A study of the relation of intellectuals to public opinion suggests the outlines of a sociology of the intellectuals as a functioning social group. The libertas philosophandi has long been asserted by the educated elite, and in pre-democratic days the theoretical relation to public opinion was quite clear. Philosophers have had the civil liberty to criticize government, but the same right was not generously extended to the vulgar conscience, or the common men who composed the “open public.” Actually, the rise of democracy has not really clarified the issue, though the mass or Gnostic movements of modern times have asserted the right to judge the government, the intellectuals, and any other group that might stand in the way of political victory. The democratic intellectual can hardly say that the revolting mass does not have the right to judge him, but he can and does say that public opinion must be reformed, purified, educated, or directed by the latest in scientific hypothesis. More especially, however, the modern selfconscious intellectuals have directed their fire against other groups or elites who have a following and who in fact provide a pluralistic leadership of public opinion.

“Congressional government is Committee government” said Woodrow Wilson in 1884, and political scientists since that day have seen no reason to disagree with him. It would be reasonable to suppose then that once committees ceased to meet secretly (as they did when Wilson wrote) and began to keep verbatim public records of their proceedings, the committee process would be subjected to relentless and systematic study. Such has not been the case. The frequency with which Wilson is quoted is as much a reflection of a lack of substantive research by later students as it is a tribute to his intuitive insights.

It would not be hard to make a case for close and continuous study of congressional committees. On every count, they would seem to hold as much interest for the student of politics as administrative bodies or the courts, upon which so much more attention has been lavished. They are decision-making agencies of crucial importance; it is a commonplace that they hold life-or-death power over legislation. Again, they provide a point of focus for the political process; they are “miniature legislatures,” “microcosms” of their parent bodies—not in the sense that they epitomize the larger houses, but rather that the committees are subject to the same influences and power drives, which are easier to intercept and analyze here than in the larger and more complex houses themselves.

Great Britain's giant nationalized industries pose unprecedented problems for a free nation. Are the old governmental forms appropriate? Can the new forms be held accountable to the public? Can public accountability and business efficiency be reconciled? The five key industries, formed out of thousands of former enterprises, employ almost two million workers—almost three times the number of civil servants. Even the strictly “business” problems are unprecedented. In personnel, the transport industry is double the size of American Telephone and Telegraph. Coal is three times the size of General Motors. Admitting that the final answers on accountability had not been found, Herbert Morrison, then Lord President of the Council, well stated the prevailing British attitude: “We are in the early years of novel constitutional and social experiments of great long-term significance, and we can be certain that as experience grows the methods which are in use at present will need to be modified and additional methods will be evolved.”

If Sophocles were alive today to recast the dilemma of Antigone in contemporary, if less sanguine, terms, he might well seize on the problem of the citizen who refuses to answer questions put to him by a congressional investigating committee. Antigone, you will recall, was torn between two loyalties. Her religion commanded her to bury the body of her brother, while her state commanded that his body be left, unburied and unmourned, to be eaten by dogs and vultures on the open plain outside the city walls. As a loyal citizen, Antigone was required to yield her conscience to the state, to guide her conduct not by her rational moral knowledge but by the precepts of the law. As a person bound to her kin by the dictates of her religion, she was required to subordinate the instructions of Creon the king to those of her faith. She chose to obey her conscience and paid the penalty. Socrates, who—according to a traditional interpretation of the Crito—would doubtless have counseled otherwise, was also executed by the state. Thoreau, who at a critical moment followed what has scornfully been termed “the primitive attitude of Antigone, rather than the mature comprehension of Socrates,” found that refusal to obey a law resulted not in loss of life but in temporary loss of physical freedom.

Postwar uprisings and nationalist assertions in Tropical Africa—that part of the continent south of the Sahara and north of the Union—have directed increased attention towards the nature and implications of the awakening of the African to political consciousness. Among scholars this neglected area has long been the preserve of the scientific linguist or of the social anthropologist; only recently have American sociologists, economists, and political scientists developed an active interest in its problems. As a consequence, apart from certain efforts by anthropologists to popularize their findings and insights we have been obliged to rely primarily upon the somewhat contradictory accounts of colonial governments seeking to explain imperial connections, or of African nationalists determined to achieve self-government and the good life of which national self-determination has become the symbol. Thus, we have been placed in the uncomfortable position of having to formulate opinions and policy and to render judgments without sufficient knowledge, or, what could be worse, on the basis of evaluations provided by participants in the nationalist struggle. There is, therefore, a very real need for independent and objective research regarding the character and probable course of African nationalist development.

The purpose of this report is to examine, on an international scale, the current trends in political science research.

The initial intention was to base the survey on the available information about researches being carried on by institutions, but it soon became apparent that such a survey could not give an adequate picture of current work or trends. In the first place, systematic information about research by institutions was, at the time of writing, available on a comparable basis only for a few countries and areas. In the second place, even if information on research by institutions were available for all countries, an analysis of it would give a very one-sided picture of the main trends in political science research. For it would leave out of account all the work being done by individual scholars, and even groups of scholars, in the ordinary course of their academic work. To single out the work being done by research institutes (whether they are attached to universities or established independently) and to call this “research,” would be putting a narrrow interpretation on the word. It is, of course, tempting to do so. It is possible to canvass institutions and compile a comparative register of their researches; it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to compile a register that would list all the significant thinking being done in political science, including the theoretical work being done by individual academic political scientists in all the universities.

A significant result of the report “Toward A More Responsible Two-Party System” has been the marked growth of interest in the American party system. It is nevertheless true that our knowledge about the way in which party systems function is far from complete. An area promising fruitful research and presenting many hypotheses susceptible of systematic inquiry is that of the role of party organizations in the legislative process.

It is the purpose of this article to examine the legislative role of political parties in the Pennsylvania General Assembly; more precisely, to measure their influence in the formation of the state's public policies in one session of the legislature. The most recent completed session at the time of this study was that of 1951—the longest session in state history.

In order to evaluate the impact of party upon legislation, the concept of a “party vote” has been used. This is merely an operating definition by which to measure differences in party attitudes on questions subjected to roll-call votes on the floor. The assumption was made that the interests of the parties can be established best by analyzing the voting behavior of their membership. Questions to which partisan significance is attached will find the parties aligned against each other.

Efforts by various states to regulate effectively the use of money in political campaigns have heretofore left ample loopholes for determined politicians. Florida has attempted to plug the loopholes with a revised election code which has become popularly known as “The Who Gave It—Who Got It Law.” Informed political observers in the Sunshine State are in agreement that in the 1952 Democratic gubernatorial primaries the new law gave an accurate accounting of monies.

Florida, like other states, has a number of economic interests which in the past have been associated with unreported contributions and expenditures in political campaigns, notably racing (both horse and dog), liquor, and corporations holding public utility franchises. By early 1951, Floridians, having had more than a fair share of adverse publicity concerning tie-ins between gangsters and politicians, were eager to guard against such tie-ins in the future. The Florida voter felt that the existing law did not effectively regulate campaign financing, and demanded effective regulation.

Distributing “raw” data among types or classes is a necessary and illuminating part of the process of research and discovery in any science, particularly in the early stages of the latter's development. But it produces fruitful results only if the types or classes make sense, which they will just to the extent that, inter alia, the variables we fix upon in defining them are the significant ones (for the purpose in view, of course), and that the classes (a) exhaust the phenomena under consideration, and (b) do not overlap.

One of the most elementary procedures used in dealing with the raw data of political conflict is that which, taking its departure from the notion of “party systems,” seeks to assign each observed instance to one or another of three types: the “one-party system,” the “two-party system,” and the “multiple-party system.” All party systems, it is assumed, belong as a matter of course to one of the three, so that one of the researcher's first tasks in studying the phenomena of party conflict in a given political situation is to find out with which one of the three types he is dealing. Until he has done this—so runs the tacit premise—he does not have his problem in manageable shape.

One of the keys to an understanding of the Communist movement is a knowledge of the nature of its leadership. The idea of the professional conspiratorial elite is one of the unique Russian contributions to Communist dogma and practice. After the professional revolutionaries in Russia had successfully engineered the Bolshevik Revolution, they became models for the leaders of the new Communist parties that were established in the West. Scholars and statesmen alike have had cause to mention some of their unique qualities—their uncompromising discipline, their complete and intransigent dedication to their cause, their ruthlessness and capacity for self-sacrifice. In this paper an attempt will be made to develop and investigate hypotheses about some of the characteristics of those who have attained positions of high leadership in the Communist parties in Italy and France. Some information on the leaders of the party in the United States has been included for purposes of comparison. It is impossible in this study, of course, to attack the problem from the point of view of the motivations and personality structures that differentiate the Communist leaders from those lower in the hierarchy.

Of the ten countries in South America, nine now have presidents who are dictators or who at some time during their careers have exercised dictatorial power. The tenth, Uruguay, with its tradition of working democracy, has resisted this trend towards personalist government. Recently it took an important step in the diffusion of executive power when through orderly constitutional reform the national presidency was replaced by a nine-man executive committee. The nation's stability has been attested to by those most cautious of judges, the international investors, who, fearful of trouble in Europe after the outbreak of war in Korea, moved their capital holdings from Berne to Montevideo. The country's democracy has been even more welcomed by those who have found it an oasis of freedom from Perón's police state across the river. Uruguay has successfully met Latin America's ever basic problem, political stability under democratic procedure.

Casual visitors who call Uruguay the Switzerland or Denmark of South America probably have in mind its small size; its location between two large states, Brazil and Argentina; its population of merely two and a half million; its pastoral economy, political liberty, social legislation, and government economic activities; and especially its penchant for a Swiss-style pluripersonal executive. Yet at best this comparison is severely out of context.