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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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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]

The article presents response of the author on comments made by Lewis E. Hill on the papers "Toward a Reconciliation of Institutional Economics and Its Critics" 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." Under appropriate arrangements for doing things, that is, under an appropriate institutional structure, the propensity to truck and barter naturally entails the creation of markets, which are themselves arrangements for effecting exchange. In the U.S., the institutional structure is such that markets permeate most of the economy. For example, in August 1970, nearly 84 per cent of total civilian employment was in the private sector, all of which consists of regulated and more or less unregulated markets. Thus, employing scholar Robert L. Heilbroner's system of classification, the economy of the U.S. would be appropriately designated as essentially a market system, as the author did in his introduction to Ayres' classic. "Institutionalism and Economic Development." But Ayres objects to him, that the U.S. economy is an industrial economy. Unfortunately, his is not intended to be a cross-classification, which, if correct, would be a suitable complement rather than a substitute for the one that the author employed, since Ayres says prefatorily, and the author flatly denies that the U.S. economy is a market economy.

The article presents information on the paper titled "Ten Years of Supreme Court Voting," written by C. Herman Pritchett. Methodologically, Pritchett's work in this period was trail blazing. Social scientist Glendon A. Schubert suggests two main contributions of that work: "First, Pritchett conceptualized the U.S. Supreme Court as a small decision-making group, whose voting and opinion behavior could best be explained in terms of imputed differences in the attitudes of individual justices toward the recurrent issues of public policy that characterize cases that reach the court for decision. Second, Pritchett based his analysis upon quantitative measurement of a large sample of data." Although Pritchett subsequently placed less emphasis on the method of data display employed in the article, it continues to be a major research tool for studying judges' voting. To avoid elaborating the case, "Ten Years of Supreme Court Voting" is representative of the journal "The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly" persistent publication of public law research. At the same time, the article is a pivotal step in developing the behavioral, quantitative approach that has become prominent not only in public law research but in political science in general.

The article presents response of the author on comments made by Lewis E. Hill on the papers "Toward a Reconciliation of Institutional Economics and Its Critics" by Coldwell Daniel and "Beyond the Market Economy Building Institutions That Work" that were published in the March 1970 issue of the periodical "Social Science Quarterly." Hill's Comment on the exchange between Daniel and the author is perfectly right in pointing out that he gave no reasons for insisting that theirs is an industrial economy rather than a market economy, as Daniel has declared. If it is not too late, the author would like to repair that omission. In various important senses theirs is of course a market economy. Obviously buying and selling go on almost everywhere and almost all the time; and scholar Karl Polanyi was quite right in pointing out that ours is the only economy in history in which buying and selling have been as general and as significant as they are today throughout the Western world--or at least throughout the free world. The question is: significant of what? Many writers have maintained that freedom to buy and sell is the quintessence of freedom, and that people who do not enjoy this freedom are not free. This may be true. But it is not the whole story. In particular it is not the whole story of economic development. Such freedom --the market may have been a necessary condition but not the determinant of the modern Western economy.

The article presents comments on the paper "Notes on the Color of the Volunteer Army," published in the December 1969 issue of the journal "Social Science Quarterly," written by William Freithaler Ford and Robert Tollison. Ford and Tollison concluded that the assertion that an "all black" army will emerge from the abolition of the draft is implausible. The purpose of this comment is to show that, if their analysis is carried far enough, it implies that a "blacker" army, far from being an unlikely outcome, is to be expected as one consequence of substituting the free market for conscription. On the demand side, Ford and Tollison argue that abolition of the draft will raise the cost of "labor" to the armed forces and induce substitution of capital for labor. Increased utilization of capital will increase the military's demand for skilled labor relative to that for unskilled labor, and, since whites make up relatively more of the more skilled portions of the labor force, increase the relative demand for whites. On the supply side, the writers argue that a greater proportion of draft-age Whites are currently volunteering than African Americans.