The American polity's designers proceeded from what John Adams called “the divine science of politics”—an approach very close to that of modern empirical political science. It was rooted in their conviction that truth is best discovered by the systematic investigation of experience; they investigated experience with methods primitive by modern standards but advanced for the eighteenth century; they applied their findings to the design of political institutions; and they regarded all institutions as experimental, to be revised when experience indicates. This faith in political and social engineering has remained ever since a major element in American political culture. It has recently been shaken by Vietnam, Watergate, and other systemic failures; but it is still far preferable to alternative faiths, especially if we today can cool our rhetoric, moderate our expectations, and recapture the pragmatic, experimental mood of those who created “the divine science.”

Partisanship has often been noted as one of the most conspicuous factors in legislative voting in the U.S. Congress. This paper attempts to trace party voting to shared policy goals. After the mean attitudes of congressmen belonging to the same party were ascertained for a number of policy domains, the effect of mean party attitudes on roll-call voting was estimated by regression analysis, taking into account the deviation of individual congressmen from their respective mean party attitudes. The results demonstrate that in all three policy domains examined, i.e., social welfare, civil rights, and foreign policy, shared party attitudes leave a strong imprint on individual roll-call decisions. The voting decisions of congressmen, in fact, are found to owe more to the shared party attitudes than to their own individual attitudes. The paper also explores the communication process through which shared policy attitudes are translated within Congress into partisan roll-call votes and points to a way of reconciling the “predispositional” and the “interactional” approach to legislative decision making.

The nature of community control ideology, its relation to more general political consciousness, and its social correlates are explored. The primary data are drawn from two main sources: a survey of the attitudes of 362 civic and political leaders in seven districts of New York City conducted in 1972 using a combination of structural and reputational indicators to identify the sample; and intensive participant observation in three of these districts during 1973–74, along with 175 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with individuals in district-level voluntary organizations, interest groups, political parties, poverty boards and agencies, and “street-level” bureaucratic roles.

Both quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that the great majority of leaders subscribes to a democratic rather than a race-conflict rationale for community control, but that there is a strong independent relationship between minority group status and operational support for community control. Possible explanations for this finding include the present interests of minority groups in American cities, the functional inadequacies of the political party structure, and the developmental history of the civil rights movement and its ideology. The relationship between race and community control may fade, however, if community control ceases to be a useful vehicle for advancing the interests of minority groups. One crucial determinant will be the identifications and beliefs of minority group members who are recruited into urban bureaucracies. Another is whether experience with decentralized city agencies indicates that movement toward increased community involvement in government leads, in fact, to enhanced power and patronage for minorities. The data point to a continuing attachment to the community control ideology but also a recasting of it in a more qualifiéd and complex form.

The assumptions imposed in spatial models of election competition generally are restrictive in that they require either unidimensional issue spaces or symmetrically distributed electorate preferences. We attribute such assumptions to the reliance of these models on a single concept of a solution to the election game—pure strategy equilibria—and to the fact that such equilibria do not exist in general under less severe restrictions. This essay considers, then, the possibility that candidates adopt mixed minimax strategies. We show, for a general class of symmetric zero-sum two-person games, that the domain of these minimax strategies is restricted to a subset of the strategy space and that for spatial games this set not only exists, but if preferences are characterized by continuous densities, it is typically small. Thus, the hypothesis that candidates abide by mixed minimax strategies can limit considerably our expectation as to the policies candidates eventually advocate. Additionally, we examine the frequently blurred distinction between spatial conceptualizations of two-candidate elections and of committees, and we conclude that if pure strategy equilibria do not exist, this distinction is especially important since committees and elections can produce entirely different outcomes.

Despite increased interest in public sector collective bargaining, a survey of recent attempts to build theory about the dynamics and outcomes of union-management negotiations in public organizations reveals that little progress has been made. One approach that appears fruitful is interorganizational analysis. In an interorganizational context, organizations interact with other autonomous organizations to make joint decisions that have implications for both parties and for the larger system. This study focuses on five interorganizational variables that are useful for understanding the collective bargaining process in the public sector: (1) goal divergence; (2) stability of the relationship; (3) organizational dependence; (4) conflictual behavior; (5) contractual change.

From these theoretical concepts, five propositions are derived which serve as the basis for the research hypotheses. The hypotheses were tested on a sample of 60 cases drawn from a population of 535 collective bargaining negotiations in New York City from 1968 through 1972. The test of the research hypotheses resulted in these conclusions: (1) a substantial amount of the conflictual behavior in public sector collective bargaining is explained by goal divergence, stability of the relationship, and asymmetry of relative dependence favoring one of the organizations; and (2) contractual change is explained by goal divergence, conflictual behavior, and asymmetry of relative dependence favoring one of the organizations.

The proof of Riker's size principle is inadequate for the general class of zero-sum bargaining games (whether symmetric or asymmetric), and the principle is valid only for a very restricted class of games—the supersymmetric games and their asymmetric counterparts. Butterworth's modification of the size principle (the maximum number of positive gainers principle) can be extended to cover games which are only approximately symmetric. Roll-call voting in the United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly violates the size principle; hence, the House does not generally play a supersymmetric zero-sum bargaining game. More generally, both Butterworth's and Riker's principles seem inapplicable to large bodies.