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State and Local Government in a Decentralized Republic

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In the past decade or so, much has been learned about the impact of party and partisanship on the electorate. A series of impressive voting studies has revealed the. great importance of party identification and partisan perceptions on individuals and the implications these have for seadership selection and system stability. The rapid development of the survey tool and the high level of competence demonstrated by those who have designed and analyzed the recent voting studies have resulted in a substantial body of information and generalization on the ‘‘party in the electorate.”

Progress in aggregating solid behavioral data and generalizations on other important but more traditional aspects of political parties has been scattered and slow. Some of these aspects are party leadership, party structure, and party operations in government. Research costs in these three areas are frequently lower than costs in mass voting studies, so there are more of these studies and their quality is varied. In the light of this quality disparity, there is a need for a systematic collection of the best of the available behavioral work so that some order can be brought out of it by both the student and the researcher. This book was designed to meet that need through a careful selection of the key articles on party which have grown out of the major voting studies and the best behavioral work that has been done on other aspects of party. It includes political recruitment, party leadership, party structure, party organization of government, and democratic linkage.

This volume is consciously behavioral in orientation. All of its articles are written by social scientists who could be placed in the behavioral tradition and almost all are based on systematic research. At the same time, the editors are acutely aware that the behavioral approach is the target of much thoughtful and very serious criticism. Much behavioral work, it is charged, focuses not on the really important problem areas of politics but on less important and more easily observed and measured aspects of political activity. Critics have complained that behavioral researchers, under the guise of affective neutrality, have become implicit apologists for the status quo and for the on-going political system by their exclusive attention to existing behavior patterns, by sometimes casual use of functional analysis and by failure to point out the value implications of their hypotheses or their findings.*

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Availability

Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

320.8 WIL s

Publisher

New York : Macmillan Publishing., 1973

Collation

xii, 539 hlm.; tabel. grafik, 23 cm

Language

Indonesia

ISBN/ISSN

0024287407

Classification

320.8

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

Ed. 1, Cet.1

Subject(s)

Local Government
State Government
Decentralization in government - United States Fed

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

William O. Winter

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