Suchergebnisse

Recent commentaries on the American party system have developed conflicting interpretations of the ways in which it changed during the 1960s and 1970s. Studies based upon individual behavior conclude that because of the intense conflicts of the 1960s, voters became more issue-oriented in their evaluations of the parties. Thus, an emerging basis for a "responsible" party system is visible in the changes of this period. System-level studies, on the other hand, point in exactly the opposite direction—to the growing instability of party alignments. The present study attempts to assess these interpretations in terms of the concept of "issue alignment," which refers to the degree to which citizens prefer the same party across a range of issues. Using data from national election surveys taken between 1956 and 1976, it is shown that issue alignment declined after 1956 and certainly did not increase during the 1960s and 1970s. Thus it appears that party alignments across issues are less stable presently than they were in the 1950s. It is suggested that we may have been exaggerating the degree of political change that occurred during the 1960s.

Political scientists have assumed that dividing the electorate into issue publics, on the basis of salient issues, leads to a better understanding of the relationships between issues and both candidate evaluations and electoral choice. This portrait accords nicely with the description offered by pluralists of the operation of the electoral arena. Our data suggest that, at least in 1972, the portrait is flawed. Using a variety of multivariate tech niques we show that salience fails to sharpen the impact of issues and that electoral choice was, fundamentally, a question of candidate images.

A study confirming & enlarging upon a partial explanation of the dominance of lawyers in US politics: that lawyers are advantaged by having legal skills which give them a monopoly over one important route of advancement -- the cluster of offices related to the judicial system. Using data from interviews conducted in 1957 with 504 state legislators from the states of Tenn, Ohio, NJ, & Calif & original data on the interviewees' subsequent political careers it was found that: (1) lawyers move from the state legislature to other offices at a much greater rate than nonlawyers, & the difference is the result of their ability to advance to "lawyers-only" positions; (2) a major reason for the "overpresentation" of laywers in US state legislatures is that legislative service has a greater political career value for lawyers than for nonlawyers; (3) lawyers who move from the state legislature to a "lawyers-only" position tend to stay there; (4) lawyers do not invest appreciably more time in their political careers than nonlawyers; but (5) lawyers are much more likely than nonlawyers to achieve their political career goals. 3 Tables. Modified HA.

Recent research into the structure of public attitudes suggests that levels of "constraint" in the mass public increased substantially between 1956 & 1972, largely in response to the ideological nature of the 1964 presidential election. The validity of this interpretation is examined, & it is suggested that constraint in the mass public probably did not increase very much, but that reported changes were due instead to changes in the survey items used to measure constraint. Implications of this view are considered. 6 Tables. HA.

Over the past 25 years a number of conclusions concerning the development of political tolerance have come to be well accepted in the literature on political behavior. There are, however, two persisting problems with the studies that have generated these findings: they have relied on a content-biased measure of tolerance, and have failed to examine well specified models of the factors leading to tolerance. In this article we report the results of an analysis of the determinants of political tolerance using a content-controlled measure of tolerance and a more fully specified multivariate model. The parameters of the model are estimated from a national sample of the U.S. The results indicate the explanatory power of two political variables, the level of perceived threat and the commitment to general norms, and psychological sources of political tolerance. Social and demographic factors are found to have no direct effect and little indirect influence on the development of political tolerance.