The prevailing view among students of judicial politics is that judges' background characteristics or personal attributes cannot provide satisfactory explanations for variation in their decision-making behavior. Parsimonious attribute models reported here account for 70 to 90 percent of the variance in the voting of postwar Supreme Court justices in split decisions concerning civil rights and liberties, and economics. Seven variables representing six meaningful and easily interpretable concepts achieve this success. The concepts are Judge's Party Identification, Appointing President, Prestige of Prelaw Education (economics only), Appointed from Elective Office, Appointment Region (civil liberties only), Extensiveness of Judicial Experience, and Type of Prosecutorial Experience. The impressive performance of these models is attributed to superior measurement, operationalization, and model building; to a greater similarity between personal attribute models and more fully specified ones than has been assumed; and to the possibility that the attitudes which intervene between the personal attributes and the voting of judges are causally very closely linked to voting.

This article examines attitudes towards the two major political parties in the United States from 1952 to 1980, using national election study data from open-ended likes/dislikes questions. The major trend which is found is a shift toward neutral evaluations of the parties. A reinterpretation of party decline in the electorate is offered, in which the much-discussed alienation from parties is largely rejected as an explanation. Rather, it is argued that the link between parties and candidates has been substantially weakened over the years and hence that political parties have become increasingly meaningless to the electorate.

There are many similarities between Dewey and Marx, particularly the claim by each to have united theory and practice. But this article argues that the distance between the two remains great. Dewey denies what Marx affirms; namely, that partisanship performs a variety of positive functions in the movement towards a more morally adequate society and in the moral transformation of man. Against Marx, Dewey argues that the “rivalry of parties” must come under the control of the norms of critical inquiry which, Dewey believes, can also serve as the site of a more comprehensive and nonpartisan social interest. The article concludes that both Dewey and Marx are correct in what they have to say about partisanship, but in a more limited way than either would acknowledge. If partisanship is functional in the reconstruction of society, as Marx holds, and dysfunctional to the moral growth of the individual, as Dewey holds, then the controversy between liberal amelioration and radical politics is likely to persist.

Recent research has demonstrated that black Americans are far more politically active than whites of similar socioeconomic status. The difference has been related to black consciousness. Yet the reasons for this relationship have not been adequately explained. Starting with the work of Gurin and Gamson, this article theorizes that black consciousness contributes to political mistrust and a sense of internal political efficacy which in turn encourages policy-related participation. The relationship between the two attitudes and policy-related behavior is demonstrated to be conditional. The conditions favor blacks more than whites. What I shall call the Gamson-Gurin thesis is supported by data from Verba's and Nie's 1967 survey of the American public. The thesis, and its derivations, prove useful in clarifying the scope and nature of black participation in the American political process as well as helping us to understand how individuals in general select one mode of participation over another and how the choice varies by race and social class.

Over the past 25 years a number of conclusions concerning the development of political tolerance have come to be well accepted in the literature on political behavior. There are, however, two persisting problems with the studies that have generated these findings: they have relied on a content-biased measure of tolerance, and have failed to examine well specified models of the factors leading to tolerance. In this article we report the results of an analysis of the determinants of political tolerance using a content-controlled measure of tolerance and a more fully specified multivariate model. The parameters of the model are estimated from a national sample of the U.S. The results indicate the explanatory power of two political variables, the level of perceived threat and the commitment to general norms, and psychological sources of political tolerance. Social and demographic factors are found to have no direct effect and little indirect influence on the development of political tolerance.

An unresolved question concerning the New Deal realignment is the extent to which the Democratic surge in the vote resulted from either the conversion of former Republicans or the mobilization of newly active voters. Analyzing survey data from the Literary Digest straw polls and from early Gallup polls, we find evidence supporting the conversion hypothesis. New voters in 1928, 1932 and 1936 were only slightly more Democratic in their voting behavior than were established voters. Between 1924 and 1936, the vote among established voters was extremely volatile, largely accounting for the Democratic gains. After 1936, however, vote shifts became minimal and party identification had become highly consistent with presidential voting, suggesting a crystallization of the New Deal realignment by the late 1930s rather than a gradual evolution due to generational replacement.

This article presents a model of decision making and introduces a new theoretical variable to the literature, namely, the modes of decision making. The theoretical focus is on the face-to-face group, and the article also develops an innovative methodology for studying this type of decision-making behavior. Variation in the decision modes is explained as a function of the strategic considerations of individual decision makers. These considerations are affected by a set of four independent variables: structure of the decision group, substance of the conflict, context of the conflict, and the decision process. The data, drawn from observations of decision-making groups in Switzerland, are tested with discriminant analysis and a simulation. In both cases total correct classifications exceed 55 percent, indicating that there is a meaningful structure relating variation in the decision modes to the theoretical framework.

This article is a comparative analysis of state income tax checkoff programs adopted between 1973 and 1979 that grew out of the Watergate era and were intended to reform methods of political finance in state elections. The descriptive characteristics of these programs are examined, their economic performance, factors contributing to economic success and program type, and the political behavior of taxpayers choosing whether to exercise the checkoff option and, if so, which suboptions they choose. Finally, a reform model based on recent works is offered as a basis for judging the performance of tax checkoffs. It is suggested that the performance of most checkoff programs falls considerably short of the expectations of the model.

Geographically based intermediary groups in cities, primarily the political party structure and community groups, can potentially affect the distribution of public services to neighborhoods in three ways. First, they can stimulate citizen demands for services, which urban bureaucracies transform into outputs; more demands yield more services. Second, urban service agencies may grant special consideration to demands mediated by the intermediary structures, producing more output per demand for mediated demands. Finally, parties and groups may intervene in neighborhoods to co-produce services, gaining more impact from agency efforts than in neighborhoods not represented by strong intermediary structures.

Using data on citizen complaints, agency outputs and service impacts in neighborhoods, this study of building code enforcement in Chicago finds that the party structure is efficacious at all three stages of the service provision process, but that groups are not effective at any stage.

Students of American political behavior have usually turned to “critical election” realignment theories to explain the dynamics of long-term change in the party system. These theories are problematic on both theoretical and empirical grounds. A theory that can account for change within the context of a stable electoral system is required. We propose a theory of issue evolution that explains normal partisan change, and illustrate the theory by examining the impact of racial issues on party identification. The theory looks to the evolution of new issues as the stimulus of partisan change and to the continuous replacement of the electorate as the mechanism through which such change is effected. In a comparison of three theoretical models of issue evolution, we conclude that racial desegregation has provoked a subtle but permanent change in the recruitment of new members of political parties.

Numerous explanations of the tax revolt have been offered since California's adoption of Proposition 13 in 1978. Unfortunately, many of these explanations remain untested or have been tested inappropriately, and the explanations are often jumbled together in a fashion that precludes theoretical clarity. We extract eight explanations from the literature, each of which assumes that the tax revolt is a systematic national phenomenon that is a function of individual-level social, economic, and political factors. Having tested these explanations by means of a discriminant analysis of data from the 1978 American National Election Study, we find little empirical corroboration for any of them. This leads us to consider two alternative research programs, one of which interprets the tax revolt within a symbolic politics framework.

Individual members of the U. S. Congress work with staffs ranging in size from a minimum of 18 to a maximum of well over 100. Each member has come to preside over a personnel system and, consequently, may best be understood as an enterprise manager. In this article we examine these congressional enterprises in order to gain some insight about the autonomy of individual staffers, the stability of these member-centered enterprises, and generally, the responsiveness of staffers to member objectives. While it is difficult to observe or measure responsiveness directly, some purchase on the question is gained through an investigation of the causes and consequences of staff turnover; this is the major empirical focus of the research reported here.

Two hypotheses have received a great deal of attention from students of congressional elections. First, many analysts have concluded that an increase in the electoral value attached to incumbency accounts for the rise in incumbents' victory margins observed since the mid-sixties. Second, many scholars have attributed the decline in electoral turnover to the percentage increase in victory margins. Analyzing the electoral histories of 13 House cohorts (1952-76), this study reexamines these two hypotheses within the framework of a quasi-experimental design. The results presented here, in contrast to those of previous studies, cast doubt on the increased incumbency effect. Moreover, little relationship is found between an increase in electoral safety, as reflected by increased victory margins, and a decline in electoral turnover.

Social scientists have given increasing attention to the diffusion of policy innovations among the American states, focusing on the legislative and administrative sectors. This study is an effort to expand our understanding of policy diffusion by analyzing the diffusion of 23 innovative tort doctrines among state court systems between 1876 and 1975. This analysis examines the innovativeness of state judicial systems, the correlates of innovativeness, and the pattern of diffusion. The findings suggest that the diffusion of judicial doctrines is a very different process from the diffusion of legislation. A major reason for the difference appears to be the courts' dependence on litigants to provide opportunities for innovation.

Because of changes in the issues at the center of controversy, changes in rules and norms and high membership turnover, the current House majority party leaders operate in a much less predictable environment than their predecessors did. In response to the changed environment, Speaker O'Neill has developed the strategy of leadership by inclusion, a central element of which is the Speaker's task force, an ad hoc group appointed by the Speaker and charged with passage of a specific bill. The leaders believe task forces help them perform both of their primary functions—building winning coalitions and “keeping peace in the family.” By increasing the number of people working in an organized way to pass the bill at issue, the task force increases the probability of a bill's success on the floor. Work on a task force satisfies junior members' expectations of participation and fosters cooperative patterns of behavior among party members.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing demand by women for political representation of women. This demand points the way toward a number of important problems for political research, many of which remain unsolved primarily because of the segregation of women's studies from the dominant concerns of political science. This discussion focuses on the problem of group interests and representation, drawing on and suggesting further research on public opinion, interest groups, social movements, international politics, political elites, and public policy.

This article deals with the transition in House leadership from Cannon to Rayburn. The transition involved moving from a hierarchical pattern of leadership to a bargaining pattern. In accounting for this transition, we argue that it is the institutional context of the House that determines leadership power and style. Moreover, we argue that there is no straightforward relationship between leadership style and effectiveness; rather, style and effectiveness are contingent or situational. We conclude that the impact of institutional context on leadership behavior is itself primarily determined by party strength. When party strength is high, power is concentrated and leaders are task- or goal-oriented, whereas when party strength is low, power is dispersed and leaders will be oriented to bargaining and maintaining relationships.

Public concerns about the social and political implications of energy choices have found expression in the nuclear debate. The Three Mile Island accident, in its complexity and far-reaching consequences, served to focus criticism of nuclear power that had been building up for a decade. It revealed with striking clarity that technology is a social concept to be understood in terms of social and political relationships if it is to be brought under public control. The ramifications of the accident revealed the conceptual difficulties of assessing social risks and the political difficulties in managing them. This article draws examples from the Three Mile Island accident to review several characteristics of nuclear technology, its scale and costs, its complexity, its uncertain and unpredictable physical effects, and its indirect risks. It then explores the implications for social, political and administrative institutions as they grope for ways to manage the risks of nuclear power in the context of critical public scrutiny. Finally it identifies a range of issues calling for policy research.

This article assesses the status of diachronic research on the United States Congress. A literature review reveals a lack of truly diachronic studies, but a wealth of insightful and useful historical and contemporary studies. Drawing on organization theory, a research approach designed to facilitate and improve diachronic analysis is put forward. A major focus of the approach is on the ways in which environmental factors—both fixed and variable—shape the operations and performance of Congress. In addition, problems and strategies in analyzing the impacts of Congress on the wider political system are examined. The concluding section presents a research agenda for political scientists interested in applying diachronic analysis to the study of Congress.