This essay introduces the reader to the contemporary literature on gender roles and feminine behavior, including the major concepts, empirical findings, and social thought which have implications for political behavior and research. Gender roles as they relate to the psychology and activity of men and women, and their systemic cultural, economic, and legal ramifications provide an explanation and a basis for understanding political behavior, including recurrent women's protest movements. Contemporary writing contributes to building a non-androcentric and accurate body of knowledge regarding political woman, and it calls into question the ideology of the biological determinism of political activity. The literature surveyed has potential usefulness for public policy: an expansion of democracy is viable with the discernment and removal of barriers which hinder substantial proportions of women from achieving political leadership and hence participating in authoritative decision making and value allocation. A bibliography of major references is appended.

Three hypotheses suggesting why senators might adopt or change positions on such an issue as the ABM are compared. The empirical analysis clearly substantiates the contention that position reflects ideology, not party commitment or potential state economic benefits. Furthermore, the influence of ideology is seen to have grown more apparent each year the issue was contested in the Senate. Virtually all the senators who changed position between 1968 and 1970 had initial positions that did not accord with their ideology, and they moved so as to bring them in accord. Virtually all those senators whose initial position was in accord with their ideology maintained that position.

Most measures of party competition were designed for the United States or other two-party systems. The measure proposed here is intended for multiparty as well as two-party systems. It is a formalization of the notion of uncertainty: election outcomes are competitive to the degree we are uncertain who will win. By ascertaining through survey research the degree of party loyalty over time, one can calculate the chances of alternative outcomes in hypothetical replications of any given election. Since the chance that a losing party might have won is one measure of the importance of that party, this approach to party competition also provides a precise indicator of the number of parties in the system (i.e., whether it is two-party, three party, etc.). The method is applied here to data on Canadian federal elections in 1965 and 1968.

This research note offers a partial model of decision making in the Soviet Union cast in terms of the level of conflict intensity within the political system, the identity of the major participants, and the corresponding mode of decision-making behavior. It also deals with the rationalization of decision making in the post-Stalin era and the role of interest groups in policy formation.

Recognizing the multifunctional nature of decisions made within politicized bureaucratic structures, the model outlines three levels of conflict intensity and decision-making behavior:

(1) Analytic conflict occurs over maximizing (technical) decisions and elicits a decision-making style described as research and persuasion. The most influential actors are specialists and technicians.

(2) Organizational conflict occurs over mixed maximizing and integrative decisions and calls forth a combination of analytic and bargaining techniques. Key actors are institutionalized interest groups.

(3) Systemic political conflict is associated with integrative (political) decisions reached either through informal high-level bargaining or voting within higher party bodies. The most important actors are leadership factions and interest groups with political resources.

Need for achievement and strategic predispositions among political party elites are hypothesized to have an important impact on the success parties enjoy in elections and in coalitions. More specifically, this study develops and tests a model which suggests that parties whose leaders have high need for achievement and are predisposed to pursue a mixed competitive/cooperative strategy are more likely to do well in elections and in coalitions than are parties whose leaders are low in need for achievement and oriented to either cooperative or competitive strategies.

When the Indian political party system between 1967 and 1971 is used as the data base, the success or failure of political parties is correctly predicted by need for achievement for thirteen out of fourteen variables. By means of multiple regression analysis, as much as seventy-two per cent of the variance in the electoral success of Indian parties is explained by the model.

In The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson shows how the activities of various political organizations can be fruitfully analyzed using the theory of collective goods. Several of Olson's major conclusions concern the relationship between the size of a group and its ability to provide its members with collective benefits. He concludes that as group size increases, the amount of collective benefits provided will become increasingly suboptimal, and that the absolute amount of collective benefits provided will decrease. This paper shows that Olson's conclusion concerning the relationship between group size and the absolute amount of collective benefits provided is not generally true. Within the framework of analysis used by Olson, it is demonstrated that the relationship is determined by the interaction between two effects, an “income” effect which may cause the level of benefits provided to increase as group size increases, and a “congestion” effect which may cause the level of benefits to decrease as group size increases. The final result is that for “inclusive” collective goods the relationship is an increasing one, while for “exclusive” goods it is a decreasing one. Some implications of this result for the use of the theory of collective goods in studying political processes are discussed.

This essay analyses the explanatory power of Davis, Dempster, and Wildavsky's theory of budgetary incrementalism. By means of sensitivity testing, it demonstrates that inferences to “gaming” or strategic explanations of budgetary incrementalism are not warranted on the basis of correlational analysis.

To explain budgetary incrementalism more satisfactorily, recourse is made to concepts and variables explicit in the vocabulary of the budget process participants. When mandatory requests are distinguished from programmatic requests, the differential treatment of the two by Congress is observed to allow good explanation of budgetary relations. In particular, the inexorable but small mandatory request, which is almost automatically granted, is adequate by itself to explain why requests always increase and why one year's appropriation surpasses the previous one.

While many scholars have recognized that decentralization encourages American party organizations to tailor activities to the local environment, few have studied systematically the relationships between that environment and party behavior. This study examines the impact of certain political and demographic county characteristics on the activities of a national sample of county party organizations in 1964. Three dimensions of party behavior—organization, mobilization, and persuasion—are utilized as dependent variables. The relationships between the environment and these dimensions of party behavior in the North support a revised “machine theory” of environment and party: organizational effort does not vary with environmental conditions, while mobilization and persuasion activities are opposites in their relationships with the concentration of parochially-oriented voters. Additionally, the division of partisan strength influences party activity: parties perform their “natural” activities well where they have strong support and the other party's “natural” activities well under competitive conditions. Few significant relationships are found in the South, but their similarity in direction to those in the North suggests that the normal relationships may have been attenuated by circumstances unique to that region, particularly one-partyism and decades of “whites only” politics.

Two theories of community conflict are examined in this paper with data from elections in 89 cities in the San Francisco Bay area. One theory is developed from the work on group conflict by Georg Simmel and Lewis Coser while the other is a rational choice theory based on assumptions about the costs and risks of conflict in different size cities. Both theories suggest that conflict, while more frequent in larger communities, is likely to become most severe in smaller communities. Both theories are confirmed by the pattern of findings in the analysis, but the rational choice theory proves to have the greater generality, i.e., that it can explain more of the findings in the paper.