This study focuses on strike activity during the 1950–1969 period in ten industrial societies, The first section of the paper deals with issues of strike measurement and introduces a three-dimensional characterization of strike activity which forms the basis of the subsequent statistical analyses. The next section examines postwar trends in industrial conflict in order to evaluate the argument that strike activity is “withering away” in advanced industrial societies. Time plots of the aggregate volume of industrial conflict show that there has been no general downward movement in strike activity during the postwar period.

The third part of the paper develops a number of theoretically plausible statistical models to explain year-to-year fluctuations in the volume of strikes. The empirical results of this section indicate that (1) there is a pronounced inverse relationship between strike activity and the level of unemployment, which suggests that on the whole strikes are timed to capitalize on the strategic advantages of a tight labor market; (2) industrial conflict responds to movements in real wages rather than money wages, which indicates that labor is not misled by a “money illusion”; (3) Labor and Socialist parties are not able to deter strike activity in the short-run despite their strong electoral incentive to do so; and (4) the volume of strikes does seem to be influenced by the relative size of Communist parties, which suggests that such parties remain important agencies for the mobilization of discontent and the crystallization of labor-capital cleavages.

This paper explains Plato's conception of the relation between politics and “political religion” (ideology) in a nonliberal participatory republican system. The discussion is in the form of a commentary on the drama of a part of Plato's Laws. The underlying methodological assumption is that Plato presented his political teaching not so much through the speeches as through the drama of the dialogue, and that he held this to be the most appropriate form for political science because in this way political science can most effectively stimulate thought about its subject matter, the psyche involved in social action.

Following Plato, we focus first on the psychological needs such a political system generates and attempts to satisfy through civil religion. We then move to a consideration of how political “theology” serves to mediate between science and society, or the philosopher and the city.

The essay is intended to contribute to the Montesquieuian project engaging the attention of more and more political theorists: the endeavor to help contemporary political science and psychology escape from the trammeling parochialism of exclusive attention to twentieth century theoretical categories and empirical experiences.

This paper examines three arguments about the impact of military regimes on social change (i.e., economic growth and social reform) in Third-World countries. The first asserts that military governments are progressive; the second claims that they are conservative or reactionary; while the third states that the impact of military regimes on social change varies by level of development. An analysis of covariance model is specified and used first to reanalyze data previously examined by Nordlinger. The results provide no support for any of the three hypotheses, but limitations of the data prevent this from being a convincing test. The model is therefore tested with a second set of data covering 77 politically independent countries of the Third World for the decade 1960 to 1970. Again, the estimates are inconsistent with all three hypotheses and suggest instead that military regimes have no unique effects on social change, regardless of societal type. The paper concludes that the civilian-military government distinction is of little use in the explanation of social change.

This study examines influence relations between the United States and countries that are dependent upon their foreign trade with it. The hypotheses are concerned with political compliance expected of these dependencies as a consequence of their economic vulnerabilities to pressure from the U.S. Informed by trade-related variables and U.N. General Assembly voting behavior of the mid-1960s, the hypotheses find some support. The evidence shows that its dependencies, especially those in the western hemisphere, agree with the U.S. in General Assembly roll calls to a greater degree than do other countries. This compliant behavior, however, is confined to votes that pit the United States against the Soviet Union; when the superpowers are in partial or complete agreement, U.S. dependencies are no more in accord with the U.S. than are other countries. Throughout the study, dependencies are proposed to be vulnerable along four dimensions of their economic circumstances. Interestingly, the respective effects of these four factors are not as hypothesized. Their relative weights in contributing to compliance are largely as expected, but the nature of their partial associations is not. Finally, it happens that most of the dependencies turn out to be Latin American and Caribbean countries, a fact that complicates the interpretation of the statistical results.

This paper presents an evolutionary-biological perspective on the stratification of political authority, power, and influence. The rudiments and relevance of a biobehavioral approach are indicated, particularly in regard to study of the behavior of subhuman primate species. Dominance-deference behavior patterns in four species—rhesus macaques, savanna baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees—are described and compared, followed by discussion of some stratification concepts that have been derived from primate studies and applied to human societies. The possible continuing influence on man's behavior of his evolutionary history is considered through discussion of a zoologist's attempt to reconstruct it, and through tentative reinterpretations of social psychological conceptions of leader-follower relationships and dispositions to obey authority figures. Finally, it is suggested that the modern conception of political authority per se as contingent and contrived may be empirically untenable, and, if so, that certain implications may follow concerning theories of political obligation and constitutionalism.

Studies attempting to predict public expenditures using political variables have generally incorrectly assumed that political, like socioeconomic, variables function as determinants of policy levels and types. If one assumes, however, that the function of the political process in representative government is to translate citizens' demands for various levels of services as accurately as possible, then political variables must be conceptualized as mediating in character. In the absence of knowledge of whether public services are being oversupplied or undersupplied in relation to citizen demands, the effects of political variables can therefore, be better tested by moving beyond single-equation regression models.

An alternative method for examining impacts of political variables is presented by integrating them with conventional theories of political representation. This leads to a concept of “translation error,” and ways of examining relationships between this concept and political variables are explicated. Finally, the greater theoretical utility of this reformulation for the study of public policy is examined, and empirical studies which indicate its validity are cited.

The paper is an examination of the relationship between Marx's theory of communism and his theory of revolution in the early writings. Avineri's claim that the Paris Manuscripts contain a two stage theory of future society is critically evaluated. It is argued that by crude communism Marx meant an incorrect theory of communism and not a description of the next stage of society. Confusion results from taking Marx's discussion of two stages in the Critique of the Gotha Program and reading the more sophisticated analysis of the later works back into the early writings. A discussion of the relationship between revolutionary theory and practice as formulated in the early writing is offered in order to substantiate the claim that Marx never thought that socialist society had to pass through the stage of crude communism.

Partisanship has often been noted as one of the most conspicuous factors in legislative voting in the U.S. Congress. This paper attempts to trace party voting to shared policy goals. After the mean attitudes of congressmen belonging to the same party were ascertained for a number of policy domains, the effect of mean party attitudes on roll-call voting was estimated by regression analysis, taking into account the deviation of individual congressmen from their respective mean party attitudes. The results demonstrate that in all three policy domains examined, i.e., social welfare, civil rights, and foreign policy, shared party attitudes leave a strong imprint on individual roll-call decisions. The voting decisions of congressmen, in fact, are found to owe more to the shared party attitudes than to their own individual attitudes. The paper also explores the communication process through which shared policy attitudes are translated within Congress into partisan roll-call votes and points to a way of reconciling the “predispositional” and the “interactional” approach to legislative decision making.

The assumptions imposed in spatial models of election competition generally are restrictive in that they require either unidimensional issue spaces or symmetrically distributed electorate preferences. We attribute such assumptions to the reliance of these models on a single concept of a solution to the election game—pure strategy equilibria—and to the fact that such equilibria do not exist in general under less severe restrictions. This essay considers, then, the possibility that candidates adopt mixed minimax strategies. We show, for a general class of symmetric zero-sum two-person games, that the domain of these minimax strategies is restricted to a subset of the strategy space and that for spatial games this set not only exists, but if preferences are characterized by continuous densities, it is typically small. Thus, the hypothesis that candidates abide by mixed minimax strategies can limit considerably our expectation as to the policies candidates eventually advocate. Additionally, we examine the frequently blurred distinction between spatial conceptualizations of two-candidate elections and of committees, and we conclude that if pure strategy equilibria do not exist, this distinction is especially important since committees and elections can produce entirely different outcomes.

Despite increased interest in public sector collective bargaining, a survey of recent attempts to build theory about the dynamics and outcomes of union-management negotiations in public organizations reveals that little progress has been made. One approach that appears fruitful is interorganizational analysis. In an interorganizational context, organizations interact with other autonomous organizations to make joint decisions that have implications for both parties and for the larger system. This study focuses on five interorganizational variables that are useful for understanding the collective bargaining process in the public sector: (1) goal divergence; (2) stability of the relationship; (3) organizational dependence; (4) conflictual behavior; (5) contractual change.

From these theoretical concepts, five propositions are derived which serve as the basis for the research hypotheses. The hypotheses were tested on a sample of 60 cases drawn from a population of 535 collective bargaining negotiations in New York City from 1968 through 1972. The test of the research hypotheses resulted in these conclusions: (1) a substantial amount of the conflictual behavior in public sector collective bargaining is explained by goal divergence, stability of the relationship, and asymmetry of relative dependence favoring one of the organizations; and (2) contractual change is explained by goal divergence, conflictual behavior, and asymmetry of relative dependence favoring one of the organizations.

The proof of Riker's size principle is inadequate for the general class of zero-sum bargaining games (whether symmetric or asymmetric), and the principle is valid only for a very restricted class of games—the supersymmetric games and their asymmetric counterparts. Butterworth's modification of the size principle (the maximum number of positive gainers principle) can be extended to cover games which are only approximately symmetric. Roll-call voting in the United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly violates the size principle; hence, the House does not generally play a supersymmetric zero-sum bargaining game. More generally, both Butterworth's and Riker's principles seem inapplicable to large bodies.