Until recently, the commonly accepted notion of human social development held that static “traditional” societies passed through a dynamic transitional period and came to rest again as “modern” industrial societies. Such simplistic stage and linear development theories have now been formally superseded by Huntington's formulation of development and decay as concurrent processes with no necessary endstate. There remains, however, an implicit assumption that highly populated, urbanindustrial societies with continuously growing economies are the proper goal of development, and that the current internal political and economic processes of third-world nations are the proper subject of study.

The recent presidential election in Chile and the subsequent installation of Salvador Allende as “The first popularly elected Marxist president in the Western Hemisphere” have once again brought that isolated republic to the attention of the academic community, journalistic commentators, and the public at large. This is not the first time that Chile has experienced such world-wide interest in its domestic political affairs: the emergence of the so-called “Socialist Republic” in 1932, the Popular Front experience of 1938–41, and the 1964 election of the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei marked other occasions when interest in Latin American politics has shifted to Chile. But perhaps never before has so much interest been lavished on tlie country as following the events of September, 1970.

Why did the Johnson Administration decide in the late 1960's to deploy a ballistic missile defense system in the United States? In attempting to answer this question we need to seek an understanding of several distinct decisions and actions. The most puzzling event occurred in San Francisco on September 18, 1967, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara delivered an address to the editors and publishers of United Press International. McNamara devoted the first fourteen pages of his talk to a general discussion of the strategic arms race, emphasizing the limited utility of nuclear weapons and the fact that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had gained any increased security from the arms race. With this as background, he turned to a specific discussion of the ABM issue

Frequently debated, infrequently resolved, but crucial to the study of international relations is the issue of the relative influence of personal factors and role factors in decision-making. Are national decision-makers so constrained by their roles that they have little individual freedom? Or, conversely, are their policies shaped in major ways by their own individual preferences

Macro-Quantitative Analysis, edited by John V. Gillespie and Betty A. Nesvold, should be welcomed by students of cross-national empirical theory and research. It places important reference materials at the fingertips of the analyst, and should stimulate him to take stock of the state of his art. Moreover, it should prove a boon to teaching. I find it hard to conceive of an undergraduate or graduate course on cross-national theory and research which would not benefit from this volume.

Statistics is the one discipline in which people have concentrated almost exclusively on how to collect and analyze data. Statisticians have been doing this as a goal in itself without having to be encumbered by substantive issues arising from some other discipline. Most of their work can be broken into components that fall in one of three categories: data gathering, data reduction (descriptive statistics), and statistical inference.

In his magisterial general history, Spain 1808–1939, Raymond Carr concluded that the failure of modern constitutional liberalism in Spain was above all “a political failure,” that is, more the consequence of political culture, status cleavages, and ideological divergence than the inevitable result of unadapted economic structures that could not support the formal political system. American reviewers such as Richard Herr and Gabriel Jackson were quick to take issue, arguing that political conflict in modern Spain had not been positively resolved because the economic structure had been too backward to permit it. They were obviously correct that the backwardness of the Spanish economy greatly hampered the civic processes of modern Spain—a point that Carr readily admitted in general. It is nonetheless largely true that modern Spanish politics have more often than not focused on issues of status and ideology rather than on specific conflicts over concrete economic issues.