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.

Robert H. Jackson died more than a decade ago, and his departure from the Supreme Court marked the end of an era in American judicial politics, since he left behind as a minority those remaining of the colleagues who had joined with him to compose the so-called Roosevelt Court. He was still very much alive when I interviewed him shortly after the Steel Seizure decision in 1952, and subsequently when the initial stages of the present research were designed and carried out. His unanticipated and fatal heart attack had two incidental consequences that are relevant here: it fixed an unavoidable natural closure for the data—his activities-that I was studying, and at the same time imposed an insurmountable foreclosure upon one of my research ambitions. For the best way to validate generalizations about a man's attitudinal predispositions and belief systems is to check them as predictions against his future behavior; social scientists understandably repose lesser confidence in findings about hypotheses that can be validated only statistically, and then only by retrospective testing. Perhaps it was an error, therefore, not to have switched from Jackson to some other justice as a subject; but even one who chose a younger justice (such as Arthur Goldberg) might have guessed wrongly about his tenure, and Jackson's career did offer several unusual advantages—for reasons that will be explained shortly—which it seemed important to exploit.

Despite its political implications, the recent explosion of an atomic device has not greatly altered China's present military position vis-à-vis the West. By all standards except population and size, Communist China is still not a first-rate power. But she has nevertheless proceeded to engage the two superpowers simultaneously in a contest from her position of military and economic weakness. What is equally undeniable is that the success of Peking's foreign policy in the struggle with both superpowers, though limited and perhaps only temporary, has considerably exceeded anticipations based on her military and economic strengths. It is the contention of this paper that an explanation of these two striking facts must be sought in the nature of Mao's revolutionary strategy in the Chinese internal political-military struggle and his belief in the applicability of this strategy to the international arena and to other countries, particularly those in the underdeveloped areas. Mao dared to challenge the militarily and economically strong United States because his revolutionary experience proved to his own satisfaction that his integrated and comprehensive strategy would enable him presently to score political gains from a position of military inferiority, and ultimately enable him to achieve highly ambitious objectives with initially meager means in a protracted struggle.

It is hardly surprising that most investigations of Soviet bureaucracy have emphasized the unique aspects of that system rather than its relation to broader problems of administration. Yet the importance of Soviet experience makes a beginning in comparative analysis highly desirable. The purpose of this article is to identify some (by no means all) of the ways in which Soviet administrative behavior resembles or differs from administrative behavior in Western Europe, which is assumed here to be the norm of administration in a politically and economically modernized society. Where Soviet and Western European administrative behavior coincide, it is assumed that the behavior arises from requirements of the economically modernized societies which prevail in both the USSR and Western Europe at present. Where administrative behavior differs in the two areas, tentative explanations are sought in (1) the circumstance that the Soviet economy has become modernized more recently and more rapidly than the economy in Western Europe; and (2) the difference between the Communist political system and the pluralistic systems prevailing in Western Europe.

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?

Evaluations of single-party democracy in Mexico have yielded a substantial literature from the researches of contemporary scholars. Their primary subjects of treatment have been the institutionalized agents of moderation and compromise that have made Mexico one of Latin America's more stable political systems. In prosecuting these studies, however, only scant attention has been given to political groups outside the officially sanctioned “revolutionary famity” of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The PRI has maintained a virtual monopoly of elective and appointive offices since 1929 and traditionally has been thought of as affiliating to itself the only politically relevant groups in Mexico.

Modern Mexican political life has always had its “out groups” and splinter parties. Mostly, they have come and gone, leaving little or no impact upon the political system which they have attempted to influence. Howard Cline has contended that opposition groups in Mexico find it impossible to woo the electorate away from the PRI and thus feel forced to adopt demagoguery and other extreme postures which serve only to reduce their popular appeal.

In some American courts of last resort, dissent is free and frequent; in others the judges vote unanimously for months, even for years at a time—a difference in judicial behavior which tempts inquiry and speculation. Although social scientists generally focus on dissenting courts and feed the human and scientific appetite for open controversy, the operation of every type of court is clarified by an examination of the ways and pitfalls of ostensible consensus among the judges. The purpose of this study of one supreme court and one body of law—zoning law in the Maryland Court of Appeals—is to demonstrate that under certain conditions unanimity in voting is illusory.

I want to try to connect the course of several regimes with what, for want of a better name, I shall call “confining conditions”—the particular social and intellectual conditions present at the births of these regimes. Do I prejudice the case by calling the sum total of the prerevolutionary situation confining conditions rather than calling them more neutrally, as Val Lorwin suggested to me, simply antecedent conditions? Yet every situation which a new regime finds at its inception is an antecedent one. I am concerned specifically—and only—with the conditions that have to be overcome if the new regime is to continue. How the new regime may accomplish this, or may fail to, is the subject of this paper. Therefore I consider the nature of the confining conditions, chiefly those of social structure; the nature of the new regime; and the nature of the methods available to it, as well as those it adopts to overcome the confining conditions.

It is a rare election year when the nation's attention is not focussed on at least one party primary where the struggle for the nomination is highly competitive and the result a matter of doubt until the last precincts are reported. In many such cases the other party has settled on its own standard-bearer and thus sits back contentedly while the opposition wages its internecine battle before a rapt public. In recent years as varied personages as Estes Kefauver, Richard Nixon, and Charles Percy found themselves engaged in a hard-fought primary campaign to secure their nomination or renomination for state office.

Marx's century-old socio-political analysis of peasant nations and of India's traditional village and caste society, because it captures so much of contemporary social and political analysis, provides a convenient framework for critical discussion and evaluation of the relationship between traditional society and modern politics in India. Peasant nations such as mid-nineteenth century France, Marx observed in the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, are formed “by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes.” Objectively, peasants form a class; the mode of life, interests and culture which flow from their productive circumstances separate peasants from other classes and place their class in opposition to other classes. But subjectively and practically, peasants form a vast mass, “the members of which live in similar conditions, but without entering into manifold relations with one another.”

American scholars generally take a dim view of the 1946 Constitution of Japan. Because it carries the imprint of a foreign political philosophy and, more particularly, because it was allegedly imposed through the willful and covert action of an American field commander, that instrument, they feel, is off key and should be rewritten. Their case was well stated some years ago by Harold S. Quigley, in these words:

… the SCAP draft Constitution … has been regarded widely in Japan as a foreign imposition not wholly suited to a people of very different legal and social traditions…. [It was] written hastily by men without adequate knowledge of Japanese civilization and with little regard … for the national right of self-determination…. The decision to prepare a constitution was made by General MacArthur, who interpreted directives from Washington liberally. These directives … did not require SCAP to write a new constitution…. they specifically laid down … that the new government should be established “in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”

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.

This paper presents an attempt, in a case study, to infer causal relationships between contests for local elective office and voter turnout—an attempt which required, in turn, the use of a recently developed mathematical technique for identifying and eliminating spurious correlations. The method no doubt has wider applications.

The case study involves a small New England town and its annual February town elections over the period 1947–1963. The town was chosen as one of the six affected by the newly established Cape Cod National Seashore. The time period was chosen to cover the interval during which the town was faced with the rapid increase in tourism which transformed it from a declining agricultural town to a service-based town. The policies and methods by which the town dealt with this basic change in its economic structure were of immediate interest, especially in the latter years when the National Park Service became involved in the problems the Cape has faced in this postwar period.

This essay has two complementary purposes. It seeks principally to clarify the basis of the political philosophy of Richard Hooker, the great Elizabethan divine, and, in so doing, to clarify as well certain of the limits of political speculation itself. We hear quite often now that reports of the death of political philosophy have been greatly exaggerated. If this is indeed a time of its resuscitation, it is important that its limits be recognized and that inquiry be liberated from doctrines which cannot be based on unassisted reason alone. The ancillary purpose of this study is a contribution to such a disentanglement.

Hooker's political thought itself also repays the attention of modern political scientists, if only as a remarkably comprehensive model of pre-modern or “traditional” society. Hooker wrestles with one of the difficulties which had much to do with ending “traditional” society in Europe and in those places Europe has influenced: the bitter and conflicting claims of church and state, and especially of various churches. Hooker's is a revealing endeavor to solve the political problems inherent in revealed religion, without abandoning—as his “enlightened” successors did—Christianity as a decisive constituent of politics or Aristotle as the secular guide of politics.

One might suppose that if political theorists are by now clear about anything at all, they should be clear about the problem of political obligation and the solution to it most commonly offered, the doctrine of consent. The greatest modern political theorists took up this problem and formulated this answer. The resulting theories are deeply imbedded in our American political tradition; as a consequence we are already taught a sort of rudimentary consent theory in high school. And yet I want to suggest that we are not even now clear on what “the problem of political obligation” is, what sorts of “answers” are appropriate to it, what the consent answer really says, or whether it is a satisfactory answer. This essay is designed to point up the extent of our confusion, to explore some of the ground anew as best it can, and to invite further effort by others. That such effort is worthwhile, that such political theory is still worth considering and that it can be made genuinely relevant to our world, are the assumptions on which this essay rests and the larger message it is meant to convey.

A chief criticism of the American party system is the lack of party responsibility. In the view of some students, one characteristic of our political system that contributes to this irresponsibility is the practice in some states of allowing individuals to vote in primaries without regard to their partisan allegiances. In such an open primary Republicans may, if they wish, vote in the Democratic primary, and vice versa. The contrasting, and more common, practice is the closed primary, in which participation is restricted to party “members.” Some political scientists think that the closed primary, by subjecting legislators to the presumed discipline of periodic scrutiny by their party's members, induces a greater measure of party regularity than the open primary, in which the official has to satisfy a more motley clientele. This position was taken in the best-known statement of the “party government” school, the 1950 report of the APS A Committee on Political Parties:

Other political scientists have expressed doubts about this presumed relationship between primaries and party responsibility, but there has been no systematic empirical evidence on the point. This paper will examine the relationship between primaries and party responsibility by comparing the party regularity of senators from open primary and closed primary states.