“Elite political culture” may be defined as the set of politically relevant beliefs, values, and habits of the most highly involved and influential participants in a political system. Studying elite political culture requires methodological innovation which will allow us to do justice to the subtleties of the belief systems of sophisticated political leaders without doing violence to our normal standards of reliability and verification. As one example of the study of elite political culture, this paper presents an empirically based analysis of “ideological politics” and “the end of ideology.”

After some clarification of the logical structure and empirical assumptions of existing descriptions of “ideological politics,” these descriptions are examined in the light of data from a study of the basic beliefs and values of British and Italian politicians, based on intensive interviews with random samples of 93 British MPs and 83 Italian deputati.

The core of the notion of “ideological politics” is interpreted in terms of “political style,” that is, how politicians talk and think about concrete policy problems such as poverty or urban transportation. Each respondent's discussion of two such issues was analyzed in terms of 12 “stylistic characteristics,” such as “inductive-deductive thinking,” “use of historical context,” “moralization,” and “reference to distributive group benefits.” Ratings of these stylistic characteristics are found to cluster in intelligible ways, and on the basis of the dominant stylistic dimension, an Index of Ideological Style is constructed. Those politicians who rank high on this Index are also found to be more ideologically motivated, more abstract in their conceptions of politics, especially party politics, and more idealistic than their less “ideological” colleagues. They are also more alienated from existing socio-political institutions and are concentrated at the extremes of the political spectrum. Further investigation shows, however, that contrary to the assumptions of the existing literature, these “ideologues” are not more dogmatic, not less open to compromise, not more antagonistic to the norms of pluralist politics, not more hostile to political opponents. Partisan hostility and ideological style are found to be two distinct syndromes.

The “end of ideology” thesis is examined by comparing the attitudes and style of respondents from different political generations. In both countries younger politicians are markedly less dogmatic and hostile, but in neither country are they any less “ideological” in their approach to political phenomena and problems of public policy.

In the light of these data the “end of ideology” debate is reformulated. The probable causes and consequences of both the decline of partisan hostility and the persistence of ideology are discussed. Finally, some conclusions are drawn concerning the role of ideology in politics and concerning the theoretical promise and methodological problems of studying elite political culture.

This paper is a systematic analysis of the comparative method. Its emphasis is on both the limitations of the method and the ways in which, despite these limitations, it can be used to maximum advantage.

The comparative method is defined and analyzed in terms of its similarities and differences vis-à-vis the experimental and statistical methods. The principal difficulty facing the comparative method is that it must generalize on the basis of relatively few empirical cases. Four specific ways in which this difficulty may be resolved are discussed and illustrated: (1) increasing the number of cases as much as possible by means of longitudinal extension and a global range of analysis, (2) reducing the property space of the analysis, (3) focusing the comparative analysis on “comparable” cases (e.g., by means of area, diachronic, or intranation comparisons), and (4) focusing on the key variables.

It is argued that the case study method is closely related to the comparative method. Six types of case studies (the atheoretical, interpretative, hypothesis-generating, theory-confirming, theory-infirming, and deviant case analyses) are distinguished, and their theoretical value is analyzed.

Questionnaire data that delineate the positions of 197 Labour and 126 Conservative M.P.s in the British House of Commons on ten major policy issues are utilized in an empirical test of some of the positions taken by British political parry scholars, Samuel H. Beer and Robert T. McKenzie. Assuming that policy stances taken on these issues reflect more general ideological orientations, the data support Beer's view that serious ideological differences divide the parties. However, McKenzie's belief that policy differences between the frontbenches are narrower than are differences between their backbench supporters is also confirmed. The data also indicate that the differences between the front and backbenches are greater in the Labour party than in the Conservative party, a situation that could be intrinsic to the parties or merely a function of the fact that Labour was in power when these data were collected. Finally, it is suggested that although there are significant differences between the frontbenches and an extreme wing of their respective backbenches, as McKenzie had assumed, it would be unwise to exaggerate the importance of such intraparty differences.

This paper appraises the relationship between judicial biography and judicial behavior research in two ways: (1) conceptually, by comparing them as modes of inquiry; and (2) empirically, by making an inventory of the behavioral content of 15. leading judicial biographies. The central theme is that judicial biographies and judicial behavior research are complementary. Conceptually, they have important common premises and problems as well as major differences. Empirically, judicial biographies also offer considerable insight into judicial behavior. Using generous standards, the inventory of 15 biographies derived 2,232 behavioral-like propositions in eight categories of behavioral research. More importantly, the biographies suggest a substantial number of hypotheses worthy of empirical investigation and validation. When viewed as case studies in judicial politics, judicial biographies thus become related to behavioral inquiry. And their strengths and weaknesses fall into place as reflecting properties generally associated with case study as a mode of political analysis.

By means of the Survey Research Center's national public opinion polls of the electorate during the 1956, 1960, and 1964 elections, the opinions of volunteer activists in the Republican and Democratic Parties were compared to those of rank and file members. On issues that divided rank and file Republicans from rank and file Democrats, Republican activists were found to be far more conservative than ordinary Republicans. Democratic activists, however, had about the same distribution of opinion as rank and file members of their party. Moreover, Republicans were proportionately far more active than Democrats. It was inferred from these findings that the two parties were different kinds of organizations. The Republican Party, it was argued, was a high participation party with an amateur base composed of right wing ideologues, while the Democratic Party was a low participation party with a professionalized base not dependent on ideological incentives to activism.

This study is based on a survey conducted by the author in a rural community in Egypt (a) to determine how mass media messages reach the population, (b) to identify opinion leaders, and (c) to assess the relation between mass media exposure and political awareness.

The data from this survey were used to test the two-step flow of communications hypothesis of Lazarsfeld and colleagues and to compare the effects of the mass media and opinion leaders on the public. Analysis of the data did not support the two-step flow of communications hypothesis; instead it was noted that the greater the exposure to the mass media, the more direct is the flow of communications.

Opinion leaders reached a smaller and less educated section of the population and were found to be the elected and official representatives of the village organizations rather than shopkeepers, teachers, and clergy. Finally, it was found that opinion leaders were specialized, each conveying policy information relevant to his role in the community. The flow of communications was found to be functional and organized rather than casual and haphazard as is usually the case in transmitting non-functional information.

The last part of this article deals with the relation between exposure to the mass media and political awareness. Indices were constructed to give each respondent a score on the degree of exposure to the mass media and another on his level of political awareness. Analysis showed that mass media exposure and political awareness are directly related (r = .53). It was also found that those who had direct access to the mass media were more sensitized to political news than those who had no such access, thus underlining the politicization role of the mass media.

Finally, the article compares the degree of correlation between mass media exposure and political awareness with similar correlations obtained in rural areas in Latin America.

This paper is concerned with the problem of relating aggregate coalition payoffs to the winnings of an individual player, so that some theoretical foundation might be developed for dealing with problems of coalition formation. Professor William H. Riker was concerned with this problem in his Theory of Political Coalitions; in that book he developed a formulation holding that in several common political situations players would strive to form only minimum winning coalitions. Riker based that formulation on his derivation in game theory of “the size principle,” which held that in zero-sum games among rational players with perfect information, only minimum winning coalitions would occur. The first part of this research note shows that there is a difficulty in Riker's derivation of the “size principle,” presents counter-examples to that principle, and shows that it is unsound in general. The second part of this note develops the maximum number of positive gainers principle, which shows that in the kind of games being examined there is a maximum upper limit to the number of players who will positively gain; but this does not insure that the winning coalition will be minimal.

The paper argues that while the state of mind of an agent exercising power is relevant in analyzing the concept of power, much of the discussion about whether an intention must be complied with for there to be an exercise of power misconceives the issue at stake because it overrates the extent to which human behavior is ratiocinative. The argument is developed in the course of a discussion of several hypothetical examples. One conclusion is that for a person to exercise power it is normally necessary that he should have a favorable attitude to the effects in question, the word “favorable” being used because it is highly general and hence relatively non-restrictive. The final conclusion is that the very generality of this criterion makes a precise conceptual analysis of power impossible.

In a recent article (this Review, 63 [June, 1969]), Bruce Russett attempts to answer the title question by using two-variable regression analysis to estimate the “trade-off” relationships between the defense spending proportion of Gross National Product (GNP) and the other nondefense expenditure proportions of GNP for the 1939–68 period. This paper contends that Russett's method of analysis is misleading because it does not permit the detection of possible subperiod shifts in the trade-off relationships. The results of a multiple regression, dummy variable analysis indicate that significant shifts in both the sign and the numerical values of the trade-off relationships occurred between the three war periods and the peacetime period. Two attempts to identify the reasons for the shifts produced mixed results, but our tentative conclusion is that the shifts are related to subperiod differences in the unemployment rate and the methods of financing defense expenditures.

Brams and O'Leary (this Review, 64 [June 1970], pp. 449–470) generate a model of the behavior of a voting body by first applying a simple combinatorial argument to the results of voting on a single issue and then extending this model by assuming voting behavior is independent across issues. In this note we show that their argument can be extended to cover voting across issues without relying on the assumption of independence. This alternative approach gives insight into the Brams and O'Leary model and strengthens their results by making several of their indices exact instead of approximate. Thus if the modification proposed in this note is used, the indices proposed by Brains and O'Leary can be used empirically without worrying about independence.

This note attempts to show the explanatory limits of current generalizations about political participation behavior by analyzing a deviant case (West Virginia). Voter participation patterns in West Virginia cannot be explained in terms of traditional research findings based on socioeconomic variables. The present study therefore suggests a research framework that complements the customary socioeconomic and political output analysis. Its thesis, broadly stated, is that political style, culture, and organizational variables must be included in any paradigm that attempts to explain the relationships between state political systems and voting behavior patterns. The West Virginia data support this thesis.