The most incisive twentieth century students of language converge from different premises on the conclusion that language is the key creator of the social worlds people experience, and they agree as well that language cannot usefully be understood as a tool for describing an objective reality. For the later Wittgenstein there are no essences, only language games. Chomsky analyzes the sense in which grammar is generative. For Derrida all language is performative, a form of action that undermines its own presuppositions. Foucault sees language as antedating and constructing subjectivity. The “linguistic turn” in twentieth century philosophy, social psychology, and literary theory entails an intellectual ferment that raises fundamental questions about a great deal of mainstream political science, and especially about its logical positivist premises.

While the writers just mentioned analyze various senses in which language use is an aspect of creativity, those who focus upon specifically political language are chiefly concerned with its capacity to reflect ideology, mystify, and distort. The more perspicacious of them deny that an undistorting language is possible in a social world marked by inequalities in resources and status, though the notion of an undistorted language can be useful as an evocation of an ideal benchmark. The emphasis upon political language as distorting or mystifying is a key theme in Lasswell and Orwell, as it is in Habermas, Osgood, Ellul, Vygotsky, Enzensberger, Bennett, and Shapiro.

Albert Camus' ironic judge-penitent, Jean-Baptiste Clemence, remarks to his compatriot in the seedy bar, Mexico City, in a shadowy district of Amsterdam, the mist rising off the canals, the fog rolling in, cheap gin the only source of warmth, “Somebody has to have the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be answered with another one and there would never be an end to it. Power, on the other hand, settles everything. It took time, but we finally realized that. For instance, you must have noticed that our old Europe at last philosophizes in the right way. We no longer say as in simple times: ‘This is the way I think. What are your objections?’ We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communique: ‘This is the truth,’ we say. You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police who will show you we are right.”

Now this is still an imperfect method of control—the enforcers are clearly identified and the coercion is too obvious. Not so in Orwell's 1984. As Syme, the chilling destroyer of language proclaims: “It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” Speaking to Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith, Syme continues: “Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten…. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”

In 1977, Charles Lindblom concluded his study of Politics and Markets with the assertion that “the large private corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed, it does not fit.” In 1983, Robert Reich envisioned The Next American Frontier as the eradication of the distinction between business culture and civic culture in the United States and the full integration of the corporation into the country's key political and social processes. Failure to achieve such a new political-economic compact could mean, Reich asserted, the end of democracy's progress in America. Between Lindblom and Reich lie six short years in time and one vast gulf in political theory and policy perspective. Their positions set the framework for a whole series of political choices confronting American politics today. They also set an agenda for political science as a discipline that studies power, authority, and social change—an agenda calling for an expansion of both intellectual focus and analytical paradigms.

Differences between the purposes and contents of Lindblom's and Reich's studies can be cited, of course. Politics and Markets presents itself as a scholarly work in the theory of political economy, whereas The Next American Frontier has a definite prescriptive flavor designed to influence current political debate. But such differences do not obscure the important element shared by the two books: recognition of the power and position of large corporations as the determining factor in the political-economic future of liberal democracy. Generated from this are several critical questions both authors confront: What is the purpose of public power and that of private economic power in advanced industrial societies today? What should be the relationship between the two as regards the preservation of liberal democracy? What is that relationship when the large corporation is taken into account? What redirection of corporate power is necessary or possible? What blending of corporate institutions and political institutions does liberal democracy allow—or demand?

This minisymposium brings together excerpts from the expert witness declarations of four political scientists in an important case challenging California's congressional reapportionment as an unconstitutional political gerrymander, Badham v. Eu (D.C. California, 1984). These declarations are merely the “opening gun” in Badham. If the case goes to trial, we can anticipate additional statistical analyses will be performed and, of course, each of these experts would be subject to cross-examination about his testimony. Nonetheless, these four declarations represent an excellent illustration of the potential for political science (and political scientists) to be helpful to (even if not determinative of) judicial decision-making in an important policy arena.

The basic issues raised by Badham are as follows:

What is a gerrymander? Are there manageable standards through which political gerrymandering can be detected and measured? Is there (prima facie) evidence giving rise to a (rebuttable) presumption that the California congressional plans in 1981 and 1983 were political gerrymandering? Ought political gerrymandering to be justiciable? If so, did the degree of political manipulation in the California congressional plan(s) rise to the level of constitutional violation? If political gerrymandering is held justiciable, on whom should the burden of proof of gerrymandering rest?

When Justin Dart, Chairman of Dart Industries, said in 1978, “talking with politicians is a fine thing, but with a little money they hear you better,” his colleagues apparently concurred. As Figure 1 indicates, subsequent to several congressional. Federal Election Commission and Supreme Court decisions which clarified some ambiguity concerning their legality, the surge in corporate PAC growth was extremely impressive. The advent of the growth in corporate PACs represented a fundamental shift in the way business money is funneled into electoral politics. Prior to the 1970s, business executives contributed to politicians in an unsystematic, ad hoc manner. Traditionally, corporate executives got together and bankrolled candidates of their choice with little pressure or need to disclose the recipients of their largess.

Gone are those days when the so-called “corporate bag-men” would pass out envelopes filled with cash on the 17th green of some exclusive country club. Today, computerized records of congressmen's roll-call votes and lists of potential PAC contributors have replaced the nine iron as an effective corporate political tool.

Many commentaries on the recent American elections conclude that the United States has taken a long-term move to the right. This shift seemingly began in the late sixties as a reaction to the turmoil occasioned by militant, sometimes violent protest tactics used by the civil rights and antiwar movements, and by the sharp challenge to traditional values encompassed in the changes in family and sex behavior, dress styles, the increased use of drugs, and the like. The Republicans have been victorious in four out of the last five presidential elections, those held from 1968 on. Only one of these, that in 1968, was close, but in that contest a right-wing and racist candidate, George Wallace, received 13 percent. The one election of the five which the Democrats won, that in 1976, was the first one after Richard Nixon's resignation following the Watergate scandal.

Yet the conclusion that America has been in a conservative mood for some time is challenged by the results of the races for Congress and state offices and by the findings of the opinion polls. In 1984, in the same election in which Ronald Reagan received 59 percent of the vote, eight percent more than in 1980, his party lost two seats in the Senate and gained only 14 in the much larger House, leaving it behind the Democrats by 252 to 183. The Democrats still hold 34 of the 50 governorships, down by only one. Judged by which party holds most electoral offices, the Democrats remain the majority party.

1. I am a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine.

… I am thoroughly familiar with the congressional districts delineated in Assembly Bill 2X as implemented with the so-called March 17, Technical Changes. The congressional districts of A.B. 2X (Plan II, passed in 1983) as implemented constitute an egregious form of partisan gerrymandering.

Methods of Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is a technique which operates to minimize or cancel out the voting strength of racial or political elements of the voting population by one or more of the following twelve methods:

(1) Packing the voting strength of a group to insure that much of its voting strength is wasted in districts which are won by lop-sided margins—in particular, packing its strength to a greater extent than is true for the voting strength of the group controlling the district.

(2) Fragmenting or submerging the voting strength of a group to create districts in which that group will constitute a permanent (or near certain) minority.

(3) Reducing the re-election likelihood of some of a group's representatives by altering district boundaries to put two or more representatives from the group into the same district.

(4) Reducing the re-election likelihood of some of a group's representatives by altering district boundaries to cut-up old districts so as to make it impossible for these representatives to continue to represent the bulk of their former constituents.