The concept of “corporatism” has usefully called attention to the importance of systems of interest representation based on non-competing groups that are officially sanctioned, subsidized, and supervised by the state. Yet these patterns have appeared in such a remarkable variety of political contexts that this concept may be too broad to be useful. On the basis of an analysis of the relationship between the state and organized labor in Latin America, this article argues that the concept of corporatism can be disaggregated so that it sheds light on rather than obscures the different power relationships and political contexts with which it is associated. The analysis focuses on the distinction between “inducements” extended by the state to win the cooperation of groups and “constraints” through which the state directly controls groups. This disaggregated approach enables one to distinguish more subtly among systems of group representation, to conceive of state-group relations in more interactive terms, and to gain insights into the larger political context.

Any theory of policy evaluation has to address the problem of the choice of criteria for decision making. In most theories of policy rationality, derived from economic theories of the utility-maximizing individual and a positivist conception of valuation, such values are to be regarded as the “preferences” of the policy maker. The stipulation and ordering of standards of judgment is not considered to be part of policy rationality itself. This conception of rationality is not obligatory. Understanding rationality as having good reasons for an action, and policy judgment as a process of argument, enables us to stipulate certain standards at the metapolitical level which any system of policy evaluation must meet. It is possible to identify a logical sense in which such classic principles as authority, justice and efficiency can be understood as necessary considerations in any rationally defensible policy appraisal.

This article contrasts the “self-interest” and “symbolic politics” explanations for the formation of mass policy preferences and voting behavior. Self-interested attitudes are defined as those supporting policies that would maximize benefits and minimize costs to the individual's private material well-being. The “symbolic politics” model emphasizes pressures to make adulthood attitudes consistent with the residues of preadult socialization. We compare the two models in terms of their ability to account for whites' opposition to busing school children for racial integration of the public schools, and the role of the busing issue in presidential voting decisions, using the 1972 Center for Political Studies election study. Regression analysis shows strong effects of symbolic attitudes (racial intolerance and political conservatism) on opposition to busing, and of the busing issue on presidential voting decisions. Self-interest (e.g., having children susceptible to busing) had no significant effect upon either. It is concluded that self-interest is often overestimated as a determinant of public opinion and voting behavior because it is too rarely directly assessed empirically.

Political behavior research has delivered less than the “behavioral revolution” seemed originally to promise. A survey of recent work suggests that the reason is not its epistemological premises (which are accepted here) or its methodology, but (1) its unsystematic, atheoretical character and limited range of research topics, and (2) the erroneous conception of human nature on which research rests. Compared with either the established principles of modern biobehavioral science or the conceptions of human problems of earlier political science, political behavior research remains “pre-behavioral.”

To progress beyond this stage, political scientists must recognize and apply the basic knowledge about human behavior provided by the biobehavioral sciences. Two brief examples of such application are given: how ethological knowledge can supply a needed theoretical perspective for identifying political behavior problems worth studying; and how neurophysiological knowledge, particularly psychophysiology and psychophysics, can correct mistaken conceptions of the relationship between political attitudes, political words, and political actions.

How are patronage rewards allocated within a political machine? This article studies the distribution of 675 CETA Title I jobs within a New Haven machine. Data suggest that the jobs were used as patronage, but that patronage allocations did not follow conventionally assumed patterns of organization maintenance. Ethnic particularism overshadowed, and in fact redefined, considerations of vote-maximization and recruitment of workers. Questionnaire data suggest that those hired were not highly active politically, either before or after hiring, a finding contrary to normal suppositions about patronage recipients. The seemingly anomalous (and perhaps even counterproductive) patronage allocations become understandable, however, viewed in light of some problems and contradictions inherent in patron-client politics. These involve the inflexibility of job-based incentive systems, qualifications on assumptions of reciprocity, and the “aging” of the organization.

Spatial analyses of party systems typically construe the dimensions of party configurations in terms of policy-defined issues and ideologies such as the left-right framework. But as far as the mass public is concerned, perceptions and evaluations of parties in those terms require a degree of political sophistication beyond the grasp of the average voter. That is why this article explores the impact of alternative criteria. Its main thesis is that in multiparty systems with coalition governments the party alignments in government–and possibly in opposition–provide a cue to the public of great consequence for its preferential choice. Party preference orders of the West German electorate are examined by way of unfolding analysis. The data come from a series of surveys collected during the period 1961–1976. The results of the analysis reveal traces of the two dominant cleavages of German politics, namely social class and religion, but fail to show any significant influence of the left-right framework. What is most conspicuous is the susceptibility of preferential choice to cues emanating from the coalition behavior of party leaders. Given a context of changing coalition alignments among parties in government, that susceptibility prevents any fixed configuration of parties from governing voters' preferential choice.

Political trust and political efficacy are concepts currently undergoing considerable discussion and revision. The discussion of voting behavior in Campbell et al. (1954), Almond's and Verba's (1965) version of the participation hypothesis, Gamson's (1968) trust-efficacy hypothesis, and Verba's and Nie's (1972) standard socioeconomic model represent quite distinct and contrasting stages in the treatment of these concepts, but share some assumptions requiring additional discussion and clarification. One of these pertains to treatment of political criticism, measured with low scores of trust in government, as political cynicism. This is not so much an operational or methodological question as a theoretical framework that has never had much to say about the role of criticism in contemporary democratic societies. This essay proffers a case in which, high levels of interpersonal distrust and high levels of government criticism notwithstanding, it is possible to make this basic distinction. Path analyses of data from a national-sample survey show that criticism is triggered by predominantly political orientations, while cynicism is a rigidified form of criticism inseparable from the social circumstances of individuals. In addition, the evidence suggests that the sense of political efficacy does not play the pivotal role assigned to it in the literature.

Between 1956 and 1960, the first long-term panel study of the American electorate was carried out at the University of Michigan. Among other findings from this original panel were sharp contrasts between the high individual-level stability of party identification and more labile individual preferences on major political issues of the day. Since 1960, several changes in the nature of the American electoral response have caught the attention of scholars, including an erosion of party loyalties on one hand and an increasing crystallization of issue attitudes on the other. Completion of a new panel segment, 1972–76, makes it possible to review the original 1956–60 findings in the light of these intervening changes. We discovered that the contrasts in individual-level continuity of party and issue positions remain nearly identical to those estimated for 1956–60. The theoretical significance of these counter-intuitive results is discussed.

Modern presidents must be attentive to influences of the federal bureaucracy on their policy initiatives and all attempt some measure of bureaucratic control. This article assesses the extent of President Nixon's success in gaining some degree of management control over the bureaucracy through the manipulation of the civil service personnel system. We find that Republicans were, in fact, more likely to be selected to top career positions during the Nixon years. We find also that career executives calling themselves Independents were more likely during the Nixon years than before to resemble Republican executives in their support of Nixon's policies and goals. This is significant to presidential control because of the large number of bureaucrats calling themselves Independents. We conclude that Independent career executives may provide a president with a considerable reservoir of bureaucratic support.

The measurement technique most commonly used by political scientists for determining the direction and intensity of opinion is category scaling–a procedure with serious weaknesses. Recent developments in psychophysics for the magnitude scaling and validation of sensory eontinua offer a powerful alternative to category scaling. Paralleling explicitly the logic and procedures used to scale psychophysically such variables as the loudness of sound and brightness of light, research methods now make it possible and feasible via a simple paper and pencil technique to obtain accurate, precise, cross-modally valid, magnitude measures of the direction and strength of political opinion from respondents in a survey setting.

A field survey, pitting category against magnitude measures for a sampling of the most important items employed in the SRC/CPS national election studies, demonstrates that the category scaling of political variables results in (1) the loss of significant portions of information and on occasion (2) the misclassification of respondents. The results of this scale-confrontation study demonstrate the superior utility of magnitude over category scaling for the description and quantitative analysis of political judgments and preferences.

Analysis of complementary data sets, a 1965–1973 panel study of young adults and their parents and the 1956–1976 Michigan presidential election series, shows that the late 1960s and early 1970s were a deviant period where participation in American politics was concerned. During this time, the young were more active politically than their elders, substantially increasing their participation from previous years, and Americans on the ideological left participated more than those at other positions along the ideological continuum. While this surge of left-wing activism was not restricted to the young, it probably accounts for the relative participation advantage enjoyed by the young. These findings challenge the “conventional wisdom” about patterns of participation in America. They are best explained by recognizing that the opportunities for political action among the American citizenry are not fixed, but instead vary with changes in the political stimuli across different periods.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (1971, 1977) have argued that mass insurgency in the United States, occurring especially between 1964 and 1969, produced a series of responses by government, one of the most significant being massive expansion of welfare rolls. Using data on which they base their claim, this study examines the hypothesis that there is a positive association between social disorders and welfare caseload increases. The conclusion is that associations specified by Piven and Cloward are not supported by the data and a plausible rival hypothesis is offered to explain the massive increases in welfare caseloads.

This article examines the logic underlying standard formulations of the interparty competition hypothesis in the comparative state policy literature, suggests a reformulation which provides some new insights into the conditions under which we might expect state policies to change as a result of party characteristics, and undertakes an initial test of the reformulation.

I develop two propositions. The first is that party systems which divide the electorate along economic class lines will generate more generous welfare policies than party systems which do not so organize the electorate. The second is that within states with class-based electoral systems, change in welfare policy will be positively related to the degree to which the party or faction with lower- and working-class support gains control of government.

I analyze welfare policies of selected American states for the period 1938 to 1970. My analysis suggests that (1) the class basis of electoral politics does influence state welfare policies and (2) parties and factions which differ in their constituency bases produce different types of policies when they are in control of government.

This article presents a new way to define and measure the ideological sentiments of the mass electorate. Citizens are classified in terms of their evaluations and perceptions of liberals and conservatives. The measure is then used to assess the impact of ideology on the 1972 and 1976 presidential elections, to explore citizens' applications of ideological labels to parties, issues, and presidential candidates, and to describe the relationship between ideology and the potential for party realignment as well as meanings of issue voting.

Although many Americans use ideological labels in ways that suggest only a partial understanding of the terms and their implications, those labels have political significance for their political attitudes and election-day decisions.

This study combines survey data from the 1974 American National Election Study with the front-page content of 94 newspapers in an investigation of the relationship between the degree of negative political criticism found in newspapers and their readers' feelings of trust in government and a sense of their own political effectiveness. Although newspaper reporting was primarily neutral or positive, readers of highly critical papers were more distrustful of government; but the impact of criticism on the more stable attitude of political efficacy was modest. Level of exposure to national news interacted with critical news content primarily to affect feelings of trust, and not efficacy.

This article posits a structural explanation of inefficacy as a result of accumulating distrust, where policy dissatisfaction, rather than dislike of incumbent leaders, acts as the main determinant of cynicism. In this model, media criticism serves as a “mediator” of political realities which eventually, although indirectly, affects political malaise.

This article uses discriminant analysis to assess sex and party differences across four aspects of party organization: incentives for participation, party role definitions, party activities and electoral ambition. The results illustrate that gender roles operate most distinctly in the two areas of electoral ambition and party activities. Party context is more important than sex in terms of the other two areas, party role definitions and incentives for participation. The authors conclude that party activists' gender-related behavior can be better understood by discovering how the context of party organization either modifies or reinforces such behavior.

The psychometric model, developed by Glendon Schubert, is a widely accepted way of conceptualizing judicial decision making. It entails the representation of justices' ideal points in a multidimensional space. A vector (representing the ordering of the justices derived from scalogram analysis) is projected through this space to aid in interpreting the underlying attitudinal dimensions of interagreement. Despite the apparent rigor of this model it contains certain indeterminacies, as no mathematical procedure has been used to determine the location of the scale vectors. Consequently ad hoc. hand procedures which may yield suboptimal solutions have been developed.

This article provides solutions for the problem of fitting scale vectors to multidimensional configurations. These solutions are developed for the problem where the scale analogue is treated at the measurement level of interval or ordinal values. In order to demonstrate the advantages of using these procedures, we undertake a reanalysis of Schubert's results (for which he used ad hoc procedures). In one-half of the cases analyzed, the results reported by Schubert are suboptimal when evaluated in terms of the coefficient he sought to maximize. The mathematical solutions and the associated computer programs give greater rigor to the psychometric model and provide a response to the criticism that scale fitting in the psychometric model is subjective and inconsistent with the premises of the behavioral approach to judicial decision making.

This study undertakes a major reanalysis of the decision-making processes in eight committees of the U.S. House of Representatives–Agriculture, Education and Labor, Interior and Insular Affairs, International Relations, Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Post Office and Civil Service, Public Works and Ways and Means. While past studies have relied mainly on interviews, this study uses a data base composed of recorded committee roll-call votes. The analysis consists of a Q-component analysis to determine voting blocs or factions; an R-component analysis to discover issue dimensions; and step-wise regression and correlation utilizing demographic, political and electoral characteristics to define the nature of the voting blocs. The results are then compared with previous analyses of the same eight committees to determine what changes, if any, have occurred since the committees were last analyzed. The findings suggest that partisanship and ideology have become stronger influences on committee decision making than previously noted.