Since 1797, when Representative Smith of South Carolina proposed a constitutional amendment to reform the electoral college, scarcely a Congress has adjourned without the introduction of one or more resolutions on this subject. A plan which is currently receiving attention was introduced in the Senate by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and in the House by Ed Gossett of Texas. The Senate has already passed the so-called Lodge-Gossett proposal by a vote of 64 to 27—three more than the necessary two-thirds. There is actually some chance that the House of Representatives will approve the measure and send it to the states as it enjoys bi-partisan support and has received favorable committee action in the House.

The plan provides for three major changes in the electoral system. First, it would abolish presidential electors but retain the electoral votes of each state as at present. The purpose of this change is to prevent electors from acting on their own judgment. In the past, this matter has seemed relatively unimportant. But the recent election indicated the dangers of an electoral system which allows a determined minority to seize a national party label and appropriate electoral votes as the Thurmond forces did in Alabama and Tennessee.

In examining the Valley Authority as an administrative device for Federal water resource management this paper will assume that its essential characteristics are those exemplified by the Tennessee Valley Authority, with such additional complications as might be necessitated by the irrigation functions performed in the western states by the Bureau of Reclamation. We may legitimately brush aside the allegations of communism and dictatorship as unwarranted propaganda exaggerations devoid of genuine reality. We may similarly discount many of the “new heaven and new earth” asseverations of those social idealists most susceptible to verbal inebriation who have stood out as the most ardent and vocal advocates of the new mode of organizing Federal resource administration.

It is a lesser question for the partisans of democracy to find means of governing the people than to get the people to choose the men most capable of governing.
Alexis de Tocqueville, in a letter to John Stuart Mill.

Politics by leadership is one of the distinguishing features of the twentieth century. If the eighteenth century enunciated popular sovereignty and direct democracy as a major theme in democratic thought and the nineteenth century was concerned with the challenge of stratification and group conflict, then twentieth century trends have made us sensitive to the role of leadership. The search for the values of security and equality have led to changes in the character of politics. If one were to delineate this newer pattern of a politics by leadership, it would include the following: (1) the shift in the center of conflict resolution and initiative from parliamentary bodies and economic institutions to executive leadership; (2) the proliferation of the immediate office of the chief executive from its cabinet-restricted status to a collectivity of co-adjuting instrumentalities; (3) the tendency toward increased centralization of political parties, with the subordination of the victorious parties as instruments for the chief executive; (4) the calculated manipulation of irrationalities by political leadership through the vast power-potential of mass communications; (5) the displacement of the amateur by the professional politician and civil servant; (6) the growth of bureaucracy as a source and technique of executive power but also as a fulcrum which all contestants for power attempt to employ; (7) the growth of interest groups in size, number and influence, with the tendency toward bureaucratization of their internal structure; (8) the changing role of the public that finds its effective voice in a direct and an interactive relation with the chief executive.

No concept has raised so many conflicting issues and involved nineteenth-century jurists and political theorists in so desperate a maze as the concept of Sovereignty. The reason is perhaps that the original, genuine philosophical meaning of the concept had not been, from the very start, sufficiently examined and seriously tested by them.

In the same measure as crucial practical problems dealing with international law developed, the controversies about State Sovereignty, considered in its external aspect (relations between states), grew deeper and more extended. The question was asked whether the international community as a whole is not the true holder of Sovereignty, rather than the individual states. And, in some quarters, the very notion of Sovereignty was challenged. Such was the stand taken first by Triepel, then by several other international lawyers, including Willoughby and Foulke. Yet that challenge to the concept of Sovereignty remained only juridical in nature, and did not go to the philosophical roots of the matter.

My aim, in this essay, is to discuss Sovereignty not in terms of juridical theory, but in terms of political philosophy. I think that the grounds for doing so are all the better since “Sovereignty,” as Jellinek once observed, “in its historical origins is a political concept which later became transformed” in order to secure a juristic asset to the political power of the State.

Few functions of the American Federal system seem less suited physically to state boundaries than the management of our water resources. The reason is readily apparent. Water flows according to drainage districts and not the riverbounded or rectilinear areas of the American states. Nevertheless, it takes more than topography to delineate the states or provinces of a nation; there are historical and constitutional factors to consider. Once provincial areas are established as states under a national constitution, and, such functions as water supply are assigned to these states, it is not only difficult but it may also be disruptive to withdraw such a function from them, even though physical facts and technological changes cry for this solution.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how public opinion research can aid political parties in adopting sound policies and wise courses of action. In view of the crisis brought to a climax by events in Korea, the analysis is confined to how current public opinion research can be used immediately and to how public opinion methodology can be adapted now for more extensive practical application. In addition, since public opinion research throws into focus the critical problems facing political parties, certain of these problems are noted to show the limitations of public opinion research as it can now be used.

Before the 1948 polling difficulties, research in the form of questionnaires showed that politicians had a high regard for public opinion polls. Although apparently no comparable research has been conducted since then on their attitude toward polls, statements of individual politicians have shown that polls have dropped sharply in prestige. At present, public opinion research techniques are perhaps undervalued, as they were once overvalued.

There is a primary misconception about polls which has been fostered in part by the pollsters themselves. Polls are not accurate to a percentage point or within an artificial “margin of error” under certain circumstances.

“The theorist can never foresee what the experimenter will find when his range is extended to include fields at present inaccessible.”

Man behaved economically, politically, and otherwise long before social scientists theorized about his behavior. In fact, present day social science is of comparatively recent origin, being the product of that progressive specialization which began in the eighteenth century.

This specialization has produced diverse problems, with one of which the present paper is concerned. The problem in question is suggested by the central thesis of this paper: that although an economist (or political scientist) must delimit what he studies qua economist (or political scientist), his understanding of economic (or political) behavior is governed by his understanding of human behavior as a whole. While this paper was written primarily from the point of view of an economist to illustrate how psychology and noneconomic social science may contribute to our understanding of economic behavior, it also suggests how political science may draw upon the disciplines treated and indicates how economists envisage a number of questions of fundamental significance to students of government.

That an animal, presumably a cousin of the simians and certainly very similar to them, has developed societies in which millions and even hundreds of millions of individuals live and act together in orderly relation to each other is one of the astounding facts of history; and an impartial observer would hardly be surprised if the incredibly intricate network of cooperation, overstrained, should suddenly tear apart.

The aggregation of men into huge organized groups is, of course, relatively recent. For a million years or longer men or near-men lived an animal-like existence, scattered in small groups. It was not until fifteen or twenty thousand years ago that men, perhaps as a consequence of unprecedented pressure from the environment, organized groups of any considerable size; it is only within the last three or four thousand years that large-scale societies have existed; and it is only in the last three or four hundred years that complex orderly interplay and interaction among individuals and subgroups in societies have been developed.