In his Economic Theory of Democracy, Anthony Downs reached the conclusion that voting is usually an irrational act. Given that voting is costly in time and effort involved in getting to the polls and making a decision and given that the probability any one voter can affect the outcome diminishes very rapidly as the number of voters increases, it appears that a rational, utility-maximizing citizen will most probably abstain. Only if the citizen perceives a phenomenally large difference between (or among) the candidates or if the number of voters is small will he go to the polls.

Empirically, however, we know that substantially more than half of all eligible voters go to the polls in American presidential elections where the probability of any one voter's affecting the outcome is smaller than in any other election. If Downs is correct, at least half of the American electorate is irrational. But of what validity is a rational choice theory which characterizes most individuals as irrational? For this reason, theorists have attempted to modify Downs's theory so as to allow it to better explain why some rational citizens vote while others abstain.

This essay addresses the question: Why does the Electoral College bias campaign resource allocations in favor of large states? Using data on candidate trips as well as estimates of the time candidates spend in states, we conclude, first, that much of the apparent empirical support for Brams and Davis's 3/2's hypothesis is an artifact of the candidates' consideration of each state's relative competitiveness and the statistical relationship between size and competitiveness. There is some evidence, however, for a residual bias. That is, after controlling for each state's competitiveness, campaign allocations still appear to favor larger states—at least for the two competitive elections of 1960 and 1968. We attribute that bias to corner solutions to the candidate's maximization problem and to the effects of sequential campaign planning. Thus, while we do not dispute the existence of bias over the course of the entire campaign, the data are consistent with a modified (albeit complex) proportional rule that each candidate applies sequentially during the campaign. Our conclusion is that the unit rule feature of the Electoral College, rather than weighted voting, is the predominant cause of bias.

It is continually demonstrated in the pages of the Review that formal theorists in political science have great difficulty in communicating with one another, in reaching consensus, e.g., on the rationality of minimal winning coalitions and the effects of vote-trading. It has always puzzled me how such confusion and controversy could surround simple arguments which are—or at least appear to be—mathematical. Reading the extraordinarily clear contribution of Ferejohn and Fiorina (“The Paradox of Not Voting: A Decision Theoretic Analysis,” APSR 68 [June, 1974], 525–536), I am led to the conjecture that a sort of natural selection is involved, that the more lucid papers are so patently silly that many of them fail to achieve publication, leaving the field to papers in which the nonsense is at least obscure.

Cross-national research has, with a few exceptions, dealt exclusively with hypotheses that focus on causal relations within nations. It is increasingly clear both on substantive and methodological grounds, however, that diffusion effects among nations must also be considered. The present research combines these alternative perspectives in an analysis of the timing of the first adoption of social security in nations. It is found that not only prerequisites explanations—which focus on causes within each nation—but also spatial and hierarchical diffusion effects must be considered in explaining patterns of social security adoption. The most important overall pattern, which appears to result from diffusion, is the tendency for later adopters to adopt at lower levels of modernization. This finding is interpreted as being due in part to a general tendency toward a larger role of the state in later developing countries—involving an important difference in the sequence in which different aspects of modernization occur—and in part to special characteristics of social security as a public policy.

This paper utilizes a national panel study of two biologically linked generations to study political change and continuity between 1965 and 1973. Four basic processes and combinations thereof are posited: absolute continuity, generational effects, life-cycle effects, and period effects. Data at the aggregate level give strong support for each type of change and continuity progression, depending upon the substantive political orientation examined. There are also strong traces of hybrid effects, especially the combination of period and life-cycle processes acting to propel the younger generation at a faster clip than the older. Over the eight-year span the absolute cleavage between the generations tended to decline, the major exception occurring with respect to specific issues and partisanship. The anomaly of this strain toward convergence in the light of the generation gap controversy is discussed.

In a recent article (“The Paradox of Not Voting: A Decision Theoretic Analysis,” APSR, 68 [June, 1974], 525–536) John Ferejohn and Morris Fiorina suggest that a (potential) voter may be rational in deciding whether to vote and yet not use the expected-utility calculus introduced for this purpose by Downs and Tullock and extended by Riker and Ordeshook. The authors suggest that a rational voter, in deciding whether to vote, may use the minimax regret criterion due to the late L. J. Savage. Define the regret of an Act A as the difference, if the true state of nature were known (in advance), between the best expected payoff that could be obtained and the expected payoff that would be obtained by act A. Then the minimax regret criterion requires the decision maker to act in such a way as to minimize the maximum regret that he can suffer.

They also discuss the fact that the minimax regret criterion does not require the voter to supply any (objective or subjective) estimates of the probabilities associated with the various outcomes of the election. Thus they feel that it is an attractive criterion for decision making under “uncertainty” as opposed to decision making under “risk.”

In his political theory, William Godwin, the founder of philosophical anarchism, defends a form of decentralized democracy as a transition stage toward his ideal of a stateless society. Godwin sanctioned temporary alliance with liberal political factions, and was a staunch defender of freedom of thought and expression. Contrary to Isaac Kramnick's interpretation, he bitterly opposed authoritarian measures such as Grenville's and Pitt's bills, although he also rejected violence as a valid means toward reform. Kramnick's reduction of anarchist praxis to education and theater constitutes a serious distortion of historical fact, and ignores the significance of revolutionary struggle, syndicalist organization, intentional communities, and nonviolent resistance as anarchist tactics. His assertion that anarchism is elitist involves a misunderstanding of the anarchist principles of popular participation and self-management, and his position that anarchism serves to perpetuate the status quo exhibits a failure to deal with the issues presented by the anarchist analysis of the effects of government and the nature of social change.

A persistent problem in the interpretation of Hobbes's self-proclaimed founding of modern political science is the nature of the link between that political science and Hobbes's understanding of modern natural science and scientific method. The intention of this essay is to suggest that Hobbes's doctrine of method reveals the unity of his teaching about science, man, and politics. The unifying role of the doctrine of method can be understood only as a function of Hobbes's intention to reform what he saw as the previously defective relationship between practice and theory. In the light of this intention, the doctrine of method will be shown to consist in a new rhetoric which links the resolution of the human problem to the conquest of nature facilitated by the new science of nature. This rhetoric will be shown to be the substantial core of the doctrine of method itself.

The introduction of decision making under uncertainty by Ferejohn and Fiorina is an interesting addition to the literature on rational theories of citizen participation. Decision making under uncertainty assumes, however, that the actor has no knowledge of the probabilities of the various outcomes; this is obviously no more true than the assumption of perfect information about these probabilities made in the decision making under risk model. Voters have some, but not perfect, information about the probabilities of at least some of the different possible outcomes.

Specifically, let us look at the two-party case. In Ferejohn's notation, (p3 + p4) is the probability of an individual's vote making a difference. We might expect a rational citizen to know that this probability is at most minuscule, even if he cannot calculate its exact value.

Much of the literature of policy analysis and public administration is dominated by incremental and “divisible goods” paradigms. Policy is assumed to be a process of marginal and adjustive decision making in which benefits are dispensed piecemeal—proportionate to prevailing distributions of power or publicized need. This essay asserts the existence of a class of nonincremental, indivisible policy pursuits for which the analytical weaponry of political science is largely inappropriate. Such policies display a distinctive set of political and administrative characteristics. These characteristics are explained and examined in connection with manned space exploration policy. An assessment is offered of the challenges posed by nonincremental policy to contemporary outlooks in political science.

In most states it is permitted to write in the names on the ballot, and these write-in candidates can win if they assemble enough votes. Thus, in all elections in which I might conceivably participate, there are at least three candidates: the Republicans, the Democrats, and my own favorite candidate for president—Gordon Tullock. Indeed, using the notation of the Ferejohn and Fiorina article, assuming that we are talking about 1972, I would find k having a value of about .001. Under the circumstances, if I understand the article correctly, I should always vote, and the vote should always take the form of writing in my own name. Further, as far as I can see, this advice can be generalized. Everyone who would really like to be president should vote and write in his own name, because the minimum regret that they produce for three-candidate elections is also correct for the elections in which there are 30 million candidates. The only problem here is that it would, of course, amount to participating in a lottery, and my possible gain from writing in my own name might turn out to be less than the cost of writing it in. Granted that people are willing to buy lottery tickets, even when the various states offering them take very substantial rakeoffs, I do not imagine this would be much of a disadvantage.

This same conclusion could have been deduced from the Casstevens article, which Ferejohn and Fiorina quite properly criticize as being mathematically incorrect.