The varying experiences of different minority groups in China's Yunnan province are analyzed in light of the power resources that each possesses. The size, location, and impregnability of the group account for whether or not it can exert leverage on the regime in attempting to obtain cultural, political, and economic benefits. The author found that a group's assimilability, or its propensity to change its cultural traits, is negatively correlated with its numbers, with living in an isolated territory, and with its impregnability. The treatment the group has received under the People's Republic is dependent upon the same three power resources, as affected by the regime's policy and goals. For example, efforts have been made toward the political integration of groups whose main power resource is numbers, while the regime's main goal, when faced with groups whose principal resource is impregnability, has been to maintain civic peace.

Weapons systems have a great impact on national security decision making. In particular, the use of air power for political coercion or “compellence” is a tempting option when a nation has overwhelming aerial capabilities relative to an opponent. Israel's decision to launch air attacks deep within Egypt during the 1970 War of Attrition suggests that coercive bombing may not yield expected benefits and effect unanticipated costs. The decision process that produced the bombing choice was characterized by inadequate search for alternatives; conservative revision of opinion; faulty evaluation of consequences in terms of likelihood, benefits, and costs; a failure to consider value trade-offs between military and political dimensions; and overestimation of the probability of preferred outcomes, coupled with underestimation of the likelihood of undesirable outcomes.

International anarchy and the resulting security dilemma (i.e., policies which increase one state's security tend to decrease that of others) make it difficult for states to realize their common interests. Two approaches are used to show when and why this dilemma operates less strongly and cooperation is more likely. First, the model of the Prisoner's Dilemma is used to demonstrate that cooperation is more likely when the costs of being exploited and the gains of exploiting others are low, when the gains from mutual cooperation and the costs of mutual noncooperation are high, and when each side expects the other to cooperate. Second, the security dilemma is ameliorated when the defense has the advantage over the offense and when defensive postures differ from offensive ones. These two variables, which can generate four possible security worlds, are influenced by geography and technology.

The recent growth of minority nationalist movements poses the conceptual question of the validity of social science theories dealing with national integration, and the practical question of assessing the options open to governments faced with nationalistic agitations and demands for secession. Older theories predicting the decline of ethnic and cultural conflicts have been challenged by the theory of internal colonialism and by a group of theories stressing the durability of ethnic loyalties. The theory of internal colonialism is analyzed and found to be unhelpful. The durability of ethnic loyalties is accepted; four propositions are advanced to explain the growth of minority nationalist movements. It is suggested that this is a rational development in view of recent changes in the international order. Canadian and British experience indicates that it is difficult for governments to prevent demands for secession from arising. However, the growth of interdependence has reduced the significance of secession; this view is supported by a brief analysis of relations between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic.

Decision makers in international crises seek to reconcile two values: on the one hand, avoiding the loss of prestige and credibility that capitulation would entail and, on the other, avoiding war. These values conflict with each other, in the sense that any policy designed to further one of them will jeopardize the other. Cognitive theory suggests that in ambiguous circumstances a decision maker will suppress uncomfortable value conflicts, conceptualizing his dilemma in such a way that the values appear to be consonant. President Kennedy's process of decision and rationalization in the Cuban missile crisis fits this pattern. He contended that compromise would allay the risk of war in the short run only at the cost of increasing it in the long run. Thus, he saw his policy of no compromise as furthering both the goal of maintaining U.S. prestige and credibility and the goal of avoiding war.

Japan has suddenly emerged as a powerful home country for multinational corporations, offering a new form of competition in the world market. She is making all-out efforts to set up manufacturing operations overseas, in addition to ventures in extractive industries in which Japan, as a resource-poor country, is naturally interested. For a number of reasons, Japan has taken up direct overseas production as a national desideratum, even though the majority of individual firms are not ready to do so on their own. A variety of governmental measures have been taken to defray part of the private costs and to realize the social benefits of overseas investment. The article explores how and why Japanese industry has suddenly gone multinational; it examines the sources of competitiveness in this new form of international economic activity, and points out that overseas investment is now an integral part of Japan's strategy for economic growth and of her foreign economic diplomacy.

The view of critics like Myrdal that a solution to problems of mass poverty requires sweeping changes in established cultural attitudes and institutions which cannot be carried out through democratic methods remains influential in India among intellectuals and radical political parties. Yet, a frontal assault on the existing social order would delay or abort basic economic reforms by fragmenting large numbers of the poorer classes along more potent allegiances to religion, language, and caste. An alternative solution can be devised based on the distinction between direct and indirect obstacles to economic development which are part of the social setting. Direct constraints are found in patterns of land ownership and land tenure. By contrast, the cultural attitudes, caste structures, and power relations are indirect obstacles in the sense that they strengthen ideological and political patterns that stand in the way of agrarian reform. Under Indian conditions democratic rather than authoritarian institutions offer the best prospect over the long term for carrying out basic economic changes. They strengthen egalitarian values and provide an opportunity for direct organization of the more numerous lower castes to weaken both the legitimacy and power of the dominant landed castes—without risking the social disorder of a direct confrontation.

A longstanding thesis on the Chinese revolution is that the peasants embraced the Communist movement because the brutalization by the invading Japanese Army aroused the village people, making it possible for the Communist Party to organize them and to appeal to their nationalist aspirations. A theoretical exploration of peasant mobilization and revolutionary war in the T'aihang Mountain-North China Plain revolutionary base suggests different reasons. The peasants there embraced the Communist movement mainly because the Communist Party 8th Route Army helped them regain their basic rights to subsistence in their struggles with landlords and local governments before the Japanese invasion. The armies of the Japanese and the Kuomintang exerted tremendous pressures on the peasant movements in the base area, and there was a negative correlation between the presence of these intruding forces and the emergence of a viable Communist political order. The revolutionary army won the War of Resistance and the War of Liberation largely by averting and ameliorating the burdens the peasants were encountering. In all of the revolutionary processes, the peasants placed greater value on the performance of the party in enhancing their livelihood than on the nationalist propaganda of the revolutionary movement.

Contemporary Soviet doctrine on international relations emphasizes changes in the relationships of both domestic and world political structures; all the processes of restructuring are said to be “organically” interconnected. An extensive reconceptualization of domestic processes of social change has provided ideological legitimation for elites in the highly bureaucratized Soviet system. Meanwhile, according to Soviet spokesmen, the world correlation of forces has shifted decisively in favor of the U.S.S.R. Because of this change in the world balance, the Soviets claim the power to set the rules in international relations. The new Brezhnev Doctrine projects the U.S.S.R. as the center of the world, largely determining the direction and pace of political change. The Soviet leaders view detente in terms of rational acceptance by the “imperialist camp” of unavoidable processes of restructuring favorable to the “socialist camp.”

The capacity of the British Government to pursue and achieve economic purposes under liberal managed capitalism without the consent, cooperation, or passive acquiescence of organized producer groups is inherently limited. The ineluctable fact is that the British Government is dependent on the holders of economic power for achieving economic purposes. For this reason, national policy makers enter into partnership arrangements and contractual relationships with vital corporatist forces. Deliberate, premeditated, collaborative action is needed to ensure correlation between the government's intentions and achievements. Concertation, which represents a partnership between the public and private sectors as well as cooperative give-and-take in reaching agreements on economic objectives, enables the government to govern.

The concept “social choice” provides a means of injecting new life into systemic analyses of the international polity. Bargaining, organized warfare, and coercive diplomacy are the most important mechanisms of social choice in the international polity. Third-party settlement is of lesser importance, though not irrelevant. Each of these mechanisms is evaluated in terms of criteria such as decisiveness, efficiency, justice, and the production of externalities. Systems of rights and rules serve to constrain processes of social choice, but they are also apt to become focal points of such processes themselves.

Two views, founded on divergent rationales, have been used to explain the allocation of official bilateral aid. One view explains the allocation of aid in terms of the humanitarian needs of the recipient, the other in terms of the foreign policy interests of the donor. Although the foreign policy view is now clearly dominant, it has not been developed systematically. This paper initially develops an analytic foreign policy model of aid allocation. The model suggests that the provision of aid leads to the establishment of commitment and dependency, enabling the donor to realize certain foreign policy utilities. These utilities in turn allow the donor to pursue its interests. These interests may be ordered into five substantive foreign policy models. The main research objective of the paper is to test these models in the context of U.S. aid by making a cross-national, longitudinal study of the distribution of U.S. aid over the years 1960- 1970. We find that the foreign policy model which best explains the allocation of U.S. aid is one that is consonant with the political interpretation of imperialism.

Qualitative analysis of China's behavior in five situations of international conflict suggests several important similarities in the structure and sequence of Peking's actions. These similarities imply the existence of a relatively stable and coherent strategy of conflict management, and provide a basis for inferring the nature of this strategy. As a result of China's strategic vulnerability, this strategy places a major emphasis on engaging in confrontations with stronger adversaries only under carefully controlled conditions, and on manipulating the “incidental” aspects of these confrontations (e.g., time, place, target, and scale of confrontation) to Peking's advantage. Peking's relative success in applying this strategy is assessed in terms of the “coercive diplomacy” model discussed by Alexander George et al. This assessment identifies areas of strength and weakness in the Chinese approach to conflict management.

Because many aspects of urbanization are similar in different societies, urban politics provides a rich opportunity for comparative analysis. Most urban political studies tend to focus on government rather than politics. In the case of the books under review, however, political variables are offered as the key to understanding. Anton's work on Stockholm, Baker's on Lagos, Cohen's on Abidjan, Cornelius's on Mexico City, Elkin's on London, Fried's on Rome, Taubman's on cities in the U.S.S.R., and Wolpe's on Port Harcourt share a concern with the ability of political systems to deal with forces of urban growth and change. Studies of industrial countries try to account for the ability of systems to develop policies that control the urban environment, while studies of developing countries attempt to analyze patterns of resource distribution, social mobility, and class formation. Despite their flaws, gaps, and manifold differences, these studies are important steps in the right direction.

Modern international negotiation is evolving toward a managerial process and away from a classical dispute-settlement procedure. Negotiation between governments is becoming the functional equivalent of bureaucracy within governments, and it is designed to increase orderly decision making and reduce uncertainty in the international society. Theories of bargaining and diplomatic representation are less useful in understanding modern large-scale negotiation than are theories about the management of information, or theories about how individuals develop common perceptions in complex situations. Concepts that help to explain modern negotiation are: problem-solving search, which emphasizes the development of relationships or hierarchies in complex data; programmed operations, which emphasize the tedious trial-and-error process of building agreement; and final agreement, which emphasizes the reformulation of problems.

A summary and reinterpretation of Weber's Sociology of Religion and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism provides the framework within which four contemporary studies in political culture, which purport to be in the Weberian tradition, are examined. The framework distinguishes three levels of analysis in which “religion,” as a social fact, can be defined. The social, economic, or political consequences that can be attributed to religious adherence are different depending on the doctrine of the charismatic founder, the practical religion, or the practical religion of the converted. The author suggests a new, perhaps more fruitful agenda for research based on the methodological arguments of the paper.

Rational-choice theories of politics have gained acceptance rapidly and may soon dominate the field. Their popularity is due in part to their real successes, which can be demonstrated in several areas, and to their hypothetical-deductive structure. But some students, in their eagerness to embrace what is by now a theoretical fad, have either ignored inconvenient facts or weakened the theory to fit them. Both the promise and the risk are demonstrated by reference to recent works by Mayhew, Niskanen, Rabushka and Shepsle, and de Swaan.

Cognitive maps are representations of the causal beliefs or assertions of a specific individual. Maps of three Latin American policy makers (Carlos Andrés Pérez, Roberto de Oliveira Campos, and Aurelio de Lyra Tavares) suggest new hypotheses and ways of comparing maps across individuals: (i) individuals with broader political responsibility may have more complicated maps with respect to numbers of goals and policies, but less complicated maps with respect to linkages between policies and goals, than individuals with narrower responsibility; (2) maps of different individuals can and should be compared with respect to the degree to which they make (or fail to make) distinctions among related concepts; and (3) maps can be used to predict the future policies of individuals, and should be used in this way to test the theoretical potential of the approach.

When detente emerged as the focal point of American foreign policy in the early 1970's, the issue of whether or not communist political systems were becoming more like Western democracies over time (i.e., “converging”) was raised. This paper assesses political scientists' efforts to analyze such a hypotheses, particularly the implication that socioeconomic changes called “development” and “modernization” co-vary with fundamental political change. After identifying three components of the convergence hypothesis—pluralism, nationalism, and legitimacy—the author examines published research for empirical evidence regarding these phenomena. He stresses the similarities and differences of political change among communist states. Convergence theory is found to be inadequate in most respects for understanding the relationships between socioeconomic and political changes, although various political trends (such as pluralization) are evident.

The recent emergence of harshly repressive military governments in several of the industrially most advanced nations of Latin America has called into question earlier hypotheses of modernization theory regarding the links between socioeconomic modernization and democracy. Guillermo O'Donnell has made an important contribution to explaining this new authoritarianism and to using the recent Latin American experience as a basis for proposing a major reformulation of the earlier hypotheses. Yet O'Donnell's analysis requires significant modification if its potential contribution is to be realized. Highly aggregated conceptual categories such as “bureaucratic-authoritarianism” should be abandoned, and his explanatory framework should be broadened to explicity incorporate the crucial political differences among Latin American countries, as well as the impact of the international economic and political system. A revised explanation for the rise of authoritarianism is presented to illustrate how some of these modifications could be applied in future research on political change in Latin America.