The law of standing—rules by which judges find whether a party may bring suit—has been liberalized in the federal courts to permit interest group disputes not ordinarily possible. Following an historical pattern of conflict containment within judicial-style processes, consumer and environmental groups contest corporate business decisions by challenging the legality of their regulatory or legislative authorization. The vagueness and substantive emphasis of the new rules give groups more influence in determining when courts will intervene in the affairs of the other branches; and the doctrine's recognition of noneconomic injuries logically forces judges to consider whether they may find standing for some “public interest” beyond a specific plaintiff. Changes in standing equalize social power; but the entanglement of courts in the puzzles of interest representation may restrict protections for strictly private litigants, and may further remove the political system from the Rule of Law.

Using an exchange model, this article examines two ethnic groups, mobilized and proletarian diasporas, in a broad range of modernizing polities. The salient dimensions of myth, communications networks, and role differentiation permit one to distinguish these groups analytically over a long time period, and to subdivide the mobilized diasporas into archetypal diasporas and situational diasporas. The latter are politically detached elements of a great society, whereas the “homeland” of the archetypal diaspora is symbolically significant as a major component of the diaspora's sacral myth. Because internal resentments and the pressures of the international environment tend to undermine the value of a diaspora to the dominant elite of a slowly and unevenly modernizing multiethnic polity, these polities (Russia and the Ottoman Empire are examined closely) exhibit a succession of mobilized diasporas. Rapidly modernizing polities, on the other hand, tolerate mobilized diasporas, but turn increasingly for their unskilled, transient labor to groups which are more distant culturally and in physical appearance from the dominant ethnic group, and which, therefore, are increasingly disadvantaged and restive.

This paper attempts to measure the impact of party ideology focusing on policy making in West German urban government. An effort is made to determine whether city governments under the control of leftist parties sponsor different, possibly more leftist policies than cities under conservative control. It is found that while “leftist” control of municipal administrations does not produce leftist policies, conservative control does have a major impact in inhibiting the growth in the scope of local government.

Several reasons for the only rough correspondence between party control and policy are examined. The low correlation between leftist (SPD) control and municipal output is traced to differences among SPD cities in the power of the SPD majority, in class structure, and in degree of financial independence. It is also traced to the lack of intercorrelation among the forms of “leftist” performance and the incremental nature of most urban policy making. Other factors—the power of municipal counter-elites and the federalistic structure of the West German government—are discounted as possible intervening variables.

This study focuses on strike activity during the 1950–1969 period in ten industrial societies, The first section of the paper deals with issues of strike measurement and introduces a three-dimensional characterization of strike activity which forms the basis of the subsequent statistical analyses. The next section examines postwar trends in industrial conflict in order to evaluate the argument that strike activity is “withering away” in advanced industrial societies. Time plots of the aggregate volume of industrial conflict show that there has been no general downward movement in strike activity during the postwar period.

The third part of the paper develops a number of theoretically plausible statistical models to explain year-to-year fluctuations in the volume of strikes. The empirical results of this section indicate that (1) there is a pronounced inverse relationship between strike activity and the level of unemployment, which suggests that on the whole strikes are timed to capitalize on the strategic advantages of a tight labor market; (2) industrial conflict responds to movements in real wages rather than money wages, which indicates that labor is not misled by a “money illusion”; (3) Labor and Socialist parties are not able to deter strike activity in the short-run despite their strong electoral incentive to do so; and (4) the volume of strikes does seem to be influenced by the relative size of Communist parties, which suggests that such parties remain important agencies for the mobilization of discontent and the crystallization of labor-capital cleavages.

This paper examines the relationship between the kinds of delegate allocation rules used in Democratic presidential primaries (Winner-Take-All, Districted, and Proportional) and the power of various states within the national Democratic party. It demonstrates that these rules are often, in the short run, more important than a state's voters in determining the fate of particular candidates. It shows, in the middle run, that different types of states are clearly favored by different sets of primary regulations. It closes with some speculation about the long-run impact of these tendencies.

Television journalism can produce significant changes in opinions about basic American institutions and may also foster political malaise. Laboratory investigation revealed that the CBS documentary, “The Selling of the Pentagon,” convinced viewers that the military participated more in national politics and misled the public more about Vietnam than these viewers had previously believed. The program also caused a significant decrease in political efficacy among all our groups. This finding led to correlational research to determine if exposure to television news is also associated with lower levels of efficacy.

SRC survey data suggest that reliance upon television news programs is associated with feelings of inefficacy and political self-doubt. These data also indicate that reliance upon television news fosters political cynicism and distrust, political instability, and frustration with civil rights. Holding constant the level of education or income of these respondents does not appreciably alter these relationships.

In short, the two sets of data imply that the networks helped to create Scammon's Social Issue and that video journalism fostered public support for George Wallace.

The ambiguity of politicians' words and actions is sometimes attributed to rational seeking of support or votes. Such an explanation must clearly specify the preferences and decision processes among constituents and the calculations by politicians which make ambiguity seem attractive.

The leading effort of this sort is Shepsle's lottery theory, in which politicians take probabilistic stands on issues in order to appeal to risk acceptant, expected-utility-maximizing voters. But the lottery theory suffers from several difficulties. Its predictions are not strong; it can at best account for only certain kinds of observed ambiguous behavior; its main condition for the prediction of ambiguity—risk acceptance among constituents—may not be met; and the expected utility model of risky decision making is not well supported by available evidence.

An emphasis allocation theory is suggested as an alternative. According to it, ambiguity involves an effort to reduce the salience of conflictual matters (such as specific policy alternatives) in the evaluation of politicians, so that attention will be paid to consensual appeals (peace, prosperity, honesty in government).

This paper explains Plato's conception of the relation between politics and “political religion” (ideology) in a nonliberal participatory republican system. The discussion is in the form of a commentary on the drama of a part of Plato's Laws. The underlying methodological assumption is that Plato presented his political teaching not so much through the speeches as through the drama of the dialogue, and that he held this to be the most appropriate form for political science because in this way political science can most effectively stimulate thought about its subject matter, the psyche involved in social action.

Following Plato, we focus first on the psychological needs such a political system generates and attempts to satisfy through civil religion. We then move to a consideration of how political “theology” serves to mediate between science and society, or the philosopher and the city.

The essay is intended to contribute to the Montesquieuian project engaging the attention of more and more political theorists: the endeavor to help contemporary political science and psychology escape from the trammeling parochialism of exclusive attention to twentieth century theoretical categories and empirical experiences.

The Center for Political Studies' 1972 presidential election survey was used to investigate the role that issue voting, ideology, candidate assessments, and partisan defections played in the Republican landslide of that year. An analysis of issue attitudes revealed a deep policy schism among the Democrats: McGovern supporters preferred liberal policy alternatives while Nixon Democrats favored distinctly conservative issue positions. Interitem correlations among various issues and a liberal-conservative scale showed the voters to have substantial attitude consistency. A normal-vote analysis of these issues demonstrated that the Vietnam war and social issue domains contributed more significantly to the explanation of the vote than did cultural or economic issues. The candidates were clearly perceived as having taken opposing issue positions, with Nixon's position the more preferred by a majority of the population. A proximity measure, computed as the discrepancy between perceived candidate issue position and the voter's policy preference, proved to be a better predictor of the vote decision than the voter's own issue position taken alone. Analyses of candidate assessments showed that McGovern was not a personally appealing candidate—a factor that allowed issue differences to gain maximal importance. The sharp intraparty polarization of Democrats over policy alternatives, a change in the educational composition of the electorate, a decrease in partisan identification, and a growth in partisan defection combined to suppress the impact of party identification as a determinant of the vote decision. It was concluded that the 1972 presidential race could be labeled “ideological” by comparison with past elections.

This study examines the extent, impact and implications of political information in Ghana using survey data. A major interest is to identify and examine variables which influence level of information and to look at the consequences for the political process of different levels of political information. I examine conventional wisdom concerning the ignorance of the masses about national politics and call into question some common assumptions. Many of the differences usually assumed between developed and underdeveloped nations are found either not to exist or to be smaller than hypothesized. The data suggest that in some areas of national political information the masses in non-modernized societies are more politically aware than their counterparts in modernized societies. It is also suggested that there is no necessary link between education (literacy) and political information and that there are a number of functional equivalents to formal education. In the last section of the study several propositions about the informed citizenry are discussed.

In the absence of historical opinion survey data, studies of the linkage between popular voting and American public policy have been confined to relatively recent time periods. Questions about these linkages, however, necessarily have a temporal dimension—what is the relationship between voting and policy over time?

This paper establishes criteria for citizen policy choice that do not depend on opinion surveys. Data drawn from national party platforms and U.S. statutes, and aggregate voting data are compared to determine the extent to which majority choices are translated into national policy over time. Analysis of these data suggests that whether or not voters are completely aware of all of the implications of their actions, over time, popular majorities appear to govern.

This paper examines three arguments about the impact of military regimes on social change (i.e., economic growth and social reform) in Third-World countries. The first asserts that military governments are progressive; the second claims that they are conservative or reactionary; while the third states that the impact of military regimes on social change varies by level of development. An analysis of covariance model is specified and used first to reanalyze data previously examined by Nordlinger. The results provide no support for any of the three hypotheses, but limitations of the data prevent this from being a convincing test. The model is therefore tested with a second set of data covering 77 politically independent countries of the Third World for the decade 1960 to 1970. Again, the estimates are inconsistent with all three hypotheses and suggest instead that military regimes have no unique effects on social change, regardless of societal type. The paper concludes that the civilian-military government distinction is of little use in the explanation of social change.

The role of the Supreme Court of the United States in national policy making has long been a subject of debate among students of the American legal system and of democratic theory. Both the relative influence of the Court vis-à-vis other political institutions and the implications of judicial review for principles of majority rule and democracy have been central to this discussion. Perhaps the most influential account of the role of the Court offered in recent years is Robert A. Dahl's 1957 article, “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Role of the Supreme Court in National Policy-Making.” Dahl argues that the Court, like other political institutions, is a member of the stable ruling coalitions that dominate American politics, and that its decisions are generally supportive of the policies emerging from other political institutions.

Consideration of the way Dahl interprets his own evidence, of Court decisions since 1957, and of other relevant evidence that is excluded from his analysis (particularly the activities of the Court in statutory construction and in cases arising out of states and localities) suggests that the Court participates more significantly in national policy making than Dahl's argument admits.

This article examines two key political beliefs of high level American federal executives: their views on the role of government in providing social services and their views regarding inequities in political representation. Data were collected in 1970 through open-ended interviews with a sample of 126 political appointees and supergrade career civil servants in the domestic agencies. Both of the beliefs analyzed were pertinent to the efforts of the Nixon administration to reorder national priorities and policies. The evidence in the paper establishes differences in the outlooks of administrators depending on agency, job status, and party affiliation. Agency and party affiliation are particularly important variables, and their joint effects on the beliefs examined are substantial. Democratic administrators in the social service agenoies were the most liberal and Republicans in the non-social service agencies the most conservative. Our data document a career bureaucracy with very little Republican representation and a social service bureaucracy dominated by administrators ideologically hostile to many of the directions pursued by the Nixon administration in the realm of social policy. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of our findings for future conflicts between the elected executive and the bureaucracy.

In contradistinction both to positivist empiricism and to the essentialism of “traditional” political thought, the paper delineates an approach to political study and theory stressing the critical interrogation between inquirer or participant and the experienced world. The approach—which relies chiefly on existential phenomenology and recent writings of the Frankfurt School— is illustrated and explicated in three contexts: those of philosophical anthropology, of epistemology, and of ethics and political action. With regard to the conception of “human nature,” critical theory refuses to equate man either with a reactive mechanism or with pure consciousness, preferring to treat him as an embodied creature concerned (in Heidegger's terms) with the sense of his existence. In the domain of epistemology, the sketched outlook deviates from simple “mirror” doctrines by emphasizing the experiential underpinnings of cognition and the need for continuous symbolic articulation. Concerning ethics, the perspective opposes both cognitivist and noncognitivist formulas in favor of the critical reconstruction of standards implicit in everyday life. The concluding portion of the paper indicates the relevance of such standards for practical politics and contemporary democratic theory.

This study examines influence relations between the United States and countries that are dependent upon their foreign trade with it. The hypotheses are concerned with political compliance expected of these dependencies as a consequence of their economic vulnerabilities to pressure from the U.S. Informed by trade-related variables and U.N. General Assembly voting behavior of the mid-1960s, the hypotheses find some support. The evidence shows that its dependencies, especially those in the western hemisphere, agree with the U.S. in General Assembly roll calls to a greater degree than do other countries. This compliant behavior, however, is confined to votes that pit the United States against the Soviet Union; when the superpowers are in partial or complete agreement, U.S. dependencies are no more in accord with the U.S. than are other countries. Throughout the study, dependencies are proposed to be vulnerable along four dimensions of their economic circumstances. Interestingly, the respective effects of these four factors are not as hypothesized. Their relative weights in contributing to compliance are largely as expected, but the nature of their partial associations is not. Finally, it happens that most of the dependencies turn out to be Latin American and Caribbean countries, a fact that complicates the interpretation of the statistical results.