Political science, as an empirical enterprise, shares with the other behavioral or social sciences at least one characteristic feature: partial formalization. For a science to most reliably discharge its two principal functions, explanation and prediction, statements embodying acquired knowledge must be systematically organized in subsumptive or deductive relations. Minimally, a set of such systematically related propositions, which include among them some lawlike generalizations, and which can be assigned specific truth value via empirical tests, is spoken of as a theory. A theory, in a substantially formalized system, includes as constituents (1) an uninterpreted or formal calculus which provides for syntactical invariance in the system, (2) a set of semantic rules of interpretation which assign some determinate empirical meanings to the formal calculus thereby relating it to an evidential or empirical base, and (3) a model for the uninterpreted calculus, in terms of more or less familiar conceptual or visualizable materials, which illustrates the relationships between variables in structural form, an alternative interpretation of the same calculus of which the theory itself is an interpretation.

The virtues of standard formalization need hardly be specified. For our purposes here it is sufficient to indicate that formalization seeks to satisfy the minimal requirements of any serious knowledge enterprise: to provide for syntactical and semantic invariance without which reliable knowledge is simply not conceivable. The language shift, exemplified in any cognitive effort, from ordinary to specialized language style is the consequence of attempting to reduce the vagueness, ambiguity and tense obscurity that afflicts common speech.

(Sartre to Camus): You blame the European proletariat because it has not publicly stigmatized the Soviets, but you also blame the European governments because they allow Spain into UNESCO; in this case I can see only one solution for you: the Galapagos Islands.

Vilfredo Pareto completed his Treatise on General Sociology in 1912, although it was not published till 1916. It is a vast work of one million words; sprawling, disorderly, and stuffed with minor masterpieces of often pointless erudition. The first three-quarters attacks the scientific status of practically all the various political and moral theories that have sought to pass themselves off as scientifically grounded and it is worth noting that even the most dedicated critics of Pareto have acknowledged the effectiveness of his onslaught. Among the positive contributions of the Treatise, five propositions stand out. First, Pareto affirms that social phenomena are not “caused” by any single factor but that all elements in society influence one another reciprocally. Secondly, social phenomena recur in cycles. Thirdly, the bulk of human behavior is not “logical” but only “logicalized”, or, as we should say today, not rational but merely rationalized. Fourthly, irrespective of constitutional forms, every society consists of the minority elite governing (leading?) the majority non-elite. Fifthly, parliamentary democracy, or to speak more accurately, “pluto-democracy”, is no exception: it comprises a governing elite of highly skilled operators who contrive to remain in power by persuasion and manipulation of the masses. Principally it is for the last three contentions that Pareto is today remembered, or, as I shall show, misremembered, as a “proto-fascist”.

The process of inquiry occasionally exhibits a dialectical pattern in which a series of assertions is advanced and then attacked. A third phase, which consists of an attempt to salvage the first set of assertions, often ensues. The study of American community power has followed this sequence almost classically, and today we find ourselves in the third phase of the dialectic. The first period marked the contemporary emergence of community power as a distinct field of study, mainly through the investigations of Hunter, Mills and their followers. These observers contended that communities were controlled by “elites,” usually economic, who imposed their will, often covertly, on non-elites. The second phase was marked by the challenge of another group of observers, the “pluralists.” Pluralists contended that the methods and premises of the “elitists” predisposed them to conclusions about community power which were unjustified. Elitists commonly reached their conclusions either by investigating the reputations for power of various members of the community or merely by assuming that all who possessed certain presumed sources of power were in fact powerful. The pluralists claimed that reputations did not guarantee control and demanded evidence that community decisions on political issues, major and minor, were controlled by a reputed elite. The pluralists, after studying community decisions on a variety of subjects, concluded that shifting coalitions of participants drawn from all areas of community life actually controlled local politics. Rarely could a single elite be discovered imposing itself in each area of decision, policy, and conflict.

Many observers felt that the pluralists had won the day. Their methodology studied actual behavior, stressed operational definitions, and turned up evidence. Most important, it seemed to produce reliable conclusions which met the canons of science. Recently, however, new considerations have been introduced which intend to prop up the elitist Humpty Dumpty on a more substantial wall of theory than the one from which it had previously tumbled. The beginnings of a new position on community power appear in the work of those responsible for the third phase, the “neo-elitists,” as I shall call them. That position forms the subject of this analysis.

The unequal distribution of power among the members of a political system is one of the most pervasive facts of political life. Yet, while many studies have confirmed the fact that a few members exercise disproportionate control over many others in most systems, the configurations of power relations that occur among the few have generally not been subjected to systematic comparative analysis. In a few notable empirical studies, attempts have been made to compare the exercise of power in different issue-areas and across different decisions. Comparative analyses have suffered, however, from the lack of any means to make tractable and compare, except in a qualitative way, schematic representations of power relations either in different political systems or over different issue-areas in the same system. When diagrams of power structures become complex and unwieldy, it is easiest to forget about making precise comparisons about the way power is distributed among decision-makers somehow identified as being influential in the political process.

In suggesting a basis for operational indices of the concentration of power Steven Brams' creative article “Measuring the Concentration of Power in Political Systems” (see pp. 461–475) has performed an important service to the discipline in opening up a neglected area. It is very surprising that despite all the past efforts to devise summary measures of power bases (e.g., income or military strength) so little effort has gone into summary indices for rigorously gauging their dispersion or the absence of dispersion. Having acknowledged Brams' piece as an extremely valuable stimulus for further thought, I would like now to exercise a scientific prerogative to propose a variation in the approach that should, for some theoretical purposes, prove even more useful. As Brams notes appropriately, it is indeed true that the best index “for any particular study will depend on the nature and purposes of the study.”

All the versions of Brams' PC index are directed toward measuring the collective exercise of influence between different levels of decision-makers. This approach reflects an essentially deterministic point of view: the influence from any level on a mutual influence set or sets is determined by the exercise of influence on only one of its members. For example, if a has power over b, and b is in a mutual influence set with c, then c's actions vis-à-vis b are completely determined by a. As far as the PC index is concerned, this is no different from the case of a's directly influencing b and directly influencing c when b and c are not in an influence relationship. But if one takes a probabilistic viewpoint of indeterminacy, of a's predominance but less than complete control over b and c when they are in a mutual influence relationship, the relations among units at a subordinate level become interesting.

Considerable attention has recently been focused on political oppositions in democracies. A recent book examines oppositions in various western countries and a journal called Government and Opposition was founded in 1965. The significance of the role of an opposition in democracies does not have to be stressed. It is generally accepted.

What of the role of the opposition in the United States? Robert A. Dahl notes that one must use the plural when speaking of opposition in this country since, “a distinctive, persistent, unified structural opposition scarcely exists in the United States … it is nearly always impossible to refer precisely to “the” opposition, for the coalition that opposes the government on one matter may fall apart, or even govern, on another.”

While it is true that “the” opposition is not institutionalized as a definite cohesive, persistent, distinctive group in American politics, it is also true that there has usually been an identifiable minority party in Congress. Though it does not always oppose the majority, and cannot be expected to be synonymous with “the” opposition very often, it does persist. Despite handsome invitations to disband—in the form of successive defeats at the polls—a sizeable number of congressmen, senators, and congressional candidates continue to call themselves Republicans and to organize as such in Congress.

Much of the business of the U.S. Congress in the post war period has involved issues concerning the size and scope of activities of the federal government. The legislation in this area can be traced, for the most part, to measures which originated during the period of the New Deal in response to the Great Depression and to measures enacted during World War II to meet the short-run exigencies attendant to rapid economic and social mobilization. From the point of view of the expansion of the federal role, the Eisenhower years are of some moment. While they marked a lull in the expansionist trend witnessed under the Democratic presidencies of Roosevelt and Truman, their significance lies in the fact that despite the change in adminsitrations, there was no reversal of the policies begun during the Roosevelt years. While most of the Republican legislators were on record in opposition to the expansion of the federal role, the failure of the Republican Party to introduce and enact legislation to reverse the trend of federal expansion resulted in a new plateau of federal activity from which the congressional dialogue was to proceed during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.

While the 87th Congress, meeting during Kennedy's first two years in the White House, did not enact the quantity of legislation expanding the federal role that Kennedy had called for in his inaugural, In the 88th Congress both parties supported a larger federal role to a greater extent than they had previously. In fact the first sessions of the 88th Congress as it bears on the federal role has been summed up as follows: “At no time did the majority of both parties reject a larger federal role.” (Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1963, p. 724) With two exceptions, the statement holds true for the second session in 1964.

By and large the Congress of the United States has been studied on its own terms, as a somewhat unique political institution. Studies of Congress are usually considered to be important simply because they shed light on an important institution in the American political system. It is true, of course, that Congress is an important policy-making body and does deserve study for that reason. But there is no reason why substantive importance cannot be combined with “importance” in another sense. It is also important, for example, to develop theory within any discipline which will help explain the phenomena under study. Trivial substantive problems can be made interesting because of the theory which they suggest. And because a problem may already be substantively important does not mean that it cannot be made even more significant by theoretical development.

As a result of this substantive focus, research on Congress has produced a very rich body of descriptive data on various components of the institution, including its members and leadership, group structure, committees, party systems, organization, and rules and procedures. Studies have also provided generalizations concerning such things as the decentralized decision-making of Congress and the effects of the seniority rule on the distribution of power within the House and Senate. These descriptive data and generalizations may serve as the content to be explained within the context of a theory. As yet there has been very little effort at theory construction concerning Congress. The data are there—their organization and explication remain.

Sidney Verba has argued that the state in modern societies may function as a religion. He is certainly not the only one to adopt such a point of view. But his work is especially notable in that he has strengthened the argument by welding together a theoretical perspective that seems to be derived from structural-functional analysis and a good deal of varied and interesting, though not crystal-clear data. Verba's discussion of the functions of the state is most explicit in his article on the Kennedy assassination—in which he seeks to interpret the many studies of public reaction to the President's death. In this article, appropriately titled “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment,” Verba attempts to go to essentials. He speaks of the deeper levels of political involvement made evident by the psychological crisis of the assassination. Repeatedly he employs the term “primordial” to describe the character of the underlying political commitment to the nation-state and its symbols in modern societies—the foremost of these symbols in America being the President. But let Verba speak for himself since he is explicit about these matters: first, on the nature of public reactions and the larger meaning of those reactions:

The Kennedy assassination … illustrates the close meshing of the sacred and the secular in the top institutions of a political system. In a society in which the formal ideology is officially secular … the close linkage of religious institutions to the events of the crisis weekend is particularly striking … a larger proportion of the American population responded to the assassination with prayer or attendance at special church services and religious ceremony and imagery abounded in the events of the weekend.

The study of developing areas has, in recent years, caused political science and theory to be increasingly aware of realities of non-Western government and politics. Comparative politics and its theory no longer, therefore, can avoid utilizing the results of the research of anthropologists and ethnologists in a way comparable to the use of historical data if they wish to be comprehensively empirical. Since the political theorist will not, as a rule, be able to become a practising anthropologist, the basic problem of such cooperation turns upon whether the investigating anthropologist asks the crucial, the basic questions in the first place. A broad survey of their reports and writings, such as the Human Relations Area Files afford, shows that this is by no means generally the case. Nor is this easy to achieve, for political scientists and anthropologists differ in their objectives. It has been suggested that the anthropologist is primarily interested in diversity, in how many ways something could be done, whereas for the political scientist and theorist such divergencies are important mainly as they lead to political insight and verifiable generalization.

The utility of the writings of anthropologists for the political scientist is seriously impeded by the over-simplified and misleading understanding of the nature of power and authority held by many of them.

Various attempts have been made in recent years to analyze judicial decisions in selected areas of law as functions of controlling facts. At least two of these attempts have relied on systems of simultaneous equations. In both endeavors the assumption was made that the combination of facts on which the decisions depend is linear. In the absence of any clear indication of a nonlinear combination, as well as in view of the significant results that were obtained on the basis of a linear model, the initial approach was justified. The use of high speed digital computers has made it possible, however, to explore the existence of nonlinear relationships where the original assumption of linear relationships was made. The important feature in detecting nonlinear relationships is not primarily the greater accuracy of the results—the linear model has provided acceptable approximations—but the acquisition of new insights into how different facts combine in influencing judicial decisions.

It is the purpose of this paper first to review the linear model, and then to show how it can be extended to a nonlinear model—in general terms as well as in the form of an actual application. Finally, limitations and implications of the nonlinear model will be indicated.

Choices made in coalition formation are costly to participants, complex, and difficult to measure with precision because observable coalitions are multi-person, non-zero-sum games. At least eight decision costs are included in the process. The purpose of this paper is to identify them and to examine their usefulness in explaining coalition formation. Decisions include: (1) information costs, (2) responsibility costs, (3) intergame costs, (4) costs of division of payoffs, (5) dissonance costs (6) inertia costs, (7) time costs, and (8) persuasion costs.

Coalition building is an essential aspect of decision making within any political system. Whether one is studying the behavior of a municipal planning commission, a committee or sub-committee of a legislative body, the United Nations Security Council, or any other decision-making institution in which more than one person is involved in reaching a decision, the essential problem is often one of establishing a winning coalition within the entire group membership. A winning coalition is any portion of the group that can decide to do or not to do something that is on the agenda of the group and over which it has competent authority. The requirements of what constitutes a winning coalition are determined by the formal and informal rules of the game. Most commonly, one of the rules is that a winning coalition must consist of one-half the members of the group plus one and this assumption is made for purposes of this paper. The size of the coalition needed is important for individual and coalition strategies, but it is not important conceptually. That is, the problems involved in securing a winning coalition on the United States Supreme Court when only four votes are needed in order to agree to hear a case affects the strategy of the members of the court, but is of no theoretical importance to coalition formation.

Perhaps the most dramatic finding of recent research on the political socialization of children is that youngsters appear to be overwhelmingly favorably disposed toward political objects which cross their vision. Officers and institutions of government are regarded as benevolent, worthy, competent, serving and powerful. The implications of such findings are striking indeed. Childhood political dispositions may represent the roots of later patriotism; we may be observing the building of basic regime-level supportive values at a very young age.

These findings are by no means new; in fact, they might be classified as part of the conventional wisdom of the discipline. Moreover, they are extremely well documented, and the study of childhood political socialization has advanced to consider far more than basic regime-level norms. Despite all this, however, there are still many empirical questions to be asked about such norms. Perhaps the recent assertion that the political scientist's model of socialization is “static and homogeneous” is particularly apropos here. Consider two closely related characteristics of the appropriate literature: 1) the “positive image” which children have about politics and political figures has been synthesized from data gathered largely in the United States and to some extent in urban, industrialized communities within the United States; and 2) empirical explanation of the favorable disposition which children manifest has not progressed very far. Though there may be hypotheses about how children get this way, there has been little systematic testing of the relationships between variables.