Abstract: This volume is a set of twelve essays in comparative analysis, built substantially on the American Enterprise Institute's At the Polls series of country studies issued in recent years. Twenty-eight countries holding regular national elections with wide suffrage make it into the volume's set: the usual assortment (at least all those with 3 million or more people), plus Colombia, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, India, Sri Lanka, and Turkey. The essays are uniformly well written, intelligent, and informative, suggesting a good editing job as well as a good choice of authors. Several of them can stand as good stateof-the-knowledge renditions on subjects of cross-national interest. David Butler supplies a good brief treatment of formal electoral systems; Leon Epstein a treatment of party organization (updating his earlier work); Howard Penniman a treatment of campaign styles and methods; Dennis Kavanagh a chapter on public-opinion polls; and Anthony Smith a piece on mass communications and their electoral effects. Austin Ranney compares nomination systems by arraying countries according to the centralization and inclusiveness (that is, how many people can participate) of their processes, and whether participation is direct or indirect. Arend Lijphart offers sensible judgments about which ideological cleavages (out of a possible seven) appear prominently in the party systems of each of the twenty-eight countries and also the European Parliament, the overall conclusion being that socioeconomic cleavages rank first, although religious cleavages rank a pretty strong second. In a treatment of campaign finance Khayyam Zev Paltiel gives attention to West Germany's party foundations, heavily funded by the government, that have reached out to strengthen allied parties elsewhere, notably in Iberia. Ivor Crewe compares voter turnout levels in the various countries, arguing among other things that turnout varies with sharpness of class or religious cleavage among parties (as calculated by Bingham Powell). Donald Stokes uses an essay on "what decides elections?" to remark on the frequency with which elections of recent times seem to have hinged on important things-the postcoup election in India in 1977, is an extreme example-and the commonality now of elections featuring "an effective competition of rival alignments" (for example, in France, West Germany, Israel, Norway, and Sweden), the dualism in some places displacing an earlier pattern of what seemed to be frozen nondualistic voter allegiances (p. 283). Anthony King's piece on "what do elections decide?" is a good think-piece for anybody trying to get a handle on the question; he takes up and appraises longitudinal approaches (for example, the work of Rudolf Klein and Andrew Cowart), promise-performance approaches (for example, Gerald Pomper), and correlational approaches (for example, Thomas Dye and David Cameron). Not to be found in the volume are treatments of the conditions that make for competitive electoral processes, treatments of frenzy or tragedy in precarious or vanished polyarchies (such as Greece, Turkey, Chile), or appraisals of matters other than electoral processes that might be thought to come under the rubric "democracy." In its tone the volume is something of a celebration of Western systems as we know them. The lead sentence in the first essay reads: "An electoral system is a means of translating the popular

Abstract: This article examines two aspects of the 1978 congressional elections. The major task undertaken involves an analysis of the type and amount of electoral competition in each of the 435 districts. H...

Abstract: This article examines the extent to which women were nominated by the major parties to run for the House of Representatives in contests they had little chance of winning. The findings indicate that...

Abstract: When the results of an analysis fly in the face both of generally accepted theory and the practice of professional politicians, it is usually a good idea to reconsider whether the point is really established. Such is the case with the small literature regarding the effects of nomination strategies on the outcomes of Dail Eireann elections that has developed in these pages since the publication of an article by Cohan, McKinlay and Mughan (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, this Journal, v (1975), 363–83). The original article made several valuable points, including a demonstration that patterns of transfer votes may be more important than the distribution of first preference votes in determining the result of elections under the single transferable vote (STV) system, and an extension of the wasted vote concept to STV, majority, and proportional elections. Unfortunately, the notes that have followed have all focused on the most questionable conclusion of the original article, that overnomination hurts a party's chances of electing the maximum possible number of deputies.

Abstract: The federal conflict of interest laws are involved in the recruiting and confirmation of the political leaders for the executive branch of our government in ways that warrant careful description and assessment. Central to the description is the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 that requires the president's nominees to disclose publicly the details of their personal financial interests, thereby creating records that the public and the press may scrutinize for potential conflicts of interest.' By manifesting the recent shift to ''sunshine" in government that markedly distinguishes public sector posts from jobs in other parts of the economy where personal and financial privacy is carefully protected, the Ethics in Government Act may be in danger of becoming a scapegoat for all that is most difficult and frustrating in presidential recruiting. Whether the Ethics in Government Act has in fact shifted the balance too far, thereby effectively barring otherwise highly-qualified persons from serving in Washington, will be the subject of congressional oversight hearings that are scheduled to take place well before the 1984 presidential election.2 At issue in these hearings will be the relative impact on presidential recruiting of such diverse factors as the Ethics Act, the long-standing conflict of interest statutes and the limitations on executive branch pay levels.3 In the meantime, however, the presidential transition has focused greater attention than ever before on efforts to prevent future conflicts by identifying and resolving problems prior to the time a presidential nominee enters office. For persons who do agree to accept nomination by the president to Senate-confirmed positions, the confirmation process itself can be a most rigorous test. As evidence of how central the conflict of interest issue has become, each committee of the Senate now refrains from reporting presidential nominees to the full Senate for confirmation prior to receipt of assurance from the Office of Government Ethics that the nominees will be able to assume office legally uncompromised by their personal financial interests. Although most of this practice regarding the identification of conflicts of interest is new, the related substantive law is not. President Reagan's administration is the first to come into office since the passage of the Ethics in Government Act which, in addition to its public financial disclosure requirements, also established the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) to provide overall direction of executive branch policies related to preventing conflicts of inter-

Abstract: terpretation must have some inferences, but their overuse will soon exhaust the author's credit with the reader, leaving no basis for distinguishing between "recovering" a theorist's intentions and an interpreter's arbitrary assignment of intentions to him. Nevertheless, A Discourse on Property presents a serious case for revising our thinking about Locke's attitude towards property, and the role played by his discussion of that institution in the context of the political argument of the Two Treatises.

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Abstract: speed with which political information is transmitted to a mass audience. Yet television newscasting, in adhering to conventions of fairness or balance and reflecting the Progressives' distrust of political party, tends to promulgate anti-partisan views of politics, a tendency most pronounced in its depicting the primary process as the genuinely democratic way of nominating presidents. The effect, says Rubin, has been to grease the downward slide of parties in the political process. The bureaucratic specialization of the print press, he might have added, facilitates dissemination of demands by non-party groups in the polity. One consequence of the new politics has been a succession of one-term presidents, each enjoying only brief moments of political effectiveness. The author traces the weakened presidency to an erosion of what Neustadt calls "public prestige," the perception in the eyes of Washingtonians of how their publics-and the president's-are likely to react to the president's acts in office. (It is often confused with popularity, as measured by the president's approval or disapproval rating in the Gallup poll.) Without a stable base for public prestige in party loyalty, presidential popularity has become very volatile. More broadly, presidents today suffer from the lack of correspondence among the coalition they need for getting the nomination, the coalition they need for gaining election, and the coalition they need for governing, once in office. One possible response to this new political environment is the traditional favorite of political science: a disciplined and responsible party government. That was, more or less, the response of the Reaganauts, who ran for election on a set of national themes with centralized financing. The election of 1980 was the triumph of party organization, not of single-issue groups. Rubin's book, in directing attention away from the direct political effects of the news media and toward their indirect effects, especially on institutions, addresses a significant set of questions, propounds a concisely and provocatively stated thesis, and performs a service for those who teach, study, and practice American politics in the 1980s.

Abstract: Representational Role Theory is applied to presidential nominating conventions. Delegates to the 1976 Democratic convention are compared to the voters who selected their slates in 10 key presidential preference primaries. Because of party rule restrictions on delegates' behavior, representational roles are not pertinent to what is typically the most important decision of the convention, the first ballet vote for the party's presidential nominee. However, role orientations appear to be useful in understanding two other sets of decisions: (1) the creation of the party platform and (2) voting for the party's presidential nominee in the event that the nomination requires more than one ballot. Other than the first ballot, the Delegate role is not very popular among convention delegates.

Abstract: state M a s s a c h u s e t t s C O { j e 025 county Midd les -ex code WI 7 3. Classification Category O w n e r s h i p S ta tus Present U s e district X publ ic X occup ied agriculture m u s e u m A building(s) pr ivate unoccup ied _X commerc ia l park structure both work in p rogress educat ional ^_ pr ivate residence site Publ ic Acqu is i t ion Access ib le entertainment rel igious object in p rocess y e s : restricted gove rnmen t scientif ic N/ A being cons ide red X y e s : unrestr icted industrial t ransportat ion no military other: 4. Owner of Property

Abstract: This article is concerned with the decline of American party organizations and, in particular, with the role of amateur (issue-oriented) activists in contributing to this. It focuses on two main problems. The first is the relevance of the post-1968 Democratic party reforms in destroying the role of party in presidential nominations. Contrary to a widely held view, it is argued that a decentralized system of nomination would have emerged in an ‘unreformed’ party. Secondly, the decline of the Democratic club movement is examined. It is argued that the clubs did not develop as major institutions within the party, and that they were an appropriate form of organization for liberals in only very restricted circumstances. The example of Denver is used to illustrate this argument. The decline of the clubs in those parts of America where they had become established is traced to one of three possible causes, each of which would be a sufficient condition for the collapse of the club movement. In conclusion it is argued that the clubs were a transitory form of political organization, linking the period of political machines with that of candidate-centred politics. Rather than destroying the parties, if anything, they served in the 1950s and early 1960s to diffuse potential anti-partyism.

Abstract: Party nominations, we attempt to show by example, can be better understood by explicitly adapting certain aspects of electoral theory to the study of parties. Specifically, the common view (based mostly on impression instead of evidence) that McGovern's nomination was the result of a surge of amateurs is considered first. The implicit surge-and-decline mechanism underlying this view is elaborated in a manner making it applicable to convention delegates; then it is used for the 1972 Democrats to demonstrate that such a surge, properly interpreted, did in fact occur. The surge approach appears, however, to be useful also in the comparison of diverse nominations, to assess even a nomination representing the very opposite of an insurgent's—the nearly unanimous renomination of a president. To illustrate the potential for broader applicability, the 1972 Republican delegates are considered within the framework of amateur surges. To the extent that this approach can be successfully applied to 1972, and beyond, the study of parties may benefit from electoral theory.