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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.

Discusses candidate behavior in the absence of equilibria in political campaigns. Information on spatial models of party competition; Theorem about incentives to convergence when there is no equilibrium; Role of competition in candidate behavior.

The article examines the contradiction between the feeling-tone of political party names and public response to their platforms. According to the author, the political behavior of an individual is presumably controlled by the same general forces, which determine his belief and conduct in other phases of life. The correlation of 0.80 or more which previous researchers have shown to hold between the intensity of one's convictions and one's desire to consider them valid apparently points to the dominance of irrational emotion in shaping the outcome of reflection. In this respect, the present study is an attempt to see what measure of logic is involved in the political preferences of representative citizens. It was found that the parties which are committed to the establishment of a collectivist society and the economy of abundance, which the bulk of the voters evidently want when the details of such a program are presented, are the very ones to whose names an attitude of hostility or indifference is most marked.