“… [T]here is no necessary conflict among these three desires of the American social scientist: to be a scientist like physical and biological scientists, to provide useful technical services, and to be significant at the level of policy. The chapters of this symposium are intended to illustrate their compatibility.”

This statement indicates a major theme of The Policy Sciences – a volume that marked, as of 1951, the aspirations of a group of leading American social scientists for the policy applications of their disciplines. The harmony of goals that it suggests is no longer evident today.

The possible incompatibilities among the goals of pure science, applied science, and policy can be seen by examining The Policy Sciences in two decades' perspective. They are of three major kinds:

1. To provide intelligent advice on practical problems, the social science disciplines need to include systematic valuative discourse in a way that natural science does not.

2. Applied social science (like applied science generally) differs from pure natural science in stressing valuative dependent variables that may not be closely related to the conceptual schemes of pure science, and independent variables related to alternative choices open to the actor.

3. Different roles and channels of influence are appropriate for pure and applied science; and for applied social science in democratic regimes, participation and consent on the part of those influenced are of vital significance.

In its election for offices in 1969, the American Political Science Association, apparently for the first time in its rarely turbulent history, found the nominees of its Official Nominating Committee challenged by an insurgent group. In order to handle this unprecedented situation, it was decided at the annual meeting to carry out the election by mail ballot and the American Arbitration Association was engaged to administer the operation.

Ballots were mailed to the 13,061 members of the Association in October, 1969. Accompanying them were materials containing statements of belief and biographies for each of the candidates. The response rate was 64 percent.

The ballots carried the contestants indicated in Table 1. For each office the candidates are listed in the Table in the order of their vote result (they were listed in alphabetical order on the ballot) and for each candidate the group endorsements, as they were presented on the ballot, are indicated. Except for the group endorsements, no identifying information accompanied the names of the candidates on the ballots.

The concept of representation has been much discussed and debated in the literature of political science. My intent here is not to review or evaluate the different meanings or implications that have been given to this concept but instead to focus on specific voting schemes which would allow the expression of minority (as well as majority) viewpoints in an elected voting body in rough proportion to their numbers of supporters in a larger electorate. As a procedural question, we shall look at representation in terms of the operation of voting rules which allow the preferences of a group to be translated into the election of representatives who would be capable of expressing the group's preferences in an elected body. Whether these representatives, upon election, should faithfully attempt to reflect the views of their supporters (the “delegate model”), or instead exercise their own independent judgments on matters before the body (the “free agent model”), is a normative question which will not be considered in this analysis.

I shall begin the analysis by postulating two abstract requirements that a voting scheme of proportional representation should meet. I shall then suggest a particular voting scheme which meets these requirements, analyze the logical interrelatedness of the requirements, and finally show the application of the proposed voting scheme to the election of officers and Council members of the American Political Science Association (APSA), using the results of the 1969 APSA election for purposes of illustration. The effects which the size of an elected body has on the strategies available to groups seeking representation on it will be analyzed and illustrated in the Appendix.

Many of the problems facing higher education are not capable of correction within the classroom setting. Yet, a great deal can be accomplished by an individual instructor in order to combat the often-spoken student criticism that classroom experiences are fundamentally deficient and unsatisfactory. This article offers political scientists a reasonably simple method of increasing student interest and participation in the Introductory American Government course. It concerns the design of a term paper which attempts to gain the active involvement of students through the use of primary source material.

The teacher of an introductory American Government course today is probably very encouraged by enormous student interest in the workings of the political system. At the same time, it is not improbable that he is discouraged by the generally low level of substantive knowledge of current events and historical facts. In addition, he is disturbed to find that students do not read books and rarely read newspapers, that they rely upon television and rumor to support their substantive beliefs. The instructor is, additionally, torn between the pull of current issues as a source of classroom learning, and the commitment to the subject matter and methodology of the discipline, as the focus of classroom attention.

In addition, those who assign term papers to their classes must fight the widespread and probably accurate student presumption that most term papers are added drudgery complementing the deadening succession of textbook assignments and blue-book examinations; that they are time-consuming, dull and irrelevant. Furthermore, students complain, again in justice, that their work is not usually read by the professor teaching them, or if read, is considered in a cursory fashion, so that hours of student effort result in simply a grade and possibly a one sentence comment along with, of course, the correction of a few grammatical and spelling errors.