On Election Day, 1964, the aspirations of Senator Barry Goldwater and the conservative wing of the Republican Party were buried under an avalanche of votes cast for incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. The margin of victory, approaching 16 million votes, was unprecedented. Historical comparisons with other presidential landslides are left somewhat indeterminate by the intrusion of third parties. However, it is safe to observe that Johnson's 61.3 percent of the two-party popular vote put him in the same general range as the striking victories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, Harding in 1920, and Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.

Before the fact, the election was also expected to be the most intensely ideological campaign since 1936, in no small measure because of Goldwater's reputation as a “pure” conservative. After the fact, doubts existed as to whether this expectation had been fulfilled. Goldwater supporters, in particular, expressed disappointment that President Johnson had refused to join battle on any of the fundamental ideological alternatives that were motivating the Goldwater camp.

The president's difficulties in inducing Congress to pass his legislative program are usually ascribed to the different constituencies of the two institutions. This difference would make for disharmony under any circumstances, but it is said to be particularly important because the seniority system bestows the most power on congressmen whose constituencies are most unlike the president's. His policy commitments are responses to the needs of a heterogeneous, industrialized, urban society. The occupants of the most influential congressional positions come from districts that re-elect them regardless of national political trends. The representative from such a district “views with alarm the great issues that sweep the nation and threaten to disrupt the familiar and comfortable politics of his district,” which is usually characterized as a rural backwater.

Both political parties are described this way. Because the Democrats have controlled Congress for all but four of the past 36 years, most illustrations of this thesis are drawn from conflicts between Democratic presidents and Democratic congresses. More specifically, the focus of attention is usually on the refusal of southern Democratic congressional leaders to support presidential legislative requests.

A principal element of the United States Government's conception of general and complete disarmament pertains to establishment and development of a force not identified with any national governing entity, subject to control by an all-embracing international collectivity, and charged with missions of global scope in connection with peace-keeping.

The purpose of this essay is to examine what might be entailed, as conditions and as consequences, in establishing such a force. The discussion focuses quite explicitly on terms in the United States' proposal before the eighteen-nation Disarmament Conference at Geneva in 1962—a document hereinafter referred to by the short title Outline. Other sources, including proposals and discussions of forces of kindred type, are referred to for details concerning conceivable forms and conditions for the undertaking.

As set forth in the Outline, such a force would be brought into existence over a span of years. The process of realizing it would be linked, stage by stage, with a progressive diminution of all forces under national control. At a transforming juncture, national forces would have been scaled down to a level rendering impossible their projection of any threat beyond the borders of their respective domains.

This paper will employ techniques of content analysis to examine some features of top-level communications between national policy makers during a momentous period of stress. It is concerned with the effects of stress upon: (1) the manner in which decision-makers perceive time as a factor in their formulation of policy; (2) the contrasting ways in which they view policy alternatives for their own nations, for their allies, and for their adversaries; and (3) the flow of communications among them.

Specifically, the following hypotheses will be tested with data from the 1914 crisis leading up to the Great War in Europe:

Hypothesis 1. As stress increases in a crisis situation:

(a) time will be perceived as an increasingly salient factor in decision-making.

(b) decision-makers will become increasingly concerned with the immediate rather than the distant future.

American experts on the Soviet Union have given much of their time to discussing whether the Russian communist government is going to remain “totalitarian” or instead turn “liberal.” Journalists and scholars alike judge Soviet policies and decrees largely according to whether or not they extend more “freedom” to the Russian people. Similarly, American writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost never inquired as to what purposes the Russian imperial government's policies and decrees were actually intended to serve but only how liberal they were or were not. When one writer said that the Tsar was liberalizing, another would reply that he had not actually surrendered any of his arbitrary power and that Russia was still as oppressive as ever. In American eyes, then, the Russian state apparently cannot move except along a single line that extends from freedom to oppression, democracy to absolutism, similarity to Western institutions to dissimilarity. If Russia is not moving toward one of these poles, then she is not moving at all. Few have suggested that Russian statesmen have been operating along other lines and coping with other problems. Seldom has it occurred to American observers that the question of liberalization has actually been rather a minor one in Russian development.

In the 1961 federal election six per cent of West German voters failed to cast two valid votes under the single-ballot, two-vote German electoral system: 1.3 million voters cast their party list vote invalidly, while almost one million failed to vote validly for a district candidate. Since 1949—and 1953, when the present single-ballot, two-vote system was introduced —the development of the invalid vote has been as shown in Table I.

Not only has the total invalid vote increased steadily, despite the counter-movement of first and second vote trends; it has also been exceptionally high in comparison to the Weimar Republic, Imperial Germany and other Western European countries. Thus in pre-Hitler Germany the invalid vote seldom exceeded 1 per cent of the poll. In postwar parliamentary elections in Scandinavia it has not yet exceeded 1 per cent while in Britain, Switzerland and Austria it has approached 2 per cent only in rare instances. In Fourth and Fifth Republic France spoiled and blank ballots have been constant at about 3 per cent of the poll. Only in isolated cases—for example, where compulsory voting is combined with a deep-seated social and political malaise, as in Belgium—has the invalid vote been comparable in proportion to that of Western Germany.

Alan T. Waterman (retired Director of the National Science Foundation and past president of the A.A.A.S.) recently insisted that there is a considerable difference between observations and perceptual images of scientists' behavior in governmental and policy-making situations when made by scientists and when they are made by persons “outside of science.” Waterman went on to say that most natural scientists would prefer to write on “science” rather than “scientists” in policy-making. Reflection on the implications of these distinctions raises several fascinating questions. In what senses may there be a political science of science? Are only natural and biological scientists equipped to investigate and interpret the behavior of scientists in non-laboratory, public policy-formulating situations? Is it necessary to have separate “natural-scientific” and “social-scientific”—to say nothing of any number of “humanistic”—views of the political role of science? What does it mean to say that the proper focus of study is the representation of science, rather than scientists in government?

This article marks an attempt to clarify the teachings of Robert Michels. It suggests that in Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1915), Michels presented a favorable account of the compatibility of organization and democracy.

Other treatments attribute to Michels a thesis of the following kind: (1) Large, organizationally complex associations, compared with small, simple associations, are likely to be governed by cliques whose powers (disposable resources, freedom of action, security of tenure) are abundant and whose policies (use of official status and resources) deviate from the policy preferences of their constituents. (2) Increments of Organization (of scale, or members, and of complexity, or procedural formality, functional differentiation, stratification, specialization, hierarchy, and bureaucracy) augment the powers and the policy-deviating propensities of leaders vis-à-vis followers.

The Thirty Years War, though essentially religious in origin, assumed towards its end a distinctly political complexion. It became a trial of strength between the major powers of Europe, resulting in the unquestioned supremacy of France and Austria, the establishment of Switzerland as a fully fledged sovereign state, and the extension of the dominion of Sweden and Denmark. Most, if not all, of these changes occurred at the expense of the territorial unity of the German Empire. At the same time the disruption of German Imperial unity brought in its wake the effective assertion of sovereignty on the part of some 360 German principalities. The political unity of ‘Germany’ became a legal fiction.

Under these changed circumstances the generally prevalent Roman Law, based as it was on the idea of strong central administration, was no longer in accordance with the political realities of Germany.