Reflections of a bourgeois Menshevik

He is author of The End of Ideology; The Radical Right; The Coming of Post-Industrial Society; The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism;and The Social Sciences since World War Two.     

Police uniforms,attitudes, and citizens

This study focuses on identifying the relationship between the citizen's attitude toward the police and the police uniform and authoritarian attitude. The perceived authority associated with the police uniform has been an essential ingredient of the police role. Consequently, the police uniform influences attitudes and behaviors of the wearers as well as the citizens with whom they interact. The citizen's attitude is negatively affected by the traditional military style police uniform in conjunction with the authoritarian attitude exhibited by police officers in performance of their duties. Consequently, when the uniform and officer's attitude are altered, there will be a corresponding change in the citizen's attitude toward the police. The attitude of the officer, in conjunction with the uniform, exerts considerably more influence on the citizen's attitude than does the uniform, officer's attitude, or any additional factor acting independently.     

Federalism and Consociational Regimes

Federalism and consociationalism are useful means of understandingpolitical systems. Federalism and consociationalism are bothbased on compound majoritarianism rather than simple majoritarianism,and both represent modern attempts to accommodate democraticcomplexity and pluralism, but the two systems are not quitesymmetrical, and territorial organization is not the only characteristicthat differentiates them. Instead, it can be said that federalismrelates to the form of a polity, while consociationalism relatesto the character of a regime. To the extent that federalismmay also function as the character of a regime, then federalismand consociationalism may be more symmetrical. One of the ambiguitiesof federalism is that it is often both form and regime. Consociationalism,however, relates only to regime.