A generally accepted interpretation of American politics today is associated with the “theory of electoral accountability.” The salient features of this theory are well known. The thesis was initially shaped in Schumpeter's classic work on democracy, and since has been elaborated by a generation of scholars. The elaboration, especially where grounded in empirical studies, has established (1) that the public, being largely apathetic about political matters and in any case ill-informed regarding public issues, cannot provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the maintenance of democratic procedures; (2) that a liberal political and social elite are committed to the preservation of democratic forms, at least more committed than the average citizen; therefore, (3) what maintains the democratic tradition is not extensive public participation in political policy-making, but, instead, competition among elites whose behavior is regulated by periodic review procedures. Competition among elites and review by citizens of political leaders are provided by elections. Thus elections hold political leaders accountable to non-leaders.

Writers associated with this general position have recently come under scholarly attack. The critique, directed at the first two assertions, can be reviewed briefly: although true that the public is not well-informed politically and is not actively engaged in political life, this is not to be attributed to the inherent traits of citizens so much as to the structure of political opportunities in the United States. Moreover, although true that research has detected among political leaders a greater commitment to democratic procedures than is the case for the ordinary citizen, this commitment is to procedures in which only the leaders participate.

Lyndon B. Johnson

With tenacious regularity over the last two and a half decades the Gallup Poll has posed to its cross-section samples of the American public the following query, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way (the incumbent) is handling his job as President?” The responses to this curious question form an index known as “Presidential popularity.” According to Richard Neustadt, the index is “widely taken to approximate reality” in Washington and reports about its behavior are “very widely read” there, including, the quotation above would suggest, the highest circles.

Plotted over time, the index forms probably the longest continuous trend line in polling history. This study seeks to analyze the behavior of this line for the period from the beginning of the Truman administration in 1945 to the end of the Johnson administration in January 1969 during which time the popularity question was asked some 300 times.

Four variables are used as predictors of a President's popularity. These include a measure of the length of time the incumbent has been in office as well as variables which attempt to estimate the influence on his rating of major international events, economic slump and war. To assess the independent impact of each of these variables as they interact in association with Presidential popularity, multiple regression analysis is used as the basic analytic technique.

Theoretical discussions of civil disobedience on ethical and political grounds received special attention in this country during the Nuremberg trials, the security and loyalty controversies of the 1950's and the pre-arms control years of nuclear power. A fourth wave of interest formed after the early civil rights protests and a fifth is appearing to consider dissent from national policies on the Vietnam War. In this paper civil disobedience is viewed from a trough between the fourth and most recent wave. The phenomenon is interpreted with selected ideas from the study of political obligation and unconventional dissent. The essay first assesses recent American analysis of civil disobedience to determine what the criteria should be to distinguish it from other forms of political action and to discover its political ethics. Secondly, there is an attempt to answer the question: Is there any appreciable service that carefully defined civil disobedience might perform in American democratic thought? The complete enterprise is provoked by a need to examine new strategies for democratic citizenship in a time when the deficiencies of American political life are becoming known to increasing numbers and varieties of people instead of remaining the preserve of enlightened elites.

A fundamental controversy in political theory from ancient times until the present concerns the rationality of political actors, what it is, if it exists at all, and whether or not humans display it in politics. Many political scientists are impatient with this controversy because it remains open after so much (apparently futile) discussion. But they ought not be. The problem of rationality is necessarily imbedded in even the simplest kinds of political research, where, if overlooked, it can occasion misinterpretation and even outright error.

Suppose, for example, in an investigation of legislators one uses the notion of party loyalty as an independent variable to explain behavior. This notion seems simple and straightforward enough and not, therefore, likely to involve one in philosophical controversy. But in fact party loyalty can be interpreted in a variety of ways and the choice among them necessarily involves a choice on one side of the controversy over rationality. Loyalty can be thought of, for example, as a truly independent variable, as a product of political socialization, as an expression of affect, and hence as an essentially irrational motive. On the other hand, it may be thought of as itself dependent on bargains rationally satisfying the preferences of legislators. Such bargains may be either short term or long term so that a legislator's manifest party loyalty may result from a series of advantageous bargains with party leaders on particular bills or from an implied bargain with them on career advantage.

Through the Looking Glass

It is not hard to find reasons why Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship has had such widespread influence. Its approach, that of comparative, historical sociology, seeks clues to the present in the past, and Moore demonstrates mastery of a wide range of historical materials. Yet I feel that the book is ultimately unsatisfactory, for it is marred by a lack of respect for its own sources of information and by contradictions and non-sequiturs at critical points in the argument.

In this critique I shall first examine the general thesis of the book and then turn to the case studies which Moore uses to support his arguments. I shall also attempt to account for the sharp contrasts in the quality of scholarship which characterize the study, and will attribute them to Moore's preconceived ideological assumptions about the nature of the good society.

Stanley Rothman is laboring under a series of misapprehensions. What appears to give them some minimal coherence is evidently the curious conviction that in criticizing Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy he must cope with the work of a disillusioned former fellow-traveller. In discussing my alleged fundamental assumptions, toward the end of his essay, Rothman asserts:

Upon reflection I think I am entitled to take this as a compliment to my efforts at critical detachment. In my books on the Soviet Union I must have restrained my hostility to the point where my critic could succeed in discovering what he takes to be evidence of enthusiasm. At any rate, his discovery is a completely original one!

After this discovery Rothman goes on to attribute ideas to me that he probably got from reading the works of my very good friend, Herbert Marcuse. For example, so far as I remember, I have never used the expression “non-repressive society,” which has become in a way Professor's Marcuse's trade-mark. (“Less repressive” is quite another expression, which I do use.) Nor did I use the expression “free non-repressive society,” preferring to say “free and rational society,” on the page cited by Rothman in this same paragraph. Indeed, to continue examining this passage as an example of Rothman's criticism, I have never been sanguine about “revolutions in the third world as embodying hope for the future” of mankind, much as such revolutions against American attempts to prop up various forms of political landlordism do seem to me justified. But perhaps Rothman is simply mixed up, because I doubt very much that either Marcuse or I would ever speak about “the goal of a compulsionless society!”

A “general will” is a philosophical and psychological contradiction in terms; will is a conception understandable, if at all, only in terms of individual actions. The problem cannot be glossed over by attempting to reduce the general will—as did T. H. Green—to a “common ego,” or to an analogical forerunner of Kant's pure practical reason. Why, then, did Rousseau make so unviable an idea the center of his political theory, and why has that idea continued to receive serious attention?

The general will has continued to be taken seriously because it is an attempted (though not explicit) amalgam of two extremely important traditions of political thought, which may be called, roughly, ancient “cohesiveness” and modern “voluntarism.” Political thought since the 17th century has been characterized, among other things, by voluntarism, by an emphasis on the assent of individuals as the standard of political legitimacy. One certainly finds this in many of the most important thinkers between Hobbes and Kant; and even Hegel, while scarcely an “atomistic individualist” or a contractarian, explicitly argued that while “in the states of antiquity the subjective end simply coincided with the state's will,” in modern times “we make claims for private judgment, private willing, and private conscience.” When a political decision is to be made, Hegel continued, “an ‘I will’ must be pronounced by man himself.” This “I will,” he thought, must have an “appropriate objective existence” in the person of a monarch; “in a well-organized monarchy, the objective aspect belongs to law alone, and the monarch's part is merely to set to the law the subjective ‘I will’.” If even Hegel allows this voluntarist turn in his own non-contractarian theory, it goes without saying that all of social contract theory can be seen as the supreme example of voluntaristic ideas.

One of the current controversies within international relations deals with the “stability” of bipolar as opposed to multipolar stratifications of world power. Morton Kaplan, in codifying the views of classical balance of power theorists, advances the view that multipolar systems are more stable than bipolar systems. Kenneth Waltz, sagely pointing to the relatively peaceful international arena since World War II, argues that a bipolar distribution of power can guarantee world stability. Many a priori arguments have been presented to buttress the Kaplan and Waltz hypotheses. In one of the most elaborate such formulations, the “interaction opportunity” hypothesis of Karl Deutsch and J. David Singer, the presence of stabilizing crosscutting alliances is postulated to be most likely within multipolar systems, which in turn are a function of the number of major powers and members of a system. In an attempt to bring the two opposing strands of theory into a larger framework, Richard Rosecrance more recently has suggested that bipolarity and multipolarity may each have their peculiar costs and benefits. Bipolarity, according to Rosecrance, is distinguished by (1) an absence of “peripheries,” such as areas for colonial expansion or neutral powers to woo; (2) all international behavior is highly politicized; (3) there are many crises; (4) changes in power confrontations are either significant or trivial, with no intervening shades of gray; (5) each pole is dominated by major powers highly motivated to expand their domains, willing even to incur brinksmanlike situations and hostility spirals; (6) no detente is possible. Multipolarity, on the other hand, is hypothesized to have (1) more interaction opportunities and thus less preoccupation (or obsession) with any one set of states; (2) fewer arms races; (3) more international conflicts; (4) the outcomes of international conflicts are harder to predict in advance; (5) changes in power confrontations have ambiguous consequences for the overall distribution of power. Rosecrance, therefore, urges a “bi-multipolar” arrangement that would combine the best features of both alternatives. The empirical questions and intriguing hypotheses so eloquently raised by Kaplan, Waltz, Deutsch, Singer, and Rosecrance have remained largely unexamined, however.

Any middle-aged member of the political science guild in a retrospective mood might ponder a question: “What ever happened to direct democracy?” In our halcyon student days the textbooks discussed the direct democracy trinity—initiative, referendum, and recall—described their mechanics and variations, explained their origin in the Progressive Era, told us that the United States, Australia, and Switzerland were leading practitioners of direct democracy, cited a few eccentric referenda, gave the standard pro and con arguments, and essayed some judgments of the relative merits of direct and representative democracy. Latter day collegians may pass through the portals innocent of the existence of the institutions of direct government. Half of the American government texts never mention the subject; the others allocate a paragraph or a page for a casual mention or a barebones explanation of the mechanics.

A similar trend has occurred in the literature. Before 1921, every volume of this Review had items on the referendum, five in one volume. Subsequently there have been only seven articles, all but two prior to World War II. “The Initiative and Referendum in Graustark” has ceased to be a fashionable dissertation topic, only four in the last thirty years. All but two of the published monographs antedate World War II.

The manifest purpose of the roll call analysis described in this paper is that of demonstrating the existence of two policy dimensions in Congressional voting: economic and welfare. Support is sought for two propositions:

I. Each of the two dimensions appears in both the House and the Senate in each of six Congresses, the 83rd through the 88th, 1953–1964;

II. Roll call voting on the economic policy dimension is more heavily influenced by partisan differences while welfare policy voting is more subject to constituency constraints.

The second proposition is significant as an attempt to distinguish between a policy dimension on which partisan differences appear to be responsible for the greater part of the voting variation, and a policy dimension on which constituency factors have a substantial impact. This bears upon the more general concern with distinguishing those party differences in voting behavior which are a function of an independent partisan factor from those which may be attributed to any number of factors correlated with partisan affiliation. This problem will be viewed from different analytic perspectives, including an analysis of the effects of intra-party and inter-party personnel turnover on the policy positions taken by representatives of the same constituency.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the bases of support for Mexico's Partido Revolucionário Institucional. A model is developed which identifies the major and minor variables affecting changes in PRI support in the six elections between 1952 and 1967. Throughout the paper the unit of analysis is the state; the dependent variables are voter turnout and the percentage of the total vote in each state received by the PRI.

The working of the electoral system in Canada is investigated in this paper. The object is to identify the more important factors which go to determine the share of seats in the federal House of Commons won by a political party at a general election. Factors considered are share of vote, distribution of the vote and number of candidates in the field. The responsiveness of share of seats to variations in these factors is estimated by fitting linear equations by least squares to data for the fourteen federal general elections which took place in Canada between 1921 and 1965.

The object of this note is to demonstrate that generalizations about political participation may be invalid when applied to “developing” or “transitional” societies. Specifically, the relationship between rates of voter turnout and levels of education for urban Chinese in Malaya is not consistent with results reported for Western societies.

A geographical classification of bibliographic entries in Lester Milbrath's Political Participation discloses a very interesting statistic: only 3 of the 288 listed entries concern the transitional societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The lack of data on developing areas may, in large measure, explain the emphasis placed on studies of political participation in North America and Western Europe. Although there is more research on transitional societies today, most studies still focus on advanced industrial societies. The validity of the generalizations presented in Political Participation, therefore, is restricted to North America and Western Europe.

Using data collected in Malaya (1957), I examine four of Milbrath's hypotheses. These include:

(1) higher education increases participation (p.122);

(2) middle-aged persons participate more than young or old persons (p. 134);

(3) men are more likely to participate than women (p. 133); and

(4) religion affects participation (p. 137).

In this brief note it is demonstrated that if all the conditions for the existence of a competitive equilibrium are satisfied, then simple majority voting to determine the distribution of goods may be less efficient than a price system.

The argument here may be somewhat cryptic for those not familiar with the work of Anthony Downs. A considerably more discursive presentation of the background material is given in “A Two Party System, General Equilibrium and the Voters' Paradox.” The tax and public goods aspect of the voting problem have been discussed elsewhere in “Notes on the Taxonomy of Problems Concerning Public Goods.” The result presented here, nevertheless, stands by itself, hence is presented in this brief form.

The political system is modeled at its simplest. We assume the existence of two players called “political parties.” The goal of each player is to win an election by as large a vote as possible. A strategy for each player is to name a policy that it will carry out if it is elected. A policy is any point in the set of feasible distributions of final product. It follows immediately that, although any policy may be considered as a strategy, any non-Pareto optimal policies are dominated by some policy that is optimal. A discussion of the reasons for modeling a party in this simple manner is given in detail elsewhere. It is assumed that all voters are passive or “mechanistic,” i.e., they do not form groups but merely vote individually, selecting optimally between the two policies offered.