Until astonishingly recent times American national government played a marginal role in the life of the nation. Even as late as the eve of World War I, the State Department could support itself on consular fees. In most years revenues from tariffs supplied adequate financing, plus a surplus, from all other responsibilities. In 1800, there was less than one-half a federal bureaucrat per 1,000 citizens. On the eve of the Civil War there were only 1.5 federal bureaucrats per 1,000 citizens, and by 1900 that ratio had climbed to 2.7. This compares with 7 per 1,000 in 1940 and 13 per 1,000 in 1962—exclusive of military personnel.

The relatively small size of the public sphere was maintained in great part by the constitutional wall of separation between government and private life. The wall was occasionally scaled in both directions, but concern for the proper relation of private life and public order was always a serious and effective issue. Americans always talked pragmatism, in government as in all other things; but doctrine always deeply penetrated public dialogue. Power, even in the United States, needed justification.

Throughout the decades between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression, almost every debate over a public policy became involved in the larger debate over the nature and consequences of larger and smaller spheres of government. This period was just as much a “constitutional period” as that of 1789–1820. Each period is distinguished by its effort to define (or redefine) and employ a “public philosophy.”

In its broadest conception, a political system is a means through which the wants of the members of a society are converted into binding decisions. To sustain a conversion process of this sort a society must provide a relatively stable context for political interaction, a set of ground rules for participating in all parts of the political process. We may describe this context variously as a constitutional order, a set of fundamental rules, or customary procedures for settling differences. But however this context is defined, it usually includes three elements: some minimal constraints on the general goals of its members, rules or norms governing behavior, and structures of authority through which the members of the system act in making and implementing political outputs. To these goals, norms and structures we may give the traditional name “political regime” or constitutional order in the broadest, nonlegal sense of the phrase.

We may hypothesize that if a political system is to persist, one of its major tasks is to provide for the input of at least a minimal level of support for a regime of some kind. A political system that proved unable to sustain a regime, that is, some relatively ordered and stable way of converting inputs into outputs, could not avoid collapsing. Each time a dispute arose it would have to seek to agree on means for settling differences at the same time as it sought to bring about a settlement of the substance of the issue, a virtually impossible combination of tasks for a society to engage in continuously.

The poverty of philosophy, for Marx, was its formalism. The social sciences, in contrast, are blessed with the ability to adjust theory to experience. In our study of Marxist movements, however, we lack precisely the marxian flexibility we need to overcome a patrimony of ideology, misinformation and rigidity. Writers like Duverger and Selznick, for example, talk about “devotee parties” and “organizational weapons” without considering that their terminology may in some cases be misleading.

The devotee party, writes Duverger, “represents a change from the conception of the party as a class; it is the party conceived as the elite.” Its members pledge their “whole human being” to the party while its structure focuses upon “unceasing propaganda and agitation,” to the detriment of parliamentary activity. Duverger leaves no doubt that his archetype of the devotee party is the Communist Party. What he never asks, however, is whether a Communist Party may be anything but a devotee party.

With a similar focus, Philip Selznick describes “the combat party,” whose peculiar property is its “competence to turn members of a voluntary association into disciplined and deployable political agents,” and its “adoption of subversion” and “penetration and manipulation of institutional targets.” While the model is most relevant in societies in which Communist doctrine is remote and unappealing to the population, Selznick, like Duverger, holds that it “provides a fair interpretation of the Communist vanguard or combat party, wherever it is found.”

In modern political systems, parties undertake the prime responsibility for nominating public office holders, while interest groups attempt to influence public policy by seeking access to the centers of governmental power. Yet recent developments in the selection of state judges have given a private interest group, the Bar, a role in choosing members of the Bench which, in essence, parallels that of traditional party organizations. A Plan developed by the American Bar Association and the American Judicature Society, first adopted by Missouri in 1940, grants the legal profession a direct, formal role in the selection process; under its provisions, commissions, composed of lawyers, judges and laymen, nominate panels of names from which the governor of the state makes his judicial appointments. As the system works in actual operation, the Bar becomes the key group in the nomination process, since the lawyers and judges on the commissions possess superior knowledge about potential candidates for judgeships, and also outnumber the lay members of these bodies. Beyond this, the Plan restricts the discretion of the governor, who must make the ultimate appointment from among the three nominees. It also protects judges from ordinary political forces once they are in office, because subsequent judicial elections are in reality plebiscites in which appointees run “on their records” with no opponents.

The construction of an empirical theory of democratic political development is dependent on the formulation of causal propositions which are generalizations of the developmental process. To date, several essential steps in the process of constructing such a theory have been taken. First, concept formation and clarification by students of political development has led to an emphasis upon political democracy as one of the dependent variables for the field. Second, the gathering and publication of quantitative indicators of social, economic, cultural, and political phenomena provide a firm basis for subsequent empirical inquiry. Finally, correlational analysis has identified numerous variables which are closely associated with the development of democratic political institutions.

The next major task is the formulation and testing of empirical models of democratic political development which provide a basis for inferring causal relationships by distinguishing between spurious correlations and indirect and direct effects. The accomplishment of this task would enable us to derive explanatory propositions concerning the process of democratic political development.

The general conclusions of the study will be stated at the outset in the broadest terms to aid the reader in his evaluation of the argument as it is unfolded in more detail.

The Soviet leaders expected to make great advances in the underdeveloped world as it decolonized. They hoped that the Communists would lead the nationalist rebellions and convert them into Communist states. Only in the North of Indochina has the Communist party been able to do so; the South is still in contest. High hopes in Indonesia, Algeria, and the Congo have come to naught. The successful seizure of power in Cuba has taken place in an unanticipated manner.

In this case, a non-Communist revolution converted itself into a Communist one. Before Castro's assumption of power in Cuba, the Soviet Union viewed Latin America in general, and the Caribbean in particular, as an area where American power severely limited Communist opportunities. The overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954 seemed to prove the point. But for a time after the Bay of Pigs episode, the Cubans believed, and seemed to have convinced the Soviets, that the Cuban revolution could be exported. But the failure of several attempts to do so, and the outcome of the missile crisis in the fall of 1962, caused first the Soviets and somewhat later the Cubans to revise their hopes for new Communist states in Latin America in the near or foreseeable future. Now several years after the windfall of Castro's conversion, Soviet attention is increasingly centered on the costs to be borne. First, although Castro will probably remain a Communist, he will continue to be as defiant as he can afford to be. Second, Castro has cost the Soviet Union a great deal of money and, although these contributions have been reduced, the end is not yet in sight.

“European Integration has slowed down since the mid-50's, and has stopped or reached a plateau since 1957–58.” This is Karl Deutsch's first major conclusion in a recent summary report of findings from a study which he and a number of colleagues have been executing over the past few years. The study appears to be one of the most ambitious and interesting political research projects undertaken in recent years; its findings should be widely useful. In reaching this conclusion, Deutsch's interpretation is not merely that integration has stopped in the relatively narrow realm of formal government decisions; on the contrary, he contends that the process has come to a halt in the “European political environment” as a whole.

Deutsch bases his case on an analysis of trade flows and other transactions, content analysis of the elite press, public opinion surveys and elite interviews. An examination of much the same data, in connection with a study of political socialization in Western Europe, has led me to a radically different conclusion. Far from finding a stagnation of integrative processes since 1958, I would argue that, in some respects, European integration may have moved into full gear only since 1958. In this article I will first present some new evidence concerning attitudes among the younger generation in The Netherlands, France, West Germany and Great Britain; I will then review Deutsch's findings in this context.

This paper proposes a theory about the differences in perspective that political scientists bring to bear upon their teaching, research, and writing. It also suggests a method which can be used to study such differences. The particular empirical example discussed relates to only one of the subfields of political science, but this report may encourage parallel investigations into the structure of professional academic values in other component areas of the discipline. Such a result would not merely confirm or refute the applicability of the theory as a generalization about political science; it also would enhance our present meager and unsystematized understanding of the extent to which our professional knowledge is affected by our quasi-professional (personal) biases. The development of such understanding evidently ought to be assigned a high priority in any normative schedule of goals relating to the social ecology of scientific inquiry.

The phenomenon of analyst value predisposition is by no means peculiar to social science, and most certainly it is not idiosyncratic among political scientists. Psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins recently has called attention to the universality of the problem of academic ideology in all scientific work:

Two of the most important traditions of quantitative research in sociology and social psychology are those of survey research and laboratory or field experiments. In the former, the explicit objective is usually that of generalizing to some specific population, whereas in the latter it is more often that of stating relationships among variables. These two objectives are not thought to be incompatible in any fundamental sense, but nevertheless we lack a clear understanding of their interrelationship.

One of the most frequent objections to laboratory experiments turns on the question of generalizability, or what Campbell and Stanley refer to as “external validity.” In essence, this question seems to reduce to at least two related problems: (1) that of representativeness or typicality, and (2) the possibility of interaction effects that vary with experimental conditions. In the first case, the concern would seem to be with central tendency and dispersion of single variables, that is, whether the means and standard deviations of variables in the experimental situation are sufficiently close to those of some larger population. The second involves the question of possible disturbing influences introduced into the experimental setting that produce non-additive effects when combined with either the experimental variable or the premeasurement. These same variables may of course be operative in larger populations. But presumably they take on different numerical values, with the result that one would infer different relationships between major independent and dependent variables in the two kinds of research settings.

The pattern of communications between representatives and constituents has become a matter of central concern to many students of legislative behavior. As Lewis A. Dexter points out, the statement that a Congressman “represents” his district is only shorthand for the fact that the Congressman “represents his image of the district or of his constituents.” This image is established, according to Dexter, by the communications between representative and constituents: “what he hears from the district as he interprets it.” Miller and Stokes explore directly Congressmen's images of their constituents' opinions. The representative's image of his district is significant because it may constitute part of the explanation for various important types of behavior, such as his roll call voting, the stands he takes on issues of public policy, and the formulation of his campaign strategies.

A portion of a representative's image of his district is composed of his beliefs about voters, his explicit or implicit theory of voting behavior. Because his position is contingent upon the approval of a majority of voters in an election, he is likely to consider at least to some degree the effect that various of his decisions might have on election outcomes. In making such judgments, the representative probably makes some assumptions, conscious or not, about the manner in which voters make their choices. If he believes, for example, that voters pay close attention to his actions, he probably feels more constrained by his district's likely opinions than if he does not hold that belief.

Factor analysis, a statistical technique of growing popularity in political science, has recently found application in the June, 1966 issue of this Review in an attempt to identify U.N. voting blocs. The hand is that of Professor Bruce M. Russett, the author of a number of outstanding contributions toward the systematic and quantitative study of international relations. The following paragraphs are designed to be cautionary in nature, not destructive, and endeavor to suggest: 1) that factor analysis has questionable value as a tool for the study of complex phenomena; 2) that even if acceptable as a tool, it has peculiar faults when applied to U.N. bloc voting; and 3) that even if acceptable as a tool for the study of bloc voting in the U.N., an application somewhat different from the one chosen by Professor Russett might have been more profitable. In the process it will be argued that the procedures of the sort profferred by Professor Arend Lijphart for determining U.N. voting blocs are preferable.

1. If appealing in its seeming promise to make order of disorder and sense of nonsense, factor analysis proves to be exasperating in practice. For while it is true, that, as Professor Russett has noted elsewhere, “the method is completely objective” in the sense that the decision as to which variables are to “load” on which factors is made entirely by the impartial machinery, the criteria which the machinery applies in arriving at this decision are manipulated by the operator—and depending on these criteria, the outcome can vary widely. Thus factor analysis can generate not one, but a number—in fact an infinite number—of solutions to the same problem. In choosing among these solutions the one most likely to represent truth (if that is what one is interested in), the analyst is commonly urged to select the solution which makes the most “sense”—in other words to embrace the objective solution which is most subjectively appealing. Therefore, one can get out of factor analysis almost whatever one wants to get.