Robert R. Alford

Voting Turnout in American Cities

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.

Sources of Local Political Involvement

Despite the legal norm of universal adult citizenship in the United States, and thus the legitimacy of participation by all strata of society, the actual level of political involvement in local communities is not high and differs greatly from group to group. Our task here is to spell out some of the conditions of group membership which contribute to local political involvement. Our broader purpose is to argue the need to re-expand the theoretical framework for analysis of political participation and thus to correct the present imbalanced focus upon participation as an individual act.Thus we shall examine some structural, rather than psychological, conditions of local political involvement. In this we shall occasionally use some measures previously reported in other studies and conventionally regarded as tapping psychological attributes of individuals; but these we shall regard as defining sets of role-expectations or as locating categories of persons placed within a certain range of normative obligations; and, more importantly, we shall systematically compare the net effect (upon local political involvement) of such variables with that of the more conventionally defined structural variables.

The Dead End of Matatheory@@@Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State, and Democracy.

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: State and society in theoretical perspective 1. Theoretical perspectives as modes of inquiry Part I. The Pluralist Perspective: 2. State and society in pluralist perspective 3. The democratic state and consensus 4. The democratic state and participation 5. The pluralist perspective on the bureaucratic state 6. The pluralist perspective on the capitalist state Part II. The Managerial Perspective: 7. State and society in managerial perspective 8. The bureaucratic state and centralisation 9. The bureaucratic state and fragmentation 10. The managerial perspective on the capitalist state 11. The managerial perspective on the democratic state Part III. The Class Perspective: 12. State and society in class perspective 13. The capitalist state and accumulation 14. The capitalist state and class struggle 15. The class perspective on the democratic state 16. The class perspective on the bureaucratic state Part IV. Theory, Politics, and Contradictions in the State: 17. The powers of theory 18. The power of politics 19. The power of contradictions.

Nations, parties, and participation: A critique of political sociology

Studies of the political behavior of the citizens of various countries, the course and outcomes of elections, and the organization and functioning of parties dominated the time and intellectual energies of political sociologists in the 1960s. Much of this work was associated with Stein Rokkan, scholars connected with him, or those whose work was facilitated by him.1 This paper makes use of a collection of essays and articles, Citizens, Elections, Parties (written over a period of nearly fifteen years of Rokkans influence on scholarship) in order to raise some issues concerning dominant intellectual perspectives in the field and the implications for research priorities.2

Research Note: Problems of Data and Measurement in Interorganizational Studies of Hospitals and Clinics

3 Heydebrand (1 973) uses these data but focuses upon the internal structure of hospitals. This note questions the usefulness of certain data sources, specifically the AHA Guide to the Health Care Field and the Directory of Social and Health Agencies in New York City, for studies of such interorganizational variables as autonomy, fragmentation, complexity, and differentiation. It identifies problems concerning ambiguities in the data themselves and ambiguities in the basic concepts which appear when empirical specification is attempted.

Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research.

While heated arguments between practitioners of qualitative and quantitative research have begun to test the very integrity of the social sciences, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba have produced a farsighted and timely book that promises to sharpen and strengthen a wide range of research performed in this field. These leading scholars, each representing diverse academic traditions, have developed a unified approach to valid descriptive and causal inference in qualitative research, where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable. Their book demonstrates that the same logic of inference underlies both good quantitative and good qualitative research designs, and their approach applies equally to each. Providing precepts intended to stimulate and discipline thought, the authors explore issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects, and generally improving qualitative research. Among the specific topics they address are interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables, the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in measurement. Mathematical notation is occasionally used to clarify concepts, but no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics is assumed. The unified logic of inference that this book explicates will be enormously useful to qualitative researchers of all traditions and substantive fields.

Powers of theory: Theoretical perspectives as modes of inquiry

The home domain of each theoretical perspective comprises a particular level of analysis, world view, and method. In addition, each perspective has a distinctive view of key societal dimensions, the state, and its most important relations with society. Table 2 summarizes these elements of the mode of inquiry of each perspective. We shall show through detailed critical examination of actual empirical inquiries where the analysis is strong on a particular home domain and how it becomes weak when it leaves that domain without the appropriate conceptual adjustments. Our own position is that individual interests, motivations, and perceptions can never adequately explain individual behavior. Both organizational and societal factors must be taken into account in explaining variations in rates of individual behavior occurring in different types of situations. But the reverse is not possible – one cannot explain organizational or societal processes by theories of individual behavior or social interaction. Nor can organizational relations explain the totality of social relations. Levels of analysis Each perspective distinguishes in its own way among three levels of analysis: individual, organizational, and societal. Each perspective regards one of the levels as central and interprets the other levels from the vantage point of that level. This is the limit of each perspectives powers, exercised in its home domain. The societal level refers to the interinstitutional relations within and between whole societies. The concept of “institution” refers to a pattern of supraorganizational relations stable enough to be described – polity, family, economy, religion, culture.