One should say at the outset what one means by democracy. I shall keep close to historical usage by excluding the economic, social, cultural and other extended meanings, and stipulate that democracy is a type of political system. A political system in turn is composed of methods of making public policies, those policies embodied in laws, orders, agreements, understandings and “conventions,” at varying levels of generality, related to government and binding upon all within the system. The approach taken here is thus to classify political systems according to how public policies are made, the assumption being that different systems use different methods or, as we may say, operate on characteristic principles.

Most political scientists concern themselves in one way or another with values and interests. References to values are ubiquitous in the literature, and one need only cite such terms as interest groups, the public interest, the common interest, and the national interest to recall the frequent reference to interests.

The two words have already been discussed a great deal. Even so, there is considerable confusion about their meaning and about the interrelationships of their meaning. Rather than serve as effective tools for incisive analyses, they frequently lead into intellectual traps; and rather than serve as clear symbols for communication, they frequently lead to misunderstanding. These difficulties have been especially great in the field of foreign affairs, where so much has been made of the concept the national interest.

This is a tentative outline of a systematic and comprehensive approach to the study of politics. Part I gives the method. Part II indicates some advantages of the approach. Part III anticipates likely objections to it. And Part IV suggests some applications. My purpose in presenting the paper in its present form is to encourage my colleagues to consider this approach and, if they find it potentially useful, to contribute to its refinement through criticism. As David Easton said in his “Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems,” I know “I run the definite risk that the meaning and implications of this point of view may be only superficially communicated; but it is a risk I shall have to undertake since I do not know how to avoid it sensibly.”

Woodrow Wilson spoke of the “little legislatures of Congress,” in referring to House and Senate standing committees. Perhaps it is not out of place, then, to call subcommittees the “miniature legislatures.” Little systematic academic attention has been given them since Burton French's discussion in this Review in 1915. They are worth understanding, however, for subcommittees often leave an indelible mark on legislation. As one Congressional staff member stated, “Given an active subcommittee chairman working in a specialized field with a staff of his own, the parent committee can do no more than change the grammar of a subcommittee report.” This article deals with the reasons for the existence and growth of subcommittees, with the variety of ways in which they are organized, and with the issues and methods involved in their control. Conference committees are outside the scope of this study.

A standard approach to American politics, national, state, or local, distinguishes the two-party and one-party systems, with a range of modifications in between. Florida has long been described as a one-party state, part of the “solid south.” Since Reconstruction days, and until very recently, the Republican party there has had virtually no state and local organization, virtually no public office seekers nor office holders, virtually no registered voters, and virtually no supporters at the polls. In recent years this state of affairs has been in perceptible change. Traditionally Democratic Florida went Republican in the last three presidential elections. Indeed, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman are the only Democratic presidential nominees to have won Florida's electoral support since 1924. In the past decade there has been a marked increase in registered Republican voters, in Republican candidates and votes for them; and the state and local Republican organizations have expanded and otherwise appeared to be viable. These political changes seem to be related to other changes—industrialization, urbanization, growing wealth and a population explosion whose principal cause has been immigration from other states, mostly northern.

The commission plan and the city manager plan-new forms of city government launched during the early years of this century—were both devised in response to local circumstances, but were soon being heralded as improvements over the then universal mayor-council system. Enthusiasts for both of these new governmental structures claimed many advantages for them. The hopes for the city manager plan seem to have been somewhat better founded, but the passage of time has shown that both plans had limitations which the reformers did not foresee.

Almost all of the early discussion about the relative merits of the three plans neglected the role of political environment. Proponents of the different systems deduced their arguments from “the principles” on which the plans were based. A three-year study of the actual operation of manager government in the late 1930s called attention to the importance of varying local conditions. “The tremendous variety of local political conditions and administrative habits apparent in the fifty cities covered by this survey,” the authors concluded, “makes it impossible to [give general answers to] many questions about the city manager plan.”

Political scientists today are more cautious than they used to be about comparing forms of government and evaluating their virtues. Moreover, in such comparisons as we do make, we rightly lay more stress on party systems and even more informal aspects of government than on constitutional forms. Yet much of what is said by way of comparing and evaluating the disciplined and programmatic type of political party with the American type carries an undertone of the old arguments. Virtues once attributed to the British style of Parliamentary government, honorifically tagged “responsible government,” are now associated with “party government,” while the evils earlier (and still) attributed to the separation of powers are now frequently laid at the door of a weak party system. To be sure, many who criticize the American constitutional and political arrangements for irresponsibility make no claim that the British system is superior.

In studies comparing the Bonn Republic with the Weimar Republic, few aspects of the former have received more attention from political scientists than its extraordinary political stability. Contrary to all expectations in the immediate postwar era, and under the same leadership, Germany's second try at parliamentary democracy has already outlasted the Nazi millennium and will soon have exceeded—successfully—the life span of its ill-fated democratic predecessor, the Weimar Republic. Interpretations abound which attribute the political stamina of the Bonn government to the economic prosperity of Western Germany, its Allied tutelage, its firm Western-oriented course, or its disenchantment with political extremism of either variety. Of particular interest to political scientists, however, are the theories which identify the political stability of the Bonn Republic with the “reign” of Konrad Adenauer from the beginning to this day.

On May 10, 1959, Austrian voters, in giving overwhelming support to the coalition that has been governing them since 1945, split their ballots about as evenly as possible between the two competing coalition partners. The Socialist Party (SPOe) obtained 50.3 per cent of the vote cast for the coalition parties; but the People's Party (OeVP), despite a rigorous system of proportional representation, moved into the new Parliament with 79 seats, a plurality of one over the SPOe. The election of 1953 had shown strikingly similar results. Then, the Socialists had not been able to translate the electoral tie into a complete governmental equilibrium. This time, stung by losses sustained in the government negotiations after the OeVP's victory in the 1956 parliamentary election, and encouraged by its own victory in the 1957 presidential election, the Socialists demanded the formation of a government based on perfect equality of the two partners. They had waged the campaign with a plea to the voters to place the ship of state in equilibrium, and the voters had responded. For eleven weeks following the balloting, OeVP and SPOe engaged in coalition renegotiations which are recounted and analyzed in this study because of the light they throw on the nature of the rigid coalition that has become postwar Austria's contribution to the taxonomy of political institutions.

Throughout the history of Indian politics in the 20th Century runs a curious and disturbing thread. Both before and after the achievement of independence in 1947, large segments of the Indian populace felt that the institutional means of redress for grievances, frustrations and wrongs—actual or fancied—were inadequate. Since the British withdrawal a fuller panoply of democratic procedures for influencing government has been introduced, but a basic suspicion persists that government is still alien and elite—although now the separation is based upon indigenous social division rather than upon foreign conquest and race. The fact is that the gaining of independence has marked very little change in the use of the more direct and agitational modes of public suasion. The Congress Government has been treated to an almost constant tattoo of demands supported by the same techniques popularized during the independence struggle, such as hunger-strikes, black-flag demonstrations, the courting of arrest, impeding of public business, and violent riots.