This article describes several techniques for predicting Soviet military expenditures on the basis of an analysis of the annual budget speech by the Minister of Finance. Using the Shishko-Nincic series as an indicator of actual ruble increments in the Soviet defense budget, more than four-fifths of the variance in the change in Soviet ruble expenditures for defense can be explained by an interactive model that combines a) the Finance Minister's changing characterizations of the United States and imperialism, b) his depiction of Soviet military intentions, and c) the planning cycle. This finding suggests that even in a relatively low information system such as the Soviet Union, its leadership believes it must depict the broad contours of the budget even with respect to military expenditures. The result is that the Soviet Union provides more information about important matters than Western analysts have hitherto realized.

This article offers a measure of judicial legitimation of marginal religious groups in litigation involving the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment. Throughout the greater part of history, marginal religious faiths have found the path to acceptance filled with legal obstacles. Pfeffer (1974) noted that legitimation of marginal groups occurs either when the secular norms change or when such groups change their religious doctrines. The Pfeffer thesis is generally consistent with the sect-church continuum defined by sociologists of religion. In the research reported below, we examined an alternative thesis, namely that official legitimation by the judiciary of marginal religions is a function of their marginality. We compared the results of the universe of all reported state and federal judicial opinions from 1946 through 1956 and 1970 through 1980. We found substantial increases in the percentage of successfully litigated free exercise claims, and furthermore, that success in litigating these claims is closely associated with those factors that distinguish these groups as marginal.

Several aggregate-level studies have found a relationship between macroeconomic conditions and election outcomes, operating in intuitively plausible directions. More recent survey-based studies, however, have been unable to detect any comparable relationship operating at the individual-voter level. This persistent discrepancy is puzzling. One recently proposed explanation for it is that voters actually behave in an altruistic or “sociotropic” fashion, responding to economic events only as they affect the general welfare, rather than in terms of self-interested “pocketbook” considerations.

It is argued here that the discrepancies between the macro- and microlevel studies are a statistical artifact, arising from the fact that observable changes in individual welfare actually consist of two unobservable components, a government-induced (and politically relevant) component, and an exogenous component caused by life-cycle and other politically irrelevant factors. Because of this, individual level cross-sectional estimates of the effects of welfare changes on voting are badly biased and are essentially unrelated to the true values of the behavioral parameters of interest: they will generally be considerable underestimates and may even be of the wrong sign. An aggregate-level time-series analysis, on the other hand, will often yield reasonably good (if somewhat attenuated) estimates of the underlying individual-level effects of interest. Therefore, in this case, individual behavior is best investigated with aggregate- rather than individual-level data.

It is also shown that the evidence for sociotropic voting is artifactual, in the sense that the various findings and evidence which ostensibly show sociotropic behavior are all perfectly compatible with the null hypothesis of self-interested, pocketbook voting.

This article extends recent work on political tolerance to a cross-national context. In it we argue that a content-controlled measurement strategy is ideal for cross-cultural research, and we examine the dual processes of target group selection and of deciding the extent to which one tolerates target groups, once they are selected. We argue that the first process is rooted in concerns of social adjustment, and the second in externalization and object appraisal. This leads to a certain set of predictions, which we modify slightly when we combine this social psychological theory with a cross-national research design, one we ultimately label a modified most-different-systems design. The same individual level model is estimated on the U.S. and on the Israeli data, and the results suggest that although the social and psychological processes underlying political tolerance are very similar in the two contexts, there are significant political differences between the two nations which do affect the impact of individual-level variables on tolerance.

This article translates several explanations for contextual effects upon politics into mathematical, dynamic representations. These representations are used to consider several questions. Under what circumstances does the social context lead to durability and volatility in mass political preferences? Do different specifications of contextual influence lead to different conclusions regarding its dynamic consequences? Does the social context have different dynamic implications for individual preference and for the aggregate preferences of the population as a whole? These questions are not addressed by gathering and analyzing data, but rather by examining the deductive consequences of the various explanations for contextual influence.

This article reports small group experiments in which subjects may choose to contribute a fixed amount of money toward a monetary public good, and in which the good itself is supplied only if a specified number of contributions (or more) are made. Given the opportunity to communicate, our subjects organized themselves by specifying precisely the number of required contributors and who they would be. This organization, which we call designation of a minimal contributing set, always resulted in provision of the public good, and provision in a nearly optimal manner. In contrast, groups presented with the identical problem but not allowed to communicate failed to generate a sufficient number of contributions 35 percent of the time, and in slightly over half of the successful groups, overprovision produced inefficiency.

We present hypotheses about why designating a minimal contributing set works, and data indicating that the mechanism results in reduced normative conflict and felt risk, as well as increased efficiency. The essential property of the minimal contributing set, we hypothesize, is criticalness: the contributions of the members of the minimal contributing set are each critical to obtaining the public good the members desire, and they know it. It is reasonable (albeit not a dominant strategy) to contribute because reasonable behavior can be expected from other minimal contributing set members who are in the same situation. Unreasonableness is a problem that increases with the size of groups, but adaptations exist that, we argue, can reduce its seriousness.

Both liberal theorists and their critics have been unable to reconcile successfully respect for individual freedom and autonomy with a system of legitimate political authority. Liberal theory fails because its system of rights and representative institutions is particularistic, favoring the interests of restricted individuals and groups. Nonliberal theory threatens individuals' freedom by having political authority exercised in the name of a dubious, real will. Present liberal and nonliberal theory continues to reflect these problems.

This article is an effort to present a view of political authority that respects individual freedom and is legitimate, supporting the interests of all citizens. The failure of liberal and nonliberal theory to achieve this reconciliation is believed to result from their excessively ambiguous, incomplete views of central issues—freedom, authority, and normative reasoning—and a related tendency to examine these problems in isolation. The analysis presented here proposes a more complete view of their meaning and integrates this understanding into a conception of legitimate political authority. The conclusion seriously challenges the view of political legitimacy presented by liberal theory and suggests that a different set of problems must be addressed if political authority is to be legitimate and support individuals' freedom.

This article is a critique of contemporary pluralist theory as found largely in the work of Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom. Two different forms of pluralism are distinguished and compared critically with Marxist class analysis. Pluralism, it is argued, fails to account for the reality of political and economic inequality in the United States. As a theory, pluralism is also marked by increasing tension between the underlying values and the performance of American polyarchy. The overall result is that pluralism's utility as a description and explanation of the American political economy is called into serious doubt, and a case is made for the explanatory superiority of class analysis.

Recent studies of party activists in the United States have shown an influx of issue-oriented activists into the presidential nominating process since the 1960s. These new activists are described as dogmatic ideologues more interested in promoting their issue concerns than in nominating an electable candidate. Based on our survey of 17,628 delegates attending party conventions in 11 states during the 1980 Democratic and Republican presidential nomination campaigns, we show that activists in both parties weighed electability more heavily than ideology in choosing a party nominee. This finding is in sharp contrast to a strong preference among these same activists for ideological purity over electability when they are presented with questions, typical of past studies, that pose the trade-off only in very general and abstract terms. A partial replication using data from the CPS survey of delegates to the 1972 Democratic national convention supports our findings and leads us to assert that previous studies have underestimated the concern of contemporary party activists with winning.

Scholarship on electoral turnout has long emphasized two main themes: explanations of nonvoting in terms of individual characteristics and in terms of contextual variables. These investigations have deeply enriched our understanding of electoral participation, but their limitations have also sensitized us to the remaining problems of explanation. Perusal of the work on American politics exposes a rather striking tendency in studies of participation to ignore, or soft pedal, the effects of active political mobilization. In this article we formulate two models of electoral turnout—socioeconomic and political mobilization—and apply them to aggregate data on voting in gubernatorial elections of 1978 and 1980. The socioeconomic model of turnout includes such influences as income, age, and educational attainment. To assess the effects of political mobilization, we have considered campaign spending, partisan competition, electoral margin, and the presence or absence of a simultaneous race for the United States Senate. Both of the models perform quite well individually, producing significant and meaningful coefficients and adequate fits. Yet in the final analysis we demonstrate that quite apart from major sources of variation in gubernatorial turnout—such as region and presidential versus nonpresidential years—the mobilizing influences of campaign activism and competitiveness have a strong impact on electoral participation; electoral law, i.e., closing date of registration, retains a small but significant effect on voting for governor; and socioeconomic characteristics, included in a fully specified model, have little to contribute independently to an explanation of electoral turnout. These findings are very much in the same vein as related cross-national investigations, which emphasize the crucial role of electoral law and political parties and downplay individual characteristics as determinants of electoral participation. On the basis of the research reported here, we argue that scholars need to pay more attention to political mobilization as an explanation of electoral turnout.

This article combines ideas from ethics, social choice, and political theory to develop a simulation method for assessing the desirability of different voting schemes in different situations. I use the method to evaluate six well-known election systems. My results are intuitive. I find that approval voting seems to be a good voting scheme for mass elections.

This article argues thai the role of the law in the political system has been construed much too narrowly. A review of the political science literature demonstrates an interest in the law that is largely confined to the making of new laws, social change, and social control. That view implies an acceptance of the legal profession's distinction between public and private law as a reasonable guide for political scientists in the study of law.

A more interactive view of the law is presented, characterizing legal mobilization (invoking legal norms) as a form of political activity by which the citizenry uses public authority on its own behalf. Further, the legal system, structured to consider cases and controversies on an individual basis, provides access to government authority unencumbered by the limits of collective action. This form of public power, although contingent, is widely dispersed.

Consideration of the factors that influence legal mobilization is important not only to understanding who uses the law, but also as predictors to the implementation of public policy; with very few exceptions, the enforcement of the laws depends upon individual citizens to initiate the legal process. By virtue of this dependence, an aggregation of individual citizens acting largely in their own interests strongly influences the form and extent of the implementation of public policy and thereby the allocation of power and authority.

This article presents a model of individuals' party identification that contrasts with previous models. Past models, with the few recent exceptions noted, assume a hierarchical relationship either from identification to other aspects of political behavior, such as the perception and evaluation of issues and candidates, or from these behaviors to party identifications. The model discussed here places party within a dynamic concept of the electoral process and tests several hypotheses about factors producing changes in identifications. The first factor, consistent with the spatial-type issue voting models, estimates the effects of the relative proximity of each party to the individual's own policy preferences. Second, we examine the effect of the actual voting decision on subsequent identifications, with the expectation that if votes differ from previous identifications, there is a resulting shift in partisanship. Finally, we examine the hypothesis that identifications become less susceptible to change as people age and accumulate political experience. When combined with other research, the results indicate a model of the electoral process in which party identifications are both influenced by circumstances specific to each election and influence other behaviors. This nonrecursive model has a number of implications for the development and evolution of individual and aggregate partisanship. These implications are discussed at the end of the article.

A formal model of electoral behavior is developed under the assumption that candidates have policy preferences as well as an interest in winning per se. This model is shown to have an equilibrium in a k-issue space when there are two candidates. The implications of this model are compared to the implications of the Downsian-type model where candidates are interested only in winning. Testable propositions are derived via the use of comparative statics. The results of recent studies are shown to coincide with the synthesis model but not the pure Downsian model.

The theoretical model bridges the gap between formal theory and empirical research and unifies a variety of seemingly unrelated studies.

A unidimensional spatial model is proposed in this article. Although its formal structure parallels the spatial model of electoral competition, this model examines the decisions of individuals as they choose whether or not to become activists in one of two political parties. An individual “calculus of participation” is developed that is similar to the spatial interpretation of the “calculus of voting.” This calculus is then generalized by examining conditions that may hold for aggregate activism probabilities, and the relationship between the two forms is investigated. Some results are then presented which concern the distributions of activists in the two parties. These results in general conform to the existence of “party cleavages,” in which there are two stable (equilibrium) distributions of activists, such that the two parties' activists are relatively cohesive internally and relatively distinctive externally. Finally, some suggestions are offered about how this model can be combined with the spatial model of candidate competition to provide a more complete model of elections.

Rather than striving to measure the influence of groups in the policy-making process this article concentrates instead on the ways in which interest groups are created and the means by which they remain in existence. A survey by mail was conducted during 1980-1981 of all voluntary associations that are open to membership and concerned with some aspects of public policy at the national level. The sample of groups was chosen from the Congressional Quarterly's Washington Information Directory. Questionnaires were delivered to 913 interest groups, and usable responses were received from 564, yielding a response rate of 64.8%.

Most studies of groups have concerned the tactics employed by group leaders in attracting and holding their members. This study demonstrates that the origins and maintenance of groups depends even more upon the success of group leaders in securing funds from outside their membership which are needed to keep their groups in operation. Estimates of patronage from different sources are provided as well as data on the congruence between the policy goals of groups and their patrons.

Economic voting is generally regarded as a straightforward political demand for the amelioration of economic grievances. This assumption about motives underlies the implicit theories of politicians and the imputations of interests to voters in aggregate time series models. Several recent articles have argued that voting is not self-interested but a manifestation of “symbolic” preferences at the level of the collectivity. This article places the dispute between personal and collective decision referents into the broader perspective of a multi-stage model of information processing and decision making. Personal and collective decision referents are shown to define the poles of a continuum, and several hypotheses are derived to predict the relative weights assigned to each in the voter's calculus. The model is used in analyses of both the public's evaluations of incumbent economic management and economic voting in different electoral arenas by varying issue publics. Designed to maximize comparability with aggregate studies, this research includes both objective and subjective measures of economic conditions and indexes changes in personal conditions over time from panel data.

To whom is the bureaucracy responsive? A study of public utility regulation in 12 states helps to answer that question. To assess potential responsiveness in the bureaucracy, we examine indicators of attitudinal concurrence. Whether we look at issue priorities or value priorities, public utility commissioners are more responsive to staff members and utility company executives than to governmental consumer advocates. However, bureaucratic responsiveness to citizens varies unexpectedly across stages of the policymaking process. Concurrence between commissioners and citizen activists is relatively high on issue priorities, relatively low on value priorities. Success at the agenda-setting stage does not guarantee success in policy formulation. In practice, agenda responsiveness may be little more than an exercise in symbolic politics.