In the summer of 1963 the California legislature passed the Rumford Act, prohibiting racial discrimination by realtors and the owners of apartment houses and homes built with public assistance. California real estate and property management interests, which had fought the Act's passage, then placed on the November 1964 ballot an initiative provision (Proposition 14) that would amend the state constitution to repeal the Rumford Act and prevent the state or any locality within it from adopting any fair housing legislation. During most of 1964 intense and lavishly financed campaigns were fought by supporters and opponents of Proposition 14. Almost 96 per cent of the people who turned out on election day voted on the measure, which passed by a ratio of two to one. In one sense the campaign and balloting were an exercise in futility, for in May of 1967 the United States Supreme Court declared Proposition 14 unconstitutional. Some short-term consequences of its passage were apparent, however. For several years there was a severe weakening of legal sanctions against racial discrimination in housing, resulting in abandonment of many cases that were underway before the 1964 election. For eighteen months the federal government froze $120 million in funds for California urban renewal projects. Less tangibly, it is claimed that the proposition's overwhelming popularity contributed to the Watts riots and other racial violence in California.

In constitutional form and in practice, the Japanese national government is parliamentary. Authority is centered in the Diet, and power is held by the parties in the Diet. Unlike the pre-war system, for example, the Diet parties really do choose the Prime Ministers.

The post-war party system changed fundamentally in 1955, when the non-socialist parties combined and formed the mammoth Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP). Since its formation in 1955, the LDP has always had a safe majority in both Houses of the Diet. But, from its beginning as a union of several political streams to the present, the LDP has been made up of several rather stable factions. These factions are the key actors in the biennial election of the party president, who naturally becomes the Prime Minister. As a general rule, votes in a party presidential election are on straight lines. So a Prime Minister is chosen by a coalition of LDP factions which controls a majority of votes at the party convention. Furthermore, the factions present nominees for Cabinet posts, and Ministers are chosen from among these nominees. Cabinet posts become rewards for the factions which voted for the Prime Minister, inducements to opposing factions to enter the Prime Minister's coalition, and buffers to soften or weaken the opposition of hostile factions. In short, the struggle over top political leadership in Japan—the president and the top officials of the ruling party, the Prime Minister, and other Cabinet members—is waged by the LDP factions. (The struggle over policy, on the other hand, is waged by other actors, within the framework established by the outcome of the factions' struggle over leadership.) And because of the wide range of opinion within the LDP, the outcomes of the factions' struggle over top political leadership are very important for Japan. A switch from an Ishibashi to a Kishi, or from a Kishi to an Ikeda, is certainly as significant as, say, the replacement of a Laniel by a Mendès-France.

The literature discussing the responses of lower court judges to decisions of the United States Supreme Court is limited, and the few comparative analyses of state and federal judicial behavior have tended to be speculative rather than empirical. It has been suggested that a controversial Supreme Court decision is likely to be supported more strongly by federal judges than by state judges, that state courts will probably construe a Supreme Court mandate more narrowly than will federal courts, and that federal courts can be expected to move in a direction hinted at by the Court more aggressively than state courts. Since all federal judges are appointed for life, it is only logical that they should be more independent of local pressures than state judges, many of whom are elected, or appointed for limited periods. The fact that state and federal judges owe their appointments to different levels of the political party hierarchy, and the historical fact that federal judges are less likely to seek future political office than are state judges, suggest a similar conclusion. Finally, the very fact of being a federal judge may produce a sense of identification with the Supreme Court which state judges would not share.

Writing about local elections in 1968, Charles R. Adrian and Charles Press report that, “It is not known whether … state and national voting-population characteristics fit municipal voting, too.” Although a number of important studies of politics and elections in individual communities have emerged in recent years, the data are far from sufficient to permit more than the most speculative generalizations about the nature of the local electorate. This study draws back the curtain, albeit only a bit, on one aspect of local political participation—voting turnout. The data presented constitute, so far as we know, the first attempt at a comprehensive comparison among American cities with respect to turnout. As will be suggested and become obvious, the breadth of the data is not matched by their depth; data were received from only 80 percent of the 729 cities above 25,000 population in 1962, and we were able to utilize comparative turnout figures from only 282 of these. While relationships are suggested between turnout, political and governmental structure, and characteristics of the population, these relationships must be regarded more as leads to future research, than as clear and unambiguous findings.

Previous work by the present authors has pointed to the importance of the political and social variables included in this analysis of American cities. Lee suggested in a study of nonpartisan elections and politics in California cities that nonpartisanship might tend to reduce voter participation. In a study of American cities, this hypothesis was confirmed in a preliminary analysis of the same data used in this article.

A few questions are still hotly debated among students of the Soviet political system, but certainly the nature of Soviet elections is not one of them. Everyone agrees that they are more interesting as a psychological curiosity than as a political reality. They are seen by various writers as ritualized affirmations of regime legitimacy, as methods of involving the masses in supportive activity, as a means of publicly honoring model citizens, and as a crushing display of unanimity designed to isolate the potential nonconformist. Both Western and Soviet writers see Soviet elections from the positive side, from the side of the dutiful 99 percent who invariably vote for the single candidate on the ballot.

In fact, Soviet and Western writers are in very close agreement on the major functions of elections in the Soviet Union, although their value judgments tend to differ along the lines one would expect. Taking one typical example from the general Western literature on the Soviet political system, we find the purposes of a Soviet election defined as “a public demonstration of the legitimacy of the regime … an invaluable educational and propaganda exercise … and perhaps most important of all, … proof that the system of control is unimpaired.” In the more detailed Western works on Soviet elections we find the same approach. Thus, Howard Swearer, in a very insightful and valuable article on Soviet local elections, states that “in the Soviet Union, the formal act of voting is comparable in purpose to such civic rituals as singing the national anthem or saluting a country's flag. It is a public display of personal reaffirmation of the Soviet way of life and the party leadership.”

This paper, part of a larger study, is a comparative analysis of five Soviet elites—the central Party apparatchicki, and four specialist elites: the central economic bureaucrats, the military, the literary intelligentsia, and the legal profession. By content analyzing representative periodicals for each elite, data are collected on elite attitudes toward participation in the political system. The overall goal is to gain a measure of the direction and scope of Soviet elite attitudinal change since Stalin; more specifically, (1) to measure the extent to which the elites perceive themselves as participants in the policy-making process, (2) to determine whether the elites perceive their participatory role as expanding over time, and (3) to demark changing patterns of Partyspecialist elite relations from 1952–65.

To ground this study in a theoretical framework, analytical categories and hypotheses—derived in part from Brzezinski and Huntington's Political Power: USA/USSR—are formulated to test the perceived extent of elite participation in the Soviet political process. Synoptically, models of political systems may be built by reducing to essentials the mode of interaction between the regime and society. A key variable in analyzing this interaction between superstructure and base is the role and efficacy of societal groups in influencing policy formation and implementation. Following this tack a descriptive continuum may be set up for classifying political systems. At one end of the continuum are ideological systems (e.g., the USSR), at the other “instrumental” systems (e.g., the United States). In instrumental systems the relationship between the political and social system is characterized by “access and interaction.”

It has become widely recognized that Soviet officials do not formulate public policy in a vacuum, and that, indeed, their deliberations take into account in some fashion the needs and demands of various elements of the society. Further, it has been observed that social groups of various types play a noticeable, if only rudimentary role in articulating interests to the top of the hierarchy. In fact one author has gone so far as to assert that communist policy-making results from a “parallelogram of conflicting forces and interests.” While such viewpoints are now far more widely accepted than in the early fifties, relatively little effort has been devoted to illustrating or illuminating how Soviet public policy in general or even a given Soviet policy can be importantly affected by group activity.

We propose here to make a contribution in that direction. Using the Educational Reform Act of 1958 as an exemplary case, we intend to show how and through what process groups can affect policy outcomes, and by identifying circumstances under which this takes place to generate some hypotheses about when such influence is most likely to recur. In their excellent analysis of Soviet policy formation, Professors Brzezinski and Huntington identify what they call “policy groups,” which come closest of any nongovernmental groups to participating in policy formation. These groups, such as the military, industrial managers, agricultural experts and state bureaucrats.

Attempts to map the political development of individuals inevitably become involved with the relative contribution of different socialization agencies throughout the life cycle. Research has focused to a large extent on the family and to a much lesser degree on other agents such as the educational system. At the secondary school level very little has been done to examine systematically the selected aspects of the total school environment. To gain some insight into the role of the formal school environment, this paper will explore the relationship between the civics curriculum and political attitudes and behavior in American high schools.

A number of studies, recently fortified by data from Gabriel Almond and Sidney's Verba's five-nation study, stress the crucial role played by formal education in the political socialization process.

[None of the other variables] compares with the educational variable in the extent to which it seems to determine political attitudes. The uneducated man or the man with limited education is a different political actor from the man who has achieved a high level of education.1

Such conclusions would not have greatly surprised the founders of the American republic, for they stressed the importance of education to the success of democratic and republican government. Starting from its early days the educational system incorporated civic training. Textbooks exposing threats to the new republic were being used in American schools by the 1790's. By 1915, the term “civics” became associated with high school courses which emphasized the study of political institutions and citizenship training.2

The empirical study of political ideology in mass publics must ultimately be related to political behavior; otherwise, the ideological description of such publics exists in an action vacuum. Yet, the most detailed and sophisticated descriptions and analyses of American conservatives and their characteristics are those which have most notably failed to connect their findings (about opinions, attitudes and ideologies) with consistent or predictable political activity of any kind.

This absence of systematic linkage between belief and behavior is primarily a consequence of the general absence of ideological structure in the political orientation of the broad American electorate. But it is also a consequence of the researchers' reliance on a priori ideological measures of doubtful validity.

Hence, when the student of politics is informed that reputed conservatives are, or tend to be, authoritarian, anti-Semitic and ethnocentric, or imbued with “… feelings of worthlessness, submissiveness, inferiority, timidity …, …. hostile and suspicious, … rigid and compulsive, … inflexible and unyielding …,” he must question the adequacy of the political designation “conservative” both on descriptive and predictive grounds.

Because of these methodological and empirical problems, I suggest that the findings of prior resaerch and hypotheses related to them, be tested in a different manner. For example, if one examines the membership and/or known supporters of organizations which exist to aggregate and channel conservative political demands, the analysis of political ideology and its correlates can be conducted in a definitively political context, with the labels being supplied (or implied) by the actors themselves.

The present trend in the comparative study of politics is a departure from the country-by-country approach and a search for analytical models based on dimensions common to all political systems. This trend is in part based on the assumption that the construction of new concepts and conceptual frameworks for comparative politics would provide the starting point for a general empirical theory of political systems. One of the new concepts which has become common currency is “political culture.” Originally proposed by Almond in 1956 and developed by Almond and Verba in The Civic Culture, the concept of political culture refers to patterns of politically relevant orientations of a cognitive, evaluative and expressive sort. It is intended to provide a researchable connecting link between the psychological tendencies of individuals and groups and the structural-functional characteristics of political systems, and to translate such concepts as “historical heritage” or “national character” into sets of cultural components more amenable to measurement and comparison across nations.

The study of political culture thus involves comparisons between the orientations of social groups towards specific political objects, between those of particular groups towards different objects, and between patterns of orientations and patterns of behavior. From a methodological viewpoint, all empirical political research is comparative research; we must therefore expect to encounter the problem of the comparability of political data, and in particular, the problem of equivalence of meaning, in all areas of political study. In the comparison of cultural data across nations the requirements of equivalence of meaning are probably more difficult to meet than in any other area. Generally speaking, there are two possible sources of differences in meaning in cross-cultural data: (a) cultural differences of a non-political nature, such as language, education or the degree of frankness or “openness” of personal opinions, and (b) cultural differences of a political nature.

One way of acquiring insight into the processes of political development in Latin America is to compare the countries of the area systematically in terms of the “degree of development” which each can be said to have attained. Ideally, such an enterprise can lead to the understanding of the past history of the “more developed” countries by reference to the present problems of the “less developed” while an understanding of the problems confronting the more developed countries can make possible a glimpse into the future of those now less developed. Isolation of the factors responsible for a state's being more or less developed can moreover prove instructive for the understanding of the relations between political and socioeconomic phenomena.

Perhaps most important, such comparisons provide the means for holding constant effects attributable to characteristics shared by all, or nearly all, of the Latin American countries. Thus it can be argued with much plausibility that military intervention in politics, say, derives from elements in the Hispanic tradition. Yet it is clear that the frequency of military intervention varies from country to country, even where they share equally in that tradidition. Thus one is forced to go beyond the “Hispanic tradition” thesis with which the investigation might otherwise have come to rest.

In the present article I will be concerned with the problem of the relation of political development to socioeconomic development in the Latin American context. For reasons that will become apparent below, I will not at this point attempt a rigorous analysis of the concept of political development, which has already been the subject of a large and rapidly growing literature.

For nearly two centuries, the mere mention of the “state of nature” was sufficient to provoke a controversy. Did the writer intend an historical reference or was he employing a fictional concept as a means of presenting an a priori ethical argument? The question, at least in so far as it applies to John Locke, has never been satisfactorily answered—although it has frequently been brushed aside as unimportant. Yet, many of the “contradictions” which seem to characterize Locke's political thought might be resolved if only we could be certain of the meaning he attributed to the state of nature.

Lacking that certainty, we are left to choose from among the various meanings others have associated with Locke's use of the concept. First, it is charged that, if Locke did intend his portrait of the state of nature to serve as an historical account of the origins of government, it is bad history. Most political societies did not begin as Locke suggests. As one writer puts it “history and sociology lend but little support to this theory of free men entering into a compact and so creating a political group.” Secondly, if the state of nature is but a fiction abstracted from history, that in itself may be grounds for rejecting its usefulness as a concept. Marx, for example, is critical of the ‘state of nature’ approach to politics because it assumes in an abstract fashion precisely what must be proven by reference to concrete historical facts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore United Nations delegate attitudes toward the major organs of the United Nations, i.e., the Security Council, General Assembly, Economic and Social Council, Secretariat, International Court of Justice, and the General and Main Committees of the General Assembly. In respect to these organs, the study probes “delegate satisfactions” concerning voting procedures, membership arrangements, and general role and past performance; “delegate perceptions” in respect to present and future importance and the probability of changes occurring in respect to membership arrangements; and “delegate desires” in respect to modifying roles and powers. The study also attempts to ascertain if delegate attitude patterns can be related to “predictors” generated from attributes of the delegates' home states. That is, is it possible to predict delegate attitudes from information about their home states?

The potential importance of delegate attitudes in respect to the United Nations will be treated in detail later in the paper. Here, suffice it to say that delegates make decisions, relay information, give advice, and engage in other types of activities which allow them to help shape the institutions in which they operate. Because this is the case, it is assumed that the discovery of attitudinal patterns and the relationship of these patterns to various other indices is a potentially fruitful line of inquiry, which may facilitate an understanding of, and provide a basis for predictions about, the political processes of the United Nations.

When a field of study begins to develop more rigorous methods, well-defined concepts, and greater emphasis on systematic comparison, it is well on the way to becoming a science. In the past decade or so, these traits have become increasingly evident in the study of comparative politics and international politics. But the development of sharper methodology and conceptual sophistication on the part of individual researchers is not quite sufficient. One of the earmarks of a healthy scientific discipline is the extent to which each set of findings may be compared to and combined with the results of earlier investigations; in short, research must become cumulative. Certain obstacles still inhibit us, among which might be counted: disagreement as to the precise boundaries of comparative and international politics; highly disparate theoretical frameworks; lack of consensus regarding the specification and measurement of key variables; and insufficient data storage and retrieval arrangements. Another difficulty has been in the absence of a generally agreed delineation of our empirical domains: What are the political entities whose attributes and relationships must concern us? More simply, we have not yet defined our population, and until the population is defined, we know neither the domain about which we seek to generalize, nor the criteria for selecting a sample from that population.

Although this is hardly the most pressing issue facing our two fields, and while a successful delineation of our population is far from a sufficient condition for the growth of a scientific discipline, it does strike us as a necessary precondition.