bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Reply to Rothman
Authors: Cropsey Joseph
Published: May 2006

Readers of Stanley Rothman's article “The Revival of Classical Political Philosophy: A Critique” will be aware that the title he has chosen does not indicate the full scope of his endeavor. He has in fact attempted to state and criticize the grounds of classical political and natural philosophy, and to state and in a certain measure defend the grounds of modern social and natural science. Exceptional resources of scholarship and analytic power would be needed to dispose of those tremendous themes, which I believe Rothman has not succeeded in doing. A prominent purpose of Rothman's paper is to criticize the work of Professor Leo Strauss and of some of his students, on the view that he, and after his instruction they, are the animators of the attempted revival of classical doctrines concerning natural right. The attempt to revive natural right is presented as complementary with a belief in the weakness of social science as now understood by the majority of academic and other professionals. The purpose of the present reflections on Rothman's article is to see how far he has made a valid criticism of the classics and of the men he regards as their attempted restorers; and to consider the soundness of his views on the received sciences.
Political Science as a Discipline: A Statement by the Committee on Standards of Instruction of the American Political Science Association
Authors: Almond Gabriel A. , Bellquist Eric C. , Ray Joseph M. , Roche John P. , Stewart Irvin , van Wagenen Richard W. , Millett John D.
Published: May 2006

Political science is a basic discipline in the social sciences. Although it must necessarily maintain close scholarly association with the disciplines of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, geography, and social psychology, political science cannot be considered a part of any of these other social sciences. Political science has its own area of human experience to analyze, its own body of descriptive and factual data to gather, its own conceptual schemes to formulate and test for truth.
On the Relation of Political Science and Economics
Authors: Cropsey Joseph
Published: May 2006

That politics and economic life have much to do with each other is a remark matched in self-evidence only by the parallel observation that political science and economics are of mutual interest. All the more striking then is the difficulty one meets in attempting to state with precision how politics and economic life, or how political science and economics are related.

Consider for example the view that politics is the ceaseless competition of interested groups. Except under very rare conditions, as for instance the absence of division of labor, economic circumstances will preoccupy the waking hours of most men at most times. Their preoccupations will express themselves in the formation of organizations, or at least interested groups, with economic foundations. Politics, so far as “interest” means “economic interest” (which it does largely, but not exclusively), is the mutual adjustment of economic positions; and to that extent, the relation between politics and economic life seems to be that political activity grows out of economic activity. But the competition of the interests is, after all, an organized affair, carried out in accordance with rules called laws and constitutions. So perhaps the legal framework, the construction of which surely deserves to be called political, supervenes over the clashing of mere interests and even prescribes which interests may present themselves at the contest. Thus politics appears to be primary in its own right.
American Denazification and German Local Politics, 1945–1949: A Case Study in Marburg
Authors: Gimbel John
Published: May 2006

Reviewing the accomplishments of three years of American occupation in Hessen the military governor wrote in 1948 that “the time is not yet ripe for a final appraisal of the effects of Denazification. There can be no doubt, however, that…it was not as effective in its ultimate objective—weeding out anti-democratic elements—as it should have been.” Although the quotation implies a basically negative purpose for denazification, American military government had a positive purpose as well: to provide conditions under which a more democratic life could grow and flourish. To achieve the positive aim, political parties, trade unions, and other democratic institutions were encouraged to develop, with the enforced condition that they be, and stay, purged of Nazis. To achieve the negative goal, military government liquidated the Nazi Party and its affiliated organizations; arrested and detained influential Nazis and “other dangerous persons”; removed and excluded Nazi Party members “of more than nominal importance” from schools, public offices and private enterprises; eradicated Nazi symbols from public places; seized and blocked Nazi property; eliminated Nazi teaching materials from the schools; and punished those Nazis who had taken an active part in the organizations declared to have been criminal by the Nuremberg Tribunal. Both a transfer of power and a transformation of the political climate were intended; each seemed a necessary condition for the other.

Studies of the American program of denazification that have so far appeared are devoted chiefly to top-level analyses of the policy and its administration. The present study complements these by examining its impact at the lowest level in the military government's administrative hierarchy, in a single locality.
Cosmopolitan Man and the Political Community: An Interpretation of Othello
Authors: Bloom Allan D.
Published: May 2006

In the world of today the existence of a common humanity has been established, negatively at least, by a common fear of a common extinction. Only rational beings fear thermonuclear annihilation; only rational beings can create such means of annihilation. An unprecedented danger supplies a new kind of evidence for the oldest thesis in political philosophy: man is by nature a rational and political animal. The roots of man's humanity, as of his inhumanity, are in the political community, and in the political community's capacity for making war or peace. As the growth from the roots reaches what were once the heavens, the problem of reconciling the origins with the ends attains an acute proportion. Can the new awareness of the commonness of our common humanity cause the fashioning of institutions and men equal to the problem that that very humanity has created? Can the particularity that characterizes individual races, nations, creeds—the particularity that has, from the known origins of political life until the present, provided the substance of political life both in its misery and in its glory—can that particularity transform itself into universality, as the finest and ultimate fruit of human reason? Or may the consummation of rationality, as it is given us to know it, be found in its own self-extinction?

In pondering these ever new questions we turn again to the oldest wisdom of our kind. We have too long neglected the understanding of Shakespeare, perhaps because the brilliance of his art has blinded us to his political genius. Shakespeare lived through a decisive period in the emergence of modern society and thought; and he presented in living tableaux the human problems created by the new world opening before him. That he does not offer solutions nor formulas does not justify ignoring him. Before political scientists can proceed to the suggestion of policies, they must perceive the problems in the fullness of their complexity. In Shakespeare's works is to be found as complete a range of human types as any man is likely to meet in his lifetime, and they are viewed with an eye that penetrates more deeply than that of any common observer. The art of the poet brings to consciousness psychological depths that have not been fathomed by any other method.
English Bards and APSR Reviewers
Authors: Burckhardt Sigurd
Published: May 2006

Recently the Review has extended its hospitality to studies which are not, technically, within the discipline it serves. A new school of Shakespeare criticism may be in the making; and since everyone deplores departmentalization, one should like to welcome, without misgivings, APSR publication of two Shakespeare interpretations. But I, for one, do have misgivings. It may be that the views of the authors are useful and needful for political theory; of that I am no judge. But I am sure that to present these views as Shakespeare's can serve neither political theory nor Shakespeare criticism. The study of Shakespeare can profit from a knowledge of the history of political theory; and we on the belletristic side of the quad like to think that we are not the sole beneficiaries of the exchange. But the two articles in question go beyond this simple form of barter; they are interpretations of dramatic poetry. They do not accept and retail what Shakespeare criticism has concluded about the poet's political philosophy; they are ambitious attempts to discover this philosophy by taking a direct and novel look at some Shakespearean texts. That is a praiseworthy ambition; but it demands something the authors do not have nor even know they lack: an adequate concept of the specificity of literature as a mode of discourse different from other modes. They have a worthy aim: to give a great poet a voice in the great concerns of practical life. But they have not yet learned to distinguish between the poet's voice and their own—so that, though I greet the aim, I must withhold the applause.
A Multi-Bloc Model of The International System
Authors: Masters Roger D.
Published: May 2006

This essay will attempt to define an abstract model of the international system (or, more precisely, a model of the structure of that system), as a supplement to the types presented by Morton A. Kaplan. Before attempting such a construction, it is well to show the utility of the “multi-bloc system” as an alternative to his six models. Kaplan's “balance-of-power” and “unit veto” systems are essentially defined in terms of nation-states as “actors”; and his “universal” and “hierarchical” systems have essentially but one “actor,” though in the former the nation-state subsists as an administrative and local political unit. The two “bipolar” models (“loose” and “tight”) have, by definition, two major bloc “actors,” with uncommitted nation-states on the margin and an “international actor” such as the U.N. playing a limited role in the former model. It is true that his “unit veto” system may have blocs instead of nation-states for “actors,” but by this very token the difference between a system with a multiplicity of states and one with a multiplicity of blocs is not suggested by Kaplan's typology.

The possibility of an international system composed of a multiplicity of blocs has been considered by a number of writers in the past few years. Even before the end of the Second World War, Walter Lippmann wrote:

The question is whether some sixty to seventy states, each acting separately, can form a universal organization for the maintenance of peace. I contend that they cannot, and that single sovereign states must combine in their neighborhoods, and that the neighborhoods must combine into larger communities and constellations, which then participate in a universal society.
The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry
Authors: Ostrom Vincent , Tiebout Charles M. , Warren Robert
Published: May 2006

Allusions to the “problem of metropolitan government” are often made in characterizing the difficulties supposed to arise because a metropolitan region is a legal non-entity. From this point of view, the people of a metropolitan region have no general instrumentality of government available to deal directly with the range of problems which they share in common. Rather there is a multiplicity of federal and state governmental agencies, counties, cities, and special districts that govern within a metropolitan region.

This view assumes that the multiplicity of political units in a metropolitan area is essentially a pathological phenomenon. The diagnosis asserts that there are too many governments and not enough government. The symptoms are described as “duplication of functions” and “overlapping jurisdictions.” Autonomous units of government, acting in their own behalf, are considered incapable of resolving the diverse problems of the wider metropolitan community. The political topography of the metropolis is called a “crazy-quilt pattern” and its organization is said to be an “organized chaos.” The prescription is reorganization into larger units—to provide “a general metropolitan framework” for gathering up the various functions of government. A political system with a single dominant center for making decisions is viewed as the ideal model for the organization of metropolitan government. “Gargantua” is one name for it.
Apportionment of the New York State Legislature
Authors: Silva Ruth C.
Published: May 2006

[What follows below is the substance of a document Miss Silva prepared, which was filed on June 6, 1961, with the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, as an Appendix to the petitioners' complaint in the case of W.M.C.A., Inc. et al. v. Caroline K. Simon, Secretary of the State of New York, et al. (61 Civil No. 1559, 1961). The suit seeks declaratory and injunctive relief and alleges that the apportionment and districting provisions of the New York Constitution deny the petitioners and others similarly situated both due process and the equal protection of the laws, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment of the federal constitution. Miss Silva had been employed in 1959–60 as special consultant on legislative apportionment by the State of New York Temporary Commission on Revision and Simplification of the Constitution, which reproduced in two volumes as Staff Report No. 33 (April, 1960) the study she made for it.

Litigation in the federal courts concerning legislative apportionments, from Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549 (1946) to Baker v. Carr, the Tennessee case pending in the Supreme Court at this writing, has been largely preoccupied with questions of federal jurisdiction. The document below does not touch this issue, but rather is confined to the practical effects of the apportionment and districting provisions of the New York Constitution. Man. Ed.]
The National Security Council as a Device for Interdepartmental Coordination: An Interpretation and Appraisal
Authors: Hammond Paul Y.
Published: May 2006

The National Security Council constitutes the most ambitious effort yet made to coordinate policy on the cabinet level in the American federal government. An examination of the experience of the NSC, together with the assumptions and expectations that went into proposing, establishing, and developing it, should help to clarify the problem of policy coordination under the President.

Various proposals for a special war cabinet in the United States, usually called a Council of National Defense, date back as far as 1911. The National Defense Act of 1916 established a body by such a name, headed by the Secretary of War. The statute was so watered down from the original proposals, however, that its uses were negligible, except later as a convenient peg for the National Defense Advisory Council (NDAC) and its subsidiaries that Roosevelt called into being in 1940. After World War I, both armed services revived the idea of a more powerful Council in an effort to find some base of support for their military policies, and as a counter to proposals for unification, proposals which they both opposed because these were founded on unrealistic expectations about the sums of money that could be saved through reorganization of the service departments.
Pressure Group Theory: Its Methodological Range
Authors: Dowling R. E.
Published: May 2006

An outstanding advance in one field of human endeavor will often inspire workers in others to try to transfer its conceptions or techniques into their own less successful fields, for obvious reasons. And so political theorists who have long been discontented with the state of politics when compared with that of certain other sciences have, in consequence, sought to advance their field by adopting the ideas or techniques of their scientific contemporaries. The impressive application of physics will probably increase both political tension and the political scientists' interest in methodology.

The last hundred years of political science have seen attempts at the introduction of various exotica, Darwinism, Economism, Freudianism, even Statisticism; but what I shall here discuss is the centuries-old attempt to appropriate the success of dynamics or mechanics to politics, an attempt which found its first great exponent in Hobbes but which has been carried on in this century by men like Bentley and Catlin. The success of dynamics, such men seem to have thought, is evidently the result of its method, which they took to be the reduction of phenomena to the primary qualities of matter and motion. We who are interested in politics, accordingly, will do well to copy the method of the successful scientists and reduce all political phenomena to similar primary entities. Just as Newtonian physicists speak of material bodies or particles, and the forces they exert upon each other, so we must confine ourselves to the description of the motions of atomic political bodies and the forces they exert upon each other. Thus we need only speak with Hobbes of men and their desires, or with Catlin of political men and their wills, or with Bentley of groups and their pressures, in order to succeed. We know that, in the early chapters of Leviathan, Hobbes announced this as his programme; but it is doubtful whether, as he moved from methodology to political theory, he did as he said he would do and whether he had not worked out his political theory before he “deduced” it from his primary entities of matter and motion. In what follows I shall try to show a similar history in the work of A. F. Bentley and D. B. Truman. I shall try to show that Bentley announced a methodological programme and that Truman's “development” of it has been quite external and could, in fact, have been undertaken without any reference to Bentley at all. I shall try to show, that is, that Bentley's contribution to political science has been of a psychological rather than a logical kind, and that the references made to him by contemporary pressure group theorists are similar to those which a Russian physicist might make to dialectical materialism.
“The Group Basis of Politics”: Notes on Analysis and Development
Authors: Golembiewski Robert T.
Published: May 2006

Academics who make scholarly book on trends in the literature must heed “the group theory of politics.” For there is much evidence that the approach is being de-emphasized for a third time. Arthur Bentley's The Process of Government is, of course, the most prominent of the contributions apparently headed for disciplinary oblivion.

This paper attempts to blunt the recent criticism by directing students to the unfinished (and largely untouched) business of exploiting “the group approach.” The prime vehicle for this effort will be Bentley's The Process of Government rather than the corpus of his work or that of his interpreters.

A three-fold rationale supports this analytical visit to the tap-root of “the group approach.” Primarily, critics have avoided the issues posed by Bentley. Moreover, pleas for abandonment of his approach often reflect an important misconception. Consider Rothman's conclusion that “there is certainly room for studies of the kind which rely upon the mature judgment of their authors, rather than being bound by conceptual schemes which appear to be simple keys to reality, but which only serve to blind students to the obvious facts of politics.”
The “Open Society” and its Fallacies
Authors: Kendall Willmoore
Published: May 2006

A little over 100 years ago John Stuart Mill wrote in his essay On Liberty that “… there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.” The sentence from which this is taken is not obiter: Chapter Two of his book is devoted to arguments, putatively philosophical in character, which if they were sound would warrant precisely such a conclusion; we have therefore every reason to assume that Mill meant by the sentence just what it says. The topic of Chapter Two is the entire “communications” process in civilized society (“advanced” society, as Mill puts it); and the question he raises is whether there should be limitations on that process. He treats that problem as the central problem of all civilized societies, the one to which all other problems are subordinate, because of the consequences, good or ill, that a society must bring upon itself according as it adopts this or that solution to it. And he has supreme confidence in the Tightness of the solution he offers. Presumably to avoid all possible misunderstanding, he provides several alternative statements of it, each of which makes his intention abundantly clear, namely, that society must be so organized as to make that solution its supreme law. “Fullest,” that is, absolute freedom of thought and speech, he asserts by clear implication in the entire argument of the chapter, is not to be one of several competing goods society is to foster, one that on occasion might reasonably be sacrificed, in part at least, to the preservation of other goods; i.e., he refuses to recognize any competing good in the name of which it can be limited.
TVA and Power Politics
Authors: Wildavsky Aaron
Published: May 2006

The passage of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Revenue Bond Act in 1959 ended a quarter of a century during which the Authority was dependent upon Congressional appropriations to supply the capital investment for its growing electric power facilities. This development marked the first appearance of consensus in the long conflict over the role of TVA in the national economy. The consensus emerged from an impasse between TVA's lack of support in Congress—the result of its narrow geographical limits, its identification with a single political party, and the growing industrialization of states on its borders—and the inability or unwillingness of its opponents to have TVA sold to private investors—the result of intensive support for the Authority among an active few in Congress, the unified nature of the TVA power system, and the huge amounts of power which TVA supplied to defense installations. The resolution of this impasse by authorizing TVA to sell revenue bonds on the public market suggests that in an open political arena like the Congress a stable consensus on policy may arise despite the most ardent efforts of the main contenders to achieve other solutions. Indeed, conflict among independent political forces may well achieve solutions meeting a far wider range of preferences than would be the case if the decision were made by any single official. Since maintenance of adequate Congressional support is a perennial problem for federal agencies, it will be instructive to review the shifting basis of support for TVA in Congress and draw from this experience the appropriate lessons.
Joseph de Maistre and the Reaction Against the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Greifer Elisha
Published: May 2006

It is a commonplace observation of French politics of the past century that men who started out as radicals turned conservative as they grew older, and that party groups launched with radical names and programs, though they kept the names, swung to the Right with the passage of time. In both cases we explain the transformation, in part at least, as evidence of an increasing satisfaction with the status quo, as the political system made room for the newcomer. In Joseph de Maistre we have an example from a somewhat earlier age of a less common phenomenon, the conservative turned reactionary, and impelled, moreover, to develop a systematic justification of his new position. Evidently, no parallel explanation will serve to account for this change, for Maistre, though he found a place for himself in the public life of his time, grew increasingly dissatisfied with the trend of events around him. It will not do, either, to dismiss him—in the manner of the orthodox tradition in the history of political thought—as an authoritarian ogre, or an irrationalist, or simply as a confused man, a split personality with humanitarian impulses and reactionary ideas. There was no inconsistency in this combination. Rather the explanation must be sought in the political situation of his day as he saw it, and in his concern for the perennial problem of political obligation. The positions that concern led him to take, his rationalizations of them, and the difficulties they landed him in, are the subject of this article.
The Rights of Majorities and of Minorities in the 1961 Term of the Supreme Court
Authors: Wright Benjamin F.
Published: May 2006

But for two decisions, the 1961 term of the Supreme Court could have been characterized as one of the least interesting in recent years. Apart from Baker v. Carr and Engel v. Vitale no decision stands out as a major interpretation either of the Constitution or of national or state legislation. Not that there was any shortage of constitutional cases. In at least thirty such the Court gave decisions and written opinions. In a number of instances, some of which will be examined presently, acts of state legislation were held invalid. Some 63 cases involved the interpretation of acts of Congress; in none was a statute held unconstitutional. There was, in other words, a continuation of the point of view which the Court adopted in the spring of 1937, rather than a hostile disposition toward both state and national legislation dealing positively with the social and economic problems coming in the wake of that new (to the United States) combination of factors, the industrialization of much of the country and the acceptance of most assumptions of nineteenth century humanitarianism.

Last year Professor McCloskey, writing in this Review on the 1960 term, quite properly limited himself to the consideration of cases dealing with civil rights. Yet before Charles Evans Hughes became Chief Justice in 1930, so few such cases arose that no one would have devoted even a major portion of an annual survey to them. Indeed, before the Civil War there was only one obscure case in which an act of a territorial legislature was held void as contrary to the guarantees of civil rights in the Constitution, and none involving either Congressional or state legislation. A few emerged in the decade after that War, but it was only with such cases as Strormberg v. California, Near v. Minnesota, Powell v. Alabama, Grosjean v. American Press Co., and DeJonge v. Oregon that the Supreme Court actively began to be the guardian of civil liberties.
Organization Theory and Political Theory
Authors: Kaufman Herbert
Published: May 2006

If two men of similar talents, identical training, shared values, and common interests were to study the same phenomena it would not be at all remarkable if they approached the phenomena in the same way, described them in the same terms, employed the same logic in analyzing them, drew the same conclusions from them, and formulated the same theories about their causes.

If, however, two men of similar talents but of rather divergent training, professing differing objectives, and displaying varied (perhaps even conflicting) concerns were to pursue studies of phenomena each believed to be quite distinct from the other's field of inquiry, it would be most astounding if their findings and inferences should turn out to be closely parallel in many important respects, particularly if there were little evidence of communication between them.
Game Theory and Cumulative Voting in Illinois: 1902–1954
Authors: Sawyer Jack , MacRae Duncan
Published: May 2006

Since the theory of games was first made widely available, with application to economic behavior, its use has been suggested in many other areas, from the global to the individual. Several correspondences between game theory and certain aspects of political process have been noted.

The contribution of game theory to substantive knowledge in the empirical sciences, however, has been modest; Luce and Raiffa judge that its impact has been greater in applied mathematics. The area of political behavior—despite the apparent applicability of the notion of conflict of interest—is similarly lacking in studies, although a few notable exceptions exist.
Two Faces of Power
Authors: Bachrach Peter , Baratz Morton S.
Published: May 2006

The concept of power remains elusive despite the recent and prolific outpourings of case studies on community power. Its elusiveness is dramatically demonstrated by the regularity of disagreement as to the locus of community power between the sociologists and the political scientists. Sociologically oriented researchers have consistently found that power is highly centralized, while scholars trained in political science have just as regularly concluded that in “their” communities power is widely diffused. Presumably, this explains why the latter group styles itself “pluralist,” its counterpart “elitist.”

There seems no room for doubt that the sharply divergent findings of the two groups are the product, not of sheer coincidence, but of fundamental differences in both their underlying assumptions and research methodology. The political scientists have contended that these differences in findings can be explained by the faulty approach and presuppositions of the sociologists. We contend in this paper that the pluralists themselves have not grasped the whole truth of the matter; that while their criticisms of the elitists are sound, they, like the elitists, utilize an approach and assumptions which predetermine their conclusions. Our argument is cast within the frame of our central thesis: that there are two faces of power, neither of which the sociologists see and only one of which the political scientists see.
Increasing the Number of Americans Potentially Available for Foreign Assignments
Authors: Laves Walter H. C.
Published: May 2006

The purpose of this paper is to inquire what contribution American political science can make to the easing of the shortage of competent manpower for assignments abroad.

The problem is, of course, not peculiar to the United States except in respect to its magnitude. Nearly every country with major responsibilities involving the assignment of personnel abroad is faced with it. On a world scale the United Nations, especially with respect to the Expanded Technical Assistance Program, is facing difficulties in searching out individuals who are competent, willing, and available. This was forcefully revealed by a study the author recently made for all the specialized agencies on behalf of the Technical Assistance Board. It appears to be a characteristic of our times that not enough men and women have been trained to deal competently with the kinds of problems with which we are faced in intensified intercultural relations. Thus, while this discussion will deal chiefly with the problem of increasing the American personnel potentially available for foreign assignments—something with which American political scientists need to be urgently concerned—we must avoid losing sight of the broader world setting of the problem.
Dimensions of Political Systems: Factor Analysis ofA Cross-Polity Survey
Authors: Gregg Phillip M. , Banks Arthur S.
Published: May 2006

Since the publication of David Easton'sThe Political System, it has become increasingly common for political scientists to speculate as to the basic factors which may be common to all political systems and which, in their varying manifestations, determine the unique styles of political behavior within each. Efforts to identify the basic political phenomena and their complex relationships have generated a variety of cross-national conceptual schemes and propositions. Some authors speak of structural and functional requisites, some refer to equilibrium conditions for system maintenance. Others, employing more traditional concepts, refer to power, legitimacy, ideology, instability, consensus, influence, and bargaining. Regardless of the form these efforts assume, they all posit the existence of factors or dimensions which are common to all political systems.
Confining Conditions and Revolutionary Breakthroughs
Authors: Kirchheimer Otto
Published: May 2006

I want to try to connect the course of several regimes with what, for want of a better name, I shall call “confining conditions”—the particular social and intellectual conditions present at the births of these regimes. Do I prejudice the case by calling the sum total of the prerevolutionary situation confining conditions rather than calling them more neutrally, as Val Lorwin suggested to me, simply antecedent conditions? Yet every situation which a new regime finds at its inception is an antecedent one. I am concerned specifically—and only—with the conditions that have to be overcome if the new regime is to continue. How the new regime may accomplish this, or may fail to, is the subject of this paper. Therefore I consider the nature of the confining conditions, chiefly those of social structure; the nature of the new regime; and the nature of the methods available to it, as well as those it adopts to overcome the confining conditions.
The Modernity of Tradition: The Democratic Incarnation of Caste in India
Authors: Rudolph Lloyd I.
Published: May 2006

Marx's century-old socio-political analysis of peasant nations and of India's traditional village and caste society, because it captures so much of contemporary social and political analysis, provides a convenient framework for critical discussion and evaluation of the relationship between traditional society and modern politics in India. Peasant nations such as mid-nineteenth century France, Marx observed in the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, are formed “by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes.” Objectively, peasants form a class; the mode of life, interests and culture which flow from their productive circumstances separate peasants from other classes and place their class in opposition to other classes. But subjectively and practically, peasants form a vast mass, “the members of which live in similar conditions, but without entering into manifold relations with one another.”
The Measurement of Inter-Party Competition and Systemic Stability
Authors: Pfeiffer David G.
Published: May 2006

The American two-party system is a constant object of study by many political scientists, yet there exists no adequate scale by which to measure inter-party competition and the stability of our two-party system. It is the purpose of this article to present a simple index by which the condition of any two-party system (national or state or foreign) can be determined in relation to its expected behavior.
Equal Protection and the Urban Majority
Authors: Pritchett C. Herman
Published: May 2006

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. On May 17, 1954, nine judges, sworn to defend a Constitution which guarantees equal protection of the laws, speaking for a country which declared its independence on the proposition that all men are created equal and which is fighting for moral leadership in a world predominantly populated by people whose skin color is other than white—these nine men unanimously concluded that segregated educational facilities are “inherently unequal.”

Most of the members of this audience can probably still recall their feelings when they heard what the Supreme Court had done. Even those who were in full sympathy with the holding must nevertheless have been awed by the responsibility the Supreme Court had undertaken and shaken by some doubts whether the judicial institution could engage in a controversy so charged with emotion and bitterness without running the risk of political defeat and possible permanent impairment of judicial power.
On the Fluidity of Judicial Choice
Authors: Howard J. Woodford
Published: May 2006

Within the past decade, a significant change has occurred in political science literature about the judiciary. The central questions have shifted from public law concerns—what is the law and its value?—to a primary focus on decision-making and process—how and why courts decide what they do, and with what political effects? The Supreme Court still dominates professional attention, but a host of new research techniques (jurimetrics and socialization studies, content and capability analysis, small group theory, etc.) vie for the allegiance of researchers.1 The variety of methods in vogue is formidable, and a testament to the borrowing power of the profession. So has been the sound and fury accompanying the change. The new approaches are perhaps too young to attempt a synthesis with traditional methods of analysis or even among themselves. Yet it is never too early to locate unities of inquiry, including common problems. The object of this essay is to air one difficulty facing virtually every student of the judicial process—the fluidity of judicial choice—and to examine some of its implications for research in and normative evaluation of judicial behavior.

The general argument should be stated at the outset. My purpose is to present empirical findings as a basis to critique some current research techniques in hopes of contributing to the analytical synthesis which must come if the discipline is to make a concerted advance in understanding judicial behavior. From a research standpoint, an unfortunate by-product of the debate between the “quantifiers” and the “qualifiers,” as Joseph Tanenhaus has distinguished them, is that extremes of advocacy have obscured the much more important
things that students of the judiciary share in common than the methodological differences which agitate them.
Majority vs. Opposition in the French National Assembly, 1956–1965: A Guttman Scale Analysis*
Authors: Wood David M.
Published: May 2006

A series of significant developments in French politics has recently touched off speculation about the possibility that a major transformation of the structure and behavioral patterns of the system of political parties is taking place. The most salient developments from 1958 until 1967 can be briefly listed: (1) the unprecedented longevity of governmental coalitions throughout the entire span of life of the Fifth Republic (only one Government overthrown in eight years); (2) the near single-party majority attained by the Gaullist UNR in the November, 1962 elections; (3) the ability of five major non-Gaullist parties to coalesce their forces behind only two candidates opposing General de Gaulle in the December, 1965 presidential election, with the resulting necessity for a second ballot; (4) the subsequent merging of forces on the moderate left and the moderate right into combinations bent upon coordinated efforts in the March, 1967 legislative elections; (5) the successful construction of a Gaullist electoral alliance limiting the number of official Gaullist first-ballot candidates in each constituency to one; (6) the electoral agreements between the Communists and the moderate left Fédération permitting only one candidate of the left to remain in the race in any constituency on the second ballot; and (7) the tendency of voters to reward the united fronts of the outgoing Gaullist majority and the consistent leftist opposition and to penalize the relatively small and ambiguous center force, the Centre Démocrate.
Comparing Communist Nations: Prospects for an Empirical Approach
Authors: Shoup Paul
Published: May 2006

The past decade has witnessed a rapid, but uneven, growth in comparative studies. While certain types of political systems have received the lion's share of attention, others have remained backwaters of comparative research, experiencing little or no development in the application of comparative techniques. The comparative study of communist states, until recently, fell into the latter category—relatively neglected and certainly not enjoying the reputation and prestige of work with newly emerging nations or Western political systems.

Now this state of affairs is undergoing a change, or at least the promise of one. In the past several years, the possibility of developing comparative techniques in the study of communist political systems has become the object of growing interest and has provoked not a little discussion and debate.1 The opportunities and the problems that face this field—especially in developing empirically oriented comparative analysis—are the subject of the present article.
The City in the Future of Democracy
Authors: Dahl Robert A.
Published: May 2006

I need hardly remind this audience that one of the characteristics of our field is the large number of old and quite elemental questions—elemental but by no means elementary—for which we have no compelling answers. I don't mean that we have no answers to these questions. On the contrary, we often have a rich variety of conflicting answers. But no answer compels acceptance in the same way as a proof of a theorem in mathematics, or a very nice fit between a hypothesis and a satisfactory set of data.

Whether the obstacles that prevent us from achieving tight closure on solutions lie in ourselves—our approaches, methods, and theories—or are inherent in the problems is, paradoxically, one of these persistent and elemental questions for which we have a number of conflicting answers. For whatever it may be worth, my private hunch is that the main obstacles to closure are in the problems themselves—in their extraordinary complexity, the number and variety of variables, dimensions qualities, and relationships, and in the impediments to observation and data-gathering.

However that may be, a question of this sort often lies dormant for decades or even centuries, not because it has been solved but because it seems irrelevant. For even when no satisfactory theoretical answer exists to a very fundamental question, historical circumstances may allow it to be ignored for long periods of time. Even specialists may refuse to take a question seriously that history seems to have shoved into the attic. What seem like fundamental controversies in one age are very likely to be boring historical curiosities in the next. And conversely it is my impression that a great many of the elemental political questions regarded as settled in one age have a way of surfacing later on.
Compatibility and Consensus: A Proposal for the Conceptual Linkage of External and Internal Dimensions of Foreign Policy
Authors: Hanrieder Wolfram F.
Published: May 2006

The relative intractablility of the international environment poses a problem for the foreign policy of all nations. Purpose and power meet with cross-purpose and countervailing power, and most foreign policy projects face external restraints that the makers of policy can neglect only at the risk of failure. Foreign policy—the more or less coordinated strategy with which institutionally designated decision-makers seek to manipulate the international environment—generally meets with tenacious resistance, if not insuperable obstacles.

To regard foreign policy and statecraft from this perspective, however, implies a good deal of determinism. In its more extreme analytical applications, this viewpoint reduces the pursuit of foreign policy goals to a contest between statesman and environment that is already settled by the insurmountable restrictions of the international “system.” Nations are implicitly delegated to play out the roles that the international system has “assigned” to its “actors” to maintain system stability or equilibrium. Domestic political variables are largely neglected in this analytical perspective. Foreign policy aspirations are assessed primarily in terms of whether a nation has adequately “internalized” system “rules”—that is to say, whether a polity has adjusted to the contingencies of the international system, which seems to move toward a preordained historical or analyticaltelos.The strictures of necessity, imposed by the international environment, take analytical precedence over considerations of preferences and the possibility of choice.
A Comparative Analysis of State and Federal Judicial Behavior: The Reapportionment Cases
Authors: Beiser Edward N.
Published: May 2006

The literature discussing the responses of lower court judges to decisions of the United States Supreme Court is limited, and the few comparative analyses of state and federal judicial behavior have tended to be speculative rather than empirical. It has been suggested that a controversial Supreme Court decision is likely to be supported more strongly by federal judges than by state judges, that state courts will probably construe a Supreme Court mandate more narrowly than will federal courts, and that federal courts can be expected to move in a direction hinted at by the Court more aggressively than state courts. Since all federal judges are appointed for life, it is only logical that they should be more independent of local pressures than state judges, many of whom are elected, or appointed for limited periods. The fact that state and federal judges owe their appointments to different levels of the political party hierarchy, and the historical fact that federal judges are less likely to seek future political office than are state judges, suggest a similar conclusion. Finally, the very fact of being a federal judge may produce a sense of identification with the Supreme Court which state judges would not share.
Group Influence and the Policy Process in the Soviet Union
Authors: Schwartz Joel J. , Keech William R.
Published: May 2006

It has become widely recognized that Soviet officials do not formulate public policy in a vacuum, and that, indeed, their deliberations take into account in some fashion the needs and demands of various elements of the society. Further, it has been observed that social groups of various types play a noticeable, if only rudimentary role in articulating interests to the top of the hierarchy. In fact one author has gone so far as to assert that communist policy-making results from a “parallelogram of conflicting forces and interests.” While such viewpoints are now far more widely accepted than in the early fifties, relatively little effort has been devoted to illustrating or illuminating how Soviet public policy in general or even a given Soviet policy can be importantly affected by group activity.

We propose here to make a contribution in that direction. Using the Educational Reform Act of 1958 as an exemplary case, we intend to show how and through what process groups can affect policy outcomes, and by identifying circumstances under which this takes place to generate some hypotheses about when such influence is most likely to recur. In their excellent analysis of Soviet policy formation, Professors Brzezinski and Huntington identify what they call “policy groups,” which come closest of any nongovernmental groups to participating in policy formation. These groups, such as the military, industrial managers, agricultural experts and state bureaucrats.