The concept of “corporatism” has usefully called attention to the importance of systems of interest representation based on non-competing groups that are officially sanctioned, subsidized, and supervised by the state. Yet these patterns have appeared in such a remarkable variety of political contexts that this concept may be too broad to be useful. On the basis of an analysis of the relationship between the state and organized labor in Latin America, this article argues that the concept of corporatism can be disaggregated so that it sheds light on rather than obscures the different power relationships and political contexts with which it is associated. The analysis focuses on the distinction between “inducements” extended by the state to win the cooperation of groups and “constraints” through which the state directly controls groups. This disaggregated approach enables one to distinguish more subtly among systems of group representation, to conceive of state-group relations in more interactive terms, and to gain insights into the larger political context.

Political trust and political efficacy are concepts currently undergoing considerable discussion and revision. The discussion of voting behavior in Campbell et al. (1954), Almond's and Verba's (1965) version of the participation hypothesis, Gamson's (1968) trust-efficacy hypothesis, and Verba's and Nie's (1972) standard socioeconomic model represent quite distinct and contrasting stages in the treatment of these concepts, but share some assumptions requiring additional discussion and clarification. One of these pertains to treatment of political criticism, measured with low scores of trust in government, as political cynicism. This is not so much an operational or methodological question as a theoretical framework that has never had much to say about the role of criticism in contemporary democratic societies. This essay proffers a case in which, high levels of interpersonal distrust and high levels of government criticism notwithstanding, it is possible to make this basic distinction. Path analyses of data from a national-sample survey show that criticism is triggered by predominantly political orientations, while cynicism is a rigidified form of criticism inseparable from the social circumstances of individuals. In addition, the evidence suggests that the sense of political efficacy does not play the pivotal role assigned to it in the literature.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (1971, 1977) have argued that mass insurgency in the United States, occurring especially between 1964 and 1969, produced a series of responses by government, one of the most significant being massive expansion of welfare rolls. Using data on which they base their claim, this study examines the hypothesis that there is a positive association between social disorders and welfare caseload increases. The conclusion is that associations specified by Piven and Cloward are not supported by the data and a plausible rival hypothesis is offered to explain the massive increases in welfare caseloads.

Many studies undertaken in recent decades have documented the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on political participation. As consensus has grown on the role of socioeconomic status, other factors, like ethnicity, have been relegated to secondary importance. However, variations in levels of participation can be traced, in part, to differences in ethnic political culture. Furthermore, the findings presented in this article indicate that holding socioeconomic status constant does not eliminate the independent impact of ethnicity on political attitudes that affect participation. Ethnicity is shown to have a greater effect than socioeconomic status on levels of participant political culture. How these findings might influence our understanding of social and political inequality is discussed, and students of participation are urged to give more serious attention to the ethnic factor.

This article proposes a model for the systematic development of adults' party identification, based on voters' need for a way to handle difficult electoral decisions. Several variables are noted which should heighten this need, thus making it more likely that voters will develop party identification. The model is partially tested, in an exploratory way, by analysis of panel data from the United States and Britain, and by cohort analysis of United States elections from 1952 to 1976. I develop the following implications of the model: (1) the “life-cycle” process by which party identification increases with age may be largely a function of difficulty in meeting information costs; (2) the process by which party identification, once it exists, becomes stronger appears to differ from the process by which voters move from independence to identification; (3) class-consciousness, in the presence of class parties, may obviate the need for direct identification with parties; (4) the American electorate appears increasingly to be one in which political change may occur regularly, rather than through the fitful process of realignment.

This article develops a simultaneous equation model of the voting decision in a form thought to mirror the main lines of cognitive decision-making processes of individual voters. The model goes beyond earlier efforts in two respects. First, it explicitly represents the causal interdependence of voter assessments in the election situation, permitting such estimations as the degree to which correlations between voter issue positions and issue positions ascribed to preferred candidates arise because of projection onto the candidate or persuasion by the candidate. Secondly, the model is truly dynamic, in the sense that it is dependent on longitudinal data for its proper estimation. The utility of the model is certified by the goodness of fit achieved when applied to 1972–76 panel data for a sample of the national electorate.

Past studies have offered diverse estimates of the role of policy preferences, party loyalties, candidate personalities and other factors in voting decisions. Most have postulated recursive (that is, one-way) causal relationships among the central variables.

This study specifies a non-recursive simultaneous equation model and estimates its parameters for the 1972 and 1976 elections using CPS data. The estimates differ markedly from those of simple recursive models. Policy preferences appear to have much more influence on voting decisions, and party attachments much less, than was previously thought. Candidate evaluations strongly affect voters' perceptions of closeness to candidates on policy issues. Party identification may be influenced by short-term factors. Differences between 1972 and 1976 reflect the issue-oriented McGovern candidacy.

Simultaneous equation models offer no cure-all; in the absence of accepted theory many specifications are open to controversy. But future research must take account of reciprocal causal paths.

Students of democratic politics have long been concerned with the role of political participation in linking government and the people it serves. Whereas participation is generally defined in terms of voting, this article defines participation as the communication of citizen preferences to public officeholders. We show that aggregate sentencing decisions of California superior courts changed to reflect more closely prevailing public opinion after a large percentage of the populace expressed their preferences on a marijuana issue. The fact that members of California superior courts are seemingly immune from any effective electoral sanction serves both to underline the importance of this form of participation to a responsive system of government and to caution against conceiving of the participation-responsiveness relationship only in terms of punitive electoral devices.

This article explains why previous empirical tests of the size principle have failed to produce conclusive results. Particular stress is given to seldom considered aspects of constitutional choice; their implications are explored by means of a simple simulation. Then I propose a test of the size principle and report some initial empirical findings based upon this test.