Theoretical analyses of international systems tend to fall into three categories: case studies of specific past systems aiming at modest generalizations; rigorous examinations of the current global system in search of manipulable variables; and heuristic models of hypothetical international systems. The late Martin Wight's studies of historical statessystems indicate possible ways of giving this area of theoretical inquiry a new empirical and conceptual foundation. Wight's insights about norms and values within specific past and present states-systems, and about ambiguities involved in identifying their boundaries and transformation mechanisms, seem especially valuable and original when compared to recent work in the same field by F. S. Northedge. Even Wight's work is essentially exploratory, however. Numerous historical states-systems remain to be thoroughly studied, and Wight's analytical framework may require some modifications.

The “Cologne School” of electoral research, which flourished during the 1960s and early 1970s, sprang from research conducted by Erwin K. Scheuch and Rudolf Wildenmann, and included studies carried on by their students. As exemplified by the ten studies reviewed here, it brought to West German political sociologists the theories and findings from American electoral research, tested some of its assumptions with West German data on voting behavior, and expanded and refined its basic notions in a comparative perspective. Especially significant were findings stressing social context as a factor influencing voting, more useful distinctions among kinds of “floating voters,” the lesser importance of party identification in the Federal Republic than in the United States, and the greater importance for West German voters of issues and ideology.

Numerous studies of role, employing diverse methodologies in a wide range of social contexts, have accumulated in the social sciences over many decades. The concept of role retains considerable appeal for some who still pursue the goal of a unified theory of behavior for the social sciences, and for many others who discern in the role perspective a major source of concepts and insights on which they may draw eclectically for all manner of social research. Since the 1950s, and especially during the current decade, political scientists have produced studies of role and of role conflict focusing on political and administrative actors caught up in the process of change in various independent African states. Because die number and diversity of these studies are likely to increase in the future, they merit description and evaluation as a group. Both objectives are pursued in this article, with particular reference to three works on politics and administration in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania.

A new body of literature, including India's Political Economy by Francine Frankel, argues that the organization of the rural poor can facilitate a “democratic socialist” mode of development in India. The author dissents from this left-liberal world view. The organization of the lower classes has seldom led to a significant redistribution of economic resources in a democracy; it is not likely to do so in India. Attempts to convert lower-class interests into redistributive policies face institutionalized obstacles the ideological, organizational, electoral, governmental, and bureaucratic levels. If the lower classes gain effective political power despite these obstacles, the stability of the democratic process generally tends to be undermined. For these reasons, simultaneous optimism for India's democracy and for India's poor is not realistic.