In this paper, I examine two key relationships relevant to the comparative study of policy implementation. The first is the linkage between the structure of elites, techniques of mobilization, and local policy implementation. Although many studies of elites have emphasized the effects of integration on political stability, they have only recently addressed the question of how elite integration affects policy implementation. More specifically, how does the existence of elites that are deeply divided over policy issues affect the power capabilities and opportunities of those elites and, therefore, the methods they employ to mobilize support for their policies? And how do these techniques affect the pattern

Regional conflicts have played a major role in American interpretations of Soviet foreign policy. They have affected judgments about Soviet intentions and have served as a barometer of Moscow's competitiveness. This study looks at the change in Soviet policy under Gorbachev. It proposes a strategic framework for the analysis of Soviet behavior and then examines Moscow's actions in terms of military support, active involvement, and the terms for peace. Special attention is paid to Soviet behavior in Southwest Asia. The study finds that Soviet behavior changed but in ways that were more subtle than often realized. Moscow pulled back having achieved partial success through compromise more often than it retreated in defeat. The shift to a strategy of detente had numerous causes, but a simple American peace-through-strength explanation that stresses external constraints and Soviet internal weakness is inadequate. Such explanations underestimate the importance of changing perceptions of threat and mistakenly affirm a deterrence conception of reciprocity (i.e., that force begets restraint). The evidence in regional conflicts suggests that a spiral model of reciprocity (i.e., that escalation begets escalation) is more apt.

JAPAN'S response to the intrusion of the West, by contrast with the response of China and other Asian nations, has long intrigued statesmen and scholars. Generalizations about Asia, its cultural traditions, its policies, its economic development, are especially difficult to fit to the Japanese. “Japan is of course sui generis,” says O. H. K. Spate, the British geographer, and few will disagree.

“Realism” and “idealism” are both terms which have been used in differing, sometimes opposite, senses in the history of philosophy. They must therefore be employed with great caution. Dr. John H. Herz, in his recent study of the application of these terms to politics, seeks to define the sense in which he uses them. He writes in his preface that the book was in the main finished when the last war was ended and that little which had happened since required modification of his conclusions. To the reviewer it seems that further thought on the concepts employed in a perspective more removed from the disturbing influences of the war period would have been desirable.

The adaptation of the United States to its declining role as a superpower is examined through an inquiry into the belief systems of the society's leaders. Three sets of mutually exclusive domestic policy belief systems are identified, along with three sets of mutually exclusive foreign policy belief systems. The degree to which they are linked to each other is explored, and the connections are found to be tenuous—suggesting that the cleavages at work in American society are more enduring and less subject to change than may be readily apparent. The last section of the paper uses more recent data from a sample of American leaders to examine the degree to which foreign policy belief systems are susceptible to change over time, allowing for an analysis of the extent to which the hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan affected pre-existing belief systems. The overall finding is that the impact was negligible, and that foreign policy belief systems are largely resistant to change.

One of the sorest needs in the social sciences is for clear and concise conceptual equipment to give structure to disciplines and order to the range of hypotheses these disciplines purport to explore. Perhaps nowhere is this need for conceptual equipment more pressing, however, than in that amorphous area of study that examines the broad range of social processes gathered under the rubric of “modernization.” Depending on one's perspective, the process of modernization is either primarily economic, or political, or psychological, or social, or technological, or all of the above. Like the elephant in the old tale, the beast is different depending on who touches it and where.

After having suffered from the self-inflicted wounds of internal convulsions and diplomatic isolation during the Cultural Revolution, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has returned to the world diplomatic scene with a new, vigorous, and imaginative foreign policy. To appreciate its dimensions fully, one must recall that China's foreign policy was left largely unprotected from the disruptive spillovers of the domestic quarrels during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards not only sacked the British chancery in Peking, but also seized their own Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1967. By November 1967, forty-four out of forty-five ambassadors were called home for “rectification,” leaving the durable Huang Hua in Cairo as the PRC's sole representative abroad. China's trade also suffered; by the end of September 1967, Peking had been involved in disputes of varying intensity with some thirty-two nations. However, the transition from revolutionary turmoil to pragmatic reconstruction came through a series of decisions made by Mao Tse-tung and his close advisors beginning in late July 1968 and culminating at the First Plenum of the Ninth Party Congress held in April 1969, ushering in a new era in Chinese foreign policy. toward the United Nations may be characterized as one of “love me or leave me, but don't leave me alone,” evolving through the stages of naive optimism, frustration, disenchantment, anger, and lingering envy and hope, the PRC's support of the principles of the United Nations Charter had remained largely unaffected from 1945 to 1964. However, the Indonesian withdrawal on January 7, 1965, triggered off a process of negative polemics against the United Nations. Indeed, Peking's bill of complaints against the United Nations was broad and sweeping: that blind faith in the United Nations had to be stopped because the organization was by no means sacred and inviolable; that by committing sins of commission and omission, the United Nations had become an adjunct of the U.S. State Department; that the United Nations had become a channel for United States economic and cultural penetration into Asian, African, and Latin American countries; and that the United Nations in the final analysis was a paper tiger.

Few students of the Soviet political scene have used coalition theory to explain Soviet behavior. However, the fact that coalitions are assumed to exist suggests that the different elements of coalition theory—coalition formation and coalition maintenance—may be useful for the study of Soviet decision making. Because the Soviet political system has evolved to the point where the elements that are vital to preserving coalitions are also an integral part of the Soviet system (e.g., fear of the alternative to the coalition, unanimity rule in decision making, the existence of a power broker, and the exclusion of contentious issues), the operation of coalition maintenance may describe the decision-making process. If that is so, the key institutional actors in the Soviet hierarchy must be minimally satisfied before major decisions can be reached. Although elite harmony and coalition stability are ensured thereby, lowest-common-denominator policies will serve to rule out fundamental changes or reform attempts that are necessary for coping with emerging problems. As emerging economic problems make it difficult to satisfy the incremental demands from elite actors and the society at large, it is quite possible that the current decision-making process, or the distribution of power it ensures, will not endure.

The concept of a profession as a social institution is a rather nebulous one. It is sometimes used to refer to any clearly defined vocational group. More traditionally it refers to a “learned profession,” the classic examples of which are divinity, medicine, and the law. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (Vol. XII, p. 478) defines a profession, in this sense, as “a vocation founded upon prolonged and specialized intellectual training which enables a particular service to be rendered.” It is this meaning of the term that is here intended.

How influential are international courts? Can their rulings reach beyond a given case and affect the behavior of countries not party to the dispute? International law is clear on the matter: rulings have no formal authority beyond the case at hand. This tenet is consistent with the incentives of sovereign states wary of delegating too much authority to courts. By contrast, the authors claim that even in the absence of formal authority, the rulings of international courts can affect behavior by mobilizing pro-compliance groups in countries not party to a dispute. They test these beliefs in the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO) through a novel approach. Because WTO rulings have implications for the fortunes of publicly traded firms, they examine whether financial markets bet on there being spillover effects beyond the case at hand. They rely on two quantitative case studies to test for a cross-border and a cross-industry spillover effect: can rulings have effects in countries and on industries other than those at issue in the initial dispute? The results suggest that the answer is a tentative yes. The spillover effects of international rulings may be a matter of scholarly contention, but their existence is something that financial markets appear willing to bet on.

Dictators depend on a committed bureaucracy to implement their policy preferences. But how do they induce loyalty and effort within their civil service? The authors study indoctrination through forced military service as a cost-effective strategy for achieving this goal. Conscription allows the regime to expose recruits, including future civil servants, to intense “political training” in a controlled environment, which should improve system engagement. To test this hypothesis, the authors analyze archival data on over 370,000 cadres from the former German Democratic Republic. Exploiting the introduction of mandatory service in the gdr in 1962 for causal identification, they find a positive effect of conscription on bureaucrats’ system engagement. Additional analyses indicate that this effect likely did not result from deep norm internalization. Findings are more compatible with the idea that political training familiarized recruits with elite preferences, allowing them to behave strategically in accordance with the rules of the game.

Is anyone's esteem for political science better suppressed than a political scientist's? Ordinary modesty is admirable, but his is professionally destructive. For, not only hiding his light under a bushel, he follows the more nihilistic course of blowing it out. Granted that many political scientists neither deprecate their discipline nor permit a low regard for it to stultify their work, I have been repeatedly assured by members of the profession that no social science is more retarded and none less promising for systematic theory. Thus they hide—even from their own eyes—their discipline's accomplishments. This I shall try to show, offering two books as evidence. There is other evidence, too. When even politically ignorant undergraduates complain that the major in political science is thin, no imaginable poverty of the field explains enough. Such a phenomenon proves concealment, either deliberate or unintended.

Economic reform in Communist states is usually evaluated in terms of a dichotomy between traditional “command” economies and systems in which production and investment decisions are “decentralized” in the hands of immediate producers. This distinction tends to be misleading, especially when applied to multinational and/or federal states. This is the case for two reasons. First, the concept of decentralization may be disaggregated into a number of political and economic policy packages whose goals are not necessarily compatible. Second, differences in policy preferences among sub-national leaders are resolved in favor of a particular set of alternatives by the form of decentralization chosen at the national level. In Yugoslavia, decentralist reforms have subordinated the goal of reducing interregional economic inequality to the goals of rapid and stable economic growth, despite the fact that both “decentralist” goals have been equally espoused by federal planners.

Recent micro-level studies of rural communities in the developing areas address themselves to three basic issues: (1) What are the major external forces that determine the welfare of persons residing in rural areas? (2) How do peasants respond to these forces? (3) What ethical evaluations are to be made of the outcome of the encounter between peasant communities and the forces intruding upon them from their environment? By addressing these questions, and by formulating and utilizing explicit models of peasant behavior, these studies provide a coherent approach to the study of the developing areas.

Recent discussions whether or not the United States is strategically “overextended” raise two important questions. First, to what extent can the fiscal and industrial difficulties of the last several decades be attributed to the comparatively high military budgets of the post-1945 period? Second, can the United States continue to maintain something resembling its postwar strategic posture without doing itself grievous economic harm? Although the issue remains open, defense spending would appear to bear only a small part of the responsibility for present U.S. economic problems. As to the future, the question is not so much whether the burden of an extended posture can be borne as whether it should be borne, and who, precisely, should bear it. These are political issues: they are conditioned but not determined by economic factors.

The writings of the so-called Cold-War revisionists have had a powerful impact in recent years. In the case of the new generation coming to political awareness, analogies drawn or suggested between Vietnam and the period of the origins of the Cold War carry immediate conviction: many others have had their image of contemporary history challenged or even shattered, and those not persuaded by the revisionist case would acknowledge that important questions have been raised. Undoubtedly circumstances have favored the revisionist critique.

Private investment in Latin America by citizens of the United States, as well as in other less-developed areas of the world, is widely regarded as a valuable—if not an indispensable—component of the overall U.S. foreign assistance program. By quickly identifying and exploring promising new business opportunities, and by providing financial resources and human skills required to translate them into going ventures, U.S. investment activities can make a vital contribution to economic development. Recognizing the role of private investment in furthering its national interests, the U.S. government has for a number of years sought to promote the flow of new investment: a rapidly growing investment guarantee program, direct government loans to eligible private investors, and investment information services are some of the instruments employed by the government in pursuing this objective. To provide additional incentives, a bill currently before Congress stipulates that U.S. investors making certain kinds of new investments in eligible, less-developed countries would be permitted to deduct 30 per cent of the cost of the investment from their total federal income-tax obligations.

It is possible to contend that in political science today, and particularly with regard to international politics, there is a significant trend towards interpreting events in termsof “power.” This trend has stimulated controversy between those who assert that the study of politics is that of the struggle for power and those who hold that such a study must incorporate other and contradictory values. This paper is not an attempt, directly, to resolve these differences. Rather, it is based squarely on the supposition that power does constitute the generalized end of politics, an end which is basic as a means to other innumerable and variegated ultimate ends. Granted this supposition, however, it is contended that there does not yet exist a structure of analysis dealing with the processes involved in the attainment of this generalized end—a conceptual structure comparable to that of economics, which deals with the attainment of the generalized end of wealth. The purpose of this paper, then, is to propose a skeleton upon which a formal body of political theory might be constructed. For until such a body of ideas about the processes of coercion exists, little progress is likely to be made in resolving the wider controversy mentioned above.

The share of basic services that NGOs deliver has grown dramatically in developing countries due to increased receipt of aid and philanthropy in these countries. Many scholars and practitioners worry that NGOs reduce reliance on government services and, in turn, lower demand for government provision and undermine political engagement. Others argue that NGOs prop-up poorly performing governments that receive undeserved credit for the production, allocation, or welfare effects of NGO services. Using original surveys and a randomized health intervention, implemented in parallel to a similar universal government program, this article investigates the long-term effect of NGO provision on political attitudes and behavior. Access to NGO services increased preferences for NGO, relative to government, provision. However, political engagement and perceptions of government legitimacy were unaffected. Instead, the intervention generated political credit for the incumbent president. This study finds that citizens see NGOs as a resource that powerful government actors control, and they reward actors who they see as responsible for allocation of those resources.