Comparative Political Studies

This article addresses the need to relate theoretical statements on the causes of political violence to micro-level activity. Gurr's relative deprivation model is reviewed and some modifications are suggested. His theory, the modifications, and a number of possible alternatives or additions to the theory are then tested against data from a survey of Roman Catholic political activists in Northern Ireland. The analysis suggests that disobedient and violent forms of antiregime behavior have quite different causes; that the connection between RD and violence is less direct than Gurr suggests; and that dissidence plays a more important role than that accorded it in the relative deprivation model.

Political scientists for some time have questioned the value of party identification in the British context. The most popular objection has been that party identification appears to be less stable and less independent from the vote in Great Britain than in the United States. We attempt to demonstrate that the first objection is based on strong assumptions about how to deal with minor party identifiers and independents while the second can be disputed by showing that short-term forces, and not just measurement error, cause party identification and the vote to covary imperfectly. The analysis is carried out with the original Butler and Stokes data.

This article examines two plausible rival explanations of regime change. The first explanation, a structuralist argument, holds that regimes change because they are not constructed properly. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that the coherence in authority relations (that is, consistently democratic or consistently autocratic features) of a polity is a necessary condition for the lengthy persistence of that polity. The second explanation, a functionalist argument, holds that regimes change because they do not perform properly. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that the cumulation of performance crises (that is, any combination of high mass illegitimacy, high mass strife, and low decisional efficacy) of a polity is a sufficient condition for its quick demise. These two rival explanations of regime change are not mutually exclusive. Hence, we attempt a synthesis of the structuralist and functionalist arguments by suggesting two further hypotheses: that the coherence in authority relations and noncumulation of performance crises in a polity are necessary and sufficient conditions for the lengthy persistence of that polity; and, that the incoherence in authority relations and cumulation of performance crises in a polity are necessary and sufficient conditions for the quick demise of that polity. Evidence gathered from 25 polities provides striking confirmation of all four hypotheses.

Based on data from the International Comparative Political Parties Project, this article reports an assessment of the importance of environmental factors in explaining the vertical decentralization of power within national political parties. The findings from exploratory regression analyses and, especially, from analysis-of-variance, suggest that much of the cross-national variance in party decentralization may indeed be explained by environmental factors. Special attention is paid to the system-level factors of country size, type of polity (democratic or autocratic), vertical and horizontal distributions of power within the polity, sectionalism, and social heterogeneity.

A concept of policy cycles has gained dominance in the literature on the People's Public of China. This article examines the model, its usage, and its underlying assumpment and limitations, and contrasts it with a suggested alternative, a social learning model. A rgue that for the People's Republic, neither model is adequate to explain the development of policy, and suggest a synthesis of the two models, using Hirschman's 3) model of “problem-solving styles.”

As an area which lends itself to empirical analysis, political participation has been subject to rigorous attempts at operationalization. In this article, an extension of these efforts is intended. Employing data collected in Kenya, Korea, and Turkey, a ten-item, three-dimensional scale of political participation is developed. The overall structure of the scale closely resembles the findings of Verba, Nie, and Kim—a fact which also lends support to the validity of the scale of political participation developed here. Easy to administer, valid, and reliable, the three-dimensional, ten-item scale provides a potential for cumulative analysis in the subfield of political participation.