The Cuban missile crisis is a seminal event. For thirteen days of October 1962, there was a higher probability that more human lives would end suddenly than ever before in history. Had the worst occurred, the death of 100 million Americans, over 100 million Russians, and millions of Europeans as well would make previous natural calamities and inhumanities appear insignificant. Given the probability of disaster—which President Kennedy estimated as “between 1 out of 3 and even”—our escape seems awesome. This event symbolizes a central, if only partially thinkable, fact about our existence. That such consequences could follow from the choices and actions of national governments obliges students of government as well as participants in governance to think hard about these problems.

Improved understanding of this crisis depends in part on more information and more probing analyses of available evidence. To contribute to these efforts is part of the purpose of this study. But here the missile crisis serves primarily as grist for a more general investigation. This study proceeds from the premise that marked improvement in our understanding of such events depends critically on more self-consciousness about what observers bring to the analysis. What each analyst sees and judges to be important is a function not only of the evidence about what happened but also of the “conceptual lenses” through which he looks at the evidence. The principal purpose of this essay is to explore some of the fundamental assumptions and categories employed by analysts in thinking about problems of governmental behavior, especially in foreign and military affairs.

We are now in the midst of a notable revival of interest in the politics of the American states. During the last decade many studies have been conducted of the social, political and economic determinants of state policy outcomes. Several of these writers have argued that the relative wealth of a state, its degree of industrialization, and other measures of social and economic development are more important in explaining its level of expenditures than such political factors as the form of legislative apportionment, the amount of party competition, or the degree of voter participation. It has been claimed that such factors as the level of personal income or the size of the urban population are responsible both for the degree of participation and party competition in a state, and the nature of the system's policy outputs. By making this argument these writers have called into question the concepts of representation and theories of party and group conflict which, in one form or another, are the foundations for much of American political science.

There is a growing awareness, however, that levels of expenditure alone are not an adequate measure of public policy outcomes. Sharkansky has shown, for example, that levels of expenditure and levels of actual service are seldom correlated; presumably, some states are able to reach given service levels with much less expenditure than others.

The Cuban missile crisis is a seminal event. For thirteen days of October 1962, there was a higher probability that more human lives would end suddenly than ever before in history. Had the worst occurred, the death of 100 million Americans, over 100 million Russians, and millions of Europeans as well would make previous natural calamities and inhumanities appear insignificant. Given the probability of disaster—which President Kennedy estimated as “between 1 out of 3 and even”—our escape seems awesome. This event symbolizes a central, if only partially thinkable, fact about our existence. That such consequences could follow from the choices and actions of national governments obliges students of government as well as participants in governance to think hard about these problems.

Improved understanding of this crisis depends in part on more information and more probing analyses of available evidence. To contribute to these efforts is part of the purpose of this study. But here the missile crisis serves primarily as grist for a more general investigation.

This study proceeds from the premise that marked improvement in our understanding of such events depends critically on more self-consciousness about what observers bring to the analysis. What each analyst sees and judges to be important is a function not only of the evidence about what happened but also of the “conceptual lenses” through which he looks at the evidence. The principal purpose of this essay is to explore some of the fundamental assumptions and categories employed by analysts in thinking about problems of governmental behavior, especially in foreign and military affairs.

Nominally, the English became a nation in the eighth century but did not achieve political integration until the seventeenth century, a thousand years later. During the millennium, the English “nation” was the scene of recurring internal wars, the last ending with the acceptance of the Bill of Rights by William III and Mary in 1688. What was the process leading to cessation in the use of armed conflict as a technique of domestic politics in England?

Nominally, Mexico was an independent nation in 1821 but did not see the end of its internal wars until the 1940's. What political process led to domestic “arms control” in Mexico?

Although taking place in different centuries and in nations with distinct political cultures, were there common elements in the two transitions to internal arms control? What were critical factors in the integrative process? May the same factors, or analogous ones, be identified and controlled in contemporary efforts related to regional and international arms control? What may be learned from the English, the Mexican, and other national cases that is generalizable to the problem of international political integration and arms control?

The present theory sketch views arms control as an aspect of the integration of political organizations. Political integration, in turn, is the consequence of a process of political transactions among principal political actors over time.

This paper seeks to open for exploration the field of decentralization in politics and organizational design. As a first approach, it examines conditions under which decentralization is preferable from the viewpoint of rationality or cost-effectiveness. Our normative statements as to what would be best, or what should be done, are formulated first from the viewpoint of the subjects or clients, but they are expected to include the interest of the community in ensuring adequate service at low cost, and they also include the interest of the rulers, insofar as their power in the long run depends on their capacity to respond to the demands made upon them quickly enough and adequately enough to retain their political support.

The political theory underlying our study assumes that modern governments retain “their just powers by the consent of the governed,” and hence that both their legitimacy and their power will depend at least in significant part on their ability to respond adequately to the popular demands made upon them. We do not deal in this study with other important criteria of preference, such as the psychological value which some of those who take the role of powerholders may put upon centralized control, or the contrary value which some of those who identify with their subjects may put upon power sharing and decentralization.

“Myself, I get confused. The President tells ya that he don't want no war, it's peace. You pick up a paper, they're bombing children. And television, the guys being interviewed, talking about peace, and the picture shows where the women and children are being bombed and slaughtered and murdered. How long if I think that way and I have had a bad feeling, how long will other people that their mentality's not strong enough, to separate the cause of it? Fear. What's gonna happen to our kids, our grandchildren?

“Lotta them are afraid of their jobs, losing their jobs. Because the government's maybe got some contract with some company. For example, we got one fellow here works with the government, with this here carbonic gas or whatever it is. If he opens his mouth up too much, he can lose his job. And the senators or congressmen, they personally don't take interest in their own country, right here, what's going on.

“The colored. We had a tavern on 61st and State, three and a half years, Negro neighborhood. I tell you I never was insulted no place by not a Negro person over there. They respected me highly. It took a white fella to come in and insult me because I wouldn't serve him beer, he was too drunk. And if it wasn't for these poor Negro fellas, I'd a probably killed this man. (Laughs) Because he called me a dirty name.”

“Nothing we have created, in politics or literature, is necessary….”

—Richard Poirier

Theory expressing new dimensions of man's political predicaments has rarely emerged from well-accredited academic quarters. Yet political scientists have come to hope that their own discipline, imaginatively pursued, might nevertheless yield comprehensive theories for coming to terms with man's present and prospective situations. To cope with emergencies—if not those of the year 1984 then those of the now more fashionable year 2000—they have proceeded to delineate possible futures. It is hardly necessary to document how industriously they have been extrapolating from the present, becoming interested in simulating, linear programming, gaming, and projecting into the future. With methodological ingenuity and resourcefulness, practitioners of futuristics have provided a new literature which is unconventional, exciting, and at times intriguingly surrealistic. Like Bentham's and Saint-Simon's more buoyant pieces, it has all the trappings of authentic radical thought: it appears to challenge the prevailing intellectual and institutional boundaries.

Yet in view of the ideological constraints inherent in every professional discipline, it would be surprising if the new blueprints and scenarios were to inspire men to transcend the present political order, if the new Utopians (to use Robert Boguslaw's apt label) acknowledged something other than the prevailing system of psychological, economic, and industrial norms as their point of departure. They understandably begin with the present, that which is.

Just beyond the state there is a kind of limbo, a strange world this side of the hell of war, whose members are deprived of the relative security of political or social membership. Different sorts of people live there, mostly for indefinite periods of time, people who have been expelled from their state or otherwise deprived of legal rights, people whose state has been defeated in war and occupied or who have been separated somehow from its jurisdiction. Among the residents, two groups endure conditions paradigmatic for all the others: refugees, deprived of their rights by persecution; and prisoners of war, separated from their state by captivity. The two are very different, since refugees are stateless persons, radically dependent on their hosts and unable to look backward to any protecting authority, while prisoners remain citizens still and receive such protection as their states can provide. However distant and isolated they may be from their home country, their captivity is (hopefully) temporary; both captives and captors may one day be required to account for their behavior. Nevertheless, prisoners and refugees belong alike to the limbo world. They cannot expect effective help from any organized society; they do not know when, if ever, they will be “at home” again; they are compelled to reconstruct or redefine their obligations without reference, or without clearcut reference, to authoritative laws and commands.

Popular discussions of the internal management of the U.S. House of Representatives in the present era generally give great weight to the ubiquity and arbitrariness of the seniority system as a significant determinant of outcomes there. Careful attention to the scholarly literature, however, should long since have modified this view. For it appears that except for relatively unimportant matters such as the allocation of office space on Capitol Hill, the criterion of seniority is generally intermingled in House decision-making with a great many other crite ria of choice, and the business of choosing is not automatic, but remains in the hands of persons having some considerable discretion. This, apparently, is the case with respect to such decisions as the allocation of Capitol Hill patronage, the initial assignment of Representatives to committees, the distribution of responsibilities within committees, and the choice of party leaders. The one important area in which seniority seems to play a role of overwhelming significance is in the matter of succession to the chairmanship of committees; this is in turn governed by the custom (not a formal rule) of seniority that guarantees members reappointment to committees at the opening of each new Congress, in rank order of committee service. It is the growth of this method of selecting committee chairmen in the House that is the subject of this paper.

Mass political participation increases as nations become more economically developed. In Part I of this study we attempted to identify the significant social experiences which explain the high levels of participation in economically developed nations. We formulated and explored the following general theory:

Economic development alters the social structure of a nation. As nations become more economically developed, three major changes occur: (1) the relative size of the upper and middle classes becomes greater; (2) larger numbers of citizens are concentrated in the urban areas; and (3) the density and complexity of economic and secondary organizations increases. These social changes imply political changes. Greater proportions of the population find themselves in life situations which lead to increased political information, political awareness, sense of personal political efficacy, and other relevant attitudes. These attitude changes, in turn, lead to increases in political participation.

The theory can be presented schematically in the following form:

We were able to demonstrate that individuals' levels of social status and organizational involvement were strongly and consistently related to their levels of political participation. The survey data from five nations showed, further, that organizational involvement was more strongly related to participation, and more consistently from nation to nation, than was social status.

A large descriptive and conjectural literature has evolved during the past decade suggesting that rapid urbanization—conceived primarily as a massive demographic shift from country to city—constitutes an important agent of political instability in much of Latin America, favoring the growth of alienation and radicalism. This effect is frequently attributed to the frustration of migrant expectations for economic improvement and social mobility in the large cities, or to the processes of personal and social disorganization allegedly inherent in the migration experience. Although field researchers have long suspected the inadequacy of such theory, derived largely from the urbanization experiences of advanced Western nations, for explaining political instability in Latin America, there have been few systematic attempts at testing the various propositions and unconfirmed generalizations advanced by the “urban instability-crisis-and-chaos” theorists. This paper attempts to explore, if not to test, some of the empirical implications of the general theoretical conceptions of the urbanizing process and its socio-political consequences as developed in recent social science literature on Latin America. Mexico is selected for analysis both by virtue of its extremely rapid rate of rural-urban migration in recent years and because of the opportunities afforded by the availability for Mexico of detailed survey data from a number of independent sources to examine systematically a wide range of theoretically relevant variables and relationships posited in the urbanization literature. While in certain areas (as indicated below) the particular nature of the Mexican political system and developmental pattern may render these findings imperfect as predictors for other parts of Latin America, the analysis presented here should serve to identify the major inadequacies of existing theory and illustrate the need for new conceptual models which can encompass both stabilizing and destabilizing concomitants of rapid urban concentration in a developing nation.

Recent comparative, quantitative studies of state politics conclude that party competition and other political variables have little or no impact on important state policies such as per pupil expenditure, old age assistance, unemployment compensation, and aid to dependent children. These are rather unexpected and disturbing conclusions for they disconfirm relationships predicted by some of the most important theoretical formulations concerning democratic politics. Before re-examining the bases for these conclusions, a review of theory is in order.

V. O. Key, Jr., set the context for examining the effects of political variables on state policies. He stressed the importance of two-party competition, or bi-factionalism in one-party states, as a determinant of policy. Key sees the degree of party competition as crucial because it reflects the extent to which politics is organized or unorganized. Party competition by producing some semblance of an organized politics lessens the difficulty of lower status groups in sorting out political actors and issues, thereby enabling them to promote their own interests more effectively. Since state social welfare policies are undoubtedly relevant to the interests of “have-nots,” we can utilize state expenditures in this area as a measure of the success that these groups have enjoyed. Key's formulation, then, would lead to a simple two variable model:

P = e1

S = k1P + ez

Where P is inter-party competition, S is expenditure on social welfare, and e1 and ez represent error or variables left out of the system, and k1 is a constant.

A question often posed by students of American state politics is: “Do state political systems leave a distinctive imprint on patterns of public policy?” Prior to recent years the nearly automatic response of political scientists was an unqualified “yes.” More recent research has led to a qualified but increasingly confident “no.”

Several recent publications have explored relationships between various indices of state politics, socio-economic characteristics, and public policy. The general conclusion has been that central features of the political system such as electoral and institutional circumstances do not explain much of the variation in policy. There are occasionally high correlations between individual measures of voter turnout, party competitiveness, or the character of state legislatures and some aspects of governmental spending. But these political-policy correlations seem to disappear when the effect of socioeconomic development is controlled.

These are disturbing findings. They have not gone unchallenged. But the challenges, rather than reassuring those who have asserted the relevance of parties, voting patterns, and government structures, have demonstrated that the burden of proof now rests on those who hypothesize a politics-policy relationship. The problem has not been resolved.

Part of the problem may rest on the conceptualization and measurement of the central variables. Electoral balance or alternation in office is not “inter-party competition,” except in the most mechanical sense. Compare Massachusetts' loose-knit party structure to the centralization of Connecticut's. “Party competition” is not the same as “party organization.” And party competition, voting habits, and patterns of apportionment fall far short of being equivalents of “political systems.”

We are now in the midst of a notable revival of interest in the politics of the American states. During the last decade many studies have been conducted of the social, political and economic determinants of state policy outcomes. Several of these writers have argued that the relative wealth of a state, its degree of industrialization, and other measures of social and economic development are more important in explaining its level of expenditures than such political factors as the form of legislative apportionment, the amount of party competition, or the degree of voter participation. It has been claimed that such factors as the level of personal income or the size of the urban population are responsible both for the degree of participation and party competition in a state, and the nature of the system's policy outputs. By making this argument these writers have called into question the concepts of representation and theories of party and group conflict which, in one form or another, are the foundations for much of American political science.

There is a growing awareness, however, that levels of expenditure alone are not an adequate measure of public policy outcomes. Sharkansky has shown, for example, that levels of expenditure and levels of actual service are seldom correlated; presumably, some states are able to reach given service levels with much less expenditure than others. Besides establishing the appropriate level of expenditure for a program, policy makers must also decide about the program's relative scope, provisions for appeal from administrative orders, eligibility requirements, the composition of regulatory boards and commissions, and many other matters which have little to do with money.