Using an exchange model, this article examines two ethnic groups, mobilized and proletarian diasporas, in a broad range of modernizing polities. The salient dimensions of myth, communications networks, and role differentiation permit one to distinguish these groups analytically over a long time period, and to subdivide the mobilized diasporas into archetypal diasporas and situational diasporas. The latter are politically detached elements of a great society, whereas the “homeland” of the archetypal diaspora is symbolically significant as a major component of the diaspora's sacral myth. Because internal resentments and the pressures of the international environment tend to undermine the value of a diaspora to the dominant elite of a slowly and unevenly modernizing multiethnic polity, these polities (Russia and the Ottoman Empire are examined closely) exhibit a succession of mobilized diasporas. Rapidly modernizing polities, on the other hand, tolerate mobilized diasporas, but turn increasingly for their unskilled, transient labor to groups which are more distant culturally and in physical appearance from the dominant ethnic group, and which, therefore, are increasingly disadvantaged and restive.

Television journalism can produce significant changes in opinions about basic American institutions and may also foster political malaise. Laboratory investigation revealed that the CBS documentary, “The Selling of the Pentagon,” convinced viewers that the military participated more in national politics and misled the public more about Vietnam than these viewers had previously believed. The program also caused a significant decrease in political efficacy among all our groups. This finding led to correlational research to determine if exposure to television news is also associated with lower levels of efficacy.

SRC survey data suggest that reliance upon television news programs is associated with feelings of inefficacy and political self-doubt. These data also indicate that reliance upon television news fosters political cynicism and distrust, political instability, and frustration with civil rights. Holding constant the level of education or income of these respondents does not appreciably alter these relationships.

In short, the two sets of data imply that the networks helped to create Scammon's Social Issue and that video journalism fostered public support for George Wallace.

This study examines the extent, impact and implications of political information in Ghana using survey data. A major interest is to identify and examine variables which influence level of information and to look at the consequences for the political process of different levels of political information. I examine conventional wisdom concerning the ignorance of the masses about national politics and call into question some common assumptions. Many of the differences usually assumed between developed and underdeveloped nations are found either not to exist or to be smaller than hypothesized. The data suggest that in some areas of national political information the masses in non-modernized societies are more politically aware than their counterparts in modernized societies. It is also suggested that there is no necessary link between education (literacy) and political information and that there are a number of functional equivalents to formal education. In the last section of the study several propositions about the informed citizenry are discussed.

This article examines two key political beliefs of high level American federal executives: their views on the role of government in providing social services and their views regarding inequities in political representation. Data were collected in 1970 through open-ended interviews with a sample of 126 political appointees and supergrade career civil servants in the domestic agencies. Both of the beliefs analyzed were pertinent to the efforts of the Nixon administration to reorder national priorities and policies. The evidence in the paper establishes differences in the outlooks of administrators depending on agency, job status, and party affiliation. Agency and party affiliation are particularly important variables, and their joint effects on the beliefs examined are substantial. Democratic administrators in the social service agenoies were the most liberal and Republicans in the non-social service agencies the most conservative. Our data document a career bureaucracy with very little Republican representation and a social service bureaucracy dominated by administrators ideologically hostile to many of the directions pursued by the Nixon administration in the realm of social policy. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of our findings for future conflicts between the elected executive and the bureaucracy.

A large and growing proportion of Americans claims to be neither Republican nor Democratic, and partisan independence is most wide-spread among young adults. A time-series cohort analysis of eleven surveys conducted by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan between 1952 and 1974 strongly suggests that the low level of partisan identification among young adults results largely from fundamental differences between their socialization and that of their elders. The overall decline in party identification results largely from generational change. High levels of partisan identification persist among persons who entered the electorate before World War II, but among those who entered the electorate more recently levels of identification are low. The analysis strongly suggests that overall levels of party identification will continue to decline, and permits examination of one process by which party loyalties among mass electorates gradually are transformed.

This article explores the extent to which Shanghai City, and its subordinate units, have been politically independent of higher authorities in the Chinese government. Evidence from the ‘fifties and early’ sixties suggests increasing managerial and cultural independence at the city level. Evidence from the early Cultural Revolution however suggests conceptual problems in the connection of usual notions of “autonomy” with substantive issue areas, and in their connection with local and central patterns of factions. The slow reconstruction of a local Party hierarchy in Shanghai was paralleled by a decentralization of some commercial and industrial decisions. Shanghai's role as a model in Party rebuilding increased the fully national role of the city's top leadership. Analysis of autonomy, power, or dependence in administrative units is affected when strong local leaders acquire national ambitions. Suggestions are made about the characteristics of an organization these words might describe.

Right-wing and Left-wing attitudes toward the cold war are strikingly similar because in some cases the anti-communist is himself an ex-communist. This is particularly true of James Burnham, a former disciple of Leon Trotsky and presently the diplomatic columnist of William F. Buckley's National Review. Burnham's writings have had profound influence in America, especially at the time of the outbreak of the Korean War when officials in Washington saw in his books both an answer to “containment” and the first theoretical formulation of the new policy of “liberation-rollback.”

Burnham's own views on the cold war, however, have undergone a number of significant changes and revisions. At different times in his career he has offered four different and often contradictory interpretations of communism: (a) first, the Soviet Union as a “managerial” state that marks the end of Trotsky's dream of “permanent revolution”; (b) next, communism as the latest expression of Machiavellianism that augers the eclipse of liberal democracy and seemingly the inevitability of Stalin; (c) then, during the early cold war period, managerialism and Machiavellianism are dropped and Soviet behavior is now attributed to a Marxist Weltanschauung that replaces power politics with ideological determinism; (d) finally, Burnham criticizes Kennan, Morgenthau, and Lippmann for failing to adopt a “dialectical” viewpoint in order to understand the “dual” nature of the Soviet Union-an ironic reinvocation of Trotsky's earlier message to the Old Left.

The article attempts a critical analysis both of Burnham's shifting perspectives and of the ethical dilemmas in his political thought. It may also be read as a chapter in the intellectual history of the cold war.

Procedures for empirical tests of political theory should be designed to evaluate the success of the specific prediction being tested. This paper introduces; (1) a formal language, termed “prediction logic,” for stating an important class of predictions, including predictions that imply there will be relatively few cases in certain cells of a cross-classification; (2) a population measure, (“del”), that indicates the degree of success achieved by a statement in the language; (3) partial measures for the multivariate case; (4) bivariate statistical inference methods when the data arise from a sample rather than a population, both for an a priori prediction statement and for a statement selected post hoc. A number of well-known measures of “association” are measures for specific prediction logic statements. Research applications are indicated through the use of contingency tables appearing in APSR articles by Eulau and Eyestone, Goldberg, Muller, Riker and Zavoina, Rosenthal, Sawyer and MacRae, Sickles, Wolfinger and Field, and Wolfinger and Heifetz.