Amidst changing voter preferences and unexpected volatility in candidate fortunes, the 1984 contest for the Democratic presidential nomination contained at least one constant. From Iowa and New Hampshire through “Super Tuesday” and the middle round in big industrial states to the early June finale, voter preferences among the major contenders for the Democratic nomination diverged sharply by age.

Gary Hart enjoyed his greatest support among young voters, while Walter Mondale's strength was drawn from older voters, especially those over 65. The appeal of Jesse Jackson varied by age as well. Young blacks flocked to the Jackson banner. Older blacks, perhaps no less excited by the presence of an attractive black candidate for president, were more reluctant to follow, giving a greater share of their vote than did young blacks to Walter Mondale. Not since the protest candidacies of McCarthy and Kennedy in 1968 or the more successful insurgency of McGovern in 1972 has so much attention been paid to the contrasting responses of Americans of different ages to candidates for the presidency.

Popular accounts of the relationship of age to presidential choice in 1984 have treated these differences as indicative of generational conflict. The epicenter of the Hart constituency is located in the “Vietnam” or “baby boom” generation, while Mondale's generational home base has been placed among voters who came of age politically during the New Deal. The implication is that Mondale represented vestiges of the old Democratic New Deal coalition, whereas Hart was the candidate of Americans for whom the New Deal is only an historical footnote. Simply put, the 1984 Democratic battle commonly has been described as pitting the old coalition against the new ideas.

In 1968 a wave of student protest manifested itself throughout the Western world. Fifteen years later, a phenomenon variously described as the “Yuppies” or “Yumpies” began to be noted in the United States; a new environmentalist party entered the West German Bundestag for the first time; and a peace movement emerged in Western Europe that was able to mobilize an even larger and more mature segment of the public than did the anti-war movements of the Vietnam era.

These seemingly dissimilar phenomena have something in common: they reflect a process of intergenerational value change that is gradually transforming the politics of Western societies. This process—a shift from Materialist to Postmaterialist value priorities—has brought new political issues to the center of the stage, and provided much of the impetus for new political movements. It has split existing political parties and given rise to new ones. And it raises serious doubts about the long-term viability of the Atlantic Alliance.

LaRuth, at forty, was on the knife's edge. Another two years and he'd be a man of influence, and therefore ineligible for any politics outside the House–or not ineligible, but shopworn, no longer new, no longer fresh. He would be ill-suited, and there were other practical considerations as well, because who wanted to be a servant for twelve or fourteen years and then surrender an opportunity to be master? Not LaRuth. So the time for temporizing was nearly past. If he was going to forsake the House and reach for the Senate (a glamorous possibility), he had to do it soon.

Ward Just, The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert

Ward Just's fictional congressman LaRuth faces two distinct, but related pressures. First, for members of the House, there are few opportunities for advancement. This truncated “structure of opportunities” forces tough choices upon ambitious politicians. The second pressure is no less profound. Ticking away are the dual clocks of chronological age and congressional seniority. Most members seek higher office early in their congressional career (though this may be changing some), when their ties to the House are least strong and the fires of ambition burn the hottest. Much as the externally imposed structure of opportunities affects career choices, so too do the roughly defined internal mandates of human development.

Tocqueville, considering how Americans compare their nation with others, observed that general ideas about politics testify to the weakness of human intelligence. “The Deity does not regard the human race collectively.… Such is, however, not the case with man. … Having superficially considered a certain number of objects, and remarked their resemblance, he assigns to them a common name, sets them apart, and proceeds onwards.”

As it is for human beings, so, too, for political scientists. And of the generalizations which have helped Americans and American political scientists organize the confusing mass of differences and similarities between this country and others, none has been more important and enduring than the notion of the uniqueness of the American political community. This conception is reflected in the split within the discipline between those who study the U.S. political system and those who study comparative politics, a field understood to encompass various foreign countries. The rubric that in the American Political Science Review until the 1950s used to read “Foreign Governments and Politics” has been replaced by a subsection of the book reviews that is entitled “Comparative Politics.” But today as in the past, it is rare to find teaching or research in political science that truly integrates the analysis of American politics within a comparative framework.

Why this should remain the case is difficult to understand, for over the past half-century there have been many shifts in the discipline and in the world that challenged the premises of research based on American exceptionalism. Already in the interwar period, significant work in political science was moving beyond configurative case studies of individual countries. C. J. Friedrich's important Constitutional Government and Democracy (1937), indeed, included the United States in its examination of how well certain general political theories explained the experiences of major political systems. Whatever reservations one might have had about the methodologies of comparative research on which Friedrich relied, the broad influence of his work promised a new integration of American politics into an expanded field of comparative politics.

Having had a foot in each camp for over 30 years, I am acutely aware of our discipline's customary division of the study of political parties between American and non-American subjects. The division remains most apparent in teaching programs despite increasing cross-national research efforts during the last few decades. I doubt that merger is entirely feasible. The division is deeply rooted in the general development of political science in the United States, and something like it is characteristic of other subjects as well as of parties. Legislatures, executives, and courts readily come to mind. Significantly, they are governmental institutions so linked to a country's constitutional and historical experience that a national context for their study seems plainly appropriate. Although parties are not governmental institutions in the same sense as are legislatures, executives, and courts, they have become more than merely private political associations. Most notably in the United States, they are plainly quasigovernmental in many respects. Perhaps this helps to explain why American political scientists have treated our parties, along with governing agencies, as American institutions while leaving parties in other nations for treatment under the rubric of comparative government and politics. Much can be said in behalf of that institutional tradition, but one must grant that it ties our work to geographic units and thus keeps many political scientists closer to historians, in at least one methodological sense, than to economists or sociologists. For better or worse, we thus appear less scientific, conceptually, than the ambitious title of our discipline suggests.

The bifurcation of American and non-American perspectives in foreign policy analysis is a large topic to which justice cannot be done in limited space. To reduce the subject to somewhat more manageable scope, the focus here is on teaching and. more specifically, on undergraduate courses on American foreign policy. After examining some evidence that might shed light on the question, this essay will suggest some reasons, both within and outside the discipline, for this development, as well as some possible ways of avoiding undue parochialism by ensuring that non-American perspectives get some hearing.

This is not the place to undertake extensive content analyses of foreign policy texts, but even a cursory glance at several recent, widely used volumes indicates that many students are exposed almost wholly to American perspectives. Materials cited in footnotes and as suggested readings are overwhelmingly written by American authors. That pattern also extends to three of the best recent collections of readings on American foreign policy. The first includes 32 essays, not one of which is by a non-American, all nine chapters in the second are by Americans, and only one of 12 essays in the third is co-authored by a foreign scholar. In fairness, it should be pointed out that these materials hardly present a homogeneous viewpoint on the sources, conduct, and consequences of American diplomacy; a collection of readings that includes essays by George Kennan, Carl Gershman, Henry Kissinger, and Stanley Hoffmann can hardly be accused of presenting a single outlook. Moreover, the diversity of choices among available texts provides a broad range of perspectives, from moderately hard-line to distinctly revisionist.

The bifurcation of political science into American and comparative politics impoverishes both. The division parochializes them by encapsulating the study of politics within national boundaries. The result is to deprive each of the theoretical contributions generated by the other and to cut them off from the institutional and policy alternatives each has devised. The loss to the study of American politics is probably the more severe because its practitioners have not been prepared to recognize the limitations of their “area specialty.”

Historical and institutional determinants help to explain the bifurcation. Because academic political science, that is, political science as a discipline and a profession is, as Bernard Crick has shown, American in its origins and early development, it has been less attentive to non-American contexts. More than other academic social science disciplines, political science's intellectual provenance is located in the new world. Unlike the other social sciences, political science lacks eighteenth and nineteenth century European masters. In the belief that America was showing the world its future, post-war behavioral political science like other aspects of the American way of life became an American export to Europe and the third world.

When undergraduates want to study legislatures, more often than not their choice is limited to a course on Congress, although they may find a course on the legislative process which includes attention to state legislatures. This is hardly a cause for student discontent. The first, and often the only, ambition of political science students is to learn about the American system of government. That is why the introductory course in the discipline is usually a course in American government, why courses on state and local politics are entirely concerned with the United States, why courses on political parties are really about the Democratic and Republican parties, and why there are hardly any courses on the executive at all since the only subject in that area which is taught is the American presidency.

It was not always so. A century ago, as curricula in political science developed in American universities, a general, theoretical concept of politics, derived from continental and particularly German approaches to the subject predominated. The focus on American politics came a full generation later, inspired by a concern for citizenship training and by the prospect of large captive audiences in classrooms of students fulfilling teacher certification requirements.

America First was consistent with the mood of the United States in the 1920s, but less so in the 1930s and 1940s. In those decades student interest in non-American politics revived in response to the nation's involvement in world affairs, and this interest was expressed in the curriculum by separate courses, often misnamed “comparative government.” These were frequently courses in a series of major foreign governments, shaped by the writing and teaching of a new cohort of emigré faculty who revived the European influence on American political science. In this form the study of what was called “comparative government” gained a larger place in the curricula of departments of political science. But as a subfield of the discipline, comparative government remained too small, and the approach was too country-specific, to permit sub-specialization except by geographic areas. There was no place in it for courses on non-American legislatures, or executives, or political parties.