of the most significant trends in American politics in the past couple of decades has been the decline in the proportion of the eligible electorate who actually vote. According to the Bureau of the Census, the turnout in presidential elections has declined each year since 1960, from 62.8 percent in 1960 to 54.4 percent in 1976 (Statistical Abstract, 1977. This marks the longest period of monotonic decline in turnout in American history (Congressional Record, 1970:41223-24). A nation long noted for a low rate of turnout, compared with other highly industrialized competitive polities, may soon see more than half of its eligible voters staying home on election day. Commentators have suggested a variety of causal factors-voter alienation due to Vietnam and Watergate, the eighteen-year-old vote, and registration requirements-and have predicted dire consequences for the stability and vigor of American politics. In Congress, legislation has been pending to ease registration requirements and, its sponsors hope, increase the size of the electorate.It is our present purpose to ascertain some of the factors associated Abstract The monotonic decline in turnout in presidential elections since 1960 is the subject of this analysis of survey data. After some common explanations for this decline were rejected, it was discovered that the decline occurred mainly among low-income and low-education whites. Two explanatory hypotheses were examined, but appropriate data for testing them were unavailable; however, in the 1970s nonvoters were more likely than voters at all income levels to express dissatisfaction with the political system. Nonvoting whites are not always a Democratic group, and their voting behavior is unpredictable over time. Their failure to vote may have an especially significant impact on Democratic party policies, and implies that palliatives like reform of voter registration laws may not have the desired effect.

In an attempt to test theories of the decline of political parties, survey data from the United States, Great Britain, Sweden and Norway are presented, and the literature on those nations is reviewed as well as that on France and West Germany. The conclusion is that party decline is by no means universal, nor does it take the same form where it does appear, or among the same social groups. Therefore far too much generalizing has been done, and the decline of party should be considered a nation-specific phenomenon rather than one that applies across most western industrialized nations and for similar reasons.

A B S T R A C TFactionalism within parties is a subject that is crucial in understanding how parties operate and how well they carry out the functions they are widely assumed to perform. However, factionalism has been undertheorized. In order to provide some theoretical content to the study of factions within parties, I develop a three-part typology of factionalism based on the degree of persistence of factional coalitions and what underlies them. An examination of presidential nominating contests in the major parties of the United States concludes that the degree of factional persistence is due to exogenous factors, and I infer from it a developmental theory. I conclude by suggesting ways in which the analysis might be extended to other nations.KEY WORDS Ⅲ American political parties Ⅲ factionalism Ⅲ factions Factionalism within parties is one of the most widely discussed but undertheorized aspects of party politics. Aside from some definitional disputes, political scientists have done little to develop taxonomic or developmental approaches to intra-party factionalism. While some political scientists have spun typologies of factionalism within particular parties, their methodology has often been no more sophisticated than their own observations and hunches. Their claims may be plausible and even insightful, but they offer no methodology that is accessible to other scholars other than their own ingenuity; methodologically, they are like clever journalists. As Laver and Schofield (1990: 33) have pointed out, the reader is left with no guidance as to how to choose between two equally plausible taxonomies of a party's factions.

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In Counter Realignment, Howard L. Reiter and Jeffrey M. Stonecash analyze data from the early 1900s to the early 2000s to explain how the Republican Party lost the northeastern United States as a region of electoral support. Although the story of how the 'Solid South' shifted from the Democratic to the Republican parties has received extensive consideration from political scientists, far less attention has been given to the erosion of support for Republicans in the Northeast. Reiter and Stonecash examine who the Republican Party lost as it repositioned itself, resulting in the shift of power in the Northeast from heavily Republican in 1900 to heavily Democratic in the 2000s.