This study is based on a survey conducted by the author in a rural community in Egypt (a) to determine how mass media messages reach the population, (b) to identify opinion leaders, and (c) to assess the relation between mass media exposure and political awareness.

The data from this survey were used to test the two-step flow of communications hypothesis of Lazarsfeld and colleagues and to compare the effects of the mass media and opinion leaders on the public. Analysis of the data did not support the two-step flow of communications hypothesis; instead it was noted that the greater the exposure to the mass media, the more direct is the flow of communications.

Opinion leaders reached a smaller and less educated section of the population and were found to be the elected and official representatives of the village organizations rather than shopkeepers, teachers, and clergy. Finally, it was found that opinion leaders were specialized, each conveying policy information relevant to his role in the community. The flow of communications was found to be functional and organized rather than casual and haphazard as is usually the case in transmitting non-functional information.

The last part of this article deals with the relation between exposure to the mass media and political awareness. Indices were constructed to give each respondent a score on the degree of exposure to the mass media and another on his level of political awareness. Analysis showed that mass media exposure and political awareness are directly related (r = .53). It was also found that those who had direct access to the mass media were more sensitized to political news than those who had no such access, thus underlining the politicization role of the mass media.

Finally, the article compares the degree of correlation between mass media exposure and political awareness with similar correlations obtained in rural areas in Latin America.

An effort to test the existence and correlates of the “unitarist” and “individualist” political ethos (first discussed in City Politics under the labels “middle-class Anglo-Saxon ethos” and “immigrant ethos”) in a sample of 1,059 mostly male Boston homeowners reveals that about one fifth of the respondents have one or the other ethos when defined by two sets of attitudes and about one eighth have one or the other when defined by three sets of attitudes. In general, the respondents displaying each attitude or two or more attitudes in the predicted combinations have the predicted ethnic, religious, income, and educational attributes. Jewish voters, however, are less likely than predicted to have the good government attitude, whereas Irish and Polish respondents are more likely to have it. Upper-income Yankees were strongly unitarist as defined by all three attitudes.

This paper seeks to clarify choices in income maintenance, not to advocate a particular policy alternative. It makes explicit the trade-offs between competing objectives that are required of policymakers, but often obscured by polemics about the advantages or disadvantages of particular transfer mechanisms (e.g., negative income taxes, child allowances, demogrants). The paper first presents a critique of contemporary public debate on welfare reform and antipoverty cash transfer schemes. The next section distinguishes among the goals of reforming the present system of public assistance, substantially reducing American poverty, and making both the tax system and the social distribution of income more equitable. There follows a discussion of six criteria for evaluating and comparing alternative measures to one or another of these goals. The paper concludes with an application of the evaluative scheme to the welfare reform alternatives considered by the Nixon Administration in the spring of 1969.

Changes in political decision-making outputs and trading activities in the European Economic Community are examined around three quasi-experimental events (formation of the EEC in 1958, first agricultural package in 1962, and the agricultural crisis in 1965–66). On the basis of a preliminary analysis, nine variables were selected for inclusion in the study (three political decision variables and six trade indicators); these were then subjected to “interrupted time-series analysis,” through which the quasi-experimental effects of the three events were assessed for statistical significance (t-tests and autocorrelation measures) and theoretical validity (through the elimination of plausible rival interpretations).

Political integration in the EEC is viewed as (1) positive growth in system indicators, and (2) increased mutual responsiveness among the major components or subsystems of the EEC. Results of the quasi-experimental analyses suggest that despite high positive growth in the selected variables, mutual responsiveness among system parts remains quite low; therefore, the principal conclusion drawn is that the EEC is a “weakly” integrating system—a collection of structures growing rapidly in many directions, with each structure very imperfectly responsive to the behavior of others.

The paper urges and attempts to demonstrate the methodological usefulness of applying the logic of experimentation to ex-post-facto research. This approach entails the demonstration that non-random variation in independent and dependent variables has occurred, that these variables are related in some way, and that the relationship is nonspurious—that is, that the important confounding variables have been controlled by eliminating plausible rival hypotheses through statistical and analytical procedures.

The widely cited concept of nondecisions is particularly prominent in criticisms of “pluralist” research on local politics. But no scholars, including those who introduced the notion of nondecisions, have done empirical research explicitly on this topic. The lack of research on nondecisions reflects the concept's weaknesses as a guide to field research: (1) It involves a number of unrealistic assumptions about political life. (2) It requires data that are difficult to gather or wholly unobtainable. (3) Even the data that can be collected do not provide a basis for sensible conclusions about the distribution of political power.

The impracticability of research on nondecisions is not a serious setback for political science, however, for most of its specific component ideas, such as the policy consequences of different governmental forms or the impact of political socialization, are being studied without reference to the notion of nondecisions. Judged by its utility for empirical research, then, the idea of nondecisions appears to be superfluous. The same might be said of the notion of “power structures.”

This investigation is based on an experimental study of voting behavior in what the author terms a minimal-information election. This type of election is characterized by a dearth of public information about election issues and partisan considerations, so that the campaign is waged primarily on the basis of the voters' attitudes toward the candidates as personalities. In general, the minimal-information election most often characterizes local nonpartisan contests.

The experiment examined changes in voting that appeared to result from electioneering strategies designed to elicit “bandwagon” or “underdog” responses. These strategies consisted of presenting the “electorate” with the results of pre-election preferential polls, as well as qualitative information explicitly aimed at arousing the emotions of the voters.

The experiment clearly demonstrated that mere poll results are insufficient to impel would-be bandwagon or underdog identifiers to switch their votes. Rather, this type of behavior does not appear until a strong qualitative stimulus sensitizes or cues bandwagon or underdog tendencies among the voters.

This paper is concerned with the problem of relating aggregate coalition payoffs to the winnings of an individual player, so that some theoretical foundation might be developed for dealing with problems of coalition formation. Professor William H. Riker was concerned with this problem in his Theory of Political Coalitions; in that book he developed a formulation holding that in several common political situations players would strive to form only minimum winning coalitions. Riker based that formulation on his derivation in game theory of “the size principle,” which held that in zero-sum games among rational players with perfect information, only minimum winning coalitions would occur. The first part of this research note shows that there is a difficulty in Riker's derivation of the “size principle,” presents counter-examples to that principle, and shows that it is unsound in general. The second part of this note develops the maximum number of positive gainers principle, which shows that in the kind of games being examined there is a maximum upper limit to the number of players who will positively gain; but this does not insure that the winning coalition will be minimal.

The article defines indirect government as self-government through intermediaries authorized by the people, as opposed to the direct rule of the people. It requires that the people abstain from government after authorizing it, and hence that political debate center on whether or how the government is representative, not on what it should do. Almost all modern government is indirect and based on the indirect question of representation. Hobbes, though not the founder of indirect government, was the founder of the science by which men could be induced to consent to be governed not in accordance with their opinions of good and bad but on the basis of their passions, particularly fear. To achieve a form of consent that was voluntary and yet not based on opinion, he was forced to understand consent almost as resigning to the inevitable, yet his purpose in attempting to expel opinions from politics was to clear away divisions of opinion, especially religious opinion, and thus remove the obstacle to progress in human power. Hobbes' doctrine and modern representative government must both be understood from the historical standpoint of Hobbes' hostility to Christianity.

This essay attempts to be at once a comment on some of the many significant points raised in Professor Wolfinger's article and a statement of a perspective on the issue of the “nonissue” in community power analysis. It is not, however, intended as another salvo in the “elitist-pluralist controversy.”

The dispute between “elitists,” “pluralists,” “neo-elitists,” “neopluralists?” et al. has been much with us. A number of valuable ideas regarding approaches and methods for power analysis have, of course, emerged from the debate, especially in its earlier stages. With them, however, seems to have come a conspicuous friction which, I believe, increasingly impedes research. The main problem, as it strikes this noncombatant, is that each side has been reluctant to grant much to the other, while the language has been painfully polemical at times. To one who has learned from both camps and wants to advance the assault on persistent problems rather than on each other, the quarrel has become unfortunate. Debating points often obfuscate truly important issues for power analysis.

The effect of party activities on the vote, while a fundamentally important question for any understanding of party operations, has received little research attention. This neglect has come about partly because the analysis is difficult to conceptualize and because the data have to be generated principally by the investigator. In addition, structural variables relevant to the nature of the environment in which the parties compete must be introduced into the analysis, and the canvas must be broad enough to permit comparative assessments within a controlled research design.

The present study sets out to deal with precisely these problems. It analyzes the contribution of the competing parties' efforts to the final vote in elections for five levels of office, from local to national, in 100 North Carolina counties.

Multiple correlation analysis was used to judge the association between the final vote and three sets of independent variables: demographic, institutional (specifically the extent of competition between the contending parties), and political, with emphasis on those associated with campaigning. The variance explained by each is described, as well as the total contribution of all to understanding the outcome of the election.

The variables proved quite successful in explaining the final vote. The strength of the associations increased as one proceeded from the local to the national level, and party output measures proved more impressive contributors to explaining the votes in competitive as against non-competitive areas. Overall, the variables relating to party effort were found to add significantly to the under-standing of the election outcomes.

The paper contends that political democracy is a matter of degree, a variable property of political institutions. An index for this property, Q, measures the extent to which complex institutions approximate a generalized definition of majority-rule (e.g. that losing coalitions must be smaller than winning or blocking ones.) This index for degrees of political democracy is in turn treated as a function of simpler structural variables, such as decision-rule, the sizes of veto groups, the sizes of groups excluded from decision-making, and simple patterns of representation. Finally, it is suggested that there is no necessity that more democracy produce more satisfaction with outcomes, but that this property does set a “maxi-min” constraint on rates of satisfaction: the more democratic an institution, the larger is the smallest possible proportion of a group (or “domain”) which can be satisfied with any single (binary) outcome.

Professor Frey and I seem to be in agreement on several points: (1) The research procedures proposed by Bachrach and Baratz are unsatisfactory. (2) Worrying about criteria of issue selection is unnecessary; policy formation can usefully be studied issue by issue. Indeed, I would add that typologies of issues are one of the more promising developments in the study of politics. (3) The notion of nondecisions is not a club with which to belabor Who Governs? in particular or “pluralists” in general. Frey has performed a considerable service by rescuing the idea of nondecisions from the ideologically tinged context in which its advocates generally have discussed it. (4) Analysts of policy formation who limit their attention to overt conflict miss many exercises of power. (5) The pluralist-elitist dichotomy is not a useful distinction.

The last two points call for further discussion. I do not know of any researcher who has disputed the fourth point. In his study of New Haven, Dahl employed three indices of power, “of roughly the same strength.” One of these was: “When a proposal initiated by one or more of the participants is adopted without opposition.”

This paper, based on a statewide survey of 907 Florida high school seniors, reveals that self-reported marijuana use, regardless of cause, has social and political implications, though not at the high level of association suggested by the stereotype of a pot-smoking, hippie, political radical. Demographically, the user is typically an urban white male from a wealthier and better educated family. Marijuana users are differentiated from non-users in their more negative views toward the most proximate authority structures and their desire for changes in laws regulating behaviors commonly associated with youth. Marijuana use was not associated with broader social concerns or political ideology, and was only tenuously associated with political alienation. The relationship between measures of social discontent and political alienation reveals a more homogeneous pattern among users than non-users, thus supporting Goode's “subcommunity” hypothesis.

This paper uses statistical analysis to consider what factors influence the way senators vote and how important these influences are. The answers are specific statements about individual senators' decision processes, and quantitative estimates of the weights applied to the different variables in these models. The form of the voting models and the variables in them were developed from hypotheses about individual decision-making and descriptions of the legislative process. Examples of the variables are the preferences of the senator's constituency, the opinions of his party leader, and the views of the President. Quantitative measures of the variables were obtained from state demographic characteristics and by Guttman-scaling the votes on passage of the amendments to specific bills considered in 1961 and 1962. Linear regression analysis of these Guttman scales was then used to test the hypotheses and estimate the coefficients in each senator's voting model. After the results from these analyses are discussed, the explanatory power of these models on individual bills is evaluated by comparing the vote they estimate with those predicted using two alternative models.

In his recent book, Moral Principles in Political Philosophy, Felix Oppenheim provides a useful examination of the assumptions of well known figures in the history of political philosophy concerning the logical status of moral principles. Classifying them as cognitivists (if they view fundamental moral principles as either true or false) or noncognitivists (if they view moral principles as neither true nor false), Oppenheim attempts to exhibit the inadequacy of the cognitivist point of view and, importantly, the adequacy of the noncognitivist position. My critique aims at demonstrating the inconclusiveness of Oppenheim’s arguments against cognitivism. Oppenheim presupposes the availability of a plausible and workable criterion for determining when a sentence counts as a statement (statements are for Oppenheim entities which are true or false and, thus, “cognitively meaningful”), but he fails to provide any attractive candidate for that position. Further critical discussion revolves around the following related questions: Is there adequate positive support for the noncognitivist view? Does it allow for the rationality of fundamental moral commitments? And can Oppenheim really justify his case that, far from being irrational or pernicious, noncognitivism is naturally associated with certain humanistic ideals, such as toleration of those of differing moral and political viewpoint?

This paper develops several simple multivariate statistical models and applies them to explain fluctuations in the aggregate vote for the United States House of Representatives, over the period 1896-1964. The basic hypothesis underlying these models is that voters are rational in at least the limited sense that their decisions as to whether to vote for an incumbent administration depend on whether its performance has been “satisfactory” according to some simple standard. Because of data limitations, the analysis focuses on measures of economic performance, treating other aspects of an incumbent's performance, such as its handling of foreign affairs, as stochastic perturbations of the underlying relationship to be estimated. (Examination of residuals suggests this assumption is not unreasonable, at least during peacetime.) Possible effects of coattails from presidential races, of incumbency, and of secular trends in the underlying partisanship of the electorate are also taken into account. The models, estimated by maximum-likelihood methods, are found to be successful. Close to two-thirds of the variance in the vote series is accounted for, and the structural coefficients of the models are of the correct signs and of quite reasonable magnitudes. Economic growth, as measured by the changes in real per capita income, is the major economic variable; unemployment or inflation have little independent effect. Presidential coattails are also found to be of some importance.

The paper argues that while the state of mind of an agent exercising power is relevant in analyzing the concept of power, much of the discussion about whether an intention must be complied with for there to be an exercise of power misconceives the issue at stake because it overrates the extent to which human behavior is ratiocinative. The argument is developed in the course of a discussion of several hypothetical examples. One conclusion is that for a person to exercise power it is normally necessary that he should have a favorable attitude to the effects in question, the word “favorable” being used because it is highly general and hence relatively non-restrictive. The final conclusion is that the very generality of this criterion makes a precise conceptual analysis of power impossible.

This project attempts to relate a large number of potential predictors to voting data generated at the United Nations. Numerous associations were found when the predictors, 77 in all, were related to 13 different kinds of voting scores. Because of considerable redundancy in both sets of data, national attribute and voting, the results were factor analyzed and the original variables were reduced to 14 sets of factor scores representing the national attribute data, and 4 representing the voting data. Several significant associations emerged from the intercorrelation of these two sets of factor scores, with the independent variables “Economic Development,” “Democracy,” and “U.S. Relations” exhibiting considerable predictive power. When the overall relationships between the two sets of data were assessed by use of the canonical correlation technique, “Economic Development” received the greatest weight on the national attribute side, and “Eastern Voting” on the voting (dependent variable) side. These findings accord well with previous research, in that “Economic Development” seems to predict negativism as revealed by voting. Thus “Economic Development” appears to be fundamentally related to certain schisms at the United Nations, with the representatives from the most developed states appearing the most “negative” as evidenced by questionnaire responses and voting behavior. Such orientations are likely to have a significant impact on the evolution of the organization.

At a theoretical level, the present findings may have considerable relevance for both Social Field theory and Attribute theory.