Showing papers in "American Political Science Review in 1960"

Issue Conflict and Consensus among Party Leaders and Followers

Abstract: American political parties are often regarded as “brokerage” organizations, weak in principle, devoid of ideology, and inclined to differ chiefly over unimportant questions. In contrast to the “ideological” parties of Europe—which supposedly appeal to their followers through sharply defined, coherent, and logically related doctrines—the American parties are thought to fit their convictions to the changing demands of the political contest. According to this view, each set of American party leaders is satisfied to play Tweedledee to the other's Tweedledum.

The Benevolent Leader: Children's Images of Political Authority

Abstract: Society's training of the young, including formal and informal citizenship instruction, character training, and the processes which lead to the development of different personality types, has been seen as an important determinant of adult political behavior by theorists since Plato. In addition, much of our traditional folklore, not to mention much twentieth century literature on personality development, national character, authoritarianism, and electoral preference, points to the utility of examining the individual's early years as one means of illuminating his mature actions.The present paper considers one aspect of the child's political development—the genesis of his attitudes toward political leaders and the possible ways that this developmental process may affect his adult responses to the formal wielders of power. Citizens' orientations to political authority have a complex and imperfectly understood, but obviously important, bearing on the equilibrium of a body politic.Two classes of data will be considered: survey literature giving some indication of how adults respond to political leaders, and results of a study of 659 New Haven public and private school children of widely varying socio-economic status, ranging from fourth- through eighth-graders (about nine to thirteen years of age). Paper-and-pencil questionnaires were administered to this sample between January and March of 1958. Findings from these sources are supplemented by a smaller collection of prolonged interviews with individual children and many informal encounters with groups of school children and teachers over a period of about two years.

Symbols and Political Quiescence

Abstract: Few forms of explanation of political phenomena are more common than the assertion that the success of some group was facilitated by the “apathy” of other groups with opposing interests. If apathy is not an observable phenomenon in a political context because it connotes an individual's mental state, quiescence is observable. It is the purpose of this paper to specify some conditions associated with political quiescence in the formation of business regulation policies. Although the same general conditions are apparently applicable to the formation of public policies in any area, the argument and the examples used here focus upon the field of government regulation of business in order to make the paper manageable and to permit more intensive treatment.Political quiescence toward a policy area can be assumed to be a function either of lack of interest—whether it is simple indifference or stems rather from a sense of futility about the practical prospects of securing obviously desirable changes—or of the satisfaction of whatever interest the quiescent group may have in the policy in question. Our concern here is with the forms of satisfaction. In analyzing the various means by which it can come to pass, the following discussion distinguishes between interests in resources (whether goods or freedoms to act) and interests in symbols connoting the suppression of threats to the group in question. Few political scientists would doubt, on the basis of common sense evidence, that public policies have value to interested groups both as symbols and as instruments for the allocation of more tangible values. The political process has been much less thoroughly studied as a purveyor of symbols, however; and there is a good deal of evidence, to be presented below, that symbols are a more central component of the process than is commonly recognized in political scientists' explicit or implicit models.

Toward an Inventory of Basic Trends and Patterns in Comparative and International Politics

Abstract: Recent decades have seen a vast increase of research in international relations, as in all fields of political and social science. We have more facts and many more expressions of opinion, and we are facing increasingly serious problems of reorientation. We know that much in the world of relations among nations has changed and is still changing, but what is the nature of this change? Is the world becoming more international? Is it turning into one world in which even the United States and the Soviet Union are influencing each other ever more, or at least into two worlds of two rival and ever more tightly integrated Communist and non-Communist blocs? Is the nation-state being superseded by the rise of new continent-wide or ocean-wide treaty organizations or federations? And what is happening within most of the old and new nation-states, as they enter upon these new arrangements? Are their governments becoming more stable or less? Are their political and administrative capabilities rising or declining? Are power and prestige within these states shifting toward the elites or toward the masses of their populations? Are political controls of economic life in the long run growing or receding? Are we moving toward a world of "garrison states" or toward a world of "open societies," or is the world moving in uncharted directions for which not even images have yet been found? Surely, these seem sweeping questions. Scholars and men of affairs might be tempted to put them aside, and to turn their attention to the immediate business at hand. They may prefer the study of some particular conflict between two countries, or of the interests of this or that state, or of the merits of this or that policy at some particular moment. All serious questions, it has been argued, are particular and perhaps unique, and any broader and more general answers might be neither warranted nor wanted. Such a retreat into the exclusive study of small-scale and short-range problems is based upon a fallacy. We cannot think about particular problems without making assumptions about the general context of the world in which they occur. Usually these assumptions are intuitive and vague. We form some indefinite conception of how states of a particular size and type of government and culture are expected to behave at particular times and places, and we feel surprised when some particular country departs strikingly from these half-formed expectations. Clearly our analysis could gain a great deal if we tried to lift these vague types and models of political behavior into the light of consciousness, and if we

Critical Elections in Illinois: 1888–1958

Abstract: In the past seventy years, lasting reorientations of the national electorate have taken place in two periods, centering about the presidential elections of 1896 and 1918. Most other presidential elections have involved relatively uniform swings of states or counties toward one party or the other; Louis Bean summarized this phenomenon in his chapter title, "As Your State Goes, So Goes the Nation."' But the occasions when this uniform swing does not occur are of special interest, because if the reorientations persist they can mark the injection of new issues into national and state politics for a generation. Lubell noted the importance of the "Al Smith revolution" which preceded the "Roosevelt revolution" ;2 and Key, naming these phenomena "critical elections," went on to show that Bryan's candidacy in 1896 marked an earlier major reorientation of the electorate.3 He defined a critical election as one in which "the depth and intensity of electoral involvement are high, in which more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community, and in which new and durable electoral groupings are formed."4 Since no sample survey data are available for either 1896 or 1928, the systematic study of voting in these elections must rest largely on analysis of voting statistics. These statistics can be interpreted more fully with the aid of

The Economic Basis of Political Choice in French West Africa

Abstract: Africans in French Tropical Africa have recently been called on to make several farreaching political decisions. Two basic questions have been at issue: the nature of the relationship between France and the African territories, and the nature of relations between the African territories themselves. On the first question, the Referendum of September 28, 1958 on the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic gave Africans the choice between total independence and internal autonomy within “The (French) Community.” With regard to their mutual relations, the territories which made up the federations of French West and French Equatorial Africa could remain tied together politically, or they could sever all formal political connections among themselves; in French African political terminology, the second issue has been whether or not the individual territories should form “primary federations.” The issue of total independence or internal autonomy within “The Community” was temporarily decided at the 1958 Referendum, when eleven of the twelve territories of French West and Equatorial Africa voted to remain with France, Guinea alone choosing immediate independence. Since then several members of “The Community” have initiated negotiations with France for the full transfer of sovereign powers to local African governments, and the indications are that all French-speaking West Africa will be fully independent within the near future. The outcome of the second question—political relations among the African territories–is not so clear. The trend up to now has been against the re-creation of primary federations.

Congressional Committee Members as Independent Agency Overseers: A Case Study

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the behavior of members of a Congressional committee in their role as overseers of an independent regulatory commission. Congressional committees seem periodically to become aware of the presence of the regulatory agencies and after a more or less spectacular examination of one or another of them, allow them to slip back to an undisturbed and unnoticed routine. Their status as “independent” agencies leaves to Congress the formal responsibility both for checking on the fulfillment of their legislative mandates and for preserving them from domination by their clientele and the President. Too little notice has been taken, however, of the nature of the control of these regulatory agencies emanating from Congress. This study results from an examination of the House Education and Labor Committee as it reviewed the performance of the National Labor Relations Board in 1953. My sources are the public hearings of the Committee in the 83d Congress and interviews with Committee members over a two-year period thereafter.

The Costs of Democracy

Abstract: A magnetic separator is disclosed having particular utility in separating ferromagnetic materials with sizes on the order of microns from viscous fluids having viscosities measured in poises. The separator utilizes a ferromagnetic filter preferably in the form of a bed of ferromagnetic particles through which the fluid is passed and a magnetic field established in the bed transversely to the direction of fluid flow.

The “Open Society” and its Fallacies

Abstract: A little over 100 years ago John Stuart Mill wrote in his essay On Liberty that “… there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.” The sentence from which this is taken is not obiter: Chapter Two of his book is devoted to arguments, putatively philosophical in character, which if they were sound would warrant precisely such a conclusion; we have therefore every reason to assume that Mill meant by the sentence just what it says. The topic of Chapter Two is the entire “communications” process in civilized society (“advanced” society, as Mill puts it); and the question he raises is whether there should be limitations on that process. He treats that problem as the central problem of all civilized societies, the one to which all other problems are subordinate, because of the consequences, good or ill, that a society must bring upon itself according as it adopts this or that solution to it. And he has supreme confidence in the Tightness of the solution he offers. Presumably to avoid all possible misunderstanding, he provides several alternative statements of it, each of which makes his intention abundantly clear, namely, that society must be so organized as to make that solution its supreme law. “Fullest,” that is, absolute freedom of thought and speech, he asserts by clear implication in the entire argument of the chapter, is not to be one of several competing goods society is to foster, one that on occasion might reasonably be sacrificed, in part at least, to the preservation of other goods; i.e., he refuses to recognize any competing good in the name of which it can be limited.

Ethics and War: A Catholic View

Abstract: World War II and Cold War I have influenced the moral appraisal of diplomacy much as they have influenced all systematic analysis of international relations. Commentators are now more aware that the wide gap between what is and what ought to be cannot be nullified by exhortation or legal formula or inexorable institutional evolution. They appreciate more profoundly the structure and function of power. They have learned from Mukden, Wal-Wal and Munich that accommodation can be more costly than resoluteness, and that an ethic dissociated from the world in which men live cannot give adequate moral guidance for men's living. Nevertheless the commentators remain reluctant, on both political and moral grounds, to accept Realpolitik's ethical outlook on the use of force. The shortcomings of yesterday's total victory have been too sobering; and Hiroshima's destruction has left a scar upon the conscience. Moral judgments on diplomacy are accordingly less simplist, less absolute, more troubled and uneasy than in the pre-war decades.The moral theories that have attracted most attention among students of international politics are either Protestant Christian or secular humanist in their basic orientations. This is not to say that these orientations are clearly distinguishable in any particular statement; more or less of them can be found in Niebuhr, Wolfers, Butterfield, Lefever, and Osgood among others. Less well known is a view that can be classified as Catholic or Scholastic. In the hope that this could illuminate, if it does not modify, the problems and the answers as conceived by the better known theories, the present study will put forth such a view. The position will be stated first, with such explanation as might be needed for understanding it, and some indication of differences from the Protestant and humanist conceptions. The theory can then be applied to varying hypothetical projections of the contemporary international scene.

Post-Totalitarian Leadership: Elites in the German Federal Republic

Abstract: A good deal has been heard in recent years concerning the "liberation" of peoples living under totalitarian rule, but the question of who are the men who succeed to the leadership of a state after the fall of its totalitarian rulers has received relatively little attention. Such observations as have been made on the subject, whether by political opponents of a totalitarian regime or by professional social scientists, have tended to follow implicitly-if not explicitly-the theory of alternating elites. There is assumed to be, on the one hand, a more or less homogeneous totalitarian elite, and, on the other, an actual or potential counter-elite, representing the political antithesis to the totalitarian elite. The stability of the rule of the former is said to vary inversely with the degree of organization of the latter.' The totalitarian elite is variously identified with the holders of high positions in the totalitarian system, with the "responsible leaders," with an entire ruling class, or simply with those individuals who are said to be influential in the determination of national policy. The counter-elite is identified with the active overt and covert opponents of the totalitarian elite-resistance leaders, the "vanguard of the proletariat," prominent exiles, and "men on whose backs in concentration camps the lash has written the new gospel in blood and tears."2 Both elite and counter-elite are thus seen as directly, actively involved in the totalitarian system, either as its leaders or as its opponents. Revolution, in this schema, is identified with the destruction of the totalitarian elite and its replacement by the counter-elite. Or, conversely, the destruction of the totalitarian elite is an act of revolution and will result in the emergence of the counter-elite to power. It is an attractively simple thesis, and it warrants investigation.

Administrative Secrecy: A Congressional Dilemma

Abstract: Attacks upon administrative secrecy are a commonplace of congressional politics. By resolution, investigation, and the threat of even more punitive sanctions, Congress has repeatedly asserted its belief that executive officials should not be allowed to withhold documents and testimony at their own discretion. The most graphic recent evidence of this legislative concern has been provided by a House Special Subcommittee on Government Information. Over the past three years, this group, headed by Representative Moss of California, has made far-ranging efforts to expose and dramatize the evils of executive secrecy.The long-standing congressional resentment against administrative efforts to conceal information has very visible roots in considerations of institutional self-interest, since the performance of legislative functions in central areas of policy-making and administrative oversight demands frequent access to facts that only executive officials can supply. In the field of defense policy, especially, congressional dependence upon executive information is acute, and bitter controversy has been sparked by executive refusals to release data bearing on such matters as the missile program, foreign-aid expenditures, and differences within the high command over the best way to spend the defense dollar.

Systematic Political Theory: Observations on the Group Approach

Abstract: Of the spate of articles on interest group behavior and interest group theory which have appeared since the “rediscovery” of Bentley, only a few have been mildly critical. Two American commentators have criticized the vagueness of certain terms and a British observer has noted that, somehow, empirical research on group behavior rarely makes use of the theoretical schemes which have been devised.But surely if we are to accept the claim of the group theorists that this is indeed the key to a science of politics, it is legitimate to ask that they submit their propositions to the tests imposed by science as a method. Perhaps the gap between research and theory stems less from a lack of data than from some limitations inherent in the group approach itself? This, in fact, is the argument of the present essay. The failure of group theory to serve as an adequate guide to research is the result both of the logical inconsistencies of its propositions and of its inability to explain what it purports to explain. The two weaknesses are related, for in their empirical work group theorists are constantly forced into inconsistencies as a result of the inability of the theory to deal with certain dimensions of experience. The ability of those who use the approach to ignore these consequences stems both from a certain looseness of vocabulary and a tendency, not limited to American scholars, to universalize their own political experience.

Feudal Aspects of National Socialism

Abstract: Attempts to establish a “morphology of civilizations” seem to continue in spite of dire warnings from scholars. Indeed, while rejecting Toynbee and Sorokin with one hand, many a scholar has beckoned with the other to adventurous young men to leave the barren tracts of specialization and re-enter the broad panoramic fields of Weltgeschichte. Current interest in “comparative feudal institutions” illustrates the case in point.The notion that “feudalism” is a “form of society,” especially a “stage in development,” can be traced back to Marxist historiography, and from there back to eighteenth century French thinkers. But instead of becoming thoroughly discredited, the notion has recently led to new thinking on the subject which may turn out to be fruitful. In Feudalism in History for example, Rushton Coulborn, has combined eight separate papers on feudalism in various parts of the world by different historians, with his own critical and synthetic studies. Though he fails to find even one “fully developed” feudal society according to his own definition—a not unexpected result—his study contains an amazing amount of suggestive analysis.His suggestions are particularly valuable in the construction of “working models” or “ideal types” as research tools. Even when we remain safely within our own “fields,” if we are to go beyond highly specialized fact-gathering and at the same time avoid “presentisi subjectivism,” we will need such tools.

The National Security Council as a Device for Interdepartmental Coordination: An Interpretation and Appraisal

Abstract: The National Security Council constitutes the most ambitious effort yet made to coordinate policy on the cabinet level in the American federal government. An examination of the experience of the NSC, together with the assumptions and expectations that went into proposing, establishing, and developing it, should help to clarify the problem of policy coordination under the President.Various proposals for a special war cabinet in the United States, usually called a Council of National Defense, date back as far as 1911. The National Defense Act of 1916 established a body by such a name, headed by the Secretary of War. The statute was so watered down from the original proposals, however, that its uses were negligible, except later as a convenient peg for the National Defense Advisory Council (NDAC) and its subsidiaries that Roosevelt called into being in 1940. After World War I, both armed services revived the idea of a more powerful Council in an effort to find some base of support for their military policies, and as a counter to proposals for unification, proposals which they both opposed because these were founded on unrealistic expectations about the sums of money that could be saved through reorganization of the service departments.

British M.P.S and their Local Parties: The Suez Cases *

Abstract: Most students of British parties have accepted the view that the mass organizations are decidedly subordinate to parliamentary leadership. Mainly this has meant rejection of the idea that policy is imposed by a party conference, or its delegated executive, in the Labour party as in the Conservative party. But it may also lead one to ignore or depreciate the role of the constituency units which compose the national organizations. That it is a mistake to do so is now suggested by the activities of local party associations during the Suez crisis of 1956–57. Research material derived from this experience provides the bases for altering the common model of the constituency party as a unit in the mass service organizations sustaining the parliamentary leadership. True enough, the association of dues-paying partisans is primarily service rather than policymaking. However, the Suez experience indicates that this service includes a partly selfgenerating function in relation to the maintenance of parliamentary party cohesion, going beyond the well-known earlier instances of local Labour units simply following national orders to drop candidates who were suspected Communists.

Pressure Group Theory: Its Methodological Range

Abstract: An outstanding advance in one field of human endeavor will often inspire workers in others to try to transfer its conceptions or techniques into their own less successful fields, for obvious reasons. And so political theorists who have long been discontented with the state of politics when compared with that of certain other sciences have, in consequence, sought to advance their field by adopting the ideas or techniques of their scientific contemporaries. The impressive application of physics will probably increase both political tension and the political scientists' interest in methodology. The last hundred years of political science have seen attempts at the introduction of various exotica, Darwinism, Economism, Freudianism, even Statisticism; but what I shall here discuss is the centuries-old attempt to appropriate the success of dynamics or mechanics to politics, an attempt which found its first great exponent in Hobbes but which has been carried on in this century by men like Bentley and Catlin. The success of dynamics, such men seem to have thought, is evidently the result of its method, which they took to be the reduction of phenomena to the primary qualities of matter and motion. We who are interested in politics, accordingly, will do well to copy the method of the successful scientists and reduce all political phenomena to similar primary entities. Just as Newtonian physicists speak of material bodies or particles, and the forces they exert upon each other, so we must confine ourselves to the description of the motions of atomic political bodies and the forces they exert upon each other. Thus we need only speak with Hobbes of men and their desires, or with Catlin of political men and their wills, or with Bentley of groups and their pressures, in order to succeed. We know that, in the early chapters of Leviathan, Hobbes announced this as his programme; but it is doubtful whether, as he moved from methodology to political theory, he did as he said he would do and whether he had not worked out his political theory before he “deduced” it from his primary entities of matter and motion. In what follows I shall try to show a similar history in the work of A. F. Bentley and D. B. Truman. I shall try to show that Bentley announced a methodological programme and that Truman's “development” of it has been quite external and could, in fact, have been undertaken without any reference to Bentley at all. I shall try to show, that is, that Bentley's contribution to political science has been of a psychological rather than a logical kind, and that the references made to him by contemporary pressure group theorists are similar to those which a Russian physicist might make to dialectical materialism.

On the Relation of Political Science and Economics

Abstract: That politics and economic life have much to do with each other is a remark matched in self-evidence only by the parallel observation that political science and economics are of mutual interest. All the more striking then is the difficulty one meets in attempting to state with precision how politics and economic life, or how political science and economics are related.Consider for example the view that politics is the ceaseless competition of interested groups. Except under very rare conditions, as for instance the absence of division of labor, economic circumstances will preoccupy the waking hours of most men at most times. Their preoccupations will express themselves in the formation of organizations, or at least interested groups, with economic foundations. Politics, so far as “interest” means “economic interest” (which it does largely, but not exclusively), is the mutual adjustment of economic positions; and to that extent, the relation between politics and economic life seems to be that political activity grows out of economic activity. But the competition of the interests is, after all, an organized affair, carried out in accordance with rules called laws and constitutions. So perhaps the legal framework, the construction of which surely deserves to be called political, supervenes over the clashing of mere interests and even prescribes which interests may present themselves at the contest. Thus politics appears to be primary in its own right.