In The Responsible Electorate, V. O. Key urged upon us “the perverse and unorthodox argument … that voters are not fools.” He challenged the notion that the voting act is the deterministic resultant of psychological and sociological vectors. He believed that the evidence supported the view of the voter as a reasonably rational fellow. The present article offers a corollary to Key's “unorthodox argument.” It suggests that certain sociological determinants, secifically group norms regarding party identification, may, upon examination, prove to be rational guides to action. For the voter who is a reasonably rational fellow, it will be argued, these group norms may seem rather sensible.

Before proceeding to the analysis of data, some discussion of the notion of rationality seems in order. The usage subscribed to in the present analysis derives from contemporary game theory. Put most simply, being rational in a decision situation consists in examining the alternatives with which one is confronted, estimating and evaluating the likely consequences of each, and selecting that alternative which yields the most attractive set of expectations. Formally, this process entails making calculations of the following type as a basis for the decision:

where:

E(Vai) = expected value of alternative i.

P(oj∣ai) = probability of outcome j given that V(oi) = value of outcome j to the decision maker.

Despite the fact that the study of politics has become increasingly empirical, quantitative and “behavioral” in recent years, and despite the apparently increasing tendency to feel that whatever meaningful debate ever existed between the behavioralists and the anti-behavioralists has ended, should end, or at least has become irrelevant since a more sophisticated and empirically productive behavioralism now predominates in virtually all fields of the discipline, the methodological debate continues, diminished perhaps in quantity but not in intensity.

This essay is based on the assumption that the antagonists concerned with the methodological issues raised by the “new science of politics” have but rarely focused precisely on the arguments raised by their opponents. A second motivating assumption is that nothing constructive, conciliatory or conducive to the integration of the discipline can be done “until the issues have been squarely confronted on the basic and general plane of philosophy….” A thorough analysis of all of the meaningful issues involved can only be a task of long-range proportions. But in the hope of bringing about some degree of communication, if not reconciliation, it is my intention in this essay to bring one of these issues into sharper focus, to show that almost despite themselves, some of the critics and proponents of the “new science of politics” have addressed themselves to the problem of concept formation, and that despite their proclaimed differences are talking at cross-purposes about a similar problem. Indeed, it will be seen that the conflict between the “traditionalists” and the “behavioralists” is utterly dependent—in the area of concept formation—upon an outmoded positivistic interpretation of behavioral science and a misguided reaction on the part of some political theorists to that obsolete conception.

Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: “How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?” Only if participation is limited to one man does this question become trivial. And this choice of decision-rules may seem only a little less important than the choice of rules in a world so largely governed by committees, councils, conventions, and legislatures. This paper is about the consequences of these rules for individual values.

Both the oral and written traditions of political theory have generally confined the search for optimal (or “best”) decision-rules to three alternatives. The rule of consensus tells us that all direct participants must agree on a policy which is to be imposed. Majority-rule tells us that more than half must concur in a policy if it is to be imposed. And the rule of individual initiative (as we may call it), holds that a policy is imposed when any single participant approves of it. These three decision-rules—“everyone,” “most of us,” and “anyone”—are terribly important, but they cannot be said to exhaust the available alternatives.

The list of alternatives is just as long as a committee's roster. Only for a committee of three would ‘consensus,’ ‘majority’ and ‘individual initiative’ exhaust the possibilities. In a committee of n members, we have n possible rules. Let the decision-rule be a minimum number of individuals (k) required to impose a policy.

Since the writings of the judicial realists in the 1920's and 1930's almost all social scientists have accepted the concept that the judicial process is basically political. One line of reasoning points out that judges inevitably are policy makers because of their functions, such as constitutional and statutory interpretation. Politics is conflict among interests or values or demands, and any activity, including judicial decisions, which advantages one interest as opposed to others is political activity. Since judges decide cases involving interest conflicts, theirs is “interest activity not as a matter of choice but of function.” Robert H. Jackson made the point cogently when he argued that the “Supreme Court has, from the very nature of its functions, been deep in power politics …” Of the power of judicial review, he said, “The ultimate function of the Supreme Court is nothing less than the arbitration between fundamental and ever-present rival forces or trends in our organized society.” Although these remarks were addressed to the Supreme Court, they are true to a substantial degree of judicial power throughout the American system. Many of the conflicts adjudicated by the judiciary advance some interests or values and disadvantage others.

At the same time that the judicial function has been recognized as political in its consequences, the process of judicial decision making has come to be viewed as involving wide opportunities for discretion by the judges. The mechanical theory of judging, enunciated most clearly by the late Justice Owen Roberts, is now generally in disrepute, and realists prefer to cite Charles Evans Hughes who stated “We are under the Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.”

One of the more fertile sources of data for systematic comparative political studies is in the regional differences that abound within political systems. When such differences are large and politically significant, explaining them becomes intriguing and important, especially if their causes cannot be found in the more familiar classes of socioeconomic variables.

Our purpose here is to present a preliminary analysis of a widely discussed intrasystem political difference—that between Northern and Southern California. This regional split has received particularly wide attention since the 1964 Republican primary, when Senator Goldwater's landslide majority in the South overcame his resounding defeat in the San Francisco Bay Area and insured his presidential nomination. Attempts to explain this pronounced regional variation have generated propositions about the political consequences of those social and economic conditions thought to be characteristic of Southern California. Since that area's most striking feature is its continuous rapid growth and economic development, many writers have been led to speculate that anxieties resulting from such changes lead to ultraconservative political preferences. These propositions are of considerable interest to students of politics, since neither economic growth nor its presumed attitudinal consequence is unique to Southern California, nor, for that matter, to the United States. AVe will examine various explanations for California's regional variation, with special emphasis on propositions about economic growth. Our data are from the 1960 Census, 1964 and 1968 election returns, and a series of statewide sample surveys conducted during the 1964 campaigns.

Alienation is both one of the most popular and vague concepts used by contemporary social scientists. Scholars often cite Robert Nisbet's statement that alienation is basically a perspective. The current age is said to be one of alienation, or writers declare alienation to be the fundamental interpretive concept for explaining deviant behavior. One author has even gone so far as to say that definition is unnecessary because we can all feel what “it” is in our very bones. Indeed, if we don't understand it intuitively we are alienated by definition.

Recently, there have been a series of attempts to clarify the meaning of the term. Daniel Bell, commenting on the uses of the concept alienation in the works of Marx, distinguishes estrangement (“a socio-psychological condition”) from reification (“a philosophical category with psychological overtones”). For research purposes, the fundamental difference between these meanings lies in the criteria which are applied in determining whether an individual is alienated. The existence of estrangement is determined by investigating the attitudes of individuals; reification is measured against “objective” standards about the quality of human life established by the investigator.

The reification (objective) tradition has many strong exponents. It offers a potentially powerful concept to an analyst wishing to evaluate the human condition in terms of explicitly stated criteria of what man ought to be in his social and personal relationships. Most of the contemporary scholarly work, however, is concerned with estrangement, and my own interest also lies in the individual's perception of the situation he faces.

The relationship of parties to democracy and to political stability has concerned scholars for years. Extant party systems have almost continually been under attack by reformers bent on achieving various objectives, among them greater party responsibility, greater honesty, and greater efficiency of governmental operation. But party systems have not suffered from a lack of defenders: reformers have often been engaged in vigorous debate. Such controversy, apart from the merits of the arguments on either side, focuses attention on a number of interesting empirical propositions about parties in democratic systems. These propositions, unfortunately, have not often been put to rigorous systematic test.

For example, defenders of the American party system in particular point out that an important function of parties is the guiding of social conflict into moderate, non-revolutionary modes of expression. Attempts at reform, goes the argument, should be considered as to whether they might interfere with this beneficial function. Citizens are viewed as having inherent tendencies to perform destabilizing political acts or to vote for extremist political figures. Somehow, we are told, these citizens are restrained from indulging these immoderate predispositions by the party system. In a sense, the argument continues, parties save the great unwashed from themselves; all democrats should be thankful that they do and appreciate them for this service.

The present study is an attempt to identify the determinants of innovation in public agencies, i.e., the degree to which they adopt and emphasize programs that depart from traditional concerns. Innovation is suggested to be the function of an interaction among the motivation to innovate, the strength of obstacles against innovation, and the availability of resources for overcoming such obstacles.

The significance of the research can be viewed in terms of Hyneman's observation nearly twenty years ago that bureaucratic agencies “… may fail to take the initiative and supply the leadership that is required of them in view of their relation to particular sectors of public affairs. …” His concern was the responsiveness of the public sector not only to expressed wants but to public wants that may go unexpressed, or be only weakly expressed, and whose utility is much more easily recognized by the informed bureaucratic official than by the ordinary citizen.

While the results and conclusions to be reported appear to be largely valid for organizations in general, the empirical focus will be local departments of public health which, as a class, have had a rather dramatic succession of opportunities to respond to new public problems over the past twenty-five years. A brief introductory paragraph will orient the reader to the applied setting.

Substantive foci in the study of international relations have altered in time with changes in the international system and the coming of academic age of new generations of scholars. Prior to World War I, the central substantive concepts were international law and diplomacy. Historiography was the major method, and, given the nature of the historical approach during this period, few theoretical generalizations emerged.

World War I revolutionized the study of international relations. The horrible consequences of this first modern war and the idealistic fervor of the war years were instrumental in overlaying the traditional concepts of international law and diplomacy with two new foci: current events and international organizations. Feeling that the citizen should be made aware of the international world—educated for world citizenship—and that he should be given the guidance that the diplomatic history and international law specialist did not provide, many international relations scholars began to accent contemporary affairs. This new interest, however, had no methodological underpinning except fidelity to the “facts,” and involved few attempts to delineate recurring patterns of events. The “guidance” given to the student often turned out to be little more than special pleading.

The focus on international organizations also reflected an internationalistic viewpoint. International organizations were conceived of as the structural beginning of world government and as a mechanism for international understanding and peace. This focus articulated itself in descriptive studies of the structure and rules of international organizations, past and present, and blueprints for their alteration.

James N. Rosenau has elaborated the issue area typology developed by Theodore Lowi in an ambitious attempt to categorize motivations, role structures, and interaction sequences which distinguish “domestic” from “foreign” issues. Lowi classified domestic issues into three areas: distribution of resources, regulation of resources, and redistribution of resources, and he equated interaction sequences in these areas with the coalition (distributive), pluralist (regulatory), and elitist (redistributive) models of the political process. The theoretical underpinning of Lowi's typology was the assumption that stable expectations develop about appropriate patterns of political competition and conflict for issues in each of these three “arenas.”

The internal logic of Lowi's argument is as follows: (1) people's expectations concerning benefits to be derived from relating to others determine their choices of relationships; (2) governmental policies (outputs) determine expectations about questions of politics; (3) ergo, the type of policy at stake determines the patterning of any political relationship; a distinctive type of political relationship should characterize every major type of policy. In these arenas of power, “each arena tends to develop its own characteristic political structure, political process, elites, and group relations.” Distributive policies are easily disaggregable into small units and can be apportioned among participants in relative isolation from one another. Regulatory policies, while specific in their impact, are not so infinitely disaggregable: “regulatory policies are distinguishable from distributive in that in the short run the regulatory decision involves a direct choice as to who will be indulged and who deprived.” Redistributive policies are similar to regulatory policies insofar as individual decisions are interrelated and apply to large categories of participants, but the impact of redistributive policies on these aggregates is much greater.

The rapidly expanding research literature in comparative state politics typically measures its dependent and independent variables with references to means, averages, and per capitas for each state. (For example, environmental inputs may be expressed as per capita personal income, percent of population living in urban places, median school year completed by the population over 25, etc.; political characteristics may be expressed as average voter turnout levels, percent of the total vote cast for the winning party, etc.; policy outputs are often expressed as per capita expenditures for education, average monthly payments for old age assistance, per capita tax revenues, etc.) With measures such as these, the comparative state politics research has systematically explored many of the linkages between environmental inputs, political system characteristics, and public policy outcomes.

Perhaps the most serious reservation regarding this research is its failure to examine distributive and redistributive aspects of state politics. Both dependent and independent variables are generally expressed as levels or amounts or averages for whole states; these can be neatly arranged for comparative analysis both longitudinally and cross-sectionally. But what about the distribution of wealth within a state? Or the distribution of public monies among high and low income groups, rural and urban populations, or other divisions within a state's population. The linkages between the distribution of resources within states, the distribution of influence within state political systems, and public policies reflecting distributional decisions, remain largely untested.

Students of Latin American political parties have long assumed a strong correlation between social class and party identification, yet this assumption has never been tested empirically in any of the Latin American nations. This is probably due in large part to the lack of reliable survey data; however, even the mass of aggregate voting data has seldom been analyzed systematically. As a result, most of what we know—or think we know—about voting behavior in Latin America is based upon the intuitive assumptions of North American scholars. “If I were a member of the Chilean middle class, I would probably vote for the Radicals or Christian Democrats, but on the other hand if I were quite wealthy I would probably vote for the Conservatives.”

Students of Argentine politics assume that the Conservative parties, always representing the interests of the nation's aristocracy, have received the bulk of their votes from the large landowners; that the interests of this group consistently have been opposed by the Radical parties who receive their electoral support from the urban middle classes; and that the more recently formed Peronist parties have championed the cause of, and been supported at the polls by, the industrial workers. It is the purpose of this article to test these assumptions, primarily through analysis of aggregate voting data, but also by examining the social backgrounds of party leaders and their actions while in power.