Search

The article discusses issues related to subjective powerlessness in the U.S. The paper focuses on changes since 1952 in citizen efficacy or feelings of control over government for various sub-groups in the U.S. population such as blacks, blue collar workers, Southerners, Jews, young and old people. As with most issues in the study of social change, there is widespread disagreement on trends in citizen efficacy for industrial societies such as the U.S. Most theory predicts trends in objective powerlessness, rather than subjective powerlessness, although it is possible that trends in objective powerlessness do not match trends in subjective powerlessness. Within the U.S. at each point of observation, powerlessness does not vary much by stratum, except when education and race are used as indicators. And within the white population, some of the differences are heavily explained by educational differentials. It therefore seems fair to conclude that white subordinate interest groups are not oriented toward government as a result of what would seem to be objective powerlessness but more on the basis of their educational achievement.

The article discusses various issues related to welfare research. One of the biggest conceptual dilemmas in welfare research is the definitional problem. A few social scientists have stepped back from empirical data and have developed a panoramic view of the welfare system or have struggled to provide a conceptual framework for a field one might term the social science of welfare. These analysts have not been content with the everyday situation. Even among those who have made important contributions toward delineating a science of social welfare there is as yet no agreement on what should or should not be included in definitions, and by implication social science analyses, of social welfare. Despite definitional limitations, current welfare research has developed substantial information about public assistance programs and recipients. Several research papers, particularly that of economists, have zeroed in on the determinants of work-welfare choices. In spite of the growing literature on recipients little attention has been given to demographic or ecological analysis. Since public assessments have accentuated speculative propositions linking demographic change to welfare problems, it would be appropriate for more social scientists to undertake such analysis.

In this paper, the authors will critically examine a central, though neglected, aspect of political socialization research--the learning concept. Following a discussion of the current status of the learning concept, they propose a research strategy towards the operationalization of the concept in political socialization research and exemplify the approach with a specific learning paradigm adopted from experimental psychology. In a field such as psychology which evidences a long history of research in the study of learning as a general concept, there is a sharp disagreement as to what precisely is meant by "the learning process." Since psychologists differ with regard to the learning process, the unqualified utilization of the concept within political socialization research is highly questionable. Moreover, the failure to explicate clearly the meaning of the learning process in political socialization research has precluded the establishment of the "empirical import" of the concept. Inclusion of the term "political learning" as an integral element in a synthetic mode of discourse requires that the empirical import of the term be established.

The article presents response of the author on comments made by Kenneth P. Hadden on the article "Migration Attractiveness of Southern Metropolitan Areas" that was published in the September 1969 issue of the periodical "Social Science Quarterly." Hadden's criticism of great width, breadth, depth and scope does raise several salient questions. His exposition to the title of my effort to examine the net migration rates of Southern Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas' (SMSA) is crucial rather than semantical or trivial. Some, noting the paper's claim that it sought one possible route to explanation of the factors associated with the patterns of net migration might think it obvious migration attractiveness was operationalized by self-definition in terms of its measure. Hadden has evidently penetrated behind this veneer to the study's philosophical and theoretical underpinnings and recognized that the actual objective must have been to study migration attractiveness sui generis rather than to assess the importance of various characteristics of SMSA units on the size, rate, and direction of the net migration patterns of these areas between 1950 and 1960. I stipulate to what Hadden styles an atheoretical orientation in failing to make the theoretical rationale explicit.

The relationship between social class, authoritarianism, and foreign policy attitudes has been re-examined in the light of evidence from a national survey and other studies. These data indicate that, contrary to the suggestion of Hamilton's recent paper, lower class people are not consistently more conciliatory on foreign policy issues than are those of higher social class. The attitudes of lower class people appear to be more consistently characterized by a preference for noninvolvement in foreign affairs. Such a preference for isolation from foreigners is congruent with the ideology which has been called authoritarianism. However, the preference for conciliatory over aggressive foreign policy actions which lower class persons sometimes show is not congruent with authoritarianism. This suggests that, although lower class persons may be more authoritarian, their foreign policy attitudes are determined mainly by other factors. The data reviewed suggest also that foreign policy attitudes can be understood best not in terms of a single orientation toward conciliation versus militancy but in terms of several basic orientations. It may prove useful to characterize specific foreign policy positions in terms of their position on the dimensions of (1) involvement-noninvolvement; (2) dominance-submissiveness; and (3) friendliness-hostility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion related to Jack P. Gibbs' work on analytical typologies in criminology. Gibbs treated as problematic an issue that has been closed for students in the field for sometime. The research was competent, its limitations clearly spelled out for the reader, and the results carefully tied to theory. Certainly, none of the others have attracted as much attention. Expectedly, the best scholarship was to be found among the papers on social theory. Unfortunately, most of these were agonizing efforts over where sociology has been and ineffectual attempts to redirect activity in a more promising direction. One has to constantly remind oneself that sociology began with three interests in mind, a distinctive subject matter, social reform, and the application of the scientific method to social behavior; that one is perilously close to forsaking the first two in mindless deference to the last in that important questions go unasked because one cannot attack them scientifically; that the questions one asks are becoming more and more scientific but more and more trivial, and, in so doing, one is, if not becoming psychologists, following psychology down the path to intellectual oblivion.

The article presents a pioneer study of contemporary significance in electoral behavior in reference to a paper on this issue written by Roscoe C. Martin. As far as taste is concerned there was a bias at the outset for selecting an article representing a contribution to an empirically based political science. Martin's piece certainly meets that standard. The article is an early attempt to investigate in a systematic, quantitative fashion a problem that has received considerable attention in more recent volumes of the Quarterly and other scholarly journals, the question of voting behavior in state and local elections. Martin's report of the socioeconomic and institutional factors associated with an Austin municipal election in 1933 precedes the major voting studies conducted on the national, state, and local levels by several years, even decades. But it is not enough merely to say that this study broke new ground in an era when political scientists generally took only marginal interest in studying electoral data; it is also worth remarking that Martin did so in a manner that is still significant for contemporary students of voting.

Presents an introduction to papers related to sociology that appear in the December 1974 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly."

The article presents comments of the author on the papers "Toward a Reconciliation of Institutional Economics and Its Critics," by Coldwell Daniel and "Beyond the Market Economy Building Institutions That Work," by Clarence E. Ayres that were published in the March 1970 issue of the periodical "Social Science Quarterly." The author's purpose in writing this comment is to attempt again the reconciliation of institutional and conventional economics. The first step in reconciliation is to differentiate the two theories. Ayres' great contribution to economic theory is his application of scholar John Dewey's instrumental theory of normative value to economics. Ayres' methodology is pragmatic and inductive, and his theory is clearly in the category of normative economics--the theory of what ought to be. It is equally clear that conventional theory uses a deductive methodology and that the resulting theory is positive economics-the theory of what is. It is obviously true that there are positive implications of Ayres' institutional theory and normative implications of conventional theory; but these implications are not essential to the respective theories. If these non-essential implications are eliminated, then Ayres' institutionalism and conventional theory become completely compatible. There are, also, deductive normative economic theories.