This paper attempts to measure the impact of party ideology focusing on policy making in West German urban government. An effort is made to determine whether city governments under the control of leftist parties sponsor different, possibly more leftist policies than cities under conservative control. It is found that while “leftist” control of municipal administrations does not produce leftist policies, conservative control does have a major impact in inhibiting the growth in the scope of local government.

Several reasons for the only rough correspondence between party control and policy are examined. The low correlation between leftist (SPD) control and municipal output is traced to differences among SPD cities in the power of the SPD majority, in class structure, and in degree of financial independence. It is also traced to the lack of intercorrelation among the forms of “leftist” performance and the incremental nature of most urban policy making. Other factors—the power of municipal counter-elites and the federalistic structure of the West German government—are discounted as possible intervening variables.

This paper examines the relationship between the kinds of delegate allocation rules used in Democratic presidential primaries (Winner-Take-All, Districted, and Proportional) and the power of various states within the national Democratic party. It demonstrates that these rules are often, in the short run, more important than a state's voters in determining the fate of particular candidates. It shows, in the middle run, that different types of states are clearly favored by different sets of primary regulations. It closes with some speculation about the long-run impact of these tendencies.

In the absence of historical opinion survey data, studies of the linkage between popular voting and American public policy have been confined to relatively recent time periods. Questions about these linkages, however, necessarily have a temporal dimension—what is the relationship between voting and policy over time?

This paper establishes criteria for citizen policy choice that do not depend on opinion surveys. Data drawn from national party platforms and U.S. statutes, and aggregate voting data are compared to determine the extent to which majority choices are translated into national policy over time. Analysis of these data suggests that whether or not voters are completely aware of all of the implications of their actions, over time, popular majorities appear to govern.

The role of the Supreme Court of the United States in national policy making has long been a subject of debate among students of the American legal system and of democratic theory. Both the relative influence of the Court vis-à-vis other political institutions and the implications of judicial review for principles of majority rule and democracy have been central to this discussion. Perhaps the most influential account of the role of the Court offered in recent years is Robert A. Dahl's 1957 article, “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Role of the Supreme Court in National Policy-Making.” Dahl argues that the Court, like other political institutions, is a member of the stable ruling coalitions that dominate American politics, and that its decisions are generally supportive of the policies emerging from other political institutions.

Consideration of the way Dahl interprets his own evidence, of Court decisions since 1957, and of other relevant evidence that is excluded from his analysis (particularly the activities of the Court in statutory construction and in cases arising out of states and localities) suggests that the Court participates more significantly in national policy making than Dahl's argument admits.

In contradistinction both to positivist empiricism and to the essentialism of “traditional” political thought, the paper delineates an approach to political study and theory stressing the critical interrogation between inquirer or participant and the experienced world. The approach—which relies chiefly on existential phenomenology and recent writings of the Frankfurt School— is illustrated and explicated in three contexts: those of philosophical anthropology, of epistemology, and of ethics and political action. With regard to the conception of “human nature,” critical theory refuses to equate man either with a reactive mechanism or with pure consciousness, preferring to treat him as an embodied creature concerned (in Heidegger's terms) with the sense of his existence. In the domain of epistemology, the sketched outlook deviates from simple “mirror” doctrines by emphasizing the experiential underpinnings of cognition and the need for continuous symbolic articulation. Concerning ethics, the perspective opposes both cognitivist and noncognitivist formulas in favor of the critical reconstruction of standards implicit in everyday life. The concluding portion of the paper indicates the relevance of such standards for practical politics and contemporary democratic theory.

This paper is both a criticism and extension of a small existing literature on procedural norms and tolerance which has been influential in several interpretations of American politics but which suffers from both conceptual and empirical shortcomings.

The existing literature concludes that tolerance is not widely distributed in the American mass public: unpopular groups such as Communists or atheists would not be allowed political activity by most Americans despite supposed acceptance by all of the principle of minority rights. The literature suggests that hostile attitudes towards the issue or group involved prevents application of the tolerant general norm in specific instances.

By failing to adequately measure or control for either issue orientation or general norms, however, the existing literature risks misrepresenting the actual extent and character of tolerance. This study discusses the weaknesses of the existing literature, describes how such weaknesses can be eliminated, and reports data which modify and expand the findings of past research for an updated set of issues, groups, and political acts.

Presidential prestige or popularity has often been cited as an important source of presidential influence in Congress. It has not been empirically and systematically demonstrated, however, that such a relationship exists. This study examines a variety of relationships between presidential prestige and presidential support in the U.S. House of Representatives. The relationships between overall national presidential popularity on the one hand and overall, domestic, and foreign policy presidential support in the House as a whole and among various groups of congressmen on the other are generally weak. Consistently strong relationships are found between presidential prestige among Democratic party identifiers and presidential support among Democratic congressmen. Similar relationships are found between presidential prestige among the more partisan Republican party identifiers and the presidential support by Republican congressmen. Explanations for these findings are presented, and the findings are related to broader questions of American politics.

The Watergate controversies and especially the recent decision in Richard M. Nixon versus the United States on July 24, 1974 have again raised in the United States the problem of the political limits to judicial policy making and the need to strike a new balance among the three branches of government for preserving and maintaining a democratic policy. In this paper, which is based on largely primary judicial, political, and academic German sources up to the year 1972, the development of jurisprudence of the West German Federal Constitutional Court is analyzed and discussed, particularly the Court's experience with judicial review. The article is geared toward the student of comparative constitutionalism and comparative government, offering possible lessons to the United States and other Common Law constitutional courts. Less concerned with the practical work of the Court, except for brief comments on actual performance, the paper focuses on such problems as past and present German approval and disapproval of the notion of judicial review, the often erudite disputation on the merits of constitutional—especially “creative”—jurisprudence; the discussion on the political limits of judicial review; and trends in particular philosophical positions of the Court in contemporary West Germany.

Agenda building is the process through which demands of various groups in a population are translated into issues which vie for the attention of decision makers (formal agenda) and/or the public (public agenda). This paper presents three models for the comparative study of agenda building. The outside initiative model describes groups with minimal prior access to decision makers, who must consequently first expand their issues to a public agenda before they can hope to reach the formal agenda. The mobilization model accounts for issues which are placed on the formal agenda by political leaders, who subsequently attempt to expand these issues to the public agenda to obtain the support required for implementation. The inside access model refers to leaders, or to those having close contact with these leaders, who seek to place issues on the formal agenda directly, and for whom expansion to the public agenda is both unnecessary and undesirable.

Propositions are stated about intergroup variation in patterns of agenda building within societies; about variations in success rates for different strategies and probabilities of occurrence for the three models in different types of societies; and about characteristics of the agenda-building process which hold in all three models and in any social setting.

The American polity's designers proceeded from what John Adams called “the divine science of politics”—an approach very close to that of modern empirical political science. It was rooted in their conviction that truth is best discovered by the systematic investigation of experience; they investigated experience with methods primitive by modern standards but advanced for the eighteenth century; they applied their findings to the design of political institutions; and they regarded all institutions as experimental, to be revised when experience indicates. This faith in political and social engineering has remained ever since a major element in American political culture. It has recently been shaken by Vietnam, Watergate, and other systemic failures; but it is still far preferable to alternative faiths, especially if we today can cool our rhetoric, moderate our expectations, and recapture the pragmatic, experimental mood of those who created “the divine science.”