In November, 1936, the voters of New York City approved the use of proportional representation for the election of members of the city council by a vote of 923,186 to 555,217, after its opponents had failed by court action to prevent the question from being submitted. By a combination of Democratic delegates from New York City and machine Republicans from upstate, the constitutional convention of 1938 provided the people of the entire state an opportunity to reject decisively an amendment that would have prohibited the use of P.R. in any election in the state. Still another unsuccessful attempt to abolish the system was made in 1940—this time through initiative petition under provision of the New York City charter. With the entry of the United States into the war, no further serious effort at repeal was made until 1947, although dissatisfaction with the results of the councilmanic elections continued to be heard even above the din of war.

How did the forces line up in the intense battle over P.R. in the campaign of 1947? The political parties, of course, had a direct stake in the results of the campaign. On the one side were the Democratic and Republican county organizations urging repeal of P.R., while the American Labor party, the Liberal party, the Communist party, and the Fusion forces worked for retention of the system.

Although the Legislative Reference Service in the Library of Congress has existed for a good many years, it was not until 1946 that increased financial support and increased staff made it possible for “L.R.S.” to render the service that friends of the legislative reference idea had long felt that it should. Under Section 203 of the Legislative Reorganization Act, the Service was authorized and directed to appoint senior specialists in various fields “to be available for special work with the appropriate committees of Congress, and upon request to advise and assist any committee of either House or any joint committee in the analysis, appraisal, and evaluation of legislative proposals pending before it, or of recommendations submitted to Congress, by the President or any executive agency, and otherwise to assist in furnishing a basis for the proper determination of measures before the committee.‘ The services of such staff members are available also for members of Congress individually.

Before proceeding further with the discussion of the expansion of the Service made possible by recent legislation, it may be desirable to outline the nature of the existing organization, and to indicate briefly the character of the services which it renders. The Legislative Reference Service as a whole is one of the departments of the Library of Congress. It functions under Dr. Ernest S. Griffith, who has been Director since 1940. For administrative purposes, the work has been divided among six different sections, each of which has its own different and peculiar responsibilities.

Until recently, despite repeated intimations from official sources that a definitive Reichsreform was in preparation, little has actually been accomplished in the direction of reorganizing administrative areas in Germany. A few consolidations of territory have been effected, a Greater Hamburg created, and the Prussian provinces4 and districts (Bezirke) made units of intermediate national administration. But thus far the traditional forces of German separatism and the opposition of powerful local party bosses have prevented the redistricting of Germany along more rational economic and geographic lines.

The article started as a long paper on distributional inequality in the advanced capitalist societies that I presented at the 1976 annual meeting of the APSA. Using OECD data on the post-tax distribution of income in 12 countries, I found that the extent of inequality varied inversely with the extent to which Social Democratic and other leftist parties had governed in recent years. Control of government by left-of-center parties was closely associated with the extent of and growth in the extractive capacity of the state, defined in terms of the ratio of all public revenues to GDP, and the extent of and growth in extractive capacity were closely associated with the degree of distributional equality. But there were perplexing anomalies. For example, the Netherlands, where the Left had seldom governed, experienced the largest increase in the ratio of revenues to GDP since 1960 and was the most egalitarian in terms of the post-tax distribution of income. Belgium and Ireland also experienced unusually large increases in the ratio of revenues to GDP despite infrequent control of government by left-of-center parties

The Free and Open Press is an exceptionally satisfying first book. Robert W. T. Martin revitalizes a debate over the status of press rights in eighteenth-century America that had grown tiresome over the past 20 years. Challenging Leonard Levy, his critics, and the ongoing republic/liberalism divide in American political thought, Martin's work offers an interpretation of free speech thought that explains why early Americans sometimes fought for and sometimes fought against press rights. Though Martin claims too much for his thesis at times, all scholars of American political thought and constitutional development should read his book.

The key argument of Robert Gottlieb's Environmentalism Unbound is that an integrated focus on pollution prevention and environmental justice can lay the groundwork for fundamental environmental and social change (p. xiii). The aim is to develop a common vision and a more “embracing language” for environmentalism that is more broadly appealing than a mainstream focus on nature and species and more broadly applicable to a range of environmental and social issues. Such an expanded environmental discourse—integrating the workplace, the social, and the ecological—would make for an unbounded and more successful environmentalism. This is another wonderful offering by Gottlieb, right up there with his Forcing the Spring (1993). The recognition of diverse discourses of environmentalism and social justice is a challenge to movement strategies, and Gottlieb takes on the issue with a focus on both a broad vision and everyday practice.

The relationship between economic redistribution and democracy has experienced a profound political shift in the past two decades, which we are only now beginning to analyze with any perspicacity or insight. This conceptual shift has consisted primarily in the ability of the administrations of Thatcher and Reagan, among others, to convince even the less well-off to support policies that seemed to widen the income gap, with the promise of securing greater absolute gains for all. Social reformers, who for the previous century had viewed democratic procedures and institutions as means of achieving a wider redistribution of wealth, were clearly flummoxed.

Liberal multiculturalism contains a tension. It values culture as the source of individual identity and development, and seeks to accommodate cultural differences by granting the relevant groups special rights, exemptions, and, in some cases, varying degrees of autonomy. However, it also values basic individual rights that some of these groups might deny or severely curtail, especially in relation to women. Liberal multiculturalism is therefore faced with a conflict between what it takes to be two important goods, or what Ayelet Shachar calls the paradox of multicultural vulnerability. If it privileges cultural differences, it compromises and even jettisons its liberalism; if it privileges individual rights, it ceases to be multicultural. Is there a way of conceptualizing and organizing society such that both these goods can be realized? Shachar thinks there is, and devotes her thoughtful and well-argued book to outlining and defending it.