American political parties have long been the victims of a peculiarly ambivalent public attitude—an attitude which on the one hand views them as perverters of the democratic spirit while on the other hand it gives them a vital role in the political process. Much of the regulation imposed on the parties in this spirit of distrust makes it all the more difficult for them to carry out their political role. To operate successfully, they have been forced to adapt their organization and functions to rigorous legal climates.

The vagueness and flexibility of political organization in the states reflect this constant struggle the parties wage to maintain their vitality and integrity against what are frequently severe legal odds. Parties have learned to create informal organs which will be effective and practical. Consequently, the real centers of political power rarely parallel the orderly, pyramided party organzations that the states create. The state or local party leader who holds no formal party office and the extra-legal organization or “machine” are commonplaces in American politics.

Direct legislation has returned to excite considerable interest after a quiet period of a few years in which the traditional legislative processes were allowed to operate undisturbed in the states and cities. Old age pension plans put before the voters by initiative petitions in Colorado, California, and Ohio have excited more inspection of direct legislation procedures than at any time in their history. Several studies have been made of the laws governing the initiative and referendum, and also of their operation in the states. No less significant than state-wide initiatives and referenda have been the anti-picketing and labor regulating initiatives in Los Angeles; ordinances in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland, California, requiring two operators on street cars; attacks upon proportional representation in New York by petitions; attempts by labor organizations in Detroit to set policies regarding working conditions on the city's street railways by initiative ordinances; or the attempts by firemen and police in many cities to obtain civil service and pension systems through the same device. Several of these cities now have approximately thirty-five years of experience with municipal direct legislation.

Numerous factors in American municipal politics have combined within the past fifty years to develop a sentiment for laying upon the electorate a portion of the responsibility for determining local policy. The idea that the voters of the municipality should be allowed, to decide certain policies was developed chiefly by the home rule movement.

A public administrative system is the product of its environment—particularly of its political environment. It is not discrete, but is an aspect of this same environment, affecting and affected by the tendencies of the society of which it is a part. In the rapidly changing present, the complex of social pressures and tensions have created over large areas of the globe an unsettled environment for public service. At a time when effective public administration is more than ever needed to reduce areas of social conflict by achieving generally acceptable solutions to accumulating social problems, the public service in many countries lacks the unity of purpose and technical skill to meet the challenge.

This is notably true where nations, undergoing rapid social transition and attempting uncertainly through democratic government to bring traditional values and practices into line with contemporary needs, must mediate amidst a variety of pressures and counter-pressures. Democratic administration is never easy, even in countries with long histories of democratic government and with well-developed techniques of organization and management. Where the spirit and practice of democratic self-government have not become a living part of the environment and where the political tendencies of the community are contradictory or obscure, the situation of the democratic public official is truly difficult.

The year 1928 will witness national elections in at least three of the great western democracies of the world. The first of these important electoral contests took place in France on the last two Sundays in April. Following a campaign of unique character, some 8,000,000 voters went to the polls to pass judgment upon the record of M. Poincaré's National Union government—a government headed, strangely enough, by the same man whom the electorate had seemingly repudiated four years earlier. Not only was this contest unusual in that it brought into play certain new kinds of campaign technique, but when carefully analyzed in the light of the operation of the new electoral law, the outcome almost defies any logical interpretation. On the surface, it has been heralded as a great personal triumph for Premier Poincaré as the “savior of the franc.” But more than that one cannot say; for he presented his case without the least semblance of a political program, and the party complexion of the newly elected Chamber of Deputies is baffling. Nor is one certain that it faithfully reflects the existing state of public opinion in the nation.

A resumé of the provisions of the latest electoral law, enacted in July, 1927, is necessary for a full understanding of what happened at the polls. In France, as all students of politics know, “electoral reform” is a perennial question. Since 1871 five successive systems of voting have been used: to 1885, the scrutin uninominal, or d'arrondissement; from 1885 to 1889, the scrutin de liste; from 1889 to 1919, the scrutin uninominal again; from 1919 to 1927, the scrutin de liste, with partial proportional representation; and now a reversion once more to the old scrutin uninominal.

Custom has decreed that the president of this Association, as almost his final act before leaving his briefly-held office, shall deliver an address to those of his colleagues who are hardy enough to assemble to hear him. In this address he endeavors to give something of his best thought concerning some political question. Thereby he generally contrives, also, to convey to his fellow-members something of a feeling of corporate unity and a sense of professional direction.

As my thoughts have turned recently toward the consideration of political science as a whole, as a unified discipline, and as a factor in the government of man, I thought I would discuss with you the question of the rôle of political science in the conduct and preservation of what we now call democratic government.

Standing before you a year ago, President Frederic Austin Ogg spoke thoughtfully and with eloquence of American democracy after the war. He directed his remarks in part to the gloomy predictions of various speculative writers who prophesy the end in our age of democracy and constitutional government. With masterly competence, he showed that the modern trend toward strong executive leadership is not at all the same as a drift into dictatorship. In the United States this trend primarily means that the executive office is being developed to fulfil its true function in a democracy that intends to become stronger, more active, and more efficient.

In this article I claim that the Greek philosopher Xenophon, in the third book of his Memorabilia, catalogues six—and perhaps the six—essential and enduring forms of human ambition. Most treatments of ambition depict the phenomenon as monolithic; or, at best, as dichotomous. That is, ambition is understood as a single trait or passion shared by all ambitious people, its manifestations differing only according to circumstance; or, alternatively, as a trait or passion with one good (or high) form and one bad (or base) form. Little attention is paid to an enterprise of cataloguing various types of human beings as embodying distinct forms of ambition, forms which a political community must tolerate or encourage, channel or confront, in different ways. This enterprise is best carried out through the dialectical approach, in which the personality of a particular interlocutor emerges in light of, and in response to, Socratic scrutiny.

In 1961 the Defense Department, under a new Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, began a major management revolution, based on a set of methods and techniques which came to be called a programming, planning, and budgeting system (PPBS). Few, if any, of the techniques were new. Their revolutionary impact depended upon (1) the high degree of development or sophistication to which some of them (e.g., cost and program analysis) had been driven, and (2) the relatively high degree of integration achieved in the new “system,” so that, for example, decisions about current operations can be taken in the light of their effect on programs four or five years in the future, and decisions about future goals can be taken with their implications for present operations specified.

In August, 1965, President Johnson announced his plans to develop comparable management systems in other executive departments. The progress of this effort has been uneven. But it is clear that PPBS is going to be with us for a while. This article is an attempt to assess its effect on the bureaucratic politics of the Defense Department.

The course of recent legislation for the regulation of commerce, trade and industry has created the impression that there exists a tendency in our law to transfer powers of determination from the courts which act according to fixed principles to administrative commissions or officials vested with large discretionary powers.

Considering that normally the progress of law should be away from discretion toward definite rule, such a tendency should receive the most careful examination. The first inquiry should however be whether and to what extent the impression is substantiated by facts.

The advent of the new administrative power is in the public mind associated chiefly with public utility and industrial commissions first created for the control of railroads, for the earlier powers over banks and insurance companies, as well as those of medical and other licensing boards, attracted relatively little attention or comment.

From the election of the National Assembly in February, 1871, to the fall of the Briand cabinet in October, 1929, France had eighty-two cabinets and 349 cabinet ministers, under-secretaries excluded. Although French ministers ordinarily neither wield the power of English ministers nor leave behind them a deep impression upon governmental policy, they nevertheless constitute, ensemble, the governing class of the nation. Every deputy and senator looks forward to the day when he can inscribe the words ancien ministre after his name. Of the 349 who have held a portefeuille, 110 are still living. They constitute a large field for selection whenever a new cabinet is formed, and it is seldom necessary—or even advisable—for an incoming premier to go far outside their ranks in making up a new list for the approval of the president of the Republic.

What type of Frenchman has risen to the ministry under the Third Republic? Whence does he come? What has been his education, his occupation, his previous political experience? If there has been a “type,” has it changed as the Third Republic has come to be more and more firmly established? Do the heads of certain ministries depart from the general type? Are there personalities that demand special attention and study? These are some of the questions that arise concerning the political personnel, not only of French, but of other modern national governments.

Benjamin Reilly makes an important contribution to the debate on the appropriate institutional design of electoral systems for mitigating conflict and sustaining democracy in ethnically plural societies. The dominant position in this debate posits the importance of proportional representation (PR) systems. An alternative position, less widely accepted largely because of an ostensible absence of empirical examples, posits the importance of majoritarian preferential systems that encourage cross-ethnic vote pooling. Reilly extends this debate by drawing on heretofore unknown or understudied cases to examine the operation of both majoritarian (the alternative vote or AV and the supplementary vote or SV) and proportional (single-transferable vote or STV) preferential systems in different social contexts and in different elections (legislative and presidential).

The fact that a sociologist has been requested to appear upon the program of the American Political Science Association is in itself far more significant than any remarks which may be made upon the subject of the relation of sociology to political theory. It is an admission that some political scientists have at last come to consider sociology of sufficient significance to students of politics to be worthy a brief survey of its contributions to modern political theory.

Many of the more liberal and progressive political scientists will doubtless ask themselves if this is not erecting a man of straw, and will inquire if there was ever a time when political scientists were not willing to consider the doctrines of sociology. One or two brief reminders will doubtless allay this suspicion. It was only about twenty years ago that a leading New York daily is reputed to have characterized a distinguished American sociologist as “the fake professor of a pretended science.” About a decade ago an ex-president of this association declared in a twice published paper that sociology was essentially worthless and unscientific and that all of its data had already been dealt with more adequately by the special social sciences.

There has long been a division of opinion among economists concerning the effects of economic developments on voting behavior. In his well-known study, Kramer (1971a) concluded that the fluctuations in economic activity have a systematic influence on U.S. congressional elections. His findings were challenged by various economists, including Stigler (1973).

The purpose of this paper is to extend the analysis of Kramer's results by examining the post-sample forecast performance of his models. As noted by Christ (1966, pp. 546–49), the acid test of a time series model is its ability to perform well outside the sample period. The results discussed below demonstrate that Kramer's equations have relatively good post-sample predictive ability. The findings thus support the view that short-term economic fluctuations have important effects on national elections. However, the results also suggest that economic factors alone are not sufficient to account for all variations of voter behavior.

Texts designed to introduce political science students to the history of political thought or to past political theories have been commonplace in the discipline, as have disputes about their pedagogical utility or justifiability, and methodological debates concerning their adequacy or legitimacy. In an effort to address these disputes and some of these debates, I construct three models of historiographical inquiry. Each model represents a particular approach, and each is defined in terms of three common features. The methodological debates are joined both indirectly and directly: indirectly by identifying clearly the major features and purposes of these approaches, and directly by consideration of such issues as the nature of a historical tradition, the legitimacy of certain interpretive strategies and presuppositions, and the viability of certain conceptions of past political theory. I conclude that each approach can make significant contributions to the education of political science students.

It is a commonplace that every period rewrites history in the light of its own problems, and with the aid of wisdom after the event. Changes in the climate of opinion and shifts in the winds of doctrine naturally bring the contributions of earlier thinkers under new scrutiny. Today the mood of critical reassessment is strong, for a significant shift has taken place in English and American political opinion during the past decade; the temper of the times is not visionary, but revisionist, and the pull is not toward revolution, but toward revaluation. The spate of books and articles on the “new conservatism,” the “new right,” and the “conservative tradition,” however, and if ever, defined; the reconsiderations of liberal and reformist thought; the succession of Michael Oakeshott to the chair of Harold J. Laski; the recantations of repentant liberals, and the curious spectacle of revolutionaries triumphantly in reverse; the vogue of Burke and De Tocqueville; and even the difference between D. W. Brogan's earlier acid etching of the American political scene and his recent essay in contentment, all make clear in their varying ways that times have changed.

Contestation over the structure and location of final sovereign authority—the right to make and enforce binding rules—occupies a central role in political development. Historically, war often settled these debates and institutionalized the victor’s vision of sovereignty. Yet sovereign authority requires more than institutions; it ultimately rests on the recognition of the governed. How does war shape imagined sovereignty? We explore the effect of warfare in the United States, where the debate over two competing visions of sovereignty erupted into the American Civil War. We exploit the grammatical shift in the “United States” from a plural to a singular noun as a measure of imagined sovereignty, drawing upon two large textual corpuses: newspapers (1800–99) and congressional speeches (1851–99). We demonstrate that war shapes imagined sovereignty, but for the North only. Our results further suggest that Northern Republicans played an important role as ideational entrepreneurs in bringing about this shift.

Who gets to “speak up” in politics? Whose voices are silenced? We conducted two field experiments to understand how harassment shapes the everyday experiences of politics for men and women in the United States today. We randomized the names campaign volunteers used to text supporters reminders to participate in a protest and call their representatives. We find that female-named volunteers receive more offensive, silencing, and withdrawal responses than male-named or ambiguously named volunteers. However, supporters were also more likely to respond and agree to their asks. These findings help make sense of prior research that finds women are less likely than men to participate in politics, and raise new questions about whether individual women may be perceived as symbolic representatives of women as a group. We conclude by discussing the implications for gender equality and political activism.