This study represents an attempt to apply quantitative methods to the prediction of human events that generally have been regarded as highly uncertain, namely, decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States. The study is designed to demonstrate that, in at least one area of judicial review, it is possible to take some decided cases, to identify factual elements that influenced the decisions, to derive numerical values for these elements by using a formula, and then to predict correctly the decisions of the remaining cases in the area specified. The analysis will be made independently of what the Court said by way of reasoning in these cases; it will rely only on the factual elements which have been emphasized by the justices in their opinions and on their votes to affirm or set aside convictions. Changes in Court personnel made no decisive difference in the pattern of judicial action in this area; so the analysis will not need to take into account the fact that twenty-five different justices have occupied the nine seats on the Court during the period covered, i.e., the past quarter century.

I want to sketch a line of reasoning about politics, a way of looking at politics. Every point of view must stand on its own legs; it is not something that can be proved. An analysis is a way of looking at something, a way of seeing something we could not see before we made it. We adopt a point of view because it is suggestive and persuasive in its own inner logic.

More specifically, I want to examine politics as a strategic concept. The concept of political strategy is itself a point of view loaded with implications for the study of politics.

Strategy is the heart of politics, as it is of war.

What are the implications of the concept? Any strategy of politics assumes that there is something that we can do about politics, that we have choices, and that what we think and do and want makes a difference. It assumes that we have something to talk about and that what we think and say and do is likely to have consequences. Without these conditions there can be no political strategy.

Out-of-date ideas—if they can only manage to survive long enough—are often put to new and surprising uses. A case in point is British Toryism. This pre-capitalist, pre-individualist, pre-liberal creed, one might think, ought surely to have died out during the 19th century. Yet not only has it survived into the era of socialism, it can also claim credit for having helped build the Welfare State. And today British socialists and Tories—both collectivists in a degree—often have more in common than either have with their fellow Liberals. Old traditions of strong government, paternalism and the organic society have made easier the modern re-assertion of state power.

New policies usually produce new kinds of politics. For every major concept of public policy, Schattschneider has observed, there has been a different theory of political organization. Over a period of decades, British collectivism has created not only a new pattern of policy, but also a new structure of power, especially in the realm of political parties and interest groups. Along with a collectivist theory of policy has arisen a collectivist theory of representation. And the latter, like the former, is today supported in interesting and subtle ways by attitudes and ideas deriving from a distant past. The purpose of this article is to look at the historical background of certain of these attitudes—especially those concerning the role of interest groups in politics.

The extraordinary discrepancy in the popular vote for President Eisenhower and the vote for Republican Congressmen in the 1956 election dramatized a privilege which the American electorate exercises almost uniquely in the democratic world, the right of voters to split their ballots between the candidates of opposing political parties.

The fact of ballot splitting in American elections is of course a commonplace but it has not been widely studied and it is not well understood. The aggregative statistics from the 1956 election make it apparent that millions of voters must have chosen President Eisenhower and a Democratic congressman but they do not tell us how many voters split their ballots in the opposite direction or how many voted for president but not for Congressman, and they give us only the vaguest indications of what was in the voters' minds when they crossed party lines in marking their ballots.

When the beginner approaches the study of politics, one of the most natural questions for him to ask is: what is it that political science studies? This is a way of asking what is the political scientist's conception of reality. More often than not, the teacher finds the student looking for an objective physical structure, simplified yet concrete, like the astronomer's reduced-scale construction of the solar system, the biologist's photographic reproduction of microscopic cellular organisms, or the physicist's diagram of atomic structure. It is important for the student of human affairs to realize that while individuals, small groups, mass meetings, and even whole cities can be photographed or diagrammed, social scientists have never succeeded in reproducing satisfactory physical models of such concepts as personality, social structure, bureaucratic organization, the price system, or government. Nor do the ends and criteria of government, like order, justice, freedom, welfare or security, lend themselves to analysis in terms of physical or chemical elements like oxygen, carbon, iron, or uranium. Perhaps the closest physical analogy to politics and government is an automobile engine or an electric power plant; but no one would claim that the driver of a car has learned the principles of the engine if all he knows is how to operate it, any more than the power plant engineer understands generation if all he learns is how to read dials and pull switches. Theory is required, and its function is to identify and abstract from total reality the essential minimal concepts and to formulate statements describing the relationships between those concepts whereby the world of experience becomes comprehensible. Theory is never identical with the totality of phenomenal experience; the propositions and principles of theory provide a means by which aspects of reality can be explicitly analyzed and verified, in the hope that some synthesizing minds will make the efforts toward a synthetic reconstruction of reality on the basis of understood principles.

Only the cold war has overshadowed the second most striking political phenomenon of the post World War II scene. The demise of imperial power over vast Asian and Middle Eastern territories and the rise of new independent states is in part the result of the transfer of power from Europe to the United States and the Soviet Union, and in part a distinct phenomenon. The politics of these new states have an increasing interest, partly because of their possible subversion to Communist allegiance, and partly because of the desire to assess the possibilities of successfully transplanting democracy. Emphasis on the danger of subversion intensifies interest in the political processes in these non-western countries; but the context of these politics, i.e., that which may be subverted, is the primary concern of the discipline of comparative government.

Political scientists have been among the last to extend the area of their research to non-western countries. They have been preceded by travelling diarists, students of comparative religion, archaeologists, historians, and latterly, anthropologists. From these sources much material, though of varied and uneven quality, exists to start with. A few political histories, fewer studies of various aspects of non-western politics, and still fewer studies of the contitutional development of these areas supplement these resources. Materials are scantiest for the Middle East.

The Senate of the United States, like other institutionalized groups, operates in accordance with a complex of norms for members' behavior which are understood by few outsiders and perhaps not completely by all senators. Formal written rules governing the behavior of members take into account the division of functions between the two major parties and the operation of the Senate's institutionalized sub-groups, the committees. These are supplemented by unwritten rules that are often more consequential. Members have generally accepted notions of the way the Senate as a body ought to perform its public business and regulate its internal affairs, and the way members ought to behave toward the Senate and toward each other.

Senatorial behavior would be difficult enough to study if this were all, but it is not. For one thing, the norms are by no means undifferentiated for the entire membership. Within the Senate a number of identifiable official and unofficial “statuses” (or “positions”) besides that of United States Senator can be distinguished, each carrying with it a “role” in the form of the behavior expected by the Senate and the public of the person occupying that status. The leadership positions in the two parties and the committee chairmanships come immediately to mind as examples of official statuses.

Many writers have attempted to describe the intention of The Prince by using the term “scientific.” This description is defensible, and even helpful, provided it is properly understood. The present article is meant to prepare such an understanding.

I. The Prince combines the characteristics of a treatise and a tract for the times.

Let us begin at the beginning. In the Epistle Dedicatory Machiavelli gives three indications of the subject-matter of the book: he has incorporated into it his knowledge of the actions of great men both modern and ancient; he dares to discuss princely government and to give rules for it; he possesses knowledge of the nature of princes. As appears from the Epistle Dedicatory, from the book itself, and from what the author says elsewhere, knowledge of the actions of great men, i.e., historical knowledge, supplies only materials for knowledge of what princely government is, of the characteristics of the various kinds of principalities, of the rules with which one has to comply in order to acquire and preserve princely power, and of the nature of princes.

Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, the study of American city government is faced with desiccation upon a sea of plenty. While the literature of municipal government continues to grow, fed by bureaus of government research and the teaching concerns of political scientists, there is very little in this literature that is of substance sufficient to rise above the level of specialized reporting and into the general stream of political science. Indeed, if the pages of this Review be taken as an index of the research concerns of our discipline, then municipal government would seem to be a stagnated area of political science, for not one article on this subject has appeared in this journal for over six years.

In controlling nationalized industries parliament plays the role of the traditional lion under the throne. It lies quietly most of the time but can rise suddenly and wrathfully to smite offenders. It has little day-to-day influence, the major decisions being made by the managers of the industries, or by the government; but occasionally its importance is capital. This conclusion emerges from a study of the methods used by parliament to control the nationalized industries. Since these industries are fundamental to the French economy, in reality this is a study of the ways and means by which parliament controls major segments of the national economy—in every industrial state a controversial and highly significant issue.

The rules of the Senate of the United States are only 40 in number and comprise only 49 of the 832 pages of the Senate Manual. Yet, when literally invoked they can bring Senate business to a standstill. They are most often ignored or circumvented by unanimous consent in order that the Senate may operate conveniently as a deliberative and parliamentary body. To pass legislation when they are invoked is a formidable enterprise.

Just as the law is said to be no better than the procedures by which it is carried out, so the substance of legislation is shaped and modified by the procedures that may be required under the Senate rules, or by the mere threat to invoke those procedures, for they are compelling. The procedures preceding and surrounding the passage of the first civil rights bill in over 80 years illumine and illustrate the effect of the rules on the substance of legislation as have few other legislative controversies in recent years.

The age old contest between the proponents of natural law and their opponents continues unabated, and a solution does not seem in sight. The reason, it seems to me, is simply that representatives of either side often quite literally do not know what they themselves, as well as their opponents, are talking about. Instead of arguing for their respective theories and against those of their antagonists, they knock down straw men. And since there are periodic “revivals” of natural law, and of its denial as well, the game continues endlessly. Yet, I believe it is sufficient to state the issue clearly to realize that the advocates of natural law adhere to an incorrect epistemological view, and that political thought must dispense with natural law because it is a mistaken doctrine.

Textbooks in public administration customarily conclude with a section on administrative responsibility. The charitable inference is that this location betokens the saving of the best till last, rather than the appendage of an afterthought. Herbert Kaufman might explain it as the preoccupation of the past generation of political scientists with the legitimation of the efficient exercise of administrative power to subserve the goals of the social state, with a consequent sublimation of the emerging problem of the control of large, professionalized bureaucracies. However that may be, it does seem clear that, with the exception of administrative decisions which adversely affect “civil liberties,” most political scientists have been content to let lawyers and defenders of the free enterprise system worry about the restraint of administrative action.

“On jongle trop avec la structure d'un Pays qui a été, dans le monde, le défenseur de l'individu, de la liberté, du sens de la mesure. Un petit paysan sur sa terre, n'est-il pas humainement autre chose que le chômeur de demain ou l'ouvrier qui sera condamné à fabriquer toute sa vie des boulons?”

Le Betteravier Français, September 1956, page 1.

Large-scale state intervention in the alcohol market in France dates from World War I, when the government committed itself to encourage the production of alcohol. Two chief reasons then lay back of this decision: a huge supply of alcohol was needed for the manufacture of gunpowder, and the devastation of the beet-growing regions of the north had severely limited production of beet alcohol, thereby throwing the domestic market out of balance. A law of 30 June 1916, adopted under emergency procedure, established a state agency empowered to purchase alcohol. At the end of the war, a decree of 1919 accorded the government the right “provisionally” to maintain the state monopoly. In 1922 the beetgrowers and winegrowers gave their support to the principle of a state monopoly which, in effect, reserved the industrial market for beet alcohol and the domestic market for viticulture. In 1931 the state was authorized to purchase alcohol distilled from surplus wine.

The postwar years have been a period of great interest in the theory of international politics. A contributor to this Review has surveyed the state of the study of that theory and indicated the alternatives open to it. Within the last year the Institute of War and Peace Studies of Columbia University has held a series of seminars on the subject in an effort to push forward research frontiers.

Interest in theory is no reflection upon the merits of scholarly endeavors that are not oriented primarily to theoretical considerations. But it does assume the independent importance of a theory of international politics. The present essay assumes the importance of theory in general, but is based upon a particular kind of theory, namely, systems theory.

The core of Oppenheim's attack on what he calls the natural law thesis is the contention that it rests upon an incorrect epistemology:

To subscribe to the natural law thesis is to adhere to the epistemological theory of value-cognitivism. Value-cognitivism claims that there exist intrinsic value-judgments which are cognitively true or false, regardless of the speaker's or listener's intrinsic value-commitments.

In contrast to this view is the epistemological theory of value non-cognitivism, which tells us that

Value-words do not designate objects, and it is misleading to use nouns such as “Justice” and “Goodness.” … A value-expression in an intrinsic value-judgment refers to a relation which holds between an evaluating subject and some object or event or state of affairs which he values intrinsically, whether positively or negatively.

I take the foregoing to mean that, to predicate just or good of a law or of a man does not tell us anything about the law or man, but rather describes an attitude toward the law or man. Justice, as a noun, is misleading, because justice is not a “thing” or a “this”; it is not a substance but an attribute; not a real noun, but an hypostatized adjective, a quality of evaluating subjects, never of the objects of which the subjects themselves always predicate it.

Because Mexican politics since the Revolution of 1910–17 have operated mainly within the framework of a one-party system and because in the past strong men have sometimes occupied the presidency, writers in the United States have tended to treat the system as authoritarian. Emphasis upon presidential rule and the corollary explanation of the role of the Revolutionary Party as nothing more nor less than an instrument of presidential domination have served to create an oversimplified picture of presidential power. It is the purpose of this paper to outline at least four checkpoints on which the authoritarian interpretation seems to have involved miscalculation of the realities of the Mexican political system. The nature of membership in the “official” party, the degree of centralization within and without the party structure, the threefold role of the party within the political system, and the ideological bias of the political elite all seem to indicate the necessity of a re-evaluation of the politics of the republic on our southern border.

In August, 1953, the National Committee of the Democratic Party began publishing a new magazine, the Democratic Digest. This venture represents an attempt to create a “Democratic” viewpoint on political issues and personalities of national concern. It is an essentially new form of activity in the American party arena, for, though minor parties and one-issue political movements have often sponsored periodicals to further their causes, neither of the present major parties has previously done so on the national level.

The role of the national committees in the political process is still only vaguely defined. The national ticket is nominated by convention, and the Presidency is independent of, and ordinarily more powerful than, the national committee after election. The selection and campaign activities of Congressional candidates lie outside national committee control. Within these limits, any change in the scale or type of activity of the official national political organizations warrants careful study to determine its possible effects on the party system. The Democratic Digest marks such a change. In place of random speculation about the purposes and possible functions of a party magazine in the American system, a reliable content analysis of the early issues of this journal may provide a sounder basis for theory. An analysis of the manifest content of the magazine suggests certain conclusions as to the function not only of the Digest, but perhaps also of all national political party mass communication activity in our party system.

1. “Facts.” Jaffa holds value non-cognitivism (NC) to imply both “complete credulity concerning ‘facts’” and “total skepticism” about facts. One and the same epistemological theory can hardly be akin to naive realism as well as to skepticism. NC implies neither. As an outgrowth of modern empiricism, NC considers concepts such as “man,” “chair,” “atom” as constructs, and statements such as “man is a political animal,” “this is a chair” as hypotheses. Empirical hypotheses are scientifically meaningful if they can be tested, however indirectly, by observational data. Most of Jaffa's comments fail to meet this criterion of meaningfulness because they contain words such as “reality,” “order of the soul,” “man's humanity,” “Justice,” which cannot be operationally defined. “The objectivity of the external world cannot be demonstrated,” Jaffa concedes. Then why talk about it? Physicists never “debate the nature of the universe” and never ask “whether it has objective existence.” Physicists establish empirical laws in order to explain past and predict future events (not “reality”). Political scientists do the same—unless they turn metaphysicians.

The topic of party finance is a subject about which not a word appears in any of the official reports and party conference records issued by the Christian Democratic Union in the course of the decade during which it has become established as West Germany's governing party. Like their colleagues in most middle class parties the world over, the leaders of the CDU apparently believe that silence is golden when it comes to answering Socialist taunts on this score. They are content to let the Socialists remain the only German party to publish reasonably full accounts of their sources of income, which, as the SPD does not fail to point out when attacking the “hidden masters” of the government parties, are predominantly derived from membership dues. The parties of the “Bonn coalition,” on the other hand, have been extremely distrustful of both publicity and legislation affecting this sector. In 1952 the first Adenanuer cabinet felt called upon to reject a draft Parties Law prepared by officials in the Interior Ministry, and since then the government has presented no bill to translate the Basic Law's Article 21, which regulates the parties' position, into the required legislation. Thus the constitutional provision that “parties must give public reckoning over the sources of their means” remains in practice a dead letter. Not that the sources of the non-Socialist parties' funds are really kept successfully secret, for every politically informed German knows roughly how the system works. But party officials still believe it best not to acknowledge their sources publicly. “The German Michel just wouldn't understand about those things,” as a CDU functionary put it.