With increasing frequency and self-assurance, the scientific objectivity of American social science is proclaimed by some of its prominent practitioners. Various explanations are offered for the onset of social science's Golden Age, but central to most of them is the claim that modern social science has managed to resolve Mannheim's Paradox, namely, that in the pursuit of the truth the social scientist himself is handicapped by the narrow focus and distortions implicit in ideological thought. Presumably, the social scientist can now probe any aspect of human organization and behavior as dispassionately as physical scientists observe the structure of the atom or chemical reactions. For this reason, it is claimed by some that the ideologically liberated social scientists—at least in the United States—can expect to be co-opted into the Scientific Culture, or that segment of society that is presumably aloof from and disdainful toward the moralistic speculations and the tender-heartedness of the literary intellectuals.

The behaviorial “revolution” in political science may have run its course, but it has left in its wake both obscurantist criticisms of empiricism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an unquestioning belief in “science.” Quite often the latter belief is not merely anti-historical and anti-philosophical but also uncritical about the extent to which empirical observations can be colored by the very orientation to values that one seeks to control in rigorous empirical research.

The claims of modern social scientists are greatly buttressed by the views of Talcott Parsons.

I am somewhat puzzled by Professor LaPalombara's critique of the decline or end of ideology thesis which points out that deideologisation is itself ideological behavior in a pure sense. This is obvious to most of those who have written on the subject. In an article cited in other contexts by Professor La Palombara, I., for one, have written as follows:

As a final comment, I would note that not only do class conflicts over issues related to division of the total economic pie, influence over various institutions, symbolic status and opportunity, continue in the absence of weltanschauungen, but that the decline of such total ideologies does not mean the end of ideology. Clearly, commitment to the politics of pragmatism, to the rules of the game of collective bargaining, to gradual change whether in the direction favored by the left or the right, to opposition both to an all powerful central state and to laissez-faire constitutes the component parts of an ideology. The “agreement on fundamentals,” the political consensus of western society, now increasingly has come to include a position on matters which once sharply separated the left from the right. And this ideological agreement, which might best be described as “conservative socialism,” has become the ideology of the major parties in the developed states of Europe and America. As such it leaves its advocates in sharp disagreement with the relatively small groups of radical rightists and leftists at home, and at a disadvantage in efforts to foster different variants of this doctrine in the less affluent parts of the world.

Despite the measured pace of American elections, there have now been a number of presidential campaigns since the advent of survey studies of voting. However sparingly, political history slowly has added to the set of distinct configurations of men and events which comprise a contest for the Presidency. The set is still small, whatever the impression created by massed thousands of interviews or by the accompanying files of election returns. Yet it is now large enough to be pressed hard for evidence about the sources of electoral change.

A primary virtue of measurements extended over a series of elections is that they can throw light on the problem of change. So long as the earliest voting studies were confined to cross-sectional relationships, they could deal only very inadequately with changes superimposed on these relationships or with changes in the relationships themselves. In the case of Lazarsfeld's enormously influential Erie County study in 1940, the natural limitations of a single-election study were compounded by the investigators' misfortune in choosing a campaign whose dominant personality and principal issues differed little from those of preceding elections. I have often wondered whether the static social determinism of The People's Choice would have emerged from a campaign in which the tides of short-term change were more nearly at flood.

I shall examine here some sources of change which are richly evident in the presidential elections of the last two decades.

Behind most political scientists' studies of nonvoting there is, implicitly at least, a theory of passive consent. This is particularly the case where nonvoting as a result of apathy is concerned. For, it is suggested, apathy tends to increase when citizens are satisfied that their interests will not be seriously harmed, regardless of which party wins. In other words: the very reasons which underlie apathetic nonvoters' failure to participate in an election testify that their inactivity is a form of passive consent to the election's outcome.

Passive consent, however, cannot be equated to the “theory of consensus” which economists have recently contributed to political science. This “theory of consensus” deals with the “welfare economics” problem of aggregating individual citizens' preferences into a “true”—indeed, into a mathematically precise—schedule of social preferences. Thus, while it is plausible that a citizen can, by nonvoting, tacitly consent to a given electoral outcome, it is also likely that the final social decision would change, however slightly, if in fact this citizen's true preferences had been admitted through voting into the social aggregation. In this case, the final choice would have popular consent without real popular consensus.

The converse can also be true. For example, while Duncan Black's Theory of Committees and Elections and Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values are characterized by a most impressive formal elegance, it is also true that neither makes provision for nonvoting.

A reexamination of even the most venerable traditional problems of political theory can sometimes yield surprisingly new and relevant results. The problem of political obligation, for example, and its most popular “solution”, based on consent, turn out on reexamination to be rather different from what we have come to assume about them. The problem of political obligation resolves itself into at least four mutually related but partially independent questions:

1. The limits of obligation (“When are you obligated to obey, and when not?”)

2. The locus of sovereignty (“Whom are you obligated to obey?”)

3. The difference between legitimate authority and mere coercion (“Is there really any difference; are you ever really obligated?”)

4. The justification of obligation (“Why are you ever obligated to obey even a legitimate authority?”)

And the consent theory of obligation, as exemplified in Locke's Second Treatise and Joseph Tussman's Obligation and the Body Politic, turns out to yield a new formulation—perhaps a new interpretation of consent theory, perhaps an alternative to it—that might be labelled either the doctrine of the “nature of the government” or the doctrine of “hypothetical consent.”

It teaches that your obligation depends not on any actual act of consenting, past or present, by yourself or your fellow-citizens, but on the character of the government. If it is a good, just government doing what a government should, then you must obey it; if it is a tyrannical, unjust government trying to do what no government may, then you have no such obligation.

“Simulation” and “case studies” are supplementary teaching aids available for university courses in political science and international relations. The newer technique, simulation, has been used at several universities to augment instruction in international relations, foreign policy making, national security policy, urban politics, and political parties and elections. In fields other than political science, similar techniques abound. The number of business games or simulations exceeds 100, and less numerous games exist for educational administration, legislatures, career choices, and diplomacy, to name a few. Case studies also supplement a wide range of politics courses, including introduction to American government, public administration, party organization, legislative processes, and public law. The case method is the hallmark of schools of law and schools of business, and it is now emulated in teaching the history of science and in training in research methodology in sociology.

Different types of simulations and cases and their uses have been described and discussed elsewhere. Evaluation of games and cases as supplementary instructional aids has almost invariably been impressionistic. The consumers of these teaching methods have reported their personal experiences with them and have advanced claims for and criticisms of them, but they have undertaken little empirical research to determine whether the claims for particular simulations or cases are valid or to compare the actual effects of alternative methods. Moreover, the Ford Foundation expended thousands of dollars to induce business schools to try business games, but their investment in evaluating the success or failure of this innovation extended to convening a conference to discuss the subject, not to carrying out research on it.

Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes' publication in 1963 of a preliminary report on the Survey Research Center's representation study is an important landmark in the development of empirical political theory. That report addressed itself to the crucial theoretical question of the linkage between mass political opinions and governmental policy-making. More specifically, the report found considerable policy agreement between Congressional roll call votes and the attitudes of the individual Congressman's constituency. This policy agreement was then interpreted through several causal paths and the Congressman's perception of his constituency's attitudes was found to be the main path by which the local district ultimately influenced Congressional outputs.

The main body of the report dealt with the broad civil rights issue dimension, and, by specifying the perceptual path by which constituency influence is brought to bear, documented the effect of political issues despite the generally low level of political information held at the mass level. Thus, the Congressmen, through their broad cognitive evaluations, were aware of how far they could proceed in determining their civil rights roll call votes on the basis of their own attitudes before risking the displeasure of their constituents.

Beyond such major substantive contributions the representation study introduced to political science a variance-apportioning technique similar to that developed by Sewall Wright, in 1921. Through this variance-apportioning technique, the importance of the perceptual link was isolated and evaluated. This study, then, symbolizes the growing recognition in political science of the importance of more sophisticated methodological tools in the process of theory building.

What is the relationship between certain major structural aspects of state governments and the content of policies adopted in the states? Do the socio-economic environments of the states relate significantly to political structures or the type of policies enacted?

The thesis advanced here is that differences in policy, at least in certain substantive areas, are more readily explained in terms of differences in the socio-economic environments of the states than by an examination of structural variables. It will also be maintained that, as policy is independent of structure, so structure is also largely independent of some major aspects of the environment. The specific structural variables to be examined are apportionment, party competitiveness, and divided party control between governors and their legislatures.

Six specific propositions will be examined:

Proposition 1. The more imbalance in a state's apportionment, the less likely the legislature is to pass “liberal” or welfare-oriented policies beneficial to urban groups.

Proposition 2. The more imbalance in a state's apportionment, the less financial aid large cities will receive directly from the state.

Proposition 3. The more imbalance in a state's apportionment, the less competitive will be its major parties.

3a. the less competitive a state's two major parties, the less welfare-oriented will be the policies adopted by its legislature.

Proposition 4. The more imbalance in a state's apportionment, the more likely it is that control of the executive and legislative branches will be divided between parties.

4a. The more frequently control of the legislature and executive are divided, the less likely a state will be to adopt welfare-oriented policies.

Proposition 5. The more industrialized a state, the more imbalance there will be in its apportionment system.

Proposition 6. The more industrialized a state, the higher will be its welfare-orientation.

In a recent article Leon D. Epstein sets out to analyze Canadian parliamentary parties, particularly the reasons for their cohesiveness, so as to better understand American parties. In some respects, this is an extension of his earlier study of British parliamentary parties. An analysis of Canadian parties is particularly appropriate, he feels, because the Canadian party system has so often been described as an Anglo-American hybrid. As he succinctly points out:

Professor Epstein argues that cohesion is maintained by Canadian Members of Parliament because: (1) they perceive it is to their personal advantage to act cohesively; (2) it is mutually advantageous to their parties and themselves; and (3) although not specifically stated, he strongly implies that the maintenance of their parties as viable, organized and effective groups requires such behavior on their part.

He also states that the transcending of intraparty policy differences may be facilitated by the party legislative caucus.

The process by which it transcends may well include caucus compromise rather than crude leadership or majority imposition of a policy on dissenting M.P.'s.