The analysis presented in this paper seeks to outline some of the political consequences of a general decline in the place of the church and religious faith in peoples’ daily lives in the Netherlands. It juxtaposes a reconstruction of religious origins or backgrounds against current assessment of the strength of confessional attachments. Erosion of traditional ties to the church of one's early loyalties is depicted as accompanied by withdrawal from formal participation in the electoral process. Interest in politics and informal participation remain high, but the rejection of institutionalized religion is associated with what appears to be an active rejection of institutionalized politics. For those who do remain in the active electorate, a continued decline in confessional attachment appears to forecast a continued decline in confessional party vote.

Insofar as change in the future involves general depillarization, or decreased political relevance of the church for all degrees of confessional attachment, the political beneficiaries may be the parties of center and right as well as left. An across-the-board drop in level of confessional voting would mean that many voters with strong confessional attachments would be turning to the secular parties and in doing so – if the recent past is any guide – would turn no more often to the left than to the other options open to them. However, insofar as the future brings a decline in confessional attachment without a diminution in the relevance of confessional attachment for confessional voters, the parties of the left will benefit disproportionately as the newly deconfessionalized turn away from the parties of tradition and seek out the parties of change.

The article presents a case study of the contemporary Bolivian state in interaction with the major interest groups and locates the Bolivian example in its comparative context. An analysis of the internal organisational problems of the Bolivian state is followed by an account of its exceptional vulnerability to international pressures of various types and a description of the unusually intractable domestic political problems it confronts. These conditions are held to explain (if not to justify) many of the techniques of government adopted by successive Bolivian régimes. There follows a discussion of the pattern of political behaviour which major domestic interests are constrained to adopt in response to the normal conduct of the Bolivian state. In general such interests are highly insecure, aggressive in their pressure group tactics, deeply politicised and subject to wildly fluctuating fortunes. However, it is also recognised that they vary widely in the resources they command, the aims they pursue, and the alliances they can enter into. In the conclusion the uniqueness, or otherwise, of the Bolivian case is assessed and this country study is related to the general debate on the degree to which military bureaucratic régimes in the Third World may be considered autonomous from sectional interests and capable of promoting some forms of ‘modernisation’.

In political systems that do not require the legislator to have his residence in the constituency which elects him, a data matrix can be created by juxtaposing the two variables of constituency affiliation and residence affiliation of legislators. This geographical matrix of representation will display a characteristic pattern which can be rendered understandable by means of a simple axiomatic model of political recruitment The model is based upon the assumption that rational office-seekers and agents of selection will make their decisions with regard to nomination in such a way that the costs of communication between the representative and his constituency are minimized. This decisional premise is operationalized by means of the three spatial distances between residence, constituency, and the site of the legislature. From the triadic distance model a number of hypotheses are derived. These are tested by means of data on Danish legislators. As the model gains considerable support, the article concludes with a discussion of the possibilities of refining and further testing the model.

Various analytic and simulation models designed to integrate the political and economic sectors are surveyed, stressing the interacting links going from the economy to the polity through the popularity function and in the reverse direction through the government's reaction function. Partial politico-economic models concentrate on a particular trade-off between goals, in particular between inflation and unemployment. The models of total politico-economic interdependence study the interrelationship of the economy as a whole with the polity. They are studied theoretically and by simulation techniques. Ongoing research by the authors indicates that such models can be applied empirically; as an example an already existing econometric model of the German economy is extended by an endogenous government sector.

The article attempts to show how the application of a “rational choice” model of electoral decision making to the 1973 Northern Ireland Assembly Election campaign points to some need for a reorientation of this approach, although there is no basic reason why the model cannot be made to work in a seemingly “irrational” situation. Aspects of strategic behaviour other than simple ideological manoeuvring are discussed and related to the campaign itself. These include strategic use of information and resources. Finally the actual vote transfers are used to test the proposition that some degree of rationality did exist in voter choice at the election.

Classical theories of omniscient rationality in organizational decision-making have largely been replaced by a view of limited rationality, but no similar concern has been reflected in the analysis of organizational learning. There has been a tendency to model a simple complete cycle of learning from unambiguous experience and to ignore cognitive and evaluative limits on learning in organizations. This paper examines some theoretical possibilities for assuming that individuals in organizations modify their understanding in a way that is intendedly adaptive even though faced with ambiguity about what happened, why it happened, and whether it is good. To develop a theory of learning under such conditions, we probably require ideas about information exposure, memory, and retrieval; learning incentives; belief structures; and the micro development of belief in organizations. We exhibit one example by specifying a structural theory of the relations among liking, seeing, trusting, contact, and integration in an organization. The argument is made that some understanding of factors affecting learning from experience will not only be important to the improvement of policy making in an organizational context, but also a necessary part of a theory of organizational choice.

In a positive, as opposed to a normative or prescriptive, approach to policy analysis, the critical examination of the conditions of feasibility of public policies assumes paramount importance. A proposal is feasible if it satisfies all relevant constraints. But while the notion of economic or technical feasibility can be explicated by pointing to the corresponding constraints, “political feasibility” is generally used in a much less precise sense; and lack of conceptual precision severely restricts its analytical usefulness. For instance, questions of political feasibility are often confused with considerations of political costs or of political opportunity. I argue that the analyst should always be prepared to translate a judgment of political feasibility or infeasibility in terms of the specific political constraints operating in the problem under consideration. In this paper, three main groups of political constraints are considered: those resulting from the limitation of the available political resources; those relating to the permissible distribution of the benefits and costs of a policy (distributional constraints); and those imposed by the institutional framework.

Traditionally, party systems are classified by the number of parties they include. More recently their coalitional possibilities have been taken into account, even though policy positions of parties were ignored. Closed Minimal Range Theory holds that parliamentary coalitions in support of a government will consist of parties that are adjacent on an ordinal scale of social-economic policy positions, and will span a range along that scale that is no larger than is necessary for the coalition in order to control a majority of seats in the voting body. This theory, which has achieved very satisfactory empirical results, allows the classification of parties according to the number of closed minimal range coalitions they are part of in a given situation. There is always a party that is a member of every such closed minimal range coalition; in actual fact such pivotal parties may maintain this position for very long periods and were found to be a member of the government in 104 out of 108 coalitions studied. Party systems may be classified according to the number of closed minimal range coalitions they present in a given situation and whether or not all parties are included in at least one such coalition. Coalitional situations in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden since 1918, and in Israel since 1948, Italy since 1945, in the French IVth Republic, and the German Weimar Republic are presented in a table and discussed briefly.

The commonly held idea that the two major British political parties are drawing nearer and nearer together is not belied by the facts. The ideological gap between the parties, measured on a series of left/right scales, has decreased since 1945. The closing of the gap is neither automatic–in 1970, for instance, the two parties drew apart–nor unilateral–both parties contribute to it.

Contrary to a view commonly held, the primary export sectors of Latin America did not lose power when industrial production for the internal market was accelerated in some countries of the area after the world economic crisis of 1930. Although based on labour intensive manufacturing for the internal market, the new model of development did not allow wages to increase at a rate capable of promoting a rise in demand for manufactured goods. This may appear surprising in the light of the usual interpretation of the post-1930 process of industrialization as designed to meet an internal demand for goods which could no longer be imported due to balance of payments deficits. In fact, the satisfaction of internal demand was only a secondary objective, or, rather, it was instrumental to achieve the primary objective of the new model of growth, which was the need to find new investment opportunities for capital accumulation.

With the exception of Argentina, where a relative shortage of labour prevailed, the existence of a labour surplus in all the other Latin American economies considerably weakened the bargaining power of the workers and allowed for a rapid capital accumulation. The basic stability of the pre-crisis distribution of national income between profits and wages was thus maintained. Furthermore, the presence of a labour surplus helped to resolve – by eliminating it – the conflict assumed to have taken place between those groups which derived their profits from the export of primary goods and those groups whose profits came from investment in industry. In other words, the presence of a labour surplus acted as a mechanism by which the pre-crisis system could be easily adapted. This article analyses some of the economic and political techniques through which that adaptation was implemented.

This article proposes a social-psychological modification to the economic theory of politics, in particular to the theory of Anthony Downs. Its focal point is the relationship between political behavior and uncertainty. The social-psychological modification permits a more systematic examination of the individual processing of information and its consequences for individual and collective behavior, and is not concerned with the entire field of application of the economic theory of politics. The argument is presented theoretically, and no empirical evidence is offered in support of the proposed modification.

The theory of consociational democracy has emphasized the internal conditions under which elites in “segmented pluralist” countries may choose such a strategy. This article suggests a distinction between genetic and sustaining conditions of this type of conflict management and, with the aid of this distinction, seeks to analyze the complex relationships between the internal structure of consociational democracies and their position in the international system. Consociationalism serves as a strategy for the settlement of international conflict (and may be imposed from outside) or for the preservation of national integrity in a situation of international conflict. On the other hand a reduction of foreign policy loads may contribute to the stabilization of consociational democracy; this may explain why most consociational democracies are small countries.

The model of ‘consociational democracy’ is no longer regarded in Anglo-Saxon countries as a curiosity but may be in danger of being accepted too uncritically as a model for the resolution of divisions within a society. This argument is applied in particular to the cases of Canada and Northern Ireland, to suggest that the effect of attempting to introduce consociational practices might make matters worse.

Analyses of party strategy in multiparty parliamentary systems often refer to the idea of a pivotal party. But this notion is not uniformly treated and rarely covers the same entities. This essay is an attempt to clarify the concept and to isolate its characteristics. Among four types of “dominated” parties, the name of pivotal party should only be given to that party which controls the maximum of potentialities belonging to these parties, namely the power to modify the government majority by bestowing or withdrawing its support. This perspective also suggests the utility of an index measuring the extent of this modification.

This article is an attempt to extract pervasive modes of thinking about nations and their foreign policies from three classical political theories and to examine to what extent it is possible to speak of “cognitive archetypes”. The study consists of two cases. The first is a treatment of The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, in particular an analysis of the debate at Sparta as a rational choice model. The conclusion is that the assumptions underlying rational actor models and the argument as presented by Thucydides closely coincide. The second case is a comparison of the logical structure of the prisoner's dilemma and the state of nature as presented by Hobbes and Rousseau. It concludes that Rousseau presents a clearer exposition of the dilemma than Hobbes who by differentiating between the security of the individual in the state of nature and that of states in the international system finds the establishment of the Leviathan an adequate solution to the problem of order.

Most measures of legislative voting behavior have been created to suit two-party systems. Many special characteristics of multi-party systems (e.g. coalition formation) can thus not be taken into account sufficiently. Consequently, there has been an increasing interest in methods that especially fit multi-party systems. This article proposes one such method and illustrates it visually by simple vector algebra.

The method is applied to data which consist of 450 divisions of the Finnish Parliament from 1964 to 1966. An attempt is made to interpret the results by taking into consideration the special characteristics of the Finnish political system and the country's political dynamics. The interpretation also uses Gunnar Sjöblom's classification of the basic goals of political parties. Finally, the observations concerning political coalition theory are condensed into broader generalizations, which, however, need further study.

The main research emphases of American political science research on urban politics are outlined, and it is concluded that many American conceptual frameworks have been determined by American political culture and by the nature of urban development in the U.S. This research has only limited utility for Europeans because in many important respects European urban development is distinctive, and because where North American and European urbanism do have similarities, American political science studies have generally not generated theories which are useful for guiding comparative research.