key concept in Marxist socialism for more than a century, to a secondary position as a determinant of Soviet foreign policy (Zagladin, 1988; Plimak, 1987). More important, they argue, is overcoming the threat to human existence posed by global problems.

FASTAT, SYSTAT, Inc., 1800 Sherman Ave., Evanston, IL 60201. (312) 864-5670. $195 suggested retail. Runs on any Macintosh with I megabyte of RAM and a hard disk drive.

FASTAT is a powerful and inexpensive statistics package for Macintosh computers. It makes full use of Macintosh graphics capabilities to allow adaptation for presentation of its many graphics outputs as well as data sets. Its data handling capacity is 50 variables and as many observations as a hard disk will hold, and it offers a solid array of data transformation, statistical, and graphics techniques.

FASTAT is not as powerful as its MS-DOS parent SYSTAT, but most researchers will find that it fits their needs. It is far easier to use than SYSTAT. Prospective purchasers can get a sense of what FASTAT is like to work with by ordering a free copy of MYSTAT for the Macintosh.

PC Datagraphics and Mapping, Version 1.0. Written by Kenneth E. Hinze, Louisiana State University in Shreveport. Distributed by National Collegiate Software Clearinghouse, Duke University Press, 6697 College Station, Durham, NC 27708. (919) 684-2173. $35. IBM or IBM compatible with at least 256K and color graphics card. Can take advantage of as much as 640K.

PC Datagraphics and Mapping (PCDM) is one of many bargain priced programs distributed by the National Collegiate Software Clearinghouse. This program's emphasis is on the creation of maps with subdivisions and the shading of the subdivisions in accordance with data, a choropleth map.

Absolute systems are strong as long as they are absolute. When they begin to reform, they are lost. Yet they cannot avoid reform, or they will explode.

Milovan Djilas

It is easy to make a strong case for economic and political reforms in Eastern Europe. First, this is what Mikhail Gorbachev wants, and what a Soviet leader wants carries special weight in the bloc. Second, it is clear that socialist economics does not work, especially in Eastern Europe. It is not just that four of these states—Romania, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia—have suffered an actual decline in their standard of living since 1980; it is also that there has been a longterm decline throughout the region in capital and labor productivity. Finally, the political future of the region is mortgaged as well. Many of these parties, most notably in Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia, can be termed mere shadows of their former Leninist selves. What is a communist party, after all, if it cannot manage the economy, agree on policies or control the public?

If the pressures for reform are great, however, so are the pressures against reform, and for many of the same reasons. Faltering economies, divided parties, nervous privileged interests and angry, impatient publics are hardly the stuff out of which a reform coalition can be cobbled. This is the lesson of Poland from 1956 to the present (Bunce, 1989b). Second, even if such a coalition could somehow be constructed, there is no guarantee that reforms would solve the problems of socialism. Indeed, they could make matters worse.

In 1988, as in four of the previous five presidential elections, the Republicans won the White House with remarkable ease. Pundits have been busy explaining the inevitability of this result. Many attribute the Republican victory to ideology, repeating the familiar line that the Democrats now are too liberal to win a national election. Another popular explanation is the economy. The incumbent party never loses, we are told, when the economy is prosperous. Some even blame the Electoral College.

Other explanations have been offered as well (e.g., Sigelman, 1988). Despite this disagreement on the details, two things appear certain. The Democrats had no chance in 1988. And the Democrats are in the throes of a painful electoral decline.

But is any of this conventional wisdom correct? If we ignore the presidency, the current Democratic party enjoys a period of national hegemony perhaps unequaled since the Era of Good Feeling. For the past quarter century, the Democrats have almost continuously controlled more state legislatures and governorships than the Republicans. And the Democratic hold on Congress is even stronger than its hold on state government. After enjoying majority control for over three decades, the Democrats' lock on the U.S. House never was safer. Following the recent interruption of Republican control, the Senate now seems safely Democratic too. Add to all this a continuous Democratic plurality in party identification and one cannot doubt that the Democrats are the dominant party in the U.S. today and have been for decades.

For a period of more than three years, from spring 1985 through the summer of 1988, the U.S. Congress labored hard to come to terms with the nation's staggering trade deficit. Since the voluminous ‘Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988’ was passed into the law, much of the ensuing policy debate has focused on whether or not this legislation is protectionist in nature. Far less attention has been given to an issue which deserves at least as much attention: What lessons regarding the future of economic policy making can be drawn from this lawmaking experience?

A Major Case of Legislative Miscarriage?

An argument can be made that, after all the agitation, commotion, and self-flagellation which went into the legislative exercise, the one tangible result of the 1988 Trade Act was the preservation of the status quo ante. Viewed in a critical light, one could go further and argue that what really happened was the performance of a national rite. This rite involved a large group of players who each invested vast amounts of political energies into the effort of making a new trade law. The problem was that their inputs traveled along largely predetermined paths and primarily satisfied the actors' symbolic needs, while it only obscured a national policy issue urgently awaiting resolution.

As the standard textbook of American politics has it, Congress is to respond to every pressure group knocking at its door. Members indeed introduced a myriad of provisions which covered every angle of trade policy, from the regulation of imports of aluminum, titanium, sugar and photo albums down to the outright prescription of world market shares as well as of interest and exchange rate policies abroad.