Comparative Political Studies

This article assesses the contemporary state of the art in comparative politics, using as its empirical base a content analysis of articles appearing in Comparative Politics and Comparative Political Studies between 1968 and 1981. Primary attention is focused on the questions of comparative scope, parochialism, and substantive concern.

This article is concerned with public views in Israel on a series of socioeconomic and labor market issues. The empirical findings were analyzed with the aim of exploring the nature of ideological orientations and value hierarchies underlying these public views. The main findings are that there is a major concern with economic recovery, at the expense of sensitivity to humanitarian, civil, and social problems; that there appears to be a pronounced emphasis on the need for law and order that, along with related preferences, suggests a pattern of an authoritarian variant of rightism; that a majority of the public gives priority to materialist goals; and that individual level and collectivist material orientations, while moderately interrelated, produce different patterns of socioeconomic attitudes and preferences. At the aggregate level, these findings seem counter to the stereotyped preference of the Israeli public for socialist policies, and the multidimensionality of materialist value orientations may have major implications for other postindustrial nations as well.

This research deals with the evolution of the bond between a charismatic leader and his mass following. Two stages in the evolutionary process are identified and discussed: the development of structure within the movement, and the dispersion of the mass response across that structure and its higher level personnel. In this, the second report from the overall research project, we focus primarily on the second stage of the process. With a mixture of descriptive reports and systematic survey data, we examine the dispersion of charisma in the case of Peronism. After showing empirically that by 1965 there was, as expected, a clear separation between organizational Peronists and their personalist counterparts, we go on to offer differentiating social and psychological profiles of each wing of the movement. Canonical regression is used to compare the causal influence of social structural and psychological factors in producing the split. It is the former which shows much the greater effects.

The attitudes, patterns of alignments, and composition of the most powerful and influential leaders in Guyana and Trinidad—selected by a two-stage positional-reputational method—are compared and the findings related to the different developmental strategies adopted by the two governments: third world socialism in the case of Guyana, and capitalism in the Trinidadian case. It is shown that clientelistic co-optation and, to a lesser extent, appeals to race can and do overcome ideologically rooted opposition to a ruling party; however, when the regime's ideological position, as reflected in its policies, is compatible with elite interests, the importance of race and clientelism declines, except for co-optation of leaders representing lower class interests. In both countries, the composition of the group of elites shows a proliferation of those representing middle- and upper-class socioeconomic sectors of the society.

This article provides a theoretical and empirical cross-national analysis of the relationship between two composite concepts: left-wing mobilization (entailing consideration of the degree of social democratic party rule, left-wing party opposition, and trade union strength) and socioeconomic equality. A typology of this latter concept is presented that focuses upon four dimensions of equality: meritocratic (equality of opportunity), welfarist (ethos of the modern welfare state), emancipatory (socio-proportional equality for sexual, ethnic, and racial groups), and egalitarian (equality of income distribution). After consideration of the theoretical literature on the impact of the partisan composition of government (as well as the role of opposition and trade union forces) upon the degree of socioeconomic equality, hypotheses are derived to test empirically this relationship for the advanced capitalist states of Western Europe, North America, and the Pacific during the postwar era. The findings lend credence to a view (termed in this article the Constrained Socialism school of thought) that perceives severe politico-economic constraints in the ability to increase substantially those dimensions of socioeconomic equality that are not highly compatible with the interests of advanced capitalism.