Like Rachel, Jacob's beloved but still childless bride, who asked herself and the Lord each morning, “Am I?,” or “Can I?,” so presidents of this Association on these annual occasions intermittently ask, “Are we a science?,” or “Can we become one?” My predecessor, David Truman, raised this question last September applying some of the notions of Thomas Kuhn in his recent book on scientific revolutions. I shall be following in Truman's footsteps, repeating much that he said but viewing the development of the profession from a somewhat different perspective and intellectual history. My comments will be organized around three assertions.

First, there was a coherent theoretical formulation in the American political theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Second, the development of professional political science in the United States from the turn of the century until well into the 1950's was carried on largely in terms of this paradigm, to use Kuhn's term. The most significant and characteristic theoretical speculation and research during these decades produced anomalous findings which cumulatively shook its validity.

Third, in the last decade or two the elements of a new, more surely scientific paradigm seem to be manifesting themselves rapidly. The core concept of this new approach is that of the political system.

With increasing frequency and self-assurance, the scientific objectivity of American social science is proclaimed by some of its prominent practitioners. Various explanations are offered for the onset of social science's Golden Age, but central to most of them is the claim that modern social science has managed to resolve Mannheim's Paradox, namely, that in the pursuit of the truth the social scientist himself is handicapped by the narrow focus and distortions implicit in ideological thought. Presumably, the social scientist can now probe any aspect of human organization and behavior as dispassionately as physical scientists observe the structure of the atom or chemical reactions. For this reason, it is claimed by some that the ideologically liberated social scientists—at least in the United States—can expect to be co-opted into the Scientific Culture, or that segment of society that is presumably aloof from and disdainful toward the moralistic speculations and the tender-heartedness of the literary intellectuals.

The behaviorial “revolution” in political science may have run its course, but it has left in its wake both obscurantist criticisms of empiricism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an unquestioning belief in “science.” Quite often the latter belief is not merely anti-historical and anti-philosophical but also uncritical about the extent to which empirical observations can be colored by the very orientation to values that one seeks to control in rigorous empirical research.

The claims of modern social scientists are greatly buttressed by the views of Talcott Parsons.

During the last thirty years, there have been numerous attempts to revise or reconstitute the “classical” theory of democracy: the familiar doctrine of popular rule, patterned after the New England town meeting, which asserts that public policy should result from extensive, informed discussion and debate. By extending general participation in decision-making the classical theorists hoped to increase the citizen's awareness of his moral and social responsibilities, reduce the danger of tyranny, and improve the quality of government. Public officials, acting as agents of the public at large, would then carry out the broad policies decided upon by majority vote in popular assemblies.

Although it is seldom made clear just which of the classical democratic theorists is being referred to, contemporary criticism has focused primarily on the descriptive elements of the theory, on its basic conceptions of citizenship, representation and decision-making. The concept of an active, informed, democratic citizenry, the most distinctive feature of the traditional theory, is the principal object of attack. On empirical grounds it is argued that very few such people can be found in Western societies. Public policy is not the expression of the common good as conceived of by the citizenry after widespread discussion and compromise. This description of policy making is held to be dangerously naive because it overlooks the role of demagogic leadership, mass psychology, group coercion, and the influence of those who control concentrated economic power. In short, classical democratic theory is held to be unrealistic; first because it employs conceptions of the nature of man and the operation of society which are Utopian, and second because it does not provide adequate, operational definitions of its key concepts.

There are striking regularities in the budgetary process. The evidence from over half of the non-defense agencies indicates that the behavior of the budgetary process of the United States government results in aggregate decisions similar to those produced by a set of simple decision rules that are linear and temporally stable. For the agencies considered, certain equations are specified and compared with data composed of agency requests (through the Bureau of the Budget) and Congressional appropriations from 1947 through 1963. The comparison indicates that these equations summarize accurately aggregate outcomes of the budgetary process for each agency.

In the first section of the paper we present an analytic summary of the federal budgetary process, and we explain why basic features of the process lead us to believe that it can be represented by simple models which are stable over periods of time, linear, and stochastic. In the second section we propose and discuss the alternative specifications for the agency-Budget Bureau and Congressional decision equations. The empirical results are presented in section three. In section four we provide evidence on deviant cases, discuss predictions, and future work to explore some of the problems indicated by this kind of analysis. An appendix contains informal definitions and a discussion of the statistical terminology used in the paper.

This paper examines the theory of political legitimacy through the framework of psychological learning theory and the theory of cognitive dissonance. The concepts of primary and secondary reinforcement in cases of learning permit a general understanding of the growth of positive affect toward a political system. Cognitive dissonance theory allows us to understand how this general positive affect built up by a regime's actions produces the sub-set of attitudes called political legitimacy. In order to build a theory of political legitimacy on these foundations, it is necessary to conceive of government policy-making as a case of producing successful learning throughout a population.

The diffuse, largely irrational nature of political legitimacy has made it difficult for political scientists to handle the concept systematically. That systems are or are not “legitimate” has been asserted numerous times, though often the precise definition of legitimacy employed has been at best vague and the indices of legitimacy unclearly stated. This paper attempts to meet the problem by setting forth a theory and a set of implicit indices of political legitimacy. After the general model has been explicated, I will specify several problems in the manipulation of political legitimacy. Finally, I will look at the relationship of governmental structure to these problems.

Before consideration of the model two preliminary tasks must be performed: a definition of legitimacy and justification for discussing it. We may define political legitimacy as the quality of “oughtness” that is perceived by the public to inhere in a political regime.

When we speak of an international system, we start with the presumption that there is something habitual and regular about the behavior of the nations that constitute it. Unfortunately, the concept of an international system has had a singularly hollow ring in the works of many scholars who have employed the term. It is frequently compared to an incredibly complicated watch or thermostat, or alternatively it is defined so abstractly that it would appear to have no specific empirical referents—and therefore practically everything in one way or another would qualify as a “system.”

The abstract and shadowy significance of the concept in international relations studies has retarded its usefulness for exploring the regularities that underlie the interactions of nations. More than ever before, however, the actions of nations have multiple reverberations on each other and can be ascribed meaning only within the context of the relations of many nations with each other. Because the configuration of inter-nation relations has become increasingly complex, it has become more and more difficult to trace out these relations and determine what structure, if any, there is in the “system.”

We shall see later that any definition of a system is arbitrary to the extent that its inclusion and exclusion rules are arbitrary. If we can specify the simplifying assumptions which create this arbitrariness, however, then the problematic cases included or excluded in a system or component subsystems can usually be identified and explained. This approach seems preferable to positing systems criteria that are either ambiguous or non-operational, enriching the vocabulary but not the analysis.

I am somewhat puzzled by Professor LaPalombara's critique of the decline or end of ideology thesis which points out that deideologisation is itself ideological behavior in a pure sense. This is obvious to most of those who have written on the subject. In an article cited in other contexts by Professor La Palombara, I., for one, have written as follows:

As a final comment, I would note that not only do class conflicts over issues related to division of the total economic pie, influence over various institutions, symbolic status and opportunity, continue in the absence of weltanschauungen, but that the decline of such total ideologies does not mean the end of ideology. Clearly, commitment to the politics of pragmatism, to the rules of the game of collective bargaining, to gradual change whether in the direction favored by the left or the right, to opposition both to an all powerful central state and to laissez-faire constitutes the component parts of an ideology. The “agreement on fundamentals,” the political consensus of western society, now increasingly has come to include a position on matters which once sharply separated the left from the right. And this ideological agreement, which might best be described as “conservative socialism,” has become the ideology of the major parties in the developed states of Europe and America. As such it leaves its advocates in sharp disagreement with the relatively small groups of radical rightists and leftists at home, and at a disadvantage in efforts to foster different variants of this doctrine in the less affluent parts of the world.

An interest in the roles, functions, contributions, and dangers of leadership in popular regimes is not, of course, new among observers of political life. This has, in fact, been an ancient and enduring interest of political theorists. It is possible, however, to distinguish—at least in a rough way—two different streams of thought: one consisting of writers sympathetic to popular rule, the other consisting of anti-democratic writers.

It has always been obvious to practical and theoretical observers alike that even where leaders are chosen by the people, they might convert a democracy into an oligarchy or a despotism. From ancient times, as everyone knows, anti-democratic writers have contended that popular governments were unlikely to provide leaders with wisdom and virtue, and insisted on the natural affinity between the people and the despot. These ancient challenges by anti-democratic writers were, I think, made more formidable in the course of the last hundred years by critics—sometimes ex-democrats turned authoritarian when their Utopian hopes encountered the ugly realities of political life—who, like Pareto, Michels, and Mosca, contended that popular rule is not only undesirable but also, as they tried to show, impossible. The failure of popular regimes to emerge, or, if they did emerge to survive, in Russia, Italy, Germany, and Spain could not be met merely by frequent assertions of democratic rhetoric.

Fortunately, alongside this stream of anti-democratic thought and experience there has always been the other. Aware both of their critics and of the real life problems of popular rule, writers sympathetic to democracy have emphasized the need for wisdom, virtue, and self-restraint not only among the general body of citizens but among leaders as well.

The purpose of this article is to compare the Inter-Nation Simulation (INS)—developed by Harold Guetzkow and his colleagues at North-western University and now employed in a number of universities throughout the country—to verbal theories of international relations. It will not be a discussion of the methodological foundations of the simulation but an analytical comparison, primarily on the level of middle-range theory, of the substantive assumptions contained in INS with contemporary international relations theory.

Although the primary purpose of this article is to compare the two bodies of theory, it will inevitably raise questions concerning the validity of the Inter-Nation Simulation model and the value of simulation as a general approach to theory. In terms of the former question, it is necessary to remember that the simulators themselves are theorists, albeit a special type. Consequently, the comparison is more a reliability check on simulation and verbal theorists than a validity check on either. The lack of congruence between the assumptions of the simulation and the assumptions of the verbal theorists does not necessarily indicate that the simulation model lacks validity, since the verbal theorist has no monopoly on valid hypotheses.

If the author's assumption that simulation is a way of theorizing about international relations is correct, the following comparison should yield some idea about the value of simulation in building a firm theoretical basis for a science of international relations. Forced to be abstract as well as explicit and parsimonious, those using simulation must approach the task of theorizing with a different operational code than the verbal theorists.

Traditionally, Chinese urbanism was as much “a way of life”as in present-day America or Europe though its style, scope and effect on general social change differed markedly from its Western counterparts. The pre-modern Chinese city, predominantly an administrative-military center, extended and enforced imperial authority and proved to be a hostile environment to entrepreneurship. Typically, the mark of officialdom was stamped on the Chinese city, and urban life and elite status were often equated. Moreover, the appeal of urban living remained sufficiently strong through the years to attract large numbers of non-official local elites or “gentry” as well as officials, particularly during periods of relative social instability and peasant unrest. Since the perquisites of status surrounded the lives of city dwellers in many areas of China, the young peasant aspirant to the elite also considered movement to the city and upward social mobility to be roughly equivalent. This view of mobility and the city in the Chinese scheme of things provides a basis from which we can examine trends in recruitment and their consequences for social change for selected periods since the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Particular emphasis will be placed on the interrelationships of urban social mobility and industrialization and on the implications of these interrelationships for political legitimacy in the Chinese People's Republic.

Following the time-honored Chinese system of evaluating occupations, the official was accorded unmatched prestige. The general citizenry, well beneath all officials, was classified into scholars, peasants, artisans, and merchants—in descending order of rank—with a tiny group of declassed individuals placed far below them.

For years specialists in local politics have deplored the anecdotal quality of literature in the field and have called for theoretically-based comparative research. One of the most stimulating and ambitious attempts in this direction is Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson's theory of “public-regardingness” and “private-regardingness,” which states that much of what Americans think about the political world can be subsumed under one or the other of these conflicting orientations and that the prevalence of one ethos over the other influences the style, structure, and outcome of local politics. Banfield and Wilson attribute these two ethics to different elements in the population and hypothesize that a number of political forms and policies are manifestations of each ethos. We intend to examine the associations between these hypothesized consequences and the demographic characteristics that are said to be the bases of the two ethics.

Despite the measured pace of American elections, there have now been a number of presidential campaigns since the advent of survey studies of voting. However sparingly, political history slowly has added to the set of distinct configurations of men and events which comprise a contest for the Presidency. The set is still small, whatever the impression created by massed thousands of interviews or by the accompanying files of election returns. Yet it is now large enough to be pressed hard for evidence about the sources of electoral change.

A primary virtue of measurements extended over a series of elections is that they can throw light on the problem of change. So long as the earliest voting studies were confined to cross-sectional relationships, they could deal only very inadequately with changes superimposed on these relationships or with changes in the relationships themselves. In the case of Lazarsfeld's enormously influential Erie County study in 1940, the natural limitations of a single-election study were compounded by the investigators' misfortune in choosing a campaign whose dominant personality and principal issues differed little from those of preceding elections. I have often wondered whether the static social determinism of The People's Choice would have emerged from a campaign in which the tides of short-term change were more nearly at flood.

I shall examine here some sources of change which are richly evident in the presidential elections of the last two decades.

The present analysis is devoted to making an empirically based choice among alternate causal explanations. This entails making causal inferences from statistical correlations. While this might, at one time, have constituted a heresy, I believe that the procedure to be followed here will soon be a part of statistical orthodoxy.

This is not the place for an extended philosophical discussion of the problem of causality. Yet I would like to make my position on the problem as clear as concise presentation will permit. My basic sympathies are with that school which argues that scientifically relevant causal explanation inheres only in our theories, i.e., that the explained event takes the shape which it does because our postulates and logic preclude any other shape on pain of being themselves incorrect. However, the development of such theory, containing such postulates, is usually the product of an inspired insight on the part of one thoroughly immersed in the manifestations of the empirical phenomenon under consideration. The production and verification of such insight in a systematic and reproducible way is the goal of inductive research. Where controlled experimentation is possible, Mill's canons may apply. Where such experiments are either impossible or impracticable, statistical inference becomes necessary. It is in this situation that the present approach, based upon a model developed by Herbert Simon and others, seems justified.

Simon's model is designed to capture the asymmetry in our notions of causality. When one speaks of A as a cause of B, one usually has in mind a unidirectional forcing, and not merely a covariation, or phased covariation.

How can a religious minority organize most effectively to protect its interests without weakening the distinction between religion and politics by which advocates of a secular state justify equal treatment for the minority? As in Europe earlier in the century, this problem is again acute in some of the so-called “New Nations” of Asia and Africa where national integration is far from complete and religion is still the primary mode of self-identification among many of its communicants. If a minority faith is geographically concentrated so as to constitute a majority in certain extensive areas, it is likely to seek independence, merger with an adjacent state of the same religion, or at least provincial autonomy if its members believe that their religious identity is threatened by assimilation.

Of the great world religions, Islam provides the most difficult case of adjustment to minority status by separation of religion from the state. The leaders of the Muslim minority of British India finally set the objective of separate national independence in 1940 after they had concluded that they could not rely upon constitutional guarantees to safeguard their rights against the Hindu majority. But the creation of Pakistan in 1947 left a substantial though scattered Muslim population of some forty million in the Indian Republic, ten percent of the latter's people. Suspected by many Hindus of further divisive intentions, how was this group to act within the framework of parliamentary and at least ostensibly secular democracy?

Behind most political scientists' studies of nonvoting there is, implicitly at least, a theory of passive consent. This is particularly the case where nonvoting as a result of apathy is concerned. For, it is suggested, apathy tends to increase when citizens are satisfied that their interests will not be seriously harmed, regardless of which party wins. In other words: the very reasons which underlie apathetic nonvoters' failure to participate in an election testify that their inactivity is a form of passive consent to the election's outcome.

Passive consent, however, cannot be equated to the “theory of consensus” which economists have recently contributed to political science. This “theory of consensus” deals with the “welfare economics” problem of aggregating individual citizens' preferences into a “true”—indeed, into a mathematically precise—schedule of social preferences. Thus, while it is plausible that a citizen can, by nonvoting, tacitly consent to a given electoral outcome, it is also likely that the final social decision would change, however slightly, if in fact this citizen's true preferences had been admitted through voting into the social aggregation. In this case, the final choice would have popular consent without real popular consensus.

The converse can also be true. For example, while Duncan Black's Theory of Committees and Elections and Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values are characterized by a most impressive formal elegance, it is also true that neither makes provision for nonvoting.

The discussion of voting groups or blocs within the United Nations General Assembly has long been a popular pastime. It is, of course, merely a special case of a wider concern with groups and coalitions in all aspects of international politics. With the apparent loosening of the early postwar bipolarity it is increasingly important to discern the number, composition, and relative strength of whatever coalitions of nations may emerge from the present seemingly transitional period.

Voting groups in the General Assembly provide a relevant datum, though hardly the only one, for an effort to identify these groups. The United Nations gives no perfect image of broader international politics; due to the one-nation one-vote principle and to the fact that it is not a world government with authority to enforce its decisions, power relationships within the Assembly are not the same as in other arenas, such as functional or geographic ones. It might well be argued that because of the majority-rule principle the smaller and poorer states have an incentive to band together in the UN that they do not have elsewhere. Thus the discovery of a “bloc” of underdeveloped countries in the UN proves nothing about the cohesion of that “bloc” in other contexts. Yet votes in the General Assembly do provide a unique set of data where many national governments commit themselves simultaneously and publicly on a wide variety of major issues.

Compared with most political institutions, the American party system has endured for a long time. The parties as organizations and symbols have become so much a part of our thinking about politics that we generally overlook the possibility of their eventual decline. One of the parties indeed has existed nearly as long as the republic itself; it thus antedates all but a few of the modern nations of the Western world. The basic form of the party system—two major, decentralized, ideologically diffuse parties—has remained generally intact throughout its lifespan. The system of parties as a principle of political organization has been extended in some form to every level and branch of government. When the persistence of the party system has been most in jeopardy—as in the period of the Civil War—it has managed always to reestablish itself. On the criteria of duration, constancy of form, degree of penetration of other political institutions and response to stress, the record of the party system has been one of marked success.

This is not to say that there has been no variability in this performance. Constraints were present from the very beginning of party life in this country and have continued—with changing levels of severity—over the years. The failure of the parties to become part of the formal constitutional structure reflects a lack of full legitimation which has proved difficult to overcome.

A reexamination of even the most venerable traditional problems of political theory can sometimes yield surprisingly new and relevant results. The problem of political obligation, for example, and its most popular “solution”, based on consent, turn out on reexamination to be rather different from what we have come to assume about them. The problem of political obligation resolves itself into at least four mutually related but partially independent questions:

1. The limits of obligation (“When are you obligated to obey, and when not?”)

2. The locus of sovereignty (“Whom are you obligated to obey?”)

3. The difference between legitimate authority and mere coercion (“Is there really any difference; are you ever really obligated?”)

4. The justification of obligation (“Why are you ever obligated to obey even a legitimate authority?”)

And the consent theory of obligation, as exemplified in Locke's Second Treatise and Joseph Tussman's Obligation and the Body Politic, turns out to yield a new formulation—perhaps a new interpretation of consent theory, perhaps an alternative to it—that might be labelled either the doctrine of the “nature of the government” or the doctrine of “hypothetical consent.”

It teaches that your obligation depends not on any actual act of consenting, past or present, by yourself or your fellow-citizens, but on the character of the government. If it is a good, just government doing what a government should, then you must obey it; if it is a tyrannical, unjust government trying to do what no government may, then you have no such obligation.

Violence is a common phenomenon in developing polities which has received little attention. Clearly a Peronist riot in Buenos Aires, a land invasion in Lima, and a massacre in rural Colombia are all different. Yet we have no typology which relates types of violence to stages or patterns of economic or social development. We know little of the causes, incidence or functions of different forms of violence. This article is an effort to understand one type of violence which can occur in societies in transition.

Violence in Colombia has traditionally accompanied transfers of power at the national level. This can account for its outbreak in 1946, when the Conservative Party replaced the Liberals. It cannot account for the intensity or duration of rural violence for two decades. This article focuses primarily on the violence from 1946 to 1953, and explains its intensification and duration as the defense of a traditional sacred order against secular modernizing tendencies undermining that order. We shall discuss violence since 1953 in the concluding section.

When the dust settles following the reapportionment upheavals, the traditional problems of legislative policy-making will remain. This process is divided between the governor and (with due respect to Nebraska) the two legislative houses, with the governor generally taking the lead. A governor represents the totality of interests within his party. No single legislator or faction represents as wide a variety of interests as the governor. The governor proposes and vetoes and normally plays an even greater legislative role in state government than the President in the national government because of the infrequent sessions, low seniority, lack of state-wide influence or prestige and inadequate staff of the legislators. The governor's legislation is geared to please his state-wide constituency and, depending largely upon his degree of control over his party, is passed, modified or rejected.

What affects the ability of the governor to control his legislative party is a question seldom asked and rarely investigated except by the harassed occupant of the executive mansion. This is surprising, since the definition of party responsibility is closely related to executive control. By common agreement, a definition of party responsibility would include the ability of the party to control nominations, to present a united front in the election and thereafter to discipline the legislators to uphold the program of the executive in order to make a good record for the next election.

Those who investigate the behavior of legislative parties in the interest of party responsibility equate the latter phenomenon with party voting loyalty.