This article argues that weaknesses in the school's socialization of democratic values can be traced to culturally patterned strains in American education. Such strains are cultural adaptations to a conflict between educational knowledge and order, on the one hand, and egalitarian politics in America, on the other. After treating a defective explanation for the school's weakness as a democratic socialization agent–the “hidden curriculum” approach–the article outlines the conflict between democratic politics and “the basic shape of schooling.” The article concludes by tracing the deleterious effect of this conflict on teachers, curricula, and students.

Much of mainstream organization theory has been concerned with the implications for organizational design and policy process of high levels of uncertainty or complexity in task environments. Decentralization, disjointed incrementalist decision strategies, and quasi-market coordinative mechanisms have been advanced as rational responses to the complexity of most problems in the socio-political sphere. This article presents and illustrates four conditions which reduce the relative utility of this approach as a means of coping with uncertainty. The propositions are shown to be implicit in the logic of “muddling through,” and are used to help explain/predict the evolution of relatively centralized and planned organizations in certain types of complex task environments.

Two bounded rationality theories of federal budgetary decision making are operationalized and tested within a stochastic process framework. Empirical analyses of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson domestic budget data, compiled from internal Office of Management and Budget planning documents, support the theory of serial judgment over the theory of incrementalism proposed by Davis, Dempster and Wildavsky. The new theory highlights both the structure of ordered search through a limited number of discrete alternatives and the importance of informal judgmental evaluations. Serial judgment theory predicts not only that most programs most of the time will receive allocations which are only marginally different from the historical base, but also that occasional radical and even “catastrophic” changes are the normal result of routine federal budgetary decision making. The methodological limitations of linear regression techniques in explanatory budgetary research are also discussed.

The impossibility theorem developed by Kenneth Arrow has implications for both rationality and morality in political thought. Transitivity in a collective ordering can be assured only with a decisive set, but this outcome is acknowledged as morally undesirable. The alternatives exhibited by the theorem thus seem to require a choice between rationality and morality. But exit routes can be cut out of this dilemma with the idea of a conditional ordering, one where warranting factors attach to a ranking of alternatives. Conditional orderings form two senses of collective rationality. One is represented by compound directives, which avoid the rational problems of the theorem by warranting local orderings. The second is moral fusion, which requires a reasoned dominance in collective outcomes. These two forms of conditional rationality put into relief the restricted scope of the composition rules and individualism of Arrow's theorem, and suggest alternative relationships of individual and social whole.

John Rawls considers his Theory of Justice to be in the Kantian tradition. Generally there seems to be agreement among Rawls' critics that at least with respect to the procedural formulation of the principles of justice, it is difficult to call Rawls' position Kantian. In this article I will argue that Rawls' Kantianism is best understood as providing a motive source for acting upon known just standards of conduct. In this regard Rawls can be read as synthesizing aspects of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Kant's moral reasoning to provide the rationale to explain why an individual who knows what is morally correct conduct in a given situation, makes such knowledge the source of his action. Demonstrating the Aristotelean roots of Rawls' Kantianism with respect to the problem of motivation for just conduct helps one understand how Kant's moral theory can be viewed in Rawls' words not as a “morality of austere command but … [as] … an ethic of mutual respect and self esteem” (1971, p. 251). Secondly, this view of Kant provides the basis for understanding the anti-corporatist aspect of Rawls' political theory that my reading of Rawls makes necessary.

While socioeconomic equality and maximum economic growth have been the proclaimed aims of Soviet leaders, the simultaneous implementation of these goals is difficult. Analysis of budgets reveals that expenditures in economic categories vary significantly across Soviet republics, and decline little over time. The republics are substantially more equal in socio-cultural expenditures, and are becoming even more so with time. The level of urbanization accounts for a large share of the variance in the social budget but not the economic one. Policy decisions concerning the latter are likely subject to a process involving a variety of political, military and socioeconomic considerations that transcend both the equality and efficiency criteria. In contrast, the increasing parity among Soviet republics in the socio-cultural budget is closely related to the increasing urbanization of the republics at the lower end of the development scale. It appears that increasing regional equality in the Soviet Union may be achieved primarily through improvements in social opportunities, and not by means of direct redistribution of economic resources.

A heavy turnout is commonly believed to favor the Democrats. This study presents theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence that challenge the conventional view. Reasonable assumptions about the behavior of core and peripheral voters lead to the conclusion that the majority party is most likely to suffer when turnout increases, common sense notwithstanding. It also appears that the recent decay of partisan loyalties among voters has eroded the relationship between turnout and the vote.

This article challenges recent socialization research which concludes that the family's influence is primarily limited to the generational transfer of partisan values. We first present a new conceptual approach for studying parent-child agreement. Then, we apply a multiple indicator methodology (LISREL) to operationalize this approach. Reanalysis of the Jennings and Niemi socialization survey finds quite substantial levels of family agreement in areas besides partisanship. These results argue for greater attention to the significance of family socialization, and to the persistence of political beliefs across generations.

While contemporary political science (as, for example, in such subjects as political socialization, studies of public opinion, etc.) tends to emphasize the study of values and tastes (because of an assumption that political outcomes–like market outcomes–are determined by the amalgamation of individual preferences), the older tradition of political science emphasized the study of institutions. The line of research in political theory followed during the last generation has involved seeking an equilibrium of tastes; but it has revealed that such an equilibrium exists only rarely, if at all. The inference then is that prudence in research directs the science of politics toward the investigation of empirical regularities in institutions, which, though congealed tastes, are “unstable constants” amenable to scientific investigation.