When violent political uprisings are anticipated by potential participants, politically responsible decision-makers, and scholarly observers, and do not occur, and when violent revolutionary uprisings suddenly erupt that no one, including most of the participants, expected, serious questions are raised as to the adequacy with which the conditions of spontaneous political violence are understood and analyzed by scholar and policy-maker alike—at least in particular cases. The problem is compounded when other cases are correctly predicted, as sometimes happens.

In Gabriel A. Almond's famous typology of political systems, first expounded in 1956, he distinguishes three types of Western democratic systems: Anglo-American political systems (exemplified by Britain and the United States), Continental European political systems (France, Germany, and Italy), and a third category consisting of the Scandinavian and Low Countries. The third type is not given a distinct label and is not described in detail; Almond merely states that the countries belonging to this type “combine some of the features of the Continental European and the Anglo-American” political systems, and “stand somewhere in between the Continental pattern and the Anglo-American.” Almond's threefold typology has been highly influential in the comparative analysis of democratic politics, although, like any provocative and insightful idea, it has also been criticized. This research note will discuss the concept of “consociational democracy” in a constructive attempt to refine and elaborate Almond's typology of democracies.

With The growing academic and governmental interest in quantitative research on nations, it is becoming increasingly important to separate substantive findings from the technical arcana in which they are embedded. In recognition of this need, this report extracts and consolidates the major results of the Dimensionality of Nations (DON) project.

The Don project (6) has been in existence since 1962 and is now in its second phase. Phase I of DON defined the major dimensions of variation among all nations for the mid-1950's and the grouping of nations on these dimensions. During this phase much of the methodological underbrush surrounding the use on cross-national data of its major mathematical model—factor analysis—was cleared away, and some measure of control was developed over problems of error and noncomparability in the data.

The appearance of major studies by Karl Deutsch and Ernst Haas in the late 1950's won for integration theory a prominent position among the contemporary approaches to the study of international relations. A decade later its achievements are very much a matter of debate. While many students of integration theory have been led, by disappointment with results, to focus their attention on smaller and more manageable units, such as local communities and city-suburb relations, others continue investigations at the international level.

The virtually simultaneous appearance of new editions of Hannah A Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and Carl Friedrich's and Zbigniew Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy affords an opportunity to reopen the question of the utility of the classical theory of totalitarianism in systematic comparative political analysis. The original editions of these two volumes went far toward shaping lay and academic understandings of totalitarianism in the 1950's; in addition, most subsequent general scholarship on totalitarianism has been written implicitly or explicitly in the light of—if not in reaction to—these two earlier works.

Are there prismatic societies in Africa? That such a question can now be asked is as much a measure of changes in the study of administration as it is a recognition of new patterns of government emerging from African independence. During both the colonial and the current period, students of African bureaucracy have contributed little to administrative theory. Before independence, scholars concentrated on formal studies designed to raise efficiency. Since independence the field has been dominated by studies of political parties, trade unions, and voluntary associations, because these organizations carried on the independence struggle, often over the opposition of the bureaucracy. Behavioral studies of colonial administration and independent Afrir can civil services are badly needed.

A useful consequence of America's deepening involvement in Asian affairs is the widespread questioning of the premises that arc assumed to underlie United States policy, but debate stressing the weaknesses of American strategy in Vietnam without placing present dilemmas in a broader perspective is deficient. Similarly, discussion that ignores the distinctive features of the American historical experience, especially its influence on the processes of policy-making, courts irrelevance. Failure to look beyond the confines of the Vietnam predicament may prove as detrimental to observers as to officialdom, yet both find the process of distinguishing the relative importance of internal and external constraints increasingly arduous. In an era of contagious domestic unrest in industrialized countries and ambiguous conflicts in less developed geographical areas, both may be tempted to generalize too broadly from a dominant though still restricted series of events. Such, such are the joys of appraising American foreign policy during the Vietnam anguish.