Sino-Soviet border fighting in early 1969 had many causes. The two Damansky Island incidents, moreover, were quite different in level of conflict and outcome. Only an investigation of the details of the incidents, together with a composite analysis of domestic, foreign policy, and international political variables suffices to determine what actually happened and why. Fitting the pieces together reveals that the Chinese caused the March 2 incident, while the Russians initiated fighting on March-14. The first incident involved only local forces; the second included regular army forces of several thousand and heavy equipment.

The history of the border conflict since 1954 is traced and found to have entered a critical stage in 1966, with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution and increased Soviet military readiness. The 1964 border negotiations aborted because the Chinese wished no agreement then; but no insurmountable obstacles stand in the way of a definitive border agreement. A combination of local excesses, regional power struggle, and national-level policy changes motivated the Chinese to initiate action on March 2. The Soviets caused the March 14 incident primarily for revenge and as the opening move in forcing the Chinese into new border talks.

The stability of voting for subsets of the Weimar population distinguished by sex, religion, and urban-rural residence is estimated: (1) by means of ecological regression, for the period 1924–1928; (2) by an examination of net changes, for the period 1928–1933.

The major conclusion is that party identification was not an important factor in the Weimar Republic. Instead, voting seems to have been channeled largely by social and economic structures. Subsidiary conclusions are that uneven distribution of information affected the stability of voting and that most of the Nazi gains from 1928 to 1933 apparently did not come disproportionately from among previous nonvoters.

Substantive due process is the classic, if temporary, achievement of judicial activism. The Roosevelt Court destroyed it out of respect for the democratic processes. Mr. Justice Black's “incorporation” ploy was calculated to forestall backsliding by equating the Fourteenth Amendment with the Bill of Rights. But the Bill of Rights, after all, is quite old fashioned. It does not cover many matters deemed crucial in our day, e.g., poverty. To fill this “gap” the Warren Court used “equal protection” as “actively” as the pre-Roosevelt Court had used “due process.” Obviously inspired by the Black incorporation principle, the early Burger Court is doing to substantive equal protection what the Roosevelt Court did to substantive due process. A generation ago we called it a “return to the Constitution,” now it is called strict construction. If in time the full Nixon Court succumbs to the magic of power and imposes its ideals upon the nation, some of us may find embarrassment in our quondam efforts to convince ourselves that judicial activism (it used to be called judicial supremacy) is a proper handmaiden of democracy.

This paper explores the relationship between the partisan division of the northern vote in U.S. House elections and the partisan division of northern House seats. From at least 1952 through 1964, there was a noticeable pro-Republican bias to northern districting, in the sense that the Republicans consistently won about ten per cent more of the seats than the Democrats could obtain from the same percentage of the vote. Following the 1964 election, this partisan inequity has disappeared, but the evidence suggests that this change is only temporary. The normal pattern of a Republican advantage in northern House elections is produced by a Republican gerrymander of accidental origins: the tendency of Democratic voters to cluster in heavily Democratic areas where their votes for Congress go “wasted.” Neither malapportionment nor deliberate partisan gerrymandering appears to have played a major role in distorting the outcomes of House elections.

Two principal problems were analyzed in the study: (1) the impact of malapportionment on party voting, and (2) the influence of constituency on legislative partisanship. The California Senate was used as a test case because it was generally considered to deviate from the pattern of party voting found in other two-party states, and because it was the most poorly apportioned upper chamber in the nation. It was found that the proportion of party votes in the Senate increased significantly after reapportionment, and gross malapportionment may have inhibited a trend toward more party voting. It was also found that there was a much stronger association between political and socioeconomic constituency variables and an index of partisan voting following elections in reapportioned districts.

This paper examines two neglected conditions of the linkage process between public opinion and public policy, in an effort to evaluate an explanation, other than voter apathy and ignorance, of why the linkage appears to be so weak. These conditions are: (1) Opposing candidates for the same elective office must differ in their issue-related attitudes. (2) The winners' subsequent behavior vis-à-vis public policy must be consonant with their pre-election issue-related attitudes.

By the use of data collected before the 1966 House election, the amount of choice, or issue-related differences between candidates for the same House seat, is examined in all 435 Congressional districts. Sufficient differences were found in three policy areas—foreign affairs, civil rights, and domestic welfare—to imply that the electorate was given the opportunity to determine the direction of public policy.

Adding data collected on the roll-call behavior of the 435 winners allowed us to examine the second condition. Although in some cases there were substantial differences between pre-election attitude and postelection roll-call behavior on the same issue, this is clearly the exception rather than the rule. As a generalization, the second condition appears to be true.

This article provides a partial test of the rational-technical model and of the patronage model of political mobility in the Soviet Communist Party. Two major hypotheses are examined: 1) the greater the number of patron client ties acquired by regional Party secretaries, the greater the probability of their upward mobility, and 2) the better the economic performance of the regions for which secretaries are responsible, the greater the probability of their upward mobility. Multiple regression analysis indicates only very weak support for these hypotheses for the 1955–1968 period in the RSFSR. Considerably greater support for the hypotheses is found when the following variables are controlled: level of economic development, political regime, and Party cohort. Changes in the level of policy conflict within the central elite are found to account for much of the variation over time in the explanatory power of the two models.

David E. Butler and Donald E. Stokes have collected the best available data about the political effects of intergenerational social mobility in Britain, but they are wrong in their conclusion that “social mobility can make only a small contribution to the fact that more than a quarter of British electors fail to vote in accord with their class.” They have defined social mobility too narrowly. My reanalysis of their data shows that over a third of those Britons who do not support the predominant party of their class are intergenerationally mobile. The upwardly mobile constitute 12 per cent of the Labour party electorate, and 75 per cent of the middle-class Labourites.

During the last 60 years, the proportion of careerists (congressmen elected ten or more times) has risen from 2.8 per cent to 20.0 per cent. The greatest increase occurred in the mid-1950s. The proportion of Southern Democrats numbered among the careerists has consistently been disproportionately large, with the number of Northern Democrats increasing, while Republican careerists have become relatively fewer. Fluctuations in the number of senior congressmen is not strongly influenced by national electoral patterns.

The most frequent cause of careerists' leaving the House has been retirement. During the last decade the incidence of defeats in primaries and general elections has increased; the greater susceptibility of careerists to rejection by the electorate coincides with reapportionment and the involvement of new groups in the electorate interested in new issues.

Fry and Winters, in a recent article in this journal, concluded that political variables are more important than socioeconomic variables in terms of redistributive policies. They based their analysis, however, on twelve political but only six socioeconomic variables. This research note re-examines these relationships, utilizing twelve political and twelve socioeconomic variables. The findings are strikingly reversed, whether one considers all twenty-four variables or the best five political and the best five socioeconomic variables. However, these findings reflect a shotgun approach, simply more and more variables added to a regression equation. To reduce and clarify the analysis, two criteria are suggested for selecting independent variables: the size of the zero-order correlations, and the degree of multicolinearity among the independent variables. When three political and three socioeconomic variables are compared using these criteria, the results are once again inconsistent with those reported by Fry and Winters.

Guttman scaling is the usual procedure for scaling legislative roll-call votes. This paper calls attention to an alternative scaling model—the proximity model. Under this model, legislators approve a consecutive set of items on the scale, without the cumulation required by the Guttman scale. Circumstances under which proximity voting is likely are discussed. Congressional voting on the Compromise of 1850 is analyzed in detail to illustrate the proximity model and to emphasize the possibility of obtaining faulty inferences if one uses the Guttman scale model when it is incorrect. Guttman scaling has been successful for contemporary Congresses, but the proximity model is seen to underlie some issues in the early 1970s. Proximity scaling is not limited to the legislative realm; it can be used in survey analysis and in attitudinal research more generally.