Office-holders periodically face the problem of choosing among a set of career alternatives, and these alternatives customarily include the choice of dropping out of political life, or seeking reelection, or of choosing to seek higher office. This paper assumes that officeholders behave according to a rational calculus in making such choices, and that the main elements involved in the choice process include the probabilities and values attached by the candidate to his alternatives, and the investments required to obtain these alternatives. Political ambition, or the desire to seek higher office, is shown to develop as a product of the investments that politicians make in their political careers, and the investments are shown to be associated with the structural characteristics of community size and electoral competitiveness. The subjects of the research are 435 city councilmen from 89 cities of the San Francisco Bay Region, and the data include information derived from interviews with the councilmen and aggregate election data collected on each city.
Foreign policy seems to command more public attention than domestic policy and yet—insofar as it has been, researched—public opinion on foreign policy seems to have less impact on governmental decisions than does opinion in most other issue areas. There are at least two reasons, one normative and one empirical, why public opinion can be regarded as pertinent to some foreign policy questions—especially those associated with “life and death.” Normatively, it is desirable for political leaders in a democracy to commit national resources in ways generally approved by the populace. Large scale military commtiments should, if at all possible, meet with the approval of public opinion. Empirically, if they do not, experience has shown there are circumstances in which public disapproval of the course of foreign policy may be registered in national elections. Specifically, our one recent experience with a situation of partial mobilization and a limited but large-scale and indefinite commitment to military action in Korea did in time produce a distribution of opinion that suggested the war was very unpopular. And though its precise impact on the 1952 presidential election is difficult to assess there is little doubt that the Korean issue contributed significantly to the Eisenhower landslide.Among the questions raised by the Korean experience is whether the American public will easily tolerate the prosecution of long drawn-out wars of partial mobilization. Therefore, it is not surprising that another such war, in Vietnam, has stimulated a concern with public opinion.
In a recent monograph, Professor Heinz Eulau begins his analysis by quoting two “evidently antagonistic formulations” of the theoretical underpinnings of voting behavior in the United States:1. “A person thinks, politically, as he is socially.”2. Crucial among the elements in the electoral decision are “traditional or habitual partisan attachments.”These rival conceptions of primacy among politically relevant variables are often summarized by the terms “class” and “party.” As Eulau points out, “from Aristotle to Harold J. Laski, the relationship between class and party has been one of the ‘grand problems,’ so-called, of speculation about political systems. It has also remained one of the most neglected areas of systematic theory and of empirical analysis.” Data drawn from Survey Research Center surveys have recently been used to explore the relative importance and specify the interdependence of class and party in American voting. Generally, they show party to be more immediately relevant to the voting decision than class, though class position clearly shapes and sets limits to possible party identification and party-related perspectives.Difficult problems are involved in attempting to sort out and define the two postulated independent variables. The extent to which, in some sense, class determines party orientation is perhaps the most difficult. For example, even when it is found that a certain portion of the working class prefers the Republican party, it may still be that a generation or two earlier the families of this group were Republican on class grounds, and have perpetuated the identification through the socialization process. Campbell et al., conclude that party identification has a “conserving influence,” inhibiting or, at least, slowing down the political manifestation of changes in class position. Their dat a strongly suggest that in any immediate situation class will be much less highly correlated with the vote than party preference. Campbell et al., do not attempt to control for class in relating party identification to the vote, although they do explore the separate effect of class. Eulau deals with this problem at length, but his focus is rather different. He does not attempt to specify the relative weight of each independent variable in predicting the vote, but concentrates on exploring the interrelationships of the two variables.
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