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In this article, the author presents his comments to the paper "On the Concept of Influence," by Talcott Pearson. The author confines his remarks to an expansion of what he takes to be the major thesis of this seminal paper. Communications in Western society is a transactional process, a major element in which is a widespread sense of trust. This notion, on the one hand, crystallizes a lot of what one has learned from communications research but have not fully articulated, and it adds, on the other hand, an ironic twist to the pervasive concern with "manipulation" and deception. For the author, the most novel insight offered by Parsons' paper is so simple that, once stated, it sounds trivial: Deception is based on trust. The Parsonian "channel variables" may seem like needless verbal distinctions. But if social scientists had firmly implanted in their skulls the distinction between affecting a man's intent and controlling his situation, much less nonsense would have been written about "brainwashing." The intention of this commentary is to reinforce the reader in the belief that it is worth the effort, and to encourage him to return to it for additional mulling.

This article presents the reply of the author to the comments made by professors Raymond A. Bauer and J.S. Coleman, on his article "On the Concept of Influence," published in March 1963 issue of the periodical "Public Opinion Quarterly." Professor Bauer has related the theoretical argument of the author's paper in an illuminating way to some of the problems, frames of reference, and data of opinion research with which both he and many of the readers of this issue of the Quarterly are certainly much more familiar than the author. He has thereby contributed importantly to making the main analysis the author has presented intelligible to many readers. Second, he has carefully elucidated one theoretical point that is especially important because of the emphasis Professor Coleman places on it. This is that the basic conceptual scheme with which the author has been working attempts consistently to think in terms of reciprocal interaction and not of a one-way schema of one actor "having an effect on" others. The author presents his views on three themes that Coleman refers to as blind alleys. The first of these is the assertion that money, power, and influence are essentially linguistic phenomena. The second is the classification of institutional components in an interaction system of the type dealt with. This again is an essential part of the frame of reference in which the analysis is placed. The third is the paradigm of ways of getting results.

This paper is an attempt to show that distinct dimensions of political alienation are reliable predictors of variations in political behaviour, independently of factors such as level of government and kinds of situations. In other words, there is a direct relation between the type of alienation and the mode in which it is expressed. The paper also calls attention to the functions served by the alienated as agents of political change. Variations in the modes of expression result from the following four types of political alienation: powerlessness, distrust, meaninglessness and isolation. Political powerlessness refers to the "perceived expectancy of an individual that his own behaviour cannot determine the occurrence of political outcomes that he seeks." The incentive to take part in politics is weak among the powerless who consequently elect to express their alienation through non-participation. Distrust is a person's feeling that the occupants of political roles systematically and consistently violate specific political norms or the "rules of the game" when dealing with certain publics.

This paper replicates an earlier study of faculty status and tolerance of political dissent by Abramson and Wences. The data support the hypothesis that length of residence on a university campus is inversely related to faculty tolerance of student dissent. The expected relationship between academic rank and tolerance was eliminated by controlling for longevity, but the predicted relationship between academic field and tolerance was unaffected. The effect of longevity appears to be independent of political orientations, and the data suggest that peer group influence is operative among faculty members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces papers published in the March 1963 issue "Public Opinion Quarterly." Political opinion polling represents one of the most highly developed applied fields of the so-called "behavioral sciences." While manpower and financial expenditures for such research do not approximate those for mental health, they are indeed considerable. In the light of the difficulties of financing political campaigns, the totals spent for political research are especially noteworthy. Moreover, in terms of social and political policy, the scientific, professional, and moral issues involved in utilizing polls for political purposes present some of the most profound problems in the applied social sciences. Nevertheless, writing and discussion of these issues has been extraordinarily meager and limited. For a time the popular media contained intemperate outbursts against the use of polling. The main arguments were that polling threatened to transfer the mandate from the electorate at large to professional specialists, and that polling ran the risk of becoming a device for manipulating election results by controlled exposure of selected findings. With the institutionalization of public opinion polls by both national parties and many state and local groups in the U.S., as well as by political groups in Western Europe, these attacks have disappeared from the press. In the popular view, opinion polling has become another hazard for the democratic process and for election campaigners.

In Part I of this article (Spring Issue), Dr. and Mrs. Gabel analyzed the editorials, in ten Texas newspapers, dealing with selected national issues. In Part II they turn their attention to several key international issues. The ten newspapers studied (see Part I, Table I; and also Part II, Table I) "appear to be the dominant metropolitan newspaper influences of Texas." They have a combined circulation of nearly 1,000,000, and cover geographical areas representative of both industrial and agricultural divisions of the state. Eight are independently owned, while the Houston Press is part of the Scripps-Howard chain and the San Antonio Light is Hearst-owned. The period covered by the study is mainly early September through December 15, 1945, with a few additional editorials from the latter half of December, 1945. The technique of analysis includes (a) noting the frequency of comment, and (b) indicating the favor, disfavor or the lack of a position, together with something of the manner in which editorial positions were urged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the influence of social and technological changes since 1787 upon the role of public opinion in the U.S. and undertakes to appraise the role of public opinion today in the light of these changes. The history of the "degree of uniformity" is the history of an important and neglected idea in American politics. The role assigned to public opinion by various departments in the federal government is something vastly different from the part given to it by founding fathers. The American Revolution was an open manifestation of a desire for a responsible government, and implicit in this idea of responsible government was the idea of responsibility to influential public opinion. The new significance of public opinion is that public information can keep pace with the facts-and along with this transformation there has followed a broadening of the base of the political pyramid. The importance which has been attached to the power to control opinion within the past few years is a result of the increased number of persons whose opinion is politically consequential.

A vital weapon in the present struggle is censorship, intelligently handled and justly applied. Yet public misunderstanding of its function has often caused resentment. Censorship is a vital weapon in national armory. The present paper attempts to do is to play lightly around the notion of what the enemy wants to know and to point up the various ideas or remarks with a few illustrations devised for the occasion on the basis of real dispatches which have been intercepted. Public resentment of censorship grows out of two main facts, ignorance of what it is and a deep-seated misconception of its functions. In the U.S. censorship is honorably used for the purposes for which it was originally intended, that is, to prevent the dissemination of any information which conceivably might benefit the enemy and as a corollary to this, the subtracting from the air, from the cables and from the international mails of whatever he may be unwise enough to say that can be fitted into the jigsaw puzzle constructed of martial activities.

This paper is the earnest consideration of what students of international affairs have thought the role of public opinion is and should be in the international arena. It emphasizes the importance of raising the competence of the public in order to make it a vital force for supporting progress in international institutions and organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study indicates that public opinion formation tends in large part to be a product of the activation of previous experiences and attitudes. The controversy at the University of California, in Berkeley, California, over the requirement that all faculty members sign an oath affirming that they were not members of the communist party created an opportunity to study the opinion forming process in a comparatively closed environment. University students reacted to a crisis situation largely according to their group affiliations and other background characteristics. Students operating within the intellectual atmosphere of the university may react in more rational ways than the general population. Student members of underprivileged groups may be more inclined to make rational identifications between their own group and other groups under attack, an identification, which underprivileged groups outside the campus may not make. Attitudes toward academic freedom are related to the same variables, which influence attitude formation in other areas of life.

This article focuses on the political sociology in Eastern Europe. The term sociology is a newcomer in the official nomenclature of social sciences in most East European countries. Sociology had been left out from the program of social studies, it was not because of any real scientific reasons, but because its name was objected, the present renaissance of sociology in these countries is related to the political changes which have taken place during the last decade; in fact, it is evidence of new political tendencies. Hence the importance of following the changing approach to political phenomena in the theoretical sociological publications in socialist countries. The period between 1957 and 1963, covered by the appended bibliography and referred to in the present paper, provides ample material on the subject. In this sense, the place of political sociology among sociological disciplines is essentially different from that of other branches of detailed sociology. The latter are concerned with some isolated fields of social life, while political sociology investigates social phenomena from the angle of their political aspect, the aspect of power. Hence, if there is any justification for regarding political sociology as a separate discipline, it is on the grounds of the difference in theoretical approach rather than the difference in the subject of study.

Details a study which explored the local political participation in a Canadian municipality. Activities and characteristics of a municipal electorate; Theory and concepts of local political participation; Results and conclusions.

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 focuses on last minute changes in voting intention and its effects on public opinion in Australia. Errors in prediction on the part of public opinion surveys are usually ascribed to faulty sampling, unexpected turnout of voters, or changes in voting intention between the date of interviewing and the date of election. This article suggests that in certain types of elections last-minute changes may present a serious problem for forecasters. The article describes the predictions and the steps taken to trace the cause of errors. Political set-up in Australia has been described. The Australian Gallup Poll accurately predicted the vote for the House of Representatives and one of the referendums. It had discrepancies, however, of plus 8.6 per cent and minus 4.6 per cent on the other two referendums. All four predictions were based on interviews with the one cross-section of 2,027 people, a week before polling day. Voting in Australia is compulsory, so an unusual turnout of voters could not have caused an error.

This article discusses the public opinion of Italian people, their thinking about the U.S. and the possible Russian strategy in this country. The appointment of Socialist Pietro Nenni as Foreign Minister of Italy in October 1946, the conclusion of a new pact between the Socialists and the Communists, and the success of the Left in several municipal elections had been interpreted by many as steps toward that goal. Then, in January 1947, came the spectacular break between the pro-and the anti-Communist wings of the Socialist Party. Two new parties were formed--the "Italian Socialist Party," led by pro-Communist Pietro Nenni, and the "Socialist Party of the Italian Workers," headed by Giuseppe Saragat. Less than half the deputies followed Saragat, the rebel; but no one knows whether the members of the Socialist Party, and those three-odd million non-members who voted Socialist in June 1946, will divide the same way in the Fall elections.

Throughout the history of Brazil as an independent country, it has been dismantled by inter-regional strife and jealousy. The Vargas régime in Brazil, in its current context, is an exceptional reminder of the Italian Fascism up to the middle 1920s. Brazil is a reminiscent of a partially completed syndicalist structure that has dominated Europe during the era. It has witnessed the evolution of an elaborate apparatus of propaganda and censorship. The article presents a discussion on the effectiveness of the Brazilian system of opinion management. The Vargas régime has been motivated by both negative and positive considerations in its attempt to design popular opinion. On the negative side, the principal objective has been to prevent the expression and spread of ideas prejudicial to the maintenance of the régime. Due to the possibility of an organized opposition undermining its foundations, the régime has not allowed the development of such opposition. Positive objectives of the control system are associated chiefly with propaganda, insuring the internal security of the régime. The propaganda has been build up an active support for its leaders and their policies.

The article throws light on the treatment of problems of political behavior in hands of modern politics students. It also emphasizes on activities of large bodies of voters. The formation and expression of what is loosely called public opinion has been treated generally as a function of an indefinite and ill-defined entity referred to as the "electorate" or the "public." It is the simple thesis of this paper that the significant part of the political process will be observed in the minute portions of it and not in the process "viewed as a whole," and that the chief contributions of the future will be made as a result of studies of these small portions. Indeed in any proper sense it is impossible to view the process "as a whole." Finally, the article presents the leader-follower relationship which includes: 1) the character and technique of the leader; 2) the relation of the leader to his lieutenants; 3) the relation of groups to their immediate leaders and immediately to the principal leader; (4) the relation between various groups interested in the situation; and 4) the relationships between individuals within groups and across group lines.

In a psychological as distinguished from a Marxian sense the state in the United States seems to be withering away. The basic reality is a shift in the psychological environment in which the state, like other institutions and organizations, must function. This transformation in the psychological environment is generating a conflict in perceptions and values. This paper suggests that the state is withering away in a psychological sense because of an increase in awareness in contemporary society and a growing questioning of all authority. It also suggests the state is withering in a technological sense because of a failure to use organized knowledge to satisfy expectations and values. While noetic men have always existed, noetic man a! a major social type distinguishable from religious man, economic man, and legal man is primarily a product of 20th century technologies of communication and production. The withering of the state in the psychological order has an objective correlative in the withering of the state in the technological order, the use of organized knowledge.

Generally speaking, scientific propaganda analysis necessarily employs many types of criteria. These include criteria of objectivity, adequacy, generalization, interpretation, causation, prediction, and interest. Of these, criteria that are frequently taken too much for granted and that usually demand most careful statement, assessment, and restatement are those associated with interest, interest in the sense of the individual, group, and general societal objectives or purposes served. The article deals with these interest criteria. In propaganda analysis, it has been common to describe interest criteria in a general way by saying that purposes of analysts are "to help the intelligent citizen to detect and to analyze propaganda." This is not to be taken as a narrow, purely individualistic or individualism-promoting approach. On the contrary, the conception is thrown into a broader perspective, as the more clear-eyed and intelligent citizens are, the more they can detect and understand actual issues at stake in a social agitation or conflict.

As Marvin E. Olsen points out in the preceding article, a number of studies of political alienation have shown it to be related to "negativism toward issues that are strongly supported by the majority of the community." In this paper the author attempts to test empirically the proposition that the proportion of protest votes in elections, especially referendum elections, varies directly with turnout. Because his findings do not support this proposition, based to a large extent on the alienated voter concept, he presents a revised statement of the concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the role of propaganda in history in the light of World War I. After the German army swept through Belgium, tales of horror appeared in the columns of the daily prints. Atrocity stories, such as cutting off the breasts of a nurse, crucifying colonial soldiers, castrating wounded men, and many other revolting yarns, were served to the people for months. The Allies were pictured as angels whose wings had been plucked by Huns, and the Kaiser was dubbed "the monster of Berlin." Indeed, before the war was over, Lloyd George promised that, when the Kaiser was captured, he would be hanged. It was an orgy of nonsensical vituperation, and several of the recognized historians of the universities made themselves ridiculous with a determination that bordered on lunacy. When the war was over, some of the principal newspapers apologized to their readers, and confessed that they had published lies because Great Britain was in danger. No one would pretend for a moment that during a war the man in the street would have time to think twice about the truth or fiction of a statement reaching him in the form of propaganda. But neither would anyone in his senses imagine that a historian would become a victim of a device necessary to keep the mass war-minded.

In their May 1963 article that appeared in the journal Social forces, Student Rebellion Against Parental Political Beliefs, writers Russell Middleton and Snell Putney discussed one aspect of political socialization, that of reaction of young adults to their parents political beliefs. Testing, as they did, a sample drawn from several public and private institutions in the four geographic regions of the United States, their results reveal this process of political socialization amongst the predominant white group in the society. The present article attempts to compare their results with a similar study undertaken at a primarily Negro institution, in order to suggest any differences that may appear in this process between the subgroup and the predominant group. The data for this study were collected by means of anonymous questionnaires administered to 396 students. The two authors, in their 1963 article, noted the lack of comparable data over time with which to view the direction of any rebellion. Author of this article hopes to help fill such a gap and to suggest some awareness of the political socialization process among students of a minority ethnic group.

While the corporation is hardly a microcosm of the state, study of the internal politics of universities and business concerns may develop insights contributing to the understanding of political action in general. Corporations are co-operative systems assembled out of the usable attributes of people. They are also social systems within which people compete for advancement; in so doing they may make use of others. Behavior is identified as political when others are made use of as resources in competitive situations. Material, or extra-human, resources are also socially organized. Additional resources, resulting from innovation or new types of personal commitment, alter the prevailing equilibrium and either instigate or release political action. Such action is a mechanism of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses trends in American political science, focusing on how the study of theory is impacting those trends. The author states that social sciences in the U.S. are transforming from focusing on traditional approaches to modeling itself to the methodology of natural sciences, and predicts that political research will be classified as behavioral research in the future. The article discusses the similarities and differences between traditional and behavioral methods of studying political science.

This analysis of changes in the party affiliations of American adults between 1952 and 1972 (1) assesses the stability of the relationship between party and a set of causal variables and (2) examines the extent to which the observed changes are attributable to changes in the electorate's demographic composition. We found that indicators of stratification position, race, region, religion, and political socialization have exerted a nearly constant causal influence on party throughout the twenty-year period. A model which assumed constant effects (equal regression slopes) across the six elections explained only 2% less of the variance in party than a model which allowed the dopes to vary across elections. Of the variables in the causal model, socialization-as indicated by father's party preference-has the largest effect on party affiliation. The addition to our model of the demographic variables, age and cohort, revealed that both factors influence individuals' party affiliations. Though age and cohort explain only a small portion of the variance in party, examination of the net differences in mean party affiliation between age groups and between cohorts showed that aging does produce a net shift away from the Democratic party and that the Depression has had lasting effects on the preferences of cohort members formulating their preferences at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leaders often used all forms of art to mobilize public sentiments in favor of their ethics, as in the case of the French Revolution. During this dynamic period various propaganda techniques in use today were developed, and in some cases perfected to a degree not generally recognized. Successive revolutionary governments tried consciously and continuously, with all means at their disposal, to mould public opinion and to direct it into channels favorable to their policies and interests. Painting and sculpture were extensively used, but the greatest contribution of the revolutionary leaders to the art of propaganda lay in their development of the pageant or festival. In the absence of mass media, artists were able to reach and influence a large number of the population who were not otherwise accessible to propaganda. An account of activities of the most important artist of the Revolutionary decade has been published, but an overall survey of other significant aspects of art as propaganda during the French Revolution must still be made. It is the purpose of this article to contribute to the inauguration of such a synthesis by calling attention to some of the more important aspects of the problem on the basis of historical research.

There are several possible approaches to the study of these opinion-makers. One is the conventional historian's technique of gathering myriad facts about the subject, organizing this material into an acceptable pattern-topical, chronological, or both-and writing the most readable account the author's talents permit. Many great and important studies have employed just this procedure. But in recent decades this so-called anecdotal approach has been brought into question by a group of social scientists who deplore what they regard as a lack of objectivity inherent in the method. The conventional historian's area of discretion, they contend, is so vast that his selection of facts must be largely a subjective one. He is constantly harassed by questions of what to include and what to leave out; and how much one fact is worth as against another. All relevant data must then be tested against these points of reference.

The authors try to find out what a respondent's answer to a public opinion interviewer really means. To know this one must examine some of the assumptions behind opinion polling, and must also identify the different meanings which identical responses may have to different groups of people. Finally, one must find ways to relate these responses to character structure, if one has to attempt to predict political or other behavior. The authors test few assumptions, which underlie polling. The scientific study of public opinion is in the hands of neither the poll-takers nor the respondents: both are caught in an historical process, which has not only set the questions to be investigated but also the form of the answer. The authors attempt to describe some of the different ways people approach the problem of having and giving an opinion. While the article groups these different ways roughly according to class, the various types, the authors describe can probably be found, in varying degrees, in all classes. As one goes down the status ladder, one still finds an astonishingly high proportion of response on polls, both in permitting oneself to be interviewed and in having an opinion that can be fitted, without too much gerrymandering, into the dimensions of current polling work. Even the lower class participates in this "conversation between the classes." The authors probe if the elections change the things. Latent meaning may be understood if we grasp the socially structured interpersonal situation between poller and pollee, and search it for the residues, verbal and non-verbal, which flow in our haste we throw away.

Taking three steps forward and two back ward, the United States has created propaganda machinery in its State Department to interpret American life and policy to the rest of the world. This machinery is being operated under serious handicaps. Americans are suspicious of propaganda as an instrument of government, even when used by themselves, although they accept it in the form of advertising. They have had little experience with it and have been more concerned with guarding against propaganda than in developing affirmative policies for influencing world opinion. Finally, American life is so broad and varied that the propaganda charged with interpreting it is faced with an almost insuperable task. The U.S. government propaganda in peace or in war must be guided by people who are clear about the essential meaning of American life. Not only the official propagandists but the legislators and administrators who sanction them must have an assured belief that the American scheme of living gives a satisfying explanation of the world today and will continue to provide a rationale by which the problems of tomorrow's world can be successfully resolved.

The article presents an opinion research and historical interpretation of elections. Presidential elections are a subject of immediate concern to historian and also to social scientists - particularly students of opinion research. Furthermore, public opinion research can assist in solving some of the problems of historians relative to elections by providing techniques for establishing trends in political opinions, evaluating the effects of specific leaders and communications on voting and determining the importance of campaign issues. Closer cooperation between the two disciplines can result in more meaningful history. When it comes to presidential elections, a variety of academic disciplines which generally manage to keep to their own bailiwicks suddenly find themselves sitting, perhaps somewhat uncomfortably, at the same table. To the historian an election is an important event in the endless stream of causes and effects - the preceding events which produced it and the subsequent events which it affects must be designated.