Since 1947 the major formal institution for channeling national security advice to Presidents has been the National Security Council. The Council has operated (1) as a forum where senior officials meet with the President; (2) as a focal point for formal policy planning and decision processes; and (3) as an umbrella for establishment of a Presidential foreign policy staff. The first was the goal of its proponents; the last is what it has most importantly become. But the N.S.C. has reflected the relationships among each administration's top officials more than it has shaped them; hence the need to think of broader advisory “systems” combining the formal and the informal. Among the variables shaping such systems are; a President's particular organizational sense; his attitude toward formality and regularity; whether he has (and wants) strong Cabinet officials; how his key advisers work out their role relationships and jurisdictional boundaries; how widely he casts his net for advce; how broad a range of substantive issue involvement he seeks; how much he seeks operational involvement; and his attitude toward divided counsel and interpersonal conflict.

Prescriptions about foreign policy advisory systems tend to stress the President's role as decision maker; they should focus also on the oft-competing role of effective Presidential leadership in getting policies and decisions executed. The importance of execution argues for giving the Secretary of State primacy over other advisers; the need to protect the President's decision authority argues for a White House assistant independent of the Secretary, though perhaps with reduced rank. Presidents also need better advice on the domestic politics of U.S. foreign policy, and each could profit from a “mid-term system review” after his institutions and advisory relationships have taken shape.

Improved analysis of the Soviet and communist political systems requires a greater effort to locate that enterprise in the mainstream of comparative political inquiry. Toward this end the article (1) surveys Soviet and Western political process similarities and differences and identifies consequent conceptual implications; (2) introduces a model for comparative politics built in part from political process similarities evident in both Soviet and Western systems; and (3) reports a case study involving a partial application of the zonal model using Soviet political data. The comparative model integrates micro-, intermediate-, and macro-level zones of analysis as research foci and operational variables for empirical testing and generation of theory. The case study—the politics of Soviet industrial reform, 1962–1965—examines the relationship between two analytic zones, and concludes that changes in both the process and the content of economic interest articulation were strongly associated with prior changes in Soviet policy making.

Most Western observers have concluded that in the conflicts between the U.S.S.R. and the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, the Soviets resorted to military intervention only when certain ideological or strategic issues were at stake. This study suggests that in the conflicts between the leaders of the CPSU and the leaders of the Communist Parties of Yugoslavia, Poland, Albania, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia there was only one real issue at stake: control over the local East European party. The adversaries in these struggles have been Muscovite factions dependent on Soviet support and ultimately loyal to Moscow, and domestic factions seeking to base their rule on genuine popular support. What determined whether the Soviets intervened militarily was not the ideological or strategic issue publicly raised by the Soviets, but whether the domestic faction had demonstrated to Moscow the capacity and will to mobilize its country for armed resistance against the Soviets.

The possibilities of an end to military rule in developing states and of a postmilitary era in these states have only recently started to receive some consideration. In general, movement away from military control of politics is perceived as a matter of choice on the part of military elites and as a question of gradually expanding participation so as not to outstrip the slow accrual of extrabureaucratic power. Pakistan's experiences since 1971 suggest another pattern of transition from military-dominated to civiliandominated politics. Pakistan has been characterized by suddenly expanded participation and by the new civilian leadership's use of demobilization and patrimonial strategies to curtail this participation. Such strategies, patrimonialism in particular, have “dedevelopmental” consequences for the political system.

Based on a content analysis of 2,915 paragraphs randomly selected from 26 introductory international relations (IR) textbooks and syllabi for 178 introductory IR courses given in the United States during 1972–1973, the article probes the dimensions of world politics to which undergraduate students are introduced, the analytic skills to which they are exposed, and the incentives with which they are provided for investigating the subject. It was found that no single text dominates the teaching of IR; that the available texts do not differ greatly in their coverage and emphases (though some exceptions were identified along a few dimensions); that they depict IR as state-centered and founded on conflict; and that they are not conspicuous in their effort to equip students with modern analytic skills or to motivate them to view IR as an exciting subject worthy of intense and careful investigation.