Liberal political theory and contemporary expositions of human rights focus largely on the individual. Some liberal theorists even deny that ethnic communities and other groups, as collective entities, can have moral rights at all. The outlook is narrow and unfortunate. It reflects a preoccupation with domestic politics and a model of domestic politics that neglects the common fact of heterogeneity. It ignores widespread practices and urgent problems, for in many countries groups identified by race, language, or religion make moral claims, and their claims are sometimes conceded. It ignores the common view that nations or “peoples” have a (moral) right of self-determination, and it even leaves the state itself without justification. If theory is to give adequate guidance, its focus must be broadened. The question of group rights needs to be explored, and interrelationships between the rights of individuals, of groups, and of the state need to be clarified.

Since 1947 the major formal institution for channeling national security advice to Presidents has been the National Security Council. The Council has operated (1) as a forum where senior officials meet with the President; (2) as a focal point for formal policy planning and decision processes; and (3) as an umbrella for establishment of a Presidential foreign policy staff. The first was the goal of its proponents; the last is what it has most importantly become. But the N.S.C. has reflected the relationships among each administration's top officials more than it has shaped them; hence the need to think of broader advisory “systems” combining the formal and the informal. Among the variables shaping such systems are; a President's particular organizational sense; his attitude toward formality and regularity; whether he has (and wants) strong Cabinet officials; how his key advisers work out their role relationships and jurisdictional boundaries; how widely he casts his net for advce; how broad a range of substantive issue involvement he seeks; how much he seeks operational involvement; and his attitude toward divided counsel and interpersonal conflict.

Prescriptions about foreign policy advisory systems tend to stress the President's role as decision maker; they should focus also on the oft-competing role of effective Presidential leadership in getting policies and decisions executed. The importance of execution argues for giving the Secretary of State primacy over other advisers; the need to protect the President's decision authority argues for a White House assistant independent of the Secretary, though perhaps with reduced rank. Presidents also need better advice on the domestic politics of U.S. foreign policy, and each could profit from a “mid-term system review” after his institutions and advisory relationships have taken shape.

In its eagerness to become scientific, political science has in recent decades tended to lose contact with its ontological base. It has tended to treat political events and phenomena as natural events lending themselves to the same explanatory logic as is found in physics and the other hard sciences. This tendency may be understood in part as a phase in the scientific revolution, as a diffusion, in two steps, of ontological and methodological assumptions from the strikingly successful hard sciences: first to psychology and economics, and then from these bellwether human sciences to sociology, anthropology, political science, and even history. In adopting the agenda of hard science, the social sciences, and political science in particular, were encouraged by the neopositivist school of the philosophy of science which legitimated this assumption of ontological and meta-methodological homogeneity. More recently, some philosophers of science and some psychologists and economists have had second thoughts about the applicability to human subject matters of strategy used in hard science.

Galton's problem raises questions about the nature of explanation in cross-national research using aggregate data. When political units such as states interact, to what extent can correlations between two traits or behaviors, such as socioeconomic development and political stability, be explained in terms of functional relationships within political systems, and to what extent are they the result of diffusion or borrowing among them? This article explores the logic of Galton's problem and then evaluates several empirical solutions to it, using data drawn from three different types of crossnational samples. The solutions juxtapose explanations based on internal (functional) relationships and external (diffusion) patterns, and suggest that previous research which has ignored diffusion may have led to incomplete or incorrect conclusions.

Foreign policy decision making is the result of a complex political process in which the political values and style of the chief executive play a large part. The case of Canada's decision, in 1963, to acquire nuclear weapons illustrates that external events and pressures generated by Canada's international obligations were processed through complex political interactions. The Government of Prime Minister Diefenbaker was unable to take the nuclear weapons decision because of two splits in the Cabinet, only one of which was pertinent to nuclear weapons policy. The decision was taken by Leader of the Opposition Pearson alone and in conformity with his personal values, because of his political style which commanded deference. The approach used combines historical detail with political analysis.

Arguing counter to the accepted positions of political sociology, we contend that voters' decisions are best explained by the absence or presence of strong loyalties to political parties rather than by social or economic factors. Hence, in areas where most people have strong party attachments, marked change in the partisan division of the vote occurs only when an exceptionally large number of new voters enters the electoral arena; alterations in the social composition of a party's voters follow changes in the occupation or social categories of those who consistently vote for the party. In presenting this argument, we analyze time-series data for Britain, West Germany, and Sweden which negate the predicted development of “catch-all” electorates, and we test the relative power of party and class variables as predictors of voting behavior in Butler's and Stokes's panel study of British voters between 1963 and 1970.

Improved analysis of the Soviet and communist political systems requires a greater effort to locate that enterprise in the mainstream of comparative political inquiry. Toward this end the article (1) surveys Soviet and Western political process similarities and differences and identifies consequent conceptual implications; (2) introduces a model for comparative politics built in part from political process similarities evident in both Soviet and Western systems; and (3) reports a case study involving a partial application of the zonal model using Soviet political data. The comparative model integrates micro-, intermediate-, and macro-level zones of analysis as research foci and operational variables for empirical testing and generation of theory. The case study—the politics of Soviet industrial reform, 1962–1965—examines the relationship between two analytic zones, and concludes that changes in both the process and the content of economic interest articulation were strongly associated with prior changes in Soviet policy making.

Discussion of the independent nature of four problems in the management and resolution of international conflicts fills a gap, since these distinct problems are often considered to be a single undifferentiated subject area. The first problem is the existence of multiple conflict structures (patterns of capabilities and interests): different structures follow differing patterns of development. The second problem concerns difficulties in statesmen's abilities to discern accurately the structure and thus the dynamics of the conflict episodes they confront. The third problem involves the strategy requirements of different conflict structures, and the fourth the discrepancies between statesmen's strategy preferences and the requirements of different conflict structures. Increased intellectual recognition of these distinct issues might help to reduce the severity of international conflicts by reducing misperception and inappropriate actions based on misperception. But statesmen would still face problems in gaining domestic political support for their intellectual understanding of international conflicts.

The author advances the thesis that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and creditor countries structured the context in which their client, Ghana—a less developed country—formulated its economic policy between 1969 and 1972. The intergovernmental organizations and creditor countries failed to take Ghana's domestic political situation into account, however. When the country became heavily dependent upon the IGO's and creditors for financial assistance to enable the government to survive a disastrous shortfall in foreign exchange earnings, it was forced to accept extreme and politically dangerous measures in order to secure assistance. The policies that were adopted were catastrophic, and destroyed what remained of the democratic government's public support. This dramatic change in public climate made the government fatally vulnerable to a military coup d'etat.

The concept of political culture embraces some of the most basic, perennially fascinating concerns in behavioral political science; because of certain ambiguities in its theoretical formulation, however, there has been a tendency for the term to grow fuzzy with continued use. Its connection with related concepts, such as political psychology, political structure, and political language, has remained unclear, with the result that political culture has been difficult to isolate as an independent variable. Thus it has come to occupy a position on the periphery of politics, and is usually presumed to reinforce the status quo.

This paper re-examines previous formulations of the concept and proposes a theoretical synthesis. The analytical framework is derived from semiological theory, a branch of science specifically designed for the analysis of meanings. The central variable is the political symbol. By analyzing the interactions of political symbols within a comprehensive semiological framework, the traditional concerns of political culture can be accommodated in a more precise and systematic way.

Most Western observers have concluded that in the conflicts between the U.S.S.R. and the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, the Soviets resorted to military intervention only when certain ideological or strategic issues were at stake. This study suggests that in the conflicts between the leaders of the CPSU and the leaders of the Communist Parties of Yugoslavia, Poland, Albania, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia there was only one real issue at stake: control over the local East European party. The adversaries in these struggles have been Muscovite factions dependent on Soviet support and ultimately loyal to Moscow, and domestic factions seeking to base their rule on genuine popular support. What determined whether the Soviets intervened militarily was not the ideological or strategic issue publicly raised by the Soviets, but whether the domestic faction had demonstrated to Moscow the capacity and will to mobilize its country for armed resistance against the Soviets.

Rather than a case where deterrence was not tried, 1939 is a case where deterrence failed. As such, it has important implications for deterrence theory. Mutual deterrence must operate on roughly the same time perceptions. Britain felt impelled to deter Germany after Prague, but could offer only a long-term deterrent. Germany's short term appeared so favorable that the long-term uncertainties posed by Britain and France failed to restrain her. The experience of 1939 also underlines the importance of political factors, particularly realignment in mutual deterrence. The Russo-German Pact tipped the balance toward war. In the contemporary setting, calculations of time perspectives between the Soviet Union and the United States are important for mutual deterrence, especially in Europe. Changes in the Sino-Soviet split hold further implications for contemporary deterrence.

The possibilities of an end to military rule in developing states and of a postmilitary era in these states have only recently started to receive some consideration. In general, movement away from military control of politics is perceived as a matter of choice on the part of military elites and as a question of gradually expanding participation so as not to outstrip the slow accrual of extrabureaucratic power. Pakistan's experiences since 1971 suggest another pattern of transition from military-dominated to civiliandominated politics. Pakistan has been characterized by suddenly expanded participation and by the new civilian leadership's use of demobilization and patrimonial strategies to curtail this participation. Such strategies, patrimonialism in particular, have “dedevelopmental” consequences for the political system.

Positions taken by delegations in the U.N. General Assembly during debates of the Sixth and Seventh Special Sessions are analyzed to determine clustering on economic issues and their sources. Third-World states took positions consistently distinct from those of Eastern and Western countries, and economic attributes appear to explain this. Differences within the Third World were not consistent, however, and were more apparent in the Seventh Special Session. Divisions found between Third-World states on issues such as resource allocations and monetary reform included: states with slow versus fast economic growth rates; states dependent on Western versus Eastern aid; and regional differences. Neither OPEC nor a “fourth world” appeared distinct from the Third World as a whole. Coalitions, varying by issue, appeared to overlap to build the Third-World “bloc.”

The two major and interrelated questions this study poses are: (1) How has Soviet naval doctrine developed and adapted to the demands of the nuclear age?; and (2) How do the changes in Soviet naval doctrine relate to the context of Soviet foreign policy and domestic politics? The article demonstrates that Soviet doctrine has accommodated to the challenges of the nuclear age by combining the tenets of traditional and modern warfare. Changes in naval doctrine have come about because of a need to meet the competition of the United States in world politics, and as a response to active interest-group pressure within the Soviet political system. Soviet naval doctrine does not necessarily “mirror” Western doctrine, but reflects a distinct, Soviet view of naval utilization.

This article evaluates one means—political gaming—for coping with the distorted processes and perceptions that are present in foreign policy making during crises. Political games are exercises in which teams representing national governments meet and discuss crisis situations presented in scenarios. American foreign policy makers have engaged in this activity since the late logo's at the RAND Corporation, M.I.T., the Pentagon, and the C.I.A. Several hypotheses are developed on the changes in decisionmaking processes generated through political gaming, and on the nature of international perceptions during crises, as reflected through political gaming. These hypotheses are evaluated by means of data from the only unclassified professional-level games on international crises (those at RAND and M.I.T.), from a series of student games conducted at Yale, and from insights gained by the author's direction of two C.I.A. games. The results show that political gaming is indeed effective in improving decision making during crises, and they introduce some new aspects into accepted wisdom about international perceptions during crises.

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls seeks to derive principles of justice from the agreement of rational, hypothetical individuals, each concerned to further his own interests. From a carefully defined initial situation of choice, Rawls derives two basic principles: one demanding equal liberties for all, the other permitting inequalities in wealth and authority only when they serve to maximize the expectations of those who are left worst off. This article explores the political and social implications of Rawls' theory. It is argued (1) that the theory requires a constitutional democracy, offering very strong protection to political and intellectual liberties; and (2) that it also requires a highly egalitarian distribution of wealth and income. Although Rawls does not discuss international distributive justice, there are good reasons for concluding that his distributive principles ought to apply globally.

Based on a content analysis of 2,915 paragraphs randomly selected from 26 introductory international relations (IR) textbooks and syllabi for 178 introductory IR courses given in the United States during 1972–1973, the article probes the dimensions of world politics to which undergraduate students are introduced, the analytic skills to which they are exposed, and the incentives with which they are provided for investigating the subject. It was found that no single text dominates the teaching of IR; that the available texts do not differ greatly in their coverage and emphases (though some exceptions were identified along a few dimensions); that they depict IR as state-centered and founded on conflict; and that they are not conspicuous in their effort to equip students with modern analytic skills or to motivate them to view IR as an exciting subject worthy of intense and careful investigation.

For over a quarter-entury, two separate states have existed in Germany. By fighting over “unity” and “unification,” the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic have in fact stabilized and legitimized their separate sociopolitical orders. This impact on the domestic politics of both states has been the main function of inter-German relations. Only recently has positive identification replaced negative orientation to the counter-state. The “German question” provides an example of “nation building” as a historical process of both the disintegration of old and the building up of new identities.