This article presents a model of arms expenditures and arms accumulation for the Soviet Union and United States from 1952 through 1978. It argues that contemporary superpowers do not react solely to the military budgets of one another in assessing the potential threat against which they must allocate military resources, i.e., in deciding upon the military budget. Rather, they respond primary to the relative balance of strategic and conventional military forces. A continuous time model of this process is developed and estimated. If one examines only the budgets of these two nations, it would appear that no race is occurring; rather, the Soviets are simply increasing their arms expenditures irrespective of what the United States does. However, when one examines the relative stocks of military capabilities, it appears that the USSR is racing to catch up to the United States. Finally, the dynamics governing arms competition between the United States and the USSR appear to be undergoing marked change.

Italian cabinets (governi) fall from power in a seemingly haphazard pattern, thus defying most deterministic analyses of their durability. This analysis views Italian government longevity as essentially indeterminate, or stochastic, and it applies the theory of “political reliability” to explain the probability that an Italian government will be in power at time t after it was formed. An exponential survival model R = e−kt, with constant government breakdown rate k = .021 per week, is developed, estimated, tested, and discussed. It is shown that Italian governments have a half-life (τ) of approximately 32.8 weeks, after which their political reliability drops below .50, and their mean duration is 47.7 weeks, so the probability that an Italian government will survive as long as the average is only 36.8%. Theoretical aspects of the model are also discussed, together with characteristic features of exponential political reliability, such as lifetime density, political mortality, and government downfall rate, as well as the systems reliability and crisis process characteristic of Italian governments.

Reagan's view of how to deal with the Soviet Union is compared to the U. S. performance record in three Soviet-American crises: Berlin, 1948-1949, Berlin, 1961, andCuba, 1962. Reagan's public statements indicate that he views the Soviets as incorrigibly hostile, so that conflict bargaining with the Soviets is a zero-sum game requiring a coercive U.S. bargaining strategy. This is characterized as a “bullying” strategy and contrasted with a “reciprocating” approach. The two approaches provide competing hypotheses for an examination of Soviet responses to U.S. influence attempts. The study tests the association between types of U.S. influence attempts and initial Soviet reactions and then proceeds to an interrupted time series analysis of the longer effects of U. S. threats of force on the mix of coercion-accommodation in Soviet crisis bargaining. The author finds a positive association between specific U.S. threats of force and initial Soviet responses in kind, and between carrot-and-stick inducements that use less specific threats and more accommodative Soviet responses. With the exception of the Cuban crisis, U.S. threats of force have not been associated with significant extended shifts in the level of Soviet hostility. The article concludes that, on balance, the performance record of the United States is more supportive of the efficacy of a reciprocating strategy than the coercive bargaining strategy implied by Reagan's beliefs.

This article develops a new statistical model of trade-offs among defense, nondefense, and fiscal policy concerns as they are reflected in the presidential budgetary process. The Competing Aspiration Levels Model (CALM) builds on Crecine's (1971) “Great Identity” argument. Unlike most previous attempts to model presidential budgeting, CALM explicitly represents the interdependence of decisions about defense, nondefense, and total federal expenditures. CALM models this interdependence as the result of the interaction of minimal aspirations for defense and nondefense expenditures with a maximum acceptable level of expenditures from a fiscal policy standpoint. Statistical analyses of presidential budgets for the fiscal years from 1955 through 1980 provide strong support for the CALM formulation. Substantively, the results indicate that fiscal constraints on total expenditures have progressively weakened, that the maximum acceptable expenditure level has generally exceeded the minimal expenditure aspiration level, and that when a potential “fiscal surplus” has existed, the nondefense sector has been more successful in capturing a share of this surplus than the defense sector. In keeping with traditional incrementalist arguments, the results indicate that previous year expenditure levels provide a relatively secure “budgetary base” for both the defense and nondefense sectors. Both sectors tend to receive their minimal aspiration levels plus a share of whatever fiscal surplus exists. The analysis also indicates that the executive branch has not been as strong a direct force for budgetary growth as Congress.

This article examines individual responsiveness to the media's changing political agenda during the years from 1964 to 1980. In the context of a dynamic model, the data indicate that responsiveness is positively associated with education, political interest, and a social motivation to attend to public affairs. A two-component model, in which heightened involvement increases individuals' exposure to information but also decreases their receptivity to the impact of the messages, is considered in a multivariate analysis. Although the results are only suggestive, the exposure function appears to operate for all three variables, whereas the inhibitions owing to the integration of previous information are evident only for political interest. Some speculations are offered about how these results may elaborate models of democratic public choice.

This study examines the impact of black school board members on educational policies that affect black students. Using data from 82 of the largest urban school districts in the United States, several measures of second-generation educational discrimination are analyzed. Black membership on the school board is associated with more equitable educational policies; this relationship remains in some cases even with controls for black political and economic resources. The implications of these findings for the study of representation are then discussed.

Students of citizen participation in public affairs disagree as to the effectiveness of such citizen involvement. Using the General Revenue Sharing program as a case study and applying techniques of both cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis, this article examines the effectiveness of one form of citizen participation, the public hearing. It is found that in the revenue-sharing program, the public hearing did have an immediate, but only short-term, impact on levels of public interest and citizen involvement. Evidence to support some short-term and some long-term effects on reported expenditure decisions is presented; however, these impacts generally are found to be inconsequential and not statistically significant. It is concluded that, as a form of citizen participation, the public hearing—at least as demonstrated in the General Revenue Sharing program—has not had much of an impact on citizen behavior or policy choices.

For some, market failures serve as a rationale for public intervention. However, the fact that self-interested market behavior does not always produce felicitous social consequences is not sufficient reason to draw this conclusion. It is necessary to assess public performance under comparable conditions, and hence to analyze self-interested political behavior in the institutional structures of the public sector. Our approach emphasizes this institutional structure—warts and all—and thereby provides specific cautionary warnings about optimistic reliance on political institutions to improve upon market performance.

There is a long-standing concern in organization theory with the effect of conflict on search. This article uses a computer model of organizational decision making to demonstrate an effect called “search-enhancing conflict”: organizational decision-making performance when there are conflicting subgoals may be better than it would be if all subunits evaluated alternatives in terms of a single organizational goal.

Legislatures are widely recognized as institutional embodiments of the concept of representation in contemporary liberal democracies, but how support for legislatures and evaluations of their members's activities influence support for national political regimes and communities is imperfectly understood. This article investigates the question with the use of data from a 1979 national survey of the Canadian public. Analyses of a model of support demonstrate that feelings about parliament and assessments of MPs' performance have significant effects on levels of support for the national political community and regime. Other important variables include cost-benefit evaluations of the personal impact of governmental activity, more general evaluations of governmental performance, and subcultural variations in political socialization.

One of the critical questions in the debate about the concept of party identification is its stability over time, particularly its stability relative to that of voting behavior. This article utilizes data from a new three-wave panel study to assess the properties of party identification in Canada, and to compare levels of partisan stability in Canada with those in Great Britain and the United States. In addition to directional stability, other features of the party identification concept and its applicability to Canada are examined, notably the constituency of identification across levels of the federal system. Analyses indicate that party identification in Canada is subject to considerable fluctuation, and that the U.S. pattern of relatively stable party identification coupled with substantial short-term swings in voting behavior reflect the institutional characteristics of the U. S. electoral system. The article concludes by suggesting that patterns of partisanship in Canada, although distinctive in certain respects, probably have important commonalities with those in many other contemporary liberal democracies.

As no passage in Thucydides is more important, so none is more dramatic than the Mytilenaian Debate. Having resolved to punish harshly a rebel city, the Athenians repent and reconsider. Exhorted by Kleon to maintain their original decision and by Diototos to abandon it, the Athenians must scrutinize the relationship between justice and expediency. Diodotos, who professes to argue from interest only, narrowly prevails in the debate. There is, however, much more to his speech than meets the eye. For it proves misleading to say that he is arguing merely from interest—and then, on a deeper level, to say that he is arguing from justice. In fact no passage in Thucydides, including the Melian Dialogue, raises starker questions about the status of political justice.