JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.T hroughout the post-World War II period the president has been called upon to make decisions concerning the use of force as a political instrument. The explanation that is offered is based upon a characterization of the president as a cybernetic human decision maker facing limitations. These limitations, in conjunction with the complexity of the environment, lead presidents to develop and use a relatively simple decision rule. The dependent variable, which is the probability of the use of force at any point in time, is explained in terms of enduring and essential concerns, which are operationalized as coming from the international, domestic, and personal environments.Data are taken from Blechman and Kaplan's Force Without War. On the basis of our estimation and evaluation, presidential decisions to use force are based on factors in all three arenas.

The growth of public opinion measurement in the last 40 years has added a new dimension to the study of presidential behavior. Not only have public evaluations become more newsworthy, but the importance of public support as a resource and determinant of political survival has been enhanced. Recent scholarship on the presidency has documented the value of public support, attempted to identify its major determinants, and speculated about the manner in which presidents might influence these evaluations.This research is designed to integrate these concerns into a single model and thereby to examine the interdependence between public support as a product of citizen decisions and as a political resource. First, a characterization of the citizen as an evaluator of the president is developed and used to construct an equation of presidential approval. Next, we develop an equation that explains presidential effectiveness in the legislative arena and illustrates the operation of public support as a presidential resource. The public support and legislative effectiveness equations are specified as a simultaneous equation system, estimated, and evaluated. The results of the model are then used to expand the conventional wisdom about the determinants of public support, to examine the consequences of the reciprocal relationship between public support and legislative success, and to generate ex post forecasts of President Reagan's support from 1981 through 1983.

Beginning with Mueller's (1970) seminal work, researchers have wrestled with explanations of the movement of presidential approval over time. In his initial argument, Mueller states that in tandem, the concepts underlying the coalition of minorities and rally round the flag variables predict that the president's popularity will continually decline over time and that international crises and similar events will explain short-term bumps and wiggles in this otherwise inexorable descent. (1970, 22) From this basis, Mueller posits “… a general downward trend in each president's popularity” (1970, 19) that is linear and deterministic over the course of a term. Others later moved away from arguments of linearity (e.g., Stimson 1976) and from the coalition of minorities concept (e.g., Kemell 1978), but these early characterizations of approval's time path, perpetuated in the “myth of the inexorable descent,” remain to this day.

1 o evaluate the comparability of the Gallup and Michigan Survey Research Center measures for studying levels of partisanship among the U.S. electorate we compare the overtime distribution of partisanship and the correlates of partisanship using the results of Gallup surveys, the National Election Studies, and the General Social Surveys. Compared with the Gallup results, both the other two surveys reveal less shortterm variation and also less total variation. Compared with the Gallup results, the National Election Studies partisanship results are less related to short-term electoral outcomes and do not appear to be strongly driven by short-term economic and political evaluations. Our analyses suggest that scholars should be cautious about using Gallup results to revise conclusions based upon analyses that employ the Michigan Survey Research Center party identification measure.

There is a glaring and potentially important discontinuity surrounding discussions of U.S. defense expenditure policy making. On the one hand, a growing body of empirically-based research questions whether the U.S. reacts in any significant fashion to the military expenditures of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, defense policy makers routinely justify defense increases as a response to similar increases by the Soviet Union. The discontinuity is resolved in the context of a multistep model of the defense expenditure policy-making process that incorporates a new estimate of Soviet defense spending and mass public opinion. Once formulated, the model provides answers to the following two questions: (1) Does the U.S., insofar as defense spending is concerned, react to the military expenditures of the Soviet Union? (2) If so, what is the magnitude of the reaction? The answers indicate that not only does the U.S. react to estimated Soviet defense spending, but that the reaction is directly responsible for a very substantial portion of the post-1978 increases in U.S. military expenditures.