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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Fernand Braudel's immense history of international politics in the sixteenth century s i significant for analytic social scientists from two standpoints—methodological and substantive. Although Braudel does not pretend to present a theory of history or international relations, he utilizes a broad range of geographic and economic theory to provide a novel conceptual framework. He devotes particular attention to defining boundaries in time and space. Braudel is highly innovative in his use of quantitative techniques, as in his analysis of communications potentials to delineate the spatial configurations of the sixteenth-century world. Just as Braudel's eclectic methodology suggests alternatives to approaches dominant in North American social science, his substantive emphasis on the pre-eminence of Latin civilization during the formative period of the modern Western world provides an impressive alternative perspective to the Whig interpretation of sixteenth-century history which has generally prevailed in English-speaking countries.