Search

The article analyzes merchant behavior in ghetto marketplaces. For this purpose, the article presents two position papers taking different perspectives in regard to a possible explanation for the racial-ethnic differences found through previous research. Walter E. Williams, research economist with the Urban Institute, criticizes previous articles on the grounds that they fail to suggest a behavioral model of merchant behavior and because they fail to suggest effective policy measures to modify this behavior. Williams suggests a rational behavior model: that minorities are characterized by more unemployment, higher residential mobility, and lower income, and that merchants use this readily accessible information to determine creditworthiness. Frederick D. Sturdivant, Meshulam Riklis Professor of Business and Its Environment at the Ohio State University, suggests that the economic model employed by Williams is outdated and inappropriate, that the behavioral model encourages racist stereotyping.

The article presents information on position papers on international exchange rates. International economic transactions are effected, directly or indirectly, through the exchange of national currencies. Obviously, therefore, the rates at which currencies exchange in such transactions is of extreme importance. Public debate relating to foreign trade is hardly a recent phenomenon. However, from mid-sixteenth century until the mid-1930's, most discussions presupposed either specie flow or fixed exchange rates with bullion convertibility, even when conditions and national objectives were changing drastically. Then, Henry C. Simons, in a series of essays, provided the context and one side's basic arguments for today's most interesting and lively debate. Certainly in the U.S. where bullion convertibility is no longer a real possibility so that changes in the size of the nation's money stock could no longer be tied critically, in any truly permanent and rigorous way, to changes in the size of the nation's "treasure," the crucial policy question now is what sort of exchange-rate system would contribute more to the attainment of the generally accepted and conflicting goals.

The article discusses Mexican American, Negro, and Anglo improvement in labor force status between 1960 and 1970 in Racine, Wisconsin. This paper is concerned with the level of economic absorption of immigrants (compared to the Anglo population in Racine) as measured by changes in their occupation, income, and employment status between 1960 and 1970-71. The paper utilized U.S. Census data for 1960 and 1970 in order to compare Mexican Americans and Anglos in Texas and Negroes and Whites in Mississippi with their counterparts in Racine. Statistics generated from the Texas, Mississippi, and Racine Census data were in turn compared with statistics based on the authors' survey research data. The latter were taken from a longitudinal study of the processes of economic absorption and cultural integration among samples of predominantly immigrant Mexican Americans and Negroes, whose 1960 and 1971 interview data were compared with that of a control group of Anglos, half of whom were themselves immigrants.

The article presents a paper that proposes a four step strategy for locating urban population service facilities. Although developed with regard to a specific problem, dealing with a system of public day care centers, the strategy has considerable generality and is applicable to a wide variety of situations and scales. Since population service agencies typically operate under budget, manpower, and other constraints that restrict the number and size of facilities and preclude serving the entire population, particular attention is given to applying the locational strategy to that situation. This includes illustrating the procedure by examining the need for public day care service among the poor in Columbus, Ohio, and locational options for a system of public day care centers in its Model Cities area. The total costs of implementing the locational strategy described in this paper were substantial. Those related to estimating and mapping the demand or need surface for day care service, which in itself would provide valuable information for a service or planning agency, are relatively small.

The article presents a paper that has attempted to illuminate the problem of the persistence of specific organizational forms, a problem which has received some theoretical attention, but for which few operational clues exist. A notable exception is researcher Arthur L. Stinchcombe's hypothesis stating that when organizational elite structures are compatible with the interests and purposes of relevant external elites who control the resources upon which the organization depends, then the organizational form has a better chance of survival. The example analyzed in this paper was that of a city police control system that by all odds should have died a hundred years ago. The first task of this paper was to show how the Police Control Board, gradually worked out a routine police control operation that proved to be of great comfort and satisfaction to nervous elites suspicious of the city's will and ability to keep the dangerous classes in check. The second task of this paper was to analyze the social backgrounds of commissioners in order to show that they could hardly be anything but acceptable to elites since they themselves were recruited from elites and brought an elite perspective into the organization.

The article presents a paper that summarizes the present status of output measurement in urban government--the state of the art as well as the use being made of it--and discusses briefly prospects for its use and further development in the immediate future. The paper is concerned with measurement of both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of local government services. Two services, solid waste collection and recreation, are used to illustrate problems of measuring output and how they are being resolved. An important quality factor of solid waste collection is the resulting cleanliness. To measure this output the Washington D.C. government has implemented a method of inspector ratings of street and alley litter conditions. Three general conclusions regarding the present state of output measurement in local governments emerge from the two surveys. First, most governments collect some data on quantitative outputs. Second, some local governments collect data on qualitative aspects of output. And third, the state of measurements varies dramatically by service or program area.

This paper examines fertility differentials by income among Mexican Americans, taking these problems as points of departure. The paper first considers alternative hypotheses relevant to the income-fertility relations. Then it proposes a decomposition of the income variable as a preliminary strategy for dealing with the problem of measuring income posed by the economic theory. Finally, it examines the relations between the income components and fertility, as well as their interaction with other variables, and discuss the results in terms of their implications for the economic theory of family formation. The analysis of the relations between social status income and relative income and fertility is based on data from the 1969 Austin, Texas Family Survey, which consisted of a sample of 348 Mexican American couples, married three years or more, in which the wife was no older than 35, married once, and the husband was no older than 50. The unusual restrictions on duration of marriage were made in order to concentrate on that stage in the family life cycle when couples would have had a reasonable opportunity to have had children and possibly to have considered family limitation.

This paper, which focuses substantively on the demography of the militant segregationist vote in the post-Brown years, uses the state as the principal unit of analysis and seeks to test V.O. Key's argument on an explicitly comparative basis. The significance of the topic extends beyond the question of the applicability of Key's general theory of southern racial politics to elections in 11 different states. The paper has attempted to show that a parsimonious theory of the politics of race, Key's black belt hypothesis, is still highly relevant to an understanding of southern politics. Even if attention is restricted to the size of the black population and urban-rural differences, much can be learned concerning the structure of electoral cleavages. Comparative analysis of the core militant segregationist vote within and between the 11 southern states demonstrated that consistent support for selected militant segregationists in the post-Brown era typically increased along a demographic continuum from large metropolitan centers to rural counties with high black populations. The geographic sectionalism of the segregationist vote was clearly established through maps; and most of the deviant segregationist counties were explained by variables related to the black belt hypothesis.

This article presents a study, discusses the trends in fertility of Mexican Americans. The present paper will examine trends in Mexican American fertility in comparison to Anglo American fertility from 1950 to 1970 in the southwestern states. Attention will be devoted primarily to cumulative fertility rather than current fertility since the former measure is the only one available for all the time periods and areas studied. The principal obstacle to investigation of the dynamics of the Mexican American population is the inconsistency in definition and identification of the population over a substantial time span. The Mexican American population has been variously defined operationally by race in the 1930 Census, by Spanish mother tongue in the 1940 Census, by Spanish surname in the 1950 and 1960 Censuses, and by questions on origin or descent in the November 1969 Current Population Survey. Information compiled in the 1970 Census will allow tabulations of data according to varying combinations of mother tongue, Spanish surname and Spanish origin or descent. At the time this paper went to press, the materials published from the 1970 Census relating to the Mexican American population consisted only of data for the population of Spanish language or Spanish surname.

The article presents the authors' reply to the criticism of their paper "Notes on the Color of the Volunteer Army," published in the December 1969 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly." In their paper they argued that a predominantly black army would probably not result from the shift to an all volunteer military system (AVMS). They also argued that the shift to the AVMS might actually have detrimental effects on the employment prospects of African Americans and other disadvantaged groups. The criticism of the demand side of their analysis is based on an implausible assumption that if conscription is abolished, it seems likely that the price of human capital will rise relative to the price of nonhuman capital and labor. What is dubious is the additional implicit assumption that the wages of human capital will also rise relative to the wages of unskilled labor. In fact the opposite assumption seems far more plausible. If one takes the remuneration of officers as indicative of the salaries paid to educated or skilled military employees, and the salaries paid to low ranking enlisted men as indicative of pay scales for unskilled military labor, it can be argued that the salaries of officers currently approximate the free market more closely than the wages of low ranking enlisted personnel.

The article presents information on the paper titled "Prestige and Esteem As Power Components: An Experimental Analysis," by E. Gartly Jaco. This paper is appealing for a number of reasons. It is an empirical study, but one with theoretical implications and relationships which are clearly delineated. This represents research as it should be. As an empirical test of the basic concepts of prestige and esteem, the research is not an effort to stand alone, but rather to contribute to the building of a body of knowledge relating to personal power and its exercise. As such, a number of theoretical conclusions are drawn, providing the suggestion and the basis for further research. For example, the contention that prestige sets a limit on the range of esteem a person may achieve requires additional examination of the dimensions of power and the relation of those dimensions to social stratification. Jaco's suggestion that, in a static society, personal power tends to be concentrated in prestige, while in a highly mobile society it may be centered in esteem, also deserves further consideration.

The article focuses on the author's response to the paper "Theories of Policy Outputs, and Assessing Measurement Error: Comments on Liebert," by Terry Nichols Clark, that appears in the December 1974 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly." Many theories, including the original decentralization theory by Clark, employ expenditures as an indicator of local effort in generating public goods, pertain to the effects of the structure and dynamics of community-based political actors working through municipal government, and are concerned in some way with all of that government's programs. Clearly, for this general paradigm, some procedure is needed to reduce or eliminate extraneous effects on expenditures by such phenomena as differential state assignment of governmental functions or functional inclusiveness. With this there seems to be agreement, as well as with the finding that the relationship reported by Clark between his measure of decentralization among reputed elites and aggregate municipal expenditures drops nearly to zero when an indicator of functional inclusiveness is introduced as a control.

The article focuses on an examination of urban mortality using age-adjusted death rates. Authors Kent P. Schwirian and Anthony J. LaGreca attempted to assess the relative impact of demographic, environmental, and social organizational factors upon differential death rates. Their data led them to conclude that mortality may be explained largely in terms of subarea differences in age structure, social status levels, and housing conditions. With respect to ecological theory per se, and more specifically the ecosystem frame of reference, Schwirian and LaGreca have made a significant contribution. Prior to their analysis there was little research on the impact of ecological variables on mortality, especially within the perspective of neoclassical human ecology. The paper aims to demonstrate that the use of a crude, rather than an age-adjusted, death rate at best confounds the theoretical issues of the causal model, and leaves unanswered any question concerning the precise empirical impact that environmental and social variables have on urban mortality.

The article discusses the effect of alternative age adjustment procedures on the analysis of urban mortality patterns. Analyses of mortality differences among populations need a single index of the overall mortality experience of each population. The conclusions one draws about the nature of mortality's correlates are a function of the type age adjustment used. In this paper housing was more important than income in explaining variations in the crude death rate and the indirect standardized rate. However, income was more important than housing in explaining variations in the direct standardized rate. Indirect standardization in itself is not necessarily enough to eliminate the compositional effect of age. Attention must be given to the extent to which there is a correspondence between the standard population's age-specific rates and those for the population studied. Census tracts, since their populations are comparatively small, are quite subject to great fluctuations in the number of deaths per year in the different age categories.

The article focuses on the relationships of information and personal characteristics to vote choice. This paper discusses one aspect of an electoral campaign, a campaign debate, by which information about candidates and their stands on political issues are communicated to the voter. A political campaign permits candidates to communicate to voters. In the process of communicating, the candidates attempt to project favorable images, discuss the issues most helpful to themselves, and manipulate symbols to elicit voter support. The media links candidates to publics by serving as a conduit for informational exchanges. As a conduit the press relies primarily on information provided by the candidates, seeing itself as mirroring events, with the result that the public is provided a bland, uniform, filling, but not satisfying diet of campaign information. In dealing with the supply of information, the usual psychological and sociological variables may be included as modifiers of informational exchanges.

The article focuses on issues related to voter registration and voting in the U.S. Of the decisions the potential voter must make, one may indeed be whether to participate in the presidential election. More often, however, the potential voter must decide whether to vote in mayoral, city council, or other local elections. Though these latter races are far more common than the selection of a president, the great bulk of electoral research has used presidential elections as the focal point. And this overemphasis is substantially magnified in voting behavior texts, which consistently disregard elections below the national level. This lack of attention to local elections would not constitute a serious problem if it could be convincingly demonstrated that one can generalize from the national to the local level. There are strong reason to believe that the findings of national studies are often inapplicable to local voting behavior. This paper focuses on one area of significant difference between national and municipal voting, the influence of registration on turnout.

The article focuses on the discrimination against Negroes and Puerto Ricans in the New York Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA). The paper is concerned with an assessment of the impact of occupational and educational differences on 1970 earnings levels of White, Negro, and Puerto Rican males in the New York SMSA. The analysis suggests that earnings differences between races largely reflect real skill differences rather than color based employer discrimination. It has been suggested that individuals within given occupations, especially in narrowly defined occupations, are likely to be of equal productivity. However, despite being rather detailed, the census occupational data are in no way sufficiently disaggregated to warrant the assumption of equal efficiency. Furthermore, within narrowly defined occupations there are likely to be productivity differences between workers as a result of differences in native ability, education, and training. Therefore, an attempt has been made to account for differences in skills.

The article focuses on the relationship between city characteristics and racial violence in the U.S. Previous research examining the impact of city characteristics on racial violence has generally failed to support most commonly asserted hypotheses, and/or has not systematically treated complex theories requiring multivariate controls. These ambiguous findings strengthen earlier explanations which deemphasize intercity differences in the condition of blacks and attribute primary importance to societal determinants, notably institutionalized deprivation of blacks and white racism. Although the emphasis is perhaps warranted, it is easy to overemphasize deprivation and racism as societal causes when such factors can be conceptualized as varying by cities. An unresolved issue, which can only be verbally addressed in this paper, concerns qualitative variations in racial violence. Those incidents occurring early in this century were characterized by white attacks on blacks and set against the background of black competition in the white labor markets of the North.

The article discusses the parameters of presidential politics in the U.S. This paper analyzes data that have been by-and-large neglected, the State of the Union Messages. The 26 Messages delivered by former U.S. Presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1946 through 1969 have been studied by means of a computer content analysis. Since the unit of analysis is the sentence, there are approximately 7,500 data points drawn from a 24 year time period. This data set is certainly comprehensive enough to sustain analysis. The State of the Union Messages are exceedingly useful vantage points because they are important statements of administration policy. Another point about the State of the Union Messages is that they are comparable from one year to the next. They come in January after the president and his aides have completed the intensive policy review that is occasioned by the State of the Union Message, Budget, and Annual Economic Message.

The article presents a paper that seeks to explicate the many serious obstacles to obtaining reliable and valid measures of the outputs of urban criminal courts. Given the importance and relevance of the operation of criminal courts, two facts are particularly pertinent to the measurement of their performance in comparative urban research. First, the knowledge of the impact has not kept pace with the increased recognition and importance accorded to them by society. Detailed statistics on admissions to local, state, and federal penal institutions are not available. The best strategy to use in measuring the performance of courts is to use defendants as the standardized unit of analysis. Such a choice produces the most valid indicators of outputs because in most instances researchers as well as policymakers are concerned with what happens to people rather than what occurs to descriptions of events. For instance, the conviction rate would tell the proportion of defendants convicted independent of the specific charge, it would disregard the additional charges which were dismissed.

The article presents a paper that offers an alternative explanation for the purported inability to make better use of the expanded productive capability which provides the base for an "affluent" life style. It is suggested that inability to understand the ethical questions raised by a high rate of economic growth and failure to make the institutional adjustments that would humanize the contemporary economic process derive in part from neglected but critical developments in economic thought and social philosophy. Now according to those who are critical of the life style of affluent America, it is obvious that economic activity as carried out in contemporary society does not achieve that ideal terminus which, according to the philosophic presuppositions of classical economics, ought to be the end result of such activity. As a matter of historical fact, the economy seems to have been forced into a developmental path which permits economic activity to escape its proper subordination to the "good life" of man. Theologically, one might argue that this tendency for economic activity to degenerate into a process which degrades man is but part of that tragic train of events which entered human history as the consequence of sin.

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 presents a paper that examines the pretrial detention institution. The data were gathered from a pretrial institution located in a north-eastern metropolitan region of the U.S. From June 1970 through May 1971 information was obtained through observations of the daily life in jail as well as interviews and conversations with various persons involved. The focus is on patterns of and reactions to infractions of jail regulations. The jail has a legal system of its own. It has its own set of rules for guiding behavior and its own mechanism for handling trouble when it arises. Infractions of these rules reflect regularized cycles of life within the institution. It is in this sense that it becomes useful to approach the criminal justice system as a series of interlocking legal levels. Each level constitutes a society apart. Individuals are confronted with one legal system in the courtroom. They face another when spending time in jail awaiting trial. This "non-systemic" aspect of the criminal justice system is often noted when discussing its workings.

The article presents a paper that addresses the ways in which black citizens from 15 large American cities broadly assess the performance of their local economies and municipal administrations. These findings about black perceptions are part of a much larger study using a rather unique set of data and reflect the critical impact of five aspects of institutional urban life--police practices, welfare policies, employment, retail merchandising, and public education. The initial purpose of the research was to detect critical political differences between "riot" and "non-riot" cities, a task which was aborted in the spring of 1968 when three of the five "non-riot" cities experienced some of the most severe civil disorders of the entire 1960's period. The findings indicate that it is possible to uncover connections between political regimes, the behavior of municipal delivery systems, and citizen responses of confidence or despair in local political regimes. The crucial point is that the actions of city officials and delivery system personnel have substantial consequences for local residents.

The article presents information on the work of sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. The paper attempts a conjunction of the two perspectives in the case of Pareto's sociology. The first refers to Pareto's role in relation to the crisis of the utilitarian-positivistic model of social action and the second concerns the "subjectivistic" crisis of both social and "natural" sciences. Pareto's recognizing the predominance of the non-logical element in human action has counterparts, even if couched in different terms, in the works of diverse scholars. More than any one else, Pareto then endeavors a super-historical generalization. It is this effort that allows him to recognize the importance of the immutability of the domination of some men over others and also to direct attention to the cyclical nature of human affairs, precisely at a time when the fashion was the search for linear directions in human evolution. The contradictions that may easily be brought to light through a reading of Pareto are, however, the very same one find in more recent authors.

The article studies relative deprivation and participation in the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement, like many social movements, incorporated several sub-movements which utilized different types of tactics. It incorporates a variety of different patterns. This paper explores the extent to which different patterns of relative deprivation may be differentially associated with a variety of movement tactics. Relative deprivation may be one state of mind which motivates participation in social movements. Reference group comparisons may result in feelings of either relative deprivation or relative satisfaction depending upon the reference group selected. It has been suggested that black participation in the civil rights movement was a consequence of an inability to achieve at a level commensurate with societally induced aspirations. Social movements undergo changes over time in terms of goals, tactics, population base contributing support, and reactions of the wider society. These variables influence participation. It may well be the case that different types of relative deprivation are associated with participation at different stages of a movement.

The article analyzes the dynamics of access among the welfare poor. Participation in political society is often considered from the perspective of the theory of democratic pluralism. This theory, which, in the 1960's, inspired a lively debate between those who found decisions controlled by monolithic elites and those who found multiple points of decision-making, has increasingly seen the empirical grounds of contention moving toward questions of participation and access to decision-making processes by non-elites. Access has been studied by analyzing the resources of individuals, the experience of new participants, the potential for manifestation of "quasi-groups," the effectiveness of group organization, and the response of competing groups, elites, and the public to the access-seeker. To comprehend the two-sided process of access-seeking, one must examine the forces that grant or block access as well as the parties that seek access. The central problem to which the empirical study of this paper is directed is the question of how difficult it is for a newly-formed group to gain a foothold in a presumably pluralistic structure of power.

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.

This paper reports the results of an experimental study of the behavioral effects of student incentive payments. The present study was designed to ascertain the efficacy of monetary payments as incentives to college freshmen for surpassing their "normal" academic performance level. The study also sought to determine whether variation in the efficacy of the payments might be attributed to race, sex, income, or other socioeconomic factors. The results of the research suggest, reasonably enough, that responsiveness to the payments may be a function of the student's access to other sources such as part-time jobs. Also, males were considerably less sensitive to the payments than females. Nonetheless, the payment rates appeared to produce differences of from roughly a fourth to a third of a letter grade in the quarterly grade averages of some large segments of the test groups. Thus, while this study does not prove the efficacy or desirability of monetary incentives, it indicates that student incentives deserve further exploration as means of improving student performance.

This paper examines top institutional leadership in both the public and private sectors of society-industry; communications, transportation, and utilities; banking; insurance; law; civic and cultural affairs; government; foundations; education; the military; personal wealth; and political finance. The purposes are to develop a systematic definition of a national, institutional elite; to measure the concentration of authority in top institutional positions; to examine the extent of interlocking and specialization among institutional elites, and to describe the pattern of recruitment to top institutional positions. The study data do not really permit any inferences about interaction, communication, informal association or mutuality of interest, among the institutional elites. But it is believed that debate over the concentration of power in the U.S. will be better informed by continuing attempts to systematically define institutional elites, to measure the real extent of interlocking and specialization, and to examine the actual paths of recruitment to top institutional positions.

This article presents a study, which discusses definite income differences between Mexican Americans and Anglos. Among males 14 years of age and older in 1959, for example, Mexican American income as a percent of Anglo income varied from a high of 73 percent in California to a low of 49 percent in Texas. By 1969 some progress had been made, but Mexican American income still varied between 81 percent if Anglo income in Arizona and California to 65 percent in Texas. Necessarily, part of the difference between Mexican American and Anglo income is due to educational and occupational differences, since on he whole Mexican Americans show much lower levels of educational attainment and are more concentrated in the manual occupations, particularly those requiring few skills. To what extent then are income differences between Mexican American and Anglos males due to educational and occupational differences, and to what extent are they due to minority status? The central purpose of this paper is to examine the cost of being a Mexican American male worker after taking into consideration the differentials in occupation and education.

This article discusses the origins of Mexican American subordination in Texas. Although there has been a frequent recognition that a full understanding of the social position of Mexican Americans in the United States requires an historical dimension, comparatively little work of this type has been published; and among the papers and books in which some attempt is made to account for the contemporary position of the Mexican Americans in terms of their unique historical background, few have been guided by an explicit theory or conceptual scheme. In the course of this test no effort is made to adduce new historical evidence. The intention here, rather, is to employ well-known secondary materials to provide tentative answers to two guiding questions: First, does Donald L. Noel's theory afford a comprehensive interpretation of the events culminating in the subordination of the Mexican Americans? Second, does the application of Noel's ideas to an historical process other than the development of black slavery in the United States-the initial testing ground for the theory-suggest ways to modify and increase the theory's explanatory flower? Students of the development of the relations among the Spanish speaking and English speaking peoples of North America have long recognized the importance of the separate elements of Noel's theory.

The article discusses intelligence and student political activism. A positive correlation between intellectual ability and leftist ideology is an empirically well-established generalization. Almost all of the research on this interesting topic has utilized college students. In reviewing the literature on American student political behavior, sociologist Seymour Martin Lip set suggests that this correlation between intelligence and leftist ideology may be spurious. This study compares a sample of student political activists at the University of Minnesota with the general student population of which they are a part The original universe of activists consisted of all elected officers of all the student political organizations on the main campus of the University over a span of ten academic years, 1955-56 through 1963-64. Intelligence is one of a number of important social science concepts that elude precise definition. This paper makes no attempt to resolve the definitional problem but defines intelligence operationally in terms of standard measures of intellectual ability.

The article focuses on activities of grass roots political activists in the U.S. During this study, the nature of political activity variable was operationalized by asking each respondent to indicate whether or not further political ambition, being close to influential people, or making business contacts was an important reason why the respondent ran for the office of precinct committee-man. Then each respondent was asked which activities he performed as committeeman were most important. The data utilized in this paper were collected over a two-year period in five communities in three states. The interview schedule concentrated upon variables used in, but not tied together by, existing studies of characteristics relevant to the recruitment and activities of precinct committeemen. In general, findings indicated that precinct committeemen tend to be motivated to run for office not because they are self-stimulated but because they are pushed across an activist threshold, to exhibit low rather than high levels of political ambition, to orient themselves more to the campaign than to the organization, and to engage more often in party-aiding than in personal-aiding activities. These findings are consistent with the literature on the recruitment and activities of grass roots political activists.

The article focuses on population commission's report in the U.S. The report of the commission and the papers accompanying it constitute a remarkable document and suggestions that could, if expanded and fully translated into policy, bring a nearly optimum demographic state into being. While discussion of population questions in both quantitative and qualitative terms has commanded attention in America since even before the nation's founding, treatment of demographic matter has been circumscribed by particular premises and objectives which have never, at least until recently, been transformed into an approach that is systematic. With the disappearance of the frontier in the 1890's, attention was directed to conservation of resources and possible shortages of agricultural land and critical minerals. Congressional concern was directed less to problems of this sort, however, than to control of immigration, demand for which issued not from fear of excessive population growth but from concern about increasing ethnic and cultural heterogeneity, labor's fear of excessive competition from immigrant workers, and so on.

The article presents the author's opinions on the book "The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969," by former U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Reviews of Johnson's book tend to resemble reviews of the Johnson Administration: disappointment based on ridiculously high expectations. Already reviews are stressing how Johnson lied, as though lying is something politicians don't do, and as though memoirs are something somehow different from politics. Reviews compare the book with the Pentagon Papers and come away still more indignant, as though private deliberations of presidents ought not to have been different from the public reports of deliberations, or as though final decisions should reveal all of the calculations back of them and all of the alternatives rejected prior to reaching the final decision. These disappointments are more than a mere literary device. Most of the reviewers and president watchers probably sincerely did expect more from Johnson, and went on expecting it late into his administration, especially where domestic politics were concerned.

The article focuses on the emergence of "amateur" organizations in certain areas. The emphasis within such organizations upon ideological and other purposive incentives as the relevant stimuli for party work was interpreted as foreshadowing changes in party goals and strategy. Several analyses concluded, however, that activism based upon purposive or impersonal incentives were somewhat evanescent. The maintenance of amateur orientations might depend, however, upon the congruence of motivational orientations between leaders and lower-level activists. The impact of the amateur type of party organization depends not only upon its ability to sustain itself but also upon its relevance for areas of growing political importance, particularly the suburbs. This paper examines Democratic and Republican party activists in DeKaib County, Georgia. During the summer of 1970, personal interviews were conducted among leaders and officials of the Democratic and Republican county party organizations in DeKaib County, Georgia.

The article presents an assessment of race and place in The New York Times. It has frequently been asserted that the media respond differently to black and white news. To a great extent, media coverage, like the races, is rigorously segregated. The contemporary significance of this argument is obvious. This paper seeks to test the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the racial content of a news item and its treatment by The New York Times. The New York Times was chosen as the hard case. It is widely regarded as the leading American daily, and has a well established reputation for fairness in racial matters. Indeed, The Times is more than a newspaper. It is studied carefully both in Washington and in foreign capitols, and it may not be inappropriate to conceive of it as a spokesman for the liberal establishment. Two time periods were chosen for study. The two-year period beginning in May, 1954, was selected because it seemed reasonable to say that the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision thrust the civil rights movement upon the consciousness of the public.

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 the reply of the author to the criticism of his paper "Causation and Theory Construction," published in the March 1972 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly." According to the author, researchers Herbert L. Costner and Hubert M. Blalock, invoke an empirical criterion to judge logical validity; but logic has nothing to do with the empirical truth of propositions, and that point bears directly on their rules for relating symbols. Had Blalock and Costner not confused utility and logical validity, there would be no argument. At one point Blalock and Costner indicate that a theorist need only assume close relations to justify the sign rule, but elsewhere they say "if those conditions are met." If so, the criterion ignores the point that the empirical validity of the premises may be unknowable directly. At one point Blalock and Costner undertake to describe the "mathematical form of causal models and how this form corresponds to one common notion of a causal relation." But the "mathematical form" of causal models requires no further explication; rather, the issue is correspondence between that form and a conception of causation.

The article discusses the formation of concepts. The formation of concepts in science is subject to the same limitations and pitfalls as perception and observation in day-to-day living. The scientist, however, is distinguished from the man in the street by virtue of the additional lengths he will go in order to see more clearly, and so all manner of care is exercised through instrumentation and measurement in order to provide more precise facts. But whereas instrumentation and measurement procedures usually enhance precision, they do not necessarily guarantee accuracy. In his famous paper on the relationship between personality and conservative ideology, researcher H. McClosky partially describes procedures by which his measure of conservatism was developed, and more recently, researcher A.L. Kalleberg has pointed to that study as illustrative of how it is possible to form, through the development of scales, objective concepts of so-called subjective meaning-structures. McClosky's procedure consisted of presenting students with 43 items, culled without their knowledge from conservative literature, and asking them to supply a name or label characterizing all the items.

In this article the author presents an empirical discussion of urban terrorism in the U.S. According to the author the purpose of this paper is twofold, first, to point out some of the problems in collecting data on urban terrorism and, second, to propose a theoretical perspective of terrorism somewhat different from the customary revolutionary or counter-insurgency model. Among the most frequently cited indicators of urban terrorism in the U.S. is the rising number of bombing incidents and threats combined with the sensational discovery of various bomb plots and caches. The authors remark that since explosive bombs require more effort in acquisition of materials, preparation and detonation than incendiaries, their greater frequency in densely populated areas suggests that explicit terror bombings as distinguished from vandal-type arson are more prevalent in an urban environment. While urban areas provide the concentrations of symbolic victims necessary for mass anxiety, unless the terrorist is very well organized into hierarchical cells and can demonstrate an escalating omnipresence, has access to resupply from a secure or liberated zone and is operating in conjunction with regular insurgent forces, any attempt at social paralysis is doomed.

The article presents an ecological analysis of urban mortality rates in the U.S. According to the authors much of the work taking account of the health factors has been done in a comparative perspective with the general conclusion being that improved health conditions and services and not pure economic factors have been the main influence in lowering mortality in the developing nations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ecological correlates of neighborhood mortality levels in a large urban center. The focus is upon the identification of the relative contribution of demographic, environmental, and social organizational variables to the explanation of differences in urban subarea death rates. The authors take as their starting point the works of those social scientists who have clearly demonstrated the relationship of ecological phenomena to differential urban mortality. Past studies have shown the importance of a large number of specific variables in explaining differential aggregate community mortality levels. These specific variables may be grouped into three gross categories, such as demographic, environmental, and social organizational.

The article presents the profiles of the differential statuses of the major ethnic and racial elements of the population of the United States with reference to a convenient norm and in comparison with each other. It also provides, a basis for conjecture about the relative salience of the different statuses for different populations, a special case of consistency analysis. The focus on racial problems has recently diverted attention from the substantial immigrant population in the U.S. In absolute terms the foreign-born population is still quite large. Admission of refugees around World War II and displaced persons under the Act of 1948 undoubtedly changed the characteristics of European migrants. These historical events are reflected in the Russian and German samples, for example, but census data do not permit us to disentangle their influence on the composition of the subsamples. In this paper, the author reports as a whole for African Americans, Mexican Americans, selected foreign born of significant numbers and for the native born of like foreign parentage.

The article presents a estimate of the quantitative impact of the foreign born labor force on the U.S. commodity production over 1869-1929. In order to demonstrate the importance of immigration, the author has constructed estimates of per capita commodity output in the absence of foreign born labor. A broader measure could be defined to include the output produced by foreign born laborers and their children. This more broadly defined measure would give a greater weight to the quantitative impact of immigration and would extend this impact later into the twentieth century. The measure used in this paper, foreign born labor, indicates the economy's dependence on an exogenous labor force, most of whose basic rearing costs have been met before entering the United States. Estimates are made of employment in the commodity producing sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and construction for the total labor force and for foreign born labor. A commodity output series is estimated, by sector, for 1869-1929. Average labor productivity for each commodity producing sector is constructed for the total labor force. The product of average labor productivity of the total labor force and immigrant employment, by sector, is taken to yield estimates of commodity output produced by the foreign born labor force.

The article presents a case study related to the theory of the linkage between local government decisions and public opinion. The most obvious and directly relevant unit of local government where public opinion has a role to play in the decision-making process is the city council. It is an elected body and it regularly makes decisions which affect the councilmen's constituencies. The decisions it makes can range from quite routine to highly controversial. The technique used in the paper is to briefly examine a number of "routine" decisions and determine if they fit the model, and then to examine one extreme example of a controversial issue in order to see if public opinion played a different role than in the routine cases. A small southern city, to be called "Eastown," was selected initially as the point of study because the city council had been forced, on two occasions, to give consideration to a proposed fluoridation ordinance. In order to study the decision-making behavior of the city Councilmen, approximately one hundrel city Council decisions in Easttown were examined for a randomly chosen time period in 1966. The results suggested that, at first glance, public opinion played no role in councilmanic decisions. It was clearly the "experts" who are dominating the Councilmen's perceptions about choices among alternative courses of action.

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]

This paper has summarized a study of presidential prestige and has, through the systematic comparison of historians of differing political per- suasions, examined patterns of relationship between prestige and two dimensions of perceived presidential attitude. These patterns indicate that presidential prestige or greatness is associated with different characteristics of perceived presidential attitude among liberal and conservative historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his conclusion, Downes states that "cities experiencing hostile out- bursts have a very distinctive set of social, economic, and even political structural characteristics."19 It is true that Downes expresses reservations about his analysis, cautioning the reader that"… this analysis represents a preliminary examination of the information we have collected,"20 and adds that he intends to undertake more extensive analysis of his data.21 By coincidence, our work involves more sophisticated analysis of data related to some of the variables which Downes studied. Furthermore, while Downes treats variables which characterize city populations in toto, and deduces from these the conditions of nonwhite persons in the cities, our study employs direct measures of characteristics of the nonwhite population and of differentials between the white and nonwhite groups. Of course, our study examines just a few socioeconomic variables, using only one bit of demographic data, and is thus less broad in scope than Downes'. Nevertheless, the results using these variables cast doubt on some of Downes' conclusions. Thus, contrary to Downes' conclusion, we find that the per cent of the population in SMSA's that is Negro does not appear to be related to the occurrence or intensity of civil disturbances. Where Downes finds low educational levels to be related to outbreaks of violence, our results are equivocal on this score. In the study most closely related to Downes (Study I), we are in partial agreement on the role of education; however, when an intensity index is used or where white-nonwhite differentials are studied, no clear relationship is observed, Furthermore, where Downes concludes from per capita income data for entire city populations that income levels are inversely related to occurrence and intensity of disturbances, we find almost the reverse to be true when nonwhite income levels are studied. When white-nonwhite income differentials are used, the results are again equivocal. Using crowding as a surrogate for housing quality we find no relationship between housing quality and the disturbances, where Downes concludes that this characteristic may be important. On the other hand, we find that home ownership, which may be a kind of proxy for community stability, is related to the disturbances in both their existence and severity. In fact, in this case the white-nonwhite differential becomes important. Finally, it is important to emphasize that our results do not go very far in "explaining" the causes of the disturbances. As Cohen has said, "One of the major errors in both the white and Negro communities has been seeking a single answer to a complex of problems. Integration, for example, has now given way to a theory of upgrading the slums. Status frustration has `lost ground to economic frustration. These are false dichotomies. The racial problem is a complex of many problems which have accumulated over the years."22 Relatively simple deprivation models of the type discussed in Downes' paper may shed light on some of the roots of urban discontent, but are over simplifications. In a way, their failure indicates the existing lack of understanding of these complex and urgent problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]