Writing about local elections in 1968, Charles R. Adrian and Charles Press report that, “It is not known whether … state and national voting-population characteristics fit municipal voting, too.” Although a number of important studies of politics and elections in individual communities have emerged in recent years, the data are far from sufficient to permit more than the most speculative generalizations about the nature of the local electorate. This study draws back the curtain, albeit only a bit, on one aspect of local political participation—voting turnout. The data presented constitute, so far as we know, the first attempt at a comprehensive comparison among American cities with respect to turnout. As will be suggested and become obvious, the breadth of the data is not matched by their depth; data were received from only 80 percent of the 729 cities above 25,000 population in 1962, and we were able to utilize comparative turnout figures from only 282 of these. While relationships are suggested between turnout, political and governmental structure, and characteristics of the population, these relationships must be regarded more as leads to future research, than as clear and unambiguous findings.Previous work by the present authors has pointed to the importance of the political and social variables included in this analysis of American cities. Lee suggested in a study of nonpartisan elections and politics in California cities that nonpartisanship might tend to reduce voter participation. In a study of American cities, this hypothesis was confirmed in a preliminary analysis of the same data used in this article.
Existing theories of the nature of the state in Western capitalist democracies have been mostly propounded from one of three major theoretical perspectives, each emphasising a particular aspect of the state: the 'pluralist', which emphasises its democratic aspect: the 'managerial', which emphasises its bureaucratic elements: and the 'class', which focuses on its capitalistic aspect. Each of these theoretical perspectives has contributed something to our understanding of the state, but each also has its limitations. In this book, Alford and Friedland evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each perspective and present a new, synthetic framework for a more comprehensive theory of the state. Impartially reviewing the major historical and empirical works within each theoretical tradition, they reveal how empirical study has been shaped by theoretical assumptions. They agree that each perspective has a distinctive 'power' to understand part of the reality of the modern state, although it is powerless to explain other parts. In each case, the part that can be explained is the perspective's 'home domain', or the aspect of the state that it emphasises, while other aspects are either rejected or reinterpreted. The authors argue that the state cannot be adequately understood unless full account is taken of each of these home domains, and they suggest how the contributions of each perspective to the explanation of its own domain can be integrated into a new, and more powerful, theory.
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