Suchergebnisse

The concepts of rationality & rational behavior can only be meaningfully used as concepts referring to individual behavior, ie, as concepts characterizing the way individuals choose among behavioral alternatives on the basis of preference & probability. Definitions of rationality & rational behavior are reviewed. The only definition that seems adequate is the vague one that defines rational behavior as the choice of an alternative in accordance with the preference ordering of the outcomes of the different alternatives, with estimation of the probability of different alternatives. The importance of the hypothesis of rational behavior in efforts of theory building is stressed. Because most theories are built on a comparable vague notion of rationality, the dichotomy of rational & nonrational theories is rejected. Modified HA.

THE CONCEPT OF NONDECISIONS HAS BEEN CRITICIZED IN RECENT YEARS ON A NUMBER OF POINTS. SOME OF THESE EMANATED FROM MULTIPLE, THOUGH NOT TOTALLY, EQUIVALENT, DEFINITIONS, SOME FROM ASSUMPTIONS WHICH SEEM TO BE IMPLIED BY THE CONCEPT--SUCH AS THE ASSUMPTION OF A RULING ELITE, ETC. THE CONCEPT OF NONDECISION IS REDEFINED. THIS CONCEPTUALIZATION IS LINKED WITH A MODEL OF THE POLITICAL PROCESS IN WHICH NONDECISIONS ARE ASSOCIATED WITH THE PROCESS OF AGENDA-BUILDING. A BROAD DEFINITION OF POLITICS, INCLUDING VALUE ALLOCATION BY AUTHORITIES OTHER THAN GOVERNMENT, LEADS TO A NUMBER OF RESEARCH QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE POLITICAL AGENDA, WHICH HAVE BEEN LITTLE EXPLORED UP TO NOW. NONDECISIONS CAN BE CONSIDERED AS ONE OF MANY MANIFESTATIONS OF THE 'MOBILIZATION OF BIAS' PREVALENT IN A POLITICAL SYSTEM. TO AVOID THE FALLACY OF 'INPUTISM', NONDECISION RESEARCH HAS TO BE COMPLEMENTED WITH RESEARCH ABOUT NONIMPLEMENTATION, FEEDBACK TO WANT-GENERATION, FEEDBACK TO THE MOBILIZATION OF BIAS ITSELF, & THE DIRECT GENERATION OF AGENDA-ITEMS BY THE DECISION-MAKERS THEMSELVES. MODIFIED HA.

THEORY FORMATION IN POLITICAL SCIENCE HAS HEADED TOWARD A "NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY" WITHIN WHICH 4 CLUSTERS ARE DISTINGUISHED: (1) 'SPATIAL MODELS OF PARTY COMPETITION', (2) THEORIES OF COLLECTIVE ACTION, (3) THEORIES OF ALLOCATION OF VALUES, UNDER SPECIFIC ASSUMPTIONS OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF POWER, IE COALITION THEORIES, BARGAINING THEORIES & REINTERPRETATIONS OF DUOPOLY THEORIES, & (4) THEORIES OF ADMINISTRATIVE BEHAVIOR. THE 4 CLUSTERS ARE THE RESULT OF THE INTEGRATION OF POLITICAL SCIENCE & ECONOMICS. THE SIMILARITY IN THEORETICAL STRUCTURE OF THE 4 CATEGORIES IN POLITICAL SCIENCE WITH THE CORRESPONDING THEORIES IN MICROECONOMICS, WELFARE ECONOMICS, & PUBLIC ECONOMICS CONSISTS OF THESE ELEMENTS: (A) THE PREPONDERANCE OF A DEDUCTIVE (VS INDUCTIVE) STRATEGY OF THEORY BUILDING, (B) THE 2 PREMISES OF INDIVIDUALISM & GOAL-ORIENTED BEHAVIOR, (C) PREOCCUPATION WITH VARIOUS CORRESPONDING AMENDMENTS ON ASSUMPTIONS IN THE ECONOMIC THEORY OF PERFECT COMPETITION, & (D) THE THEORY OF ADMINISTRATIVE BEHAVIOR AS BASED ON THE AMENDMENT OF THE ASSUMPTION OF PERFECT & COSTLESS INFORMATION & THE HOLISTIC ('UNITARY ACTOR') OF DECISION-MAKING IN THE THEORY OF THE FIRM. MODIFIED HA.

Aus niederländischer Sicht

Why does pol'al life in the US seem to suffer from intellectual anemia? Partly at least, because historically, the US has been an Eldorado, the ideal society. For many generations of underpriveleged people all over the world, the 'Amer Dream' was simply the belief in heaven on earth. Hence the US became a messianistic society, with some overtones, on the one hand, of complacency, & on the other of fear of the Villain who would endanger the Promised Land. This mixture of self-righteousness & anxiety forms the basis for a solid conservatism, not only more widely spread than in any other country, but also more respectable-a paradox as such in the most dynamic & progressive nation of the world. Consequently, the security syndrome, if not permanent, can always easily be revived at any moment. Many groups, pol'al or others, respectable or secret, derive from it, for a variety of reasons & flourish on the suspicion of an anti-Amer conspiracy, whether inside or outside the US. Among them, the John Birch Society seems to be one of the most interesting, because the discrepancy between its modest numbers & considerable influence, expresses, by contrast, the extent to which it is representative of a basic feature of Amer soc behavior. AA.

Typical of current work in contemporary Soviet political theory is the work of V. N. Danilenko, a specialist in French political theory which appeared in Sovjetskoje Gosoedarstvo i Pravo (1976, Apr). Danilenko analyzes some French political theorists. The needs of ideological struggle require attention to new development in bourgeois ideology. The crisis of world capitalism as well as the emergence of formerly colonial nations has created a need for a renovation of political theories. Today's interest in the typology of political systems is typical of that renovation effort. The French theorists are criticized for assuming the independence of the political & economic structures & for not recognizing the role of ideologies as well as of social & geographic factors. They absolutize political systems & study them abstractly. By contrast, Marxist-Leninist political science asserts that a political system is an expression of the relations between classes & of the means by which the dictatorship of the ruling class is enforced. Therefore, the important criteria in the classification of bourgeois systems are: the rights & liberties of the Wc, how the Wc is represented in the parliamentary institution, what share the Wc has in state power & to what extent the state is forced to respond to PO & use democratic means of government. The Soviet juridical literature is criticized for not recognizing the full diversity of bourgeois systems. However, Marxism-Leninism brings to light what all these systems have in common: they are dictatorships of the bourgeoisie. A. Orianne.

Most theorists on international relations agree on recognizing natural resources, economic strength, technological development, political stability, & military strength as the five bases of a state's power. This unanimity is in sharp contrast with the divergences in the operationalizations of the power of states. Most operationalizations use only one or two bases of a state's power & thus are very limited in scope. Therefore, the demand for an operationalization sticking as closely as possible to the unanimity among theorists forces itself on the researcher. An attempt is made to transform the theoretical unanimity into an operational measure. Each power basis represented by partial indicators is listed: (1) natural resources--area, population, production of energy, (2) economic strength--gross national product, energy consumption, monetary stability, (3) technological development--level of alphabetization, number of students in higher education, scientific production & infrastructure, (4) political stability--length of independence, internal stability, & (5) military strength--number of men in the armed forces, conventional weapons, nuclear strength. The operationalization was obtained by granting all five power bases an equal share in the index & by giving an equal weight to the sums of the arithmetical values for fifteen partial indicators & thus, for the five indicators. The nation's power-index, thus obtained, was applied to 110 nation states as they existed at the beginning of the '70s. On this power scale, ratings differ from 29,046 indexpoints of world power (IWM) for the US to 276 IWM for Gambia & even less for a number of the smaller states that could not be investigated. Modified HA.