ABSTRACT
The first of the post-1945 cross-national surveys was the work of Hadley Cantril and William Buchanan, How Nations See Each Other, a project coordinated by UNESCO and published in 1953. Stefan Nowak, a Polish participant in the work of the Vienna Centre, has classified cross-national surveys into two major groupings: those which are nation-oriented and those which are variable-oriented. The selection of nations for this tri-national study was inevitably a pragmatic decision for such is a necessary ingredient in any large scale research effort. All three nations rank reasonably closely when measures of general government expenditures are considered. Although the percentage of government expenditures is considerably less in the United States, it is comparable with other nations such as France and West Germany; similar data were not available from East Bloc states. Levels of economic development must also be considered in questions of equivalence among nations.
