Showing papers in "American Political Science Review in 1973"

The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American Cities

Abstract: This paper is an exploration of various political environmental conditions associated with the incidence of political protest activities directed toward urban institutions, agencies, and officials in 43 American cities.Two preliminary questions are considered first. One deals with making explicit the theoretical linkage between elements in the political environment and political behavior. The other is an attempt to define protest technically and to differentiate it from political violence. This effort is made necessary by the facts that violence and protest are not treated in the literature as distinct forms of behavior (but rather as similar acts at different points on a continuum of aggressiveness) and that studies of collective violence in American ghettos indicate no relation between environment and rioting.Two alternative hypotheses are considered: protest varies negatively with indicators of an open political system (a linear model) and protest is greatest in systems characterized by a mix of open and closed factors (a curvilinear model). Data are drawn from newspaper accounts of protest incidents in 43 cities over a six month period in 1968, producing a sample of 120 protest incidents.Both the simple incidence of protest and the intensity of protest seem to fit the curvilinear model more closely than the linear one. The incidence of protest, then, seems to signify change not only among previously quiescent or conventionally oriented groups but also in the political system itself as it becomes more open and responsive.

Innovation in the States: A Diffusion Study

Abstract: This study focuses on a nonmonetary dimension of public policy—innovation by states in the fields of education, welfare, and civil rights. Innovation is considered equivalent to the adoption of a law by a state. From the literature on diffusion (or spread) of innovations, the explanation of user interaction is taken, and a simple model with an interaction term is constructed. The model performs fairly well when evaluated by several common criteria. The results do vary somewhat from one issue area to another; other types of supplementary analysis also indicate variation in diffusion patterns according to the issue involved. Political and economic differences among states are found to account for differences in time of adoption, and “innovativeness” is shown to be an issue- and time-specific factor.

The Relationship between Seats and Votes in Two-Party Systems*

Abstract: An enduring fact of life in democratic electoral systems is that the party winning the largest share of the votes almost always receives a still larger share of the seats. This paper tests three models describing the inflation of the legislative power of the victorious party and then develops explanations of the observed differences in the swing ratio and the partisan bias of an electoral system. The “cube law” is rejected as a description, since it assumes uniformity (which is not observed in the data) across electoral systems. Explanations for differences in swing ratio and bias are found in variations in turnout over districts, the extent of the “nationalization” of politics, and, most importantly, in who does the districting or reapportionment. The measures of swing ratio and partisan bias appear useful for the judicial evaluation of redistricting schemes and may contribute to the reduction of partisan and incumbent gerrymandering.

Schema Theory: An Information Processing Model of Perception and Cognition

Abstract: The world is complex, and yet people are able to make some sense out of it. This paper offers an information-processing model to describe this aspect of perception and cognition. The model assumes that a person receives information which is less than perfect in terms of its completeness, its accuracy, and its reliability. The model provides a dynamic description of how a person evaluates this kind of information about a case, how he selects one of his pre-existing patterns (called schemata) with which to interpret the case, and how he uses the interpretation to modify and extend his beliefs about the case. It also describes how this process allows the person to make the internal adjustments which will serve as feedback for the interpretation of future information. A wide variety of evidence from experimental and social psychology is cited to support the decisions which went into constructing the separate parts of the schema theory, and further evidence is cited supporting the theory's system-level predictions. Since the schema theory allows for (but does not assume) the optimization of its parameters, it is also used as a framework for a normative analysis of the selection of schemata. Finally, a few illustrations from international relations and especially foreign-policy formation show that this model of how people make sense out of a complex world can be directly relevant to the study of important political processes.

Aspects of Coalition Payoffs in European Parliamentary Democracies

Abstract: One important proposition about the distribution of coalition payoffs is found in W. A. Gamson's theory of coalition formation: “Any participant will expect others to demand from a coalition a share of the payoff proportional to the amount of resources which they contribute to a coalition.” This proposition is tested in a universe of cabinet coalitions existing in thirteen European democracies during the postwar period. Here, payoffs to partners are indicated by the percentage share of cabinet ministries received by parties for their percentage contribution of parliamentary seats/votes to the coalition.The proportionality proposition is shown to hold strongly. Disproportionality, however, is observed to occur in distributions at the extremities of party size—large parties tend to be proportionately underpaid and small parties overpaid, the larger or smaller they become. This effect, however, is most pronounced when the size of the coalition is small, and tends to reverse itself as the size of the coalition increases.

Parties as Utility Maximizers

Abstract: The article introduces two models of political party decision making. Both models assume that the parties are solely interested in policy and that winning the election is just a means to that end. In one, the parties are competitive, while in the other the parties collude. The main result, in either case, is that the parties tend to be unresponsive to the interests of the voters.The models are analyzed in an intransitive case (an election concerned only with income distribution) and a transitive one (an election where all political attitudes can be put on a left-right continuum), and under the assumptions of perfect and imperfect information.With perfect information the intransitive case results in the parties ending up with all the income; while in the single peaked case neither party will have a position to the left (right) of the left (right) party's most preferred position whatever the attitudes of the voters.Finally it is shown that it is rational for the parties to collude and present similar platforms.

The Paradox of Vote Trading

Abstract: Although, conventionally, vote trading in legislatures has been condemned as socially undesirable by both scholars and lay citizens, a recently popular school of scholarship has argued that vote trading improves the traders' welfare in the direction of Pareto-optimal allocations. This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disagreement by showing formally that vote trading does improve the position of the traders but that at the same time trading may impose an external cost on nontraders. In sum, it turns out that sporadic and occasional trading is probably socially beneficial but that systematic trading may engender a paradox of vote trading. This paradox has the property that, while trading is immediately advantageous for the traders, still, when everybody trades, everybody is worse off. Furthermore, vote trading may not produce a stable equilibrium that is Pareto-optimal either for individual members or for coalitions of members.

The Structuring Principle: Political Socialization and Belief Systems

Abstract: This paper assesses the theoretical significance of data on childhood political learning. Two socialization models are involved. Each confers relevance on childhood learning by linking it with political outcomes. The first is an allocative politics model, which seeks a linkage with policy outputs. The other is a system persistence model, looking toward the stability and continued existence of political systems. Each model incorporates the following assumptions: (a) the primacy principle: childhood learning is relatively enduring throughout life; (b) the structuring principle: basic orientations acquired during childhood structure the later learning of specific issue beliefs.It is this structuring principle which we examined and tested in the present paper. The data show no or little association between childhood orientations and the later learning of specific beliefs about the most important political issues of the day. Our evidence suggests a need to carefully reexamine the basic assumptions and directions of current political socialization research.

The Concept of Organizational Goal

Abstract: The organizational goal concept is important for significant types of organizational research but its utility has been downgraded in recent scholarship. This paper reviews critically key contributions to conceptualizing the organizational goal and synthesizes many of their elements into a more concrete and comprehensive conceptualization. The efforts of Etzioni, Seashore and Yuchtman, Simon, and Thompson to bypass the need for a goal concept in evaluative and other behavioral research are unconvincing in important respects. However, they are persuasive in underscoring the importance of viewing organizational goals as multiple and as empirically determined. Perrow, Gross, and others convincingly suggest a dual conceptualization, so that goals are dichotomized into those with external referents (transitive goals) and those with internal referents (reflexive goals). Deniston et al. contribute the desirability of subsetting the goals of organizations into “program goals” and of differentiating goals from both subgoals and activities. The existence and relative importance of organizational goals and an allied concept, “operative goals,” may be operationally determined by current social science methods. The goal concept as presented here has implications for the evaluation of organizational effectiveness, for research on organizational behavior, for organization theory, and for views of the role of organizations in society.

Foreign Aid and United Nations Votes: A Comparative Study

Abstract: This study examines in a comparative foreign policy framework the relationship between bilateral foreign aid allocations and pairwise voting agreements between developed and developing nations in the UN General Assembly. The foreign aid donors considered include the United States, the Soviet “bloc,” and the twelve other UN members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. Two different measures of aid allocations in two three-year periods (1962–1964 and 1965–1967) are correlated with two different measures of the percentage of agreements in the UN between each aid donor and its aid recipients, with both indices calculated on the basis of all roll calls taken in the 1963 and 1966 General Assemblies. In general, the results of the analysis were found to be consistent with the hypothesized positive association between aid and votes only in the case of the United States. For many of the remaining donors the association was found to be negative rather than positive, suggesting either that enemies are rewarded more than friends, or, alternatively, that there is little relationship of substantive interest between aid and votes for most donor countries. Even in the case of the U.S., however, which of the two variables should be considered a cause and which a consequence remains unresolved.

Policy and Priority in the Budgetary Process

Abstract: Recent quantitative studies vastly understate the political conflicts and policy choices that are embedded in the budgetary process. The reason for this lies in the way these quantitative studies have organized budgetary data. Thus far the units of analysis have been federal agencies, the administrative categories of government. The “striking regularities” that have been reported reflect—quite accurately—the great stability of the administrative structure of government. However, these categories do not describe the intense competition between programs and policies that takes place within the framework. We argue, further, that the entire metaphor of an inert bureaucratic machine doing this year essentially what it did last year is erroneous. Rather, priority setting in the federal bureaucracy more resembles the market situation of nineteenth century capitalism where aggressive “policy entrepreneurs,” unequal in talent and resources, struggle to build and sustain support for their programs. The competition between policies is both reflected in and promoted by the budgetary process. By shifting the units of analysis to programs and transforming these data so that programs of different size are commensurate, we develop an index that reflects the relative growth and decay of programs as they compete for budgetary resources.

Democratic Committee Assignments in the House of Representatives: Strategic Aspects of a Social Choice Process*

Abstract: This paper examines the committee assignment process for Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Unlike previous studies of committee assignments, this paper employs data on the requests for assignments submitted by members to the Committee on Committees. The theoretical perspective employed is one in which all the participants in the process are rational actors who have goals they want to achieve and who choose among alternative courses of action on the basis of which alternative is most likely to lead to the achievement of those goals. We argue that the allocation of committee assignments affects the goals of all the participants in the process, and thus we consider the choices of actors in the process in terms of their goals; specifically the goals of re-election, influence within the House, and good public policy. After first considering the process from the point of view of the member making requests, we show that the member's requests are related to the type of district he represents, and that the number of requests he makes is related to such considerations as whether he is a freshman, whether he faces competition from a member from his state, and whether there is a vacancy from his state on his most preferred committee. The process is also considered from the point of view of the members making the assignments. Decisions on assignments are found to be affected by seniority (where success in getting requested committees is inversely related to seniority), margin of election (where members from marginal districts are more successful), and region (where southerners are less successful than members from other regions).

The Strange Case of Relative Gratification and Potential for Political Violence: The V-Curve Hypothesis*

Abstract: Perception of discrepancy between optimum level of achievement with respect to desired values and actual level of achievement is a concept that has figured importantly in explanations of collective violence and its subset, political violence (approval of and readiness to engage in behaviors which constitute progressively greater challenge to a political regime). Hypotheses about relationships between a number of static and dynamic achievement discrepancy constructs (labeled “relative gratification,” and built from a variant of the Cantril Self-Anchoring scale) are tested. The achievement discrepancy constructs generally show only a weak degree of association with potential for political violence. However, measures of shift over time in discrepancy show an unexpected and intriguing relationship with potential for political violence: individuals who perceive negative change and individuals who perceive positive change show the highest potential for political violence, while individuals who perceive no change show the lowest potential for political violence; and this V-Curve relationship persists in the presence of various control variables. Moreover, absolute magnitude of shift in discrepancy from present to future shows a moderate degree of correlation with potential for political violence, and makes an independent contribution to a linear additive model. The data base is a sample of a population in which instances of political violence have been relatively frequent in the past.

The Learning of Legislative Norms

Abstract: The paper focuses on the learning of legislative norms on the part of freshman members elected to the United States House of Representatives in November, 1968. Since a research interest in learning is a longitudinal concern, a two-page panel design was employed, the first set of interviews conducted in late January and February of 1969 and the second set the following May. As the concept of a norm involves the notion of shared expectations, a sample of the nonfreshman members of the 91st Congress was also interviewed.The main finding of the paper is that the amount of norm learning was surprisingly low; it appeared that freshmen largely knew the general House norms prior to entering Congress. And the extent of attitude change toward the norms once in office was minimal. Freshmen and nonfreshmen generally expressed similar attitudes toward the norms. Support for the norm of apprenticeship was found to be weak, suggesting the need to revise the traditional image of the freshman representative.

Networks and Groups in Southeast Asia: Some Observations on the Group Theory of Politics

Abstract: The paper describes a “dyadic” type of political structure which, it is argued, is a necessary supplement to class and interest group models for the analysis of informal political structure in contemporary Southeast Asia, and probably in other developing areas.Various types of simple and complex dyadic structures are described. The paper then examines four Southeast Asian polities, of different degrees of political development, with attention to the manner in which they combine group and dyadic structures. The examples are the Kalinga, a pagan ethnolinguistic group of Northern Luzon; the Tausug, a Muslim group of the Sulu archipelago; the traditional Thai monarchy; and the present Republic of the Philippines. In each case the effects of structure upon the operation of the system are explored. The paper concludes with a set of paired propositions concerning the characteristics of “trait associations” and “personal followings.”

Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination: A Test of Three Explanations of Political Participation*

Abstract: Students of political participation have generally taken as given that nonparticipation in politics is a result of apathy, and that apathy is a function of low income, low education, and low status. This article suggests that there are two additional potential explanations of political participation rates besides that offered by the conventional wisdom. One of these acknowledges that political participation for some people in some circumstances involves considerable risk, so that nonparticipation can be explained more accurately in terms of fear than in terms of apathy. The other views political participation as a response to a sense of “relative deprivation” or discrimination. After each of these three “models” of political participation is translated into operational terms, it is tested by determining how well it accounts for the variations in black political participation rates in Mississippi during the first half-decade following the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The conclusion that emerges from these tests is that political scientists have erred seriously by overlooking the role of fear in political life. In situations like those faced by blacks in Mississippi, situations that are probably similar to those in parts of the “developing world,” apathy compares poorly with fear as an explanation of political participation.

Authority Patterns: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry

Abstract: The paper proposes a novel (even if not wholly unprecedented) solution to an old and fundamental problem: What should be the scope of political studies? Arguments have long been directed against the conventional equation of the scope of the field with the study of “state-organizations” and structures that directly impinge upon such organizations. The arguments are convincing. However, the principal proposed alternatives have important flaws of their own. These alternatives are the extension of the scope of the field to phenomena “functionally” similar to state-organizations and the inclusion in polititcal study of all “asymmetrical” social relations—power, influence, or control relations. By means of the classificatory method of “progressive differentiation,” an alternative that seems preferable is worked out: equating political study with the study of authority patterns in any and all social units. That conception of the subject matter of the field, it is argued, avoids all the difficulties raised by other conceptions and affords all of their advantages. Above all, it reconciles subjective interests with scientific (or disciplinary) imperatives and achieves a proper trade-off between the numerousness and homogeneity of phenomena covered by the field—a trade-off critical for the achievement of general, testable, informative empirical theory. A concluding section discusses the place in political study, thus conceived, of the study of international relations and of recent work in “political economy,” which appears to focus on symmetrical, not asymmetrical, interactions.

Voting Systems, Honest Preferences and Pareto Optimality*

Abstract: The market is a decentralized system that can bring about efficient economic decisions. This paper examines whether social choice mechanisms can duplicate this success in the political arena. The famed Arrow result tells us centralized systems cannot achieve efficient, nondictatorial outcomes unless they rely on cardinal preferences. With decentralization, efficiency comes to require something more: the truthful revelation of preferences. Schemes that elicit honest preferences are derived here. By their very structure they are shown to lead to inefficient outcomes. This negative result leads to the question whether the validity of the initial analogy continues. Market-based standards of performance may be innappropriate for investigations of political phenomena.

Party and Incumbency in Postwar Senate Elections: Trends, Patterns, and Models

Abstract: Senators who seek re-election usually achieve it. Yet it is not clear whether they tend to win mainly because they are incumbents or because their party is strong in their states. Thus, the two principal questions motivating this study are the following: (1) What is the relative importance of party and of incumbency in influencing the outcomes of Senate elections? (2) How has their relative importance changed over the last quarter-century? To answer these questions, a theory is developed accounting for the outcomes of Senate elections in terms of the major potential sources of electoral support given to the candidates, namely, party loyalty, incumbency, “national tides,” and idiosyncratic factors (e.g., issues, personality, local conditions). The theory is then represented in a formal model for which are generated multiple regression estimates of the respective roles of party and incumbency in all postwar Senate contests. The major finding is that the relative importance of party and incumbency has changed dramatically over the last quarter-century. Party has undergone an overall decline in influence, while incumbency has experienced a roughly proportionate increase. At the same time, the importance of idiosyncratic factors has grown. The implications of these results for broader theories of American politics, including the argument that the United States has been experiencing a “critical realignment,” are noted.

The Attribution of Variance in Electoral Returns: An Alternative Measurement Technique

Abstract: Swings in district vote for Congress are conditioned by many factors. An attempt is made here to apportion the variance in the partisan distribution of votes for U. S. representative among three levels of influence—national, state, and district—measuring the degree of nationalization, regionalization, and localization of voting. Previous attempts have defined “nationalization” of voting as the degree to which district interelection differences are numerically identical. Here this concept is defined in a two-stage regression model as the degree to which districts behave as if these differences were caused by the same factors. In contrast to previous research, national factors are found to be responsible for more than 50 per cent of the variance in local vote, with state and district forces accounting for 19 per cent and 26 per cent, respectively. Several analytic uses for this measure are suggested and illustrated.

Issue Area and Foreign-Policy Process: A Research Note in Search of a General Theory

Abstract: The purpose of this research note is to suggest a potential general paradigm for the study of foreign policy processes. It is explicitly synthetic in that it combines Arnold Wolfers's notion of a continuum, the extremities of which he labels the pole of power and pole of indifference, with Theodore Lowi's efforts to affirm the nexus between issue and policy process. Two questions prove crucial in the determination of issue area: Is or is not the domestic impact of the issue symmetrical? And are the political goods at stake exclusively tangible or not? With the answers to these questions it becomes possible to specify the issue area (distribution, regulation, “interaction-protection,” redistribution) in which an event may be classified and to hypothesize the nature of the policy process (the identity of the major actors, the intensity of conflict) to be observed. Particular attention is paid to limited war as a redistributive issue area in order to make the case that redistribution, contrary to Lowi's view, is an important foreign policy process. Finally an effort is made to suggest how issue-based propositions could be utilized in the transnational comparison of foreign policy processes. It is suggested that differences in the policy process across issue areas within a given state may be as great as differences in process within a particular arena of power for two states as different in political system as the United States and the USSR.

Comment: Problems in Research on the Diffusion of Policy Innovations*

Abstract: Diffusion theory has been an important tool for analysis by geographers, sociologists and economists, but the diffusion of diffusion theory among political scientists, so far, definitely does not approximate an S-shaped curve! In fact, as far as I know, Professor Gray's is only the second article in The Review that employs the word "diffusion" in its title.' The obstacles to the spread of diffusion theory among political scientists do not exist in the essential nature of political phenomena. The American federal system can usefully be conceived as an elaborate diffusion process, as Gray's article demonstrates, and many other cases where distinctive approaches to policy have evolved within some part of the governmental system might better be understood if seen as examples of diffusion. The reasons for political scientists' neglect of diffusion theory, of course, lie not in the peculiarities of their subject matter, but in the prevailing division of labor among scholarly disciplines in American universities. The various branches of learning stake out their special preserves and claim exclusive jurisdiction over certain variables, research problems, and explanatory theoriesdiffusion processes have been centrally important for anthropologists but have rarely been employed by students of politics. There is no good intellectual justification for restricting the use of any explanatory scheme to a limited class of social problems. All the social sciences need as much theoretical help as they can get. Certainly, Gray's article, with its references to material from several disciplines, is a model of the ecumenical spirit and a good example of the progress that can be made through judicious borrowing from other scholarly traditions. Professor Gray set out in her article to "extend in a more rigorous fashion the investiga-

National and Local Forces in State Politics: The Implications of Multi-Level Policy Analysis

Abstract: Studies of American states and their policies are severely handicapped by the use of a single level of analysis. The operations of American politics and the assumptions of correlation methodology imply that only a multi-level approach can adequately comprehend state politics. All major aspects of politics, but particularly policies, are distorted by the single level approach. The extent of distortion suggests that relations among states and between states and the national government are the prime determinants of state politics and that the study of states ought to be organized around these relations. This approach accounts for the salient characteristics of state politics, indicating that states are not political systems but collections of tangentially related components of a national system. States which appear systematic derive their coherence from interactions with the national pattern, a process with important residual effects on the legitimacy of state governments.

Electoral Participation in the French Fifth Republic

Abstract: Variations in second ballot abstention and blank and invalid ballot rates (over the cross-section of French election districts) are examined for all four legislative elections of the French Fifth Republic. Analysis was conducted primarily through a heuristic decision-making model and a spatial model developed from the theories of Riker, McKelvey, and Ordeshook, and Davis, Hinich, and Ordeshook.Abstentions appear to be primarily influenced by long-term factors and the competitiveness of the contest. Blank ballots appear to be primarily dependent upon short-term factors, especially nonvoting from the alienation that results when a candidate present on the first ballot is not present on the second. The alienation model and the heuristic model, though partly collinear, make independent contributions to the explanation of the blank ballot variance.

Woodrow Wilson and the Study of Administration: A New Look at an Old Essay

Abstract: Unquestionably, Woodrow Wilson's scholarly essay, “The Study of Administration,” (1887) stands as an historic landmark in American administrative thought. As Leonard D. White once wrote, “Wilson's essay introduced this country to the idea of administration.” Based upon the recent publication of the Woodrow Wilson papers by Princeton University Press, the present paper attempts to examine the origin and enduring contribution of Wilson's administrative thought. The central thesis of the paper is that Wilson's administrative theories grew out of the salient ideas of late nineteenth century America, particularly, Social Darwinism and the pressing demands for political reform. In many respects, however, Wilson's essay created more issues than it resolved since it failed to delineate clearly the substance and boundaries of the field of administration.

Economic Growth and Intergenerational Change in Japan

Abstract: This article seeks to apply the hypotheses and findings presented by Ronald Inglehart in his “The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies,” to the Japanese scene. Inglehart argued that affluence had produced changes in value priorities in Western Europe: the older generation has acquisitive values, while the younger age groups have postbourgeois values. An analysis of Japanese data collected by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in four national surveys in 1953, 1958, 1963, and 1968 suggests that value changes in Japan produced by rapid economic growth may be somewhat different. Three types of change were found, namely intergenerational, life-cycle, and adult. Compared to its elders, the younger generation is less acquisitive, more democratic, and somewhat more inclined to value freedom. The most important value change, however, appears to be intergenerational change from collectivity orientation toward individuation. It is suggested that individuation has led to a tendency toward privatization and less concern for the electoral process on the part of youth. Whether or not this is a temporary phenomenon is not clear.

A New Shape Measure for Evaluating Electoral District Patterns

Abstract: The year 1812 is famous for the birth of that favorite political monster, the gerrymander. Many facets of this creature's subsequent behavior have been studied although most scholars have overlooked its most powerful trait-the ability to hypnotize both friend and foe alike. Politicians, political commentators, and political scientists have become fascinated by the shapes of electoral districts. Politicians have proposed and sometimes enacted legislation to ensure contiguity and compactness;' political commentators have been using their imaginations to conjure up more political monsters ;2 and political scientists have recently been trying to measure some elusive shape ideas.3 In this short note I want to shake off the hypnotic influence of the gerrymander to consider briefly how the concept of shape has been approached in other disciplines, notably geography, so that we may return to the electoral districting problem with what seems to be a new shape measure that is particularly suited to this problem. Shape is in many ways a rather peculiar empirical concept. In its most general form it can only be a classificatory concept.4 Thus areal shapes are often compared to the shapes of familiar objects-Italy is like a boot, etc. This nominal level of measurement is equivalent to that of the political commentators referred to above. But if we compare areal shapes to geo-