In the infancy of a science the use even of fairly crude methods of analysis and description can produce surprisingly large increments of knowledge if new perspectives are brought to bear upon available data. Such perspectives not infrequently require both a combination of methodologies and a critical appraisal of the limitations of each. The emergence of American voting-behavior studies over the last two decades constitutes a good case in point. Studies based on aggregate election statistics have given us invaluable insights into the nature of secular trends in the distribution of the party vote, and have also provided us with useful theory concerning such major phenomena as critical elections. Survey research has made significant contributions to the understanding of motivational forces at work upon the individual voter. As it matures, it is now reaching out to grapple with problems which involve the political system as a whole.

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.

A discipline, at least to the initiated, is known more by the questions it asks than by the answers that it provides. For questions indicate goals or aspirations that answers may not reach. At certain periods, however, a field of knowledge may be more conspicuously characterized by the controversies that occur among those who work in it. When these take the form of debates over the adequacy of particular answers, as determined by agreed, even though sometimes imprecise, criteria of assessment, they are unlikely to be highly prominent, except for the immediate participants. When, on the other hand, such controversies extend to the standing of the questions asked and place in dispute the means of appraising answers, it becomes obvious to all that something is happening that has implications for the entire field. Clearly the discipline is undergoing redefinition or at least an attempt at redefinition that may sharply alter its meaning.

The pattern of international relations has always been in flux. The further we are removed from a period, the easier it is to discern its most salient features. So the fifteenth century now emerges as the time of the birth of the nation-state which was to become the key factor in international relations. Yet the supra-national church was not successfully challenged until the next century. Today it is clear that the French revolution completed the conversion of dynastic states into national states. In retrospect the 18th and particularly the 19th centuries are seen as the high point of the world expansion of Europe and the extension of its system of international relations. Now we realize that the Japanese victory over Russia in 1904–1905 marked the beginning of the counter-offensive against Europe. But what emerges sharply now was obscured then by a welter of incident.

Marx is surely right when he says that the way men earn their living shapes their relations to each other and to the state; but this is, of course, only the beginning. Aside from all the other non-economic factors which also have these effects, there is the matter of the source of income, the level of income, and, especially, the security of income. Moreover, each of these factors has both an individual effect, a set of influences apparent in the study of individual enrichment or immiseration, and a social effect, the influences which appear when whole societies become richer or more secure economically. So I am led to inquire into what is happening to men's political interests, behavior, and attitudes toward politics and government in an Age of Affluence, a period when men's economic security and income have increased and when, for the first time in history, it appears likely that the business cycle can now be controlled. Like Marx's, my interest is in change over time.

The political scientist is a teacher of public men in the making, and an adviser of public men in activity; “public men,” that is, men who are taught, invited or assumed to feel some responsibility for the exercise of political power; “political power,” that is, concentrated means of affecting the future.

Obviously we can not affect the past, or that present moment which is now passing away, but only what is not yet: the future alone is sensitive to our actions, voluntary if aimed at a pictured outcome, rational if apt to cause it, prudently conceived if we take into account circumstances outside our control (known to decision theorists as “states of nature”), and the conflicting moves of others (known in game theory as opponents' play). A result placed in the future, conditions intervening in the future, need we say more to stress that decisions are taken “with an eye to the future,” in other terms, with foresight?

Since the publication of David Easton's The Political System, it has become increasingly common for political scientists to speculate as to the basic factors which may be common to all political systems and which, in their varying manifestations, determine the unique styles of political behavior within each. Efforts to identify the basic political phenomena and their complex relationships have generated a variety of cross-national conceptual schemes and propositions. Some authors speak of structural and functional requisites, some refer to equilibrium conditions for system maintenance. Others, employing more traditional concepts, refer to power, legitimacy, ideology, instability, consensus, influence, and bargaining. Regardless of the form these efforts assume, they all posit the existence of factors or dimensions which are common to all political systems.

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.

This article reports the results of a scale analysis of the votes cast by three prominent senators, two Democrats and a Republican, on legislative measures pending during the second term of the Eisenhower administration. My method employed the Guttman scaling technique to identify the ideological issues presented in the roll calls and to rank the senators according to the positions they took on these issues, looking separately at their records in the 85th and the 86th Congresses. My purpose was twofold: first, to distinguish objectively the differences in the public postures the three men assumed as they voted; and second, to look for movement in the stance of each as the 1960 campaign approached.

A curious state of affairs has developed within the academic discipline that bravely calls itself Political Science—the discipline that in a much-quoted phrase has been called “a device, invented by university teachers, for avoiding that dangerous subject politics, without achieving science.” A growing and now indeed a predominant proportion of leading American political scientists, the behavioralists, have become determined to achieve science. Yet in the process many of them remain open to the charge of strenuously avoiding that dangerous subject, politics.

Consider a recent essay on the behavioral persuasion in politics. The conclusion stresses the purpose of political inquiry: “The Goal is Man.” There is to be a commitment to some humane purpose after all. But what kind of man? A democratic kind of man, a just man, or perhaps a power-seeking man? The answer follows: “These are philosophical questions better left to the philosophers.”

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.

Mass immigration ended fifty years ago, but national origins continue to be a salient dimension in many people's perceptions of themselves and of others. Where this salience is widespread, ethnicity plays a major role in politics. Ethnicity is often an important independent variable in voting behavior. “Ethnic voting,” as I shall call it, has two manifestations. (1) Members of an ethnic group show an affinity for one party or the other which cannot be explained solely as a result of other demographic characteristics. Voters of Irish descent, to take a familiar example, are more likely than other voters of similar economic status to be Democrats. (2) Members of an ethnic group will cross party lines to vote for—or against—a candidate belonging to a particular ethnic group.

Political power in Congress, all observers agree, is highly decentralized. The factors chiefly responsible for this are also well known: weak national parties (in the Congress this results in strong constituency ties and weak leadership sanctions over members) and a highly developed division of labor through the committee system. A leadership endowed with few opportunities to punish and reward, coupled with specialization by policy area, inevitably produces an institution with numerous and disparate centers of power. Just as inevitably the politics of such an institution is compounded of persuasion, bargaining, and log-rolling.

As weak as the legislative parties are, however, they still provide the major organizing force in Congress. Roll-call vote analyses have demonstrated this, and a recent study of the House Whip organizations also bears it out. Generally speaking, the single most important variable explaining legislative outcomes is party organization.

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.

Roll-call votes are being used increasingly to throw light on various aspects of the legislative process. As long as these votes are neither simply unanimous nor cast purely on party lines, they contain information that can often be rendered more intelligible by the simplification or condensation of many votes into fewer variables or dimensions. The researcher interested in a particular legislative decision can thus profit by seeing whether it exemplifies a more general and repeated type of occurrence. The techniques of analysis used in studying legislative votes are broadly applicable to collegial bodies of many sorts, including municipal, state, and national legislative bodies; party congresses and conventions; the U.S. Supreme Court; and the United Nations General Assembly.

Two major questions have been asked which lead to the search for different kinds of simplifying variables in this analysis. One concerns the issues that divide a given group of legislators at a given time, i.e., what general matters are being argued about? The second concerns the subgroups of legislators within the group selected for study: what are the blocs, factions, cliques, and the like, whose more persistent existence is reflected by the division on a given vote?

This paper presents an effort to adapt techniques of content analysis and measurement to the study of relations between a House appropriations subcommittee and the agencies whose budget estimates it reviews. Since Arthur Macmahon's pioneering work on the topic observers have depended on interviews and impressionistic readings of the published record for their evidence. They have identified a variety of attitudes on the part of the committee members, ranging from the obsequious to the pugnacious. And they have noted various techniques of committee control and agency compliance or evasion. They have also expressed varying opinions about the efficacy and utility of congressional oversight.

The existing literature leaves at least one question partially unanswered: how does the subcommittee divide its supervisory and control efforts among the agencies within its jurisdiction? This study deals with this question, and illustrates a method that may have wider application in the systematic study of legislative-executive relations.

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.

One of the most perplexing questions to students of politics since the mid-1950s has been whether western societies are now approaching, or have reached, a condition called “the end of ideology.” Numerous answers have been propounded, both by those who regard such a development as desirable and by those who view it with disquietude. But difficulties have arisen because exponents of one view or the other have had recourse to markedly different, and often shifting, concepts of the terms “ideology” and “end.” If this important controversy is to be saved from sterility, social scientists must both reflect more upon the nature of the terms employed and descend from the level of sweeping cultural generalizations to examine the condition of ideology in particular political settings.

Judged by any standards the 1963 term of the United States Supreme Court was one of momentous importance to the future of the American political system. Most immediately, the Justices once again found themselves embroiled in political controversy, their decisions attacked by the Republican party platform, by the Republican presidential candidate and by many members of Congress.

Among the more notable deeds of the 1963 term were decisions writing into the margins of the Constitution the formula “one man, one vote” as the proper rule for apportioning electoral districts for the House of Representatives and for both houses of state legislatures. The Court also invalidated two acts of Congress, and in the field of criminal justice introduced several new principles while overturning supposedly settled law. In addition the Court again struck down officially sanctioned prayers in public schools.

For its part, Congress seriously considered constitutional amendments to reverse the school prayer decisions of this and previous terms, and to modify the doctrine of the reapportionment cases. The House went so far as to pass a bill to remove from federal courts jurisdiction to hear apportionment suits.

The House Committee on Ways and Means, according to its members, is assigned the responsibility of resolving some of the most partisan issues coming before Congress: questions of taxation, social welfare legislation, foreign trade policy, and management of a national debt which exceeds $300 billion. Yet members of the Committee also contend, at the same time, that they handle most of these problems in a “responsible” way. A Republican member of Ways and Means echoed the views of his fellow Committee members when he said “it's the issues that are partisan, not the members.” A Democratic member went so far as to claim that Ways and Means is “as bipartisan a committee as you have in the House.” And a Treasury Department official who has worked closely with Ways and Means for several years believes that it is a partisan committee in the sense that you get a lot of partisan voting. But while you get a lot of party votes the members discuss the bills in a nonpartisan way. It's a very harmonious committee, the members work very well and harmoniously together. Sure there is partisanship but they discuss the issues in a nonpartisan way.