The 1950 Report of the APSA Committee on Political Parties, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” is relevant today to current problems of public policy and party reform and to the efforts of political scientists, as political scientists, to contribute to the resolution of these problems. This essay examines the Report from a policy science perspective.

The Report was explicitly therapeutic in aim. It defined health, diagnosed ills, and prescribed remedies for the American party system; through the remedies prescribed, the whole American political system was to be restored to health. The healthy democratic system was asserted to be one in which the two national parties were cohesive, disciplined, programmatic, and responsible; internally responsible to their members through primaries, caucuses and conventions, and externally responsible to the whole electorate for carrying out their programs. The programs of the two parties were to be clearly differentiated so as to provide the electorate a real choice. The ills of the Ameican system were said to be due to the failure of parties to have these characteristics. The prescription was recommendation for comprehensive reform.

Despite the special expertise of political scientists on such “constitutional” questions and the work of such distinguished predecessors as Wilson, Goodnow, Lowell, Ford, and Herring, the Report was both normatively and empirically deficient. Little attempt was made to clarify or justify norms or goals. Repeatedly, instrumental propositions linking proposed reforms to goals were based on inadequate evidence or no evidence at all. Even in 1950, evidence (not mentioned in the Report) was available that cast doubt on the Committee's description of the political world. Subsequent research has produced a rich body of literature making clear that much of the substance of the Report is simply mistaken.

The errors of the Report do not vitiate its goals; democratic potential is not revealed by democratic practices. But the errors drastically affect the utility of the Report as policy science. The failure of the Report as policy science is due, in part, to failures of the discipline to clarify the roles of political scientist as policy scientist, to explore adequately the problems of relating knowledge to goals, to pay appropriate attention to the development of political theory, and to develop intellectual tools more specifically suited to the tasks of policy science. The last half of the essay is devoted to an examination of these problems, concluding that the political scientist will succeed in being effective in the policy field just to the extent he succeeds at his own distinctive tasks, in sharpening his own tools, and in thoughtfully applying his special knowledge and skills.

A transformation of basic political priorities may be taking place in Western Europe. I hypothesize: (1) that people have a variety of needs which are given high or low priority according to their degree of fulfillment: people act on behalf of their most important unsatisfied need, giving relatively little attention to needs already satisfied—except that (2) people tend to retain the value priorities adopted in their formative years throughout adult life. In contemporary Western Europe, needs for physical safety and economic security are relatively well satisfied for an unprecedentedly large share of the population. Younger, more affluent groups have been formed entirely under these conditions, and seem relatively likely to give top priority to fulfillment of needs which remain secondary to the older and less affluent majority of the population. Needs for belonging and intellectual and esthetic self-fulfillment (characterized as “post-bourgeois” values) may take top priorities among the former group. Survey data from six countries indicate that the value priorities of the more affluent postwar group do contrast with those of groups raised under conditions of lesser economic and physical security. National patterns of value priorities correspond to the given nation's economic history, moreover, suggesting that the age-group differences reflect the persistence of preadult experiences, rather than life cycle effects. The distinctive value priorities imply distinctive political behavior—being empirically linked with preferences for specific political issues and political parties in a predictable fashion. If the respective age cohorts retain their present value priorities, we would expect long-term shifts in the political goals and patterns of political partisanship prevailing in these societies.

This paper presents evidence that candidate issue positions have a measurable impact on elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. For eight election years, electoral margins of Northern incumbent congressional candidates were examined to test the proposition that “moderates” within each party are better vote getters than those whose roll call records reflect their party's ideological extreme. The effects of roll call positions on election results were estimated by examining the relationships between roll call “extremism” and vote margins with district presidential voting held constant as a control for normal constituency voting habits. Although no strong support was found for the proposition that Democratic Representatives lose electoral support when they take extremely liberal roll call positions, a clear pattern emerged for Republicans: the Republican Congressmen who are the best vote getters tend to be the relative moderates and liberals who avoid the extreme conservative end of the political spectrum. An analysis of survey data suggests that the small group of voters whose electoral decisions are influenced by their Republican Congressman's roll call performance are found within the ranks of a select group who are both free of strong partisan motivations and highly politically informed.

This article identifies four fundamental modes of thought employed in the cognition of policy problems. These modes of thought are moral, cause-effect, sociocentric, and imaginative. Nine variants of these four forms are described and investigated among a small sample of adolescents. The maturation of these forms of thought appears limited during adolescence, and change is not well predicted by the respondent's level of politicization. The article concludes with some speculations about the structure of socialization theory as it relates to the development of fundamental forms of political thinking.

An effort to test the existence and correlates of the “unitarist” and “individualist” political ethos (first discussed in City Politics under the labels “middle-class Anglo-Saxon ethos” and “immigrant ethos”) in a sample of 1,059 mostly male Boston homeowners reveals that about one fifth of the respondents have one or the other ethos when defined by two sets of attitudes and about one eighth have one or the other when defined by three sets of attitudes. In general, the respondents displaying each attitude or two or more attitudes in the predicted combinations have the predicted ethnic, religious, income, and educational attributes. Jewish voters, however, are less likely than predicted to have the good government attitude, whereas Irish and Polish respondents are more likely to have it. Upper-income Yankees were strongly unitarist as defined by all three attitudes.

The widely cited concept of nondecisions is particularly prominent in criticisms of “pluralist” research on local politics. But no scholars, including those who introduced the notion of nondecisions, have done empirical research explicitly on this topic. The lack of research on nondecisions reflects the concept's weaknesses as a guide to field research: (1) It involves a number of unrealistic assumptions about political life. (2) It requires data that are difficult to gather or wholly unobtainable. (3) Even the data that can be collected do not provide a basis for sensible conclusions about the distribution of political power.

The impracticability of research on nondecisions is not a serious setback for political science, however, for most of its specific component ideas, such as the policy consequences of different governmental forms or the impact of political socialization, are being studied without reference to the notion of nondecisions. Judged by its utility for empirical research, then, the idea of nondecisions appears to be superfluous. The same might be said of the notion of “power structures.”

This essay attempts to be at once a comment on some of the many significant points raised in Professor Wolfinger's article and a statement of a perspective on the issue of the “nonissue” in community power analysis. It is not, however, intended as another salvo in the “elitist-pluralist controversy.”

The dispute between “elitists,” “pluralists,” “neo-elitists,” “neopluralists?” et al. has been much with us. A number of valuable ideas regarding approaches and methods for power analysis have, of course, emerged from the debate, especially in its earlier stages. With them, however, seems to have come a conspicuous friction which, I believe, increasingly impedes research. The main problem, as it strikes this noncombatant, is that each side has been reluctant to grant much to the other, while the language has been painfully polemical at times. To one who has learned from both camps and wants to advance the assault on persistent problems rather than on each other, the quarrel has become unfortunate. Debating points often obfuscate truly important issues for power analysis.

Professor Frey and I seem to be in agreement on several points: (1) The research procedures proposed by Bachrach and Baratz are unsatisfactory. (2) Worrying about criteria of issue selection is unnecessary; policy formation can usefully be studied issue by issue. Indeed, I would add that typologies of issues are one of the more promising developments in the study of politics. (3) The notion of nondecisions is not a club with which to belabor Who Governs? in particular or “pluralists” in general. Frey has performed a considerable service by rescuing the idea of nondecisions from the ideologically tinged context in which its advocates generally have discussed it. (4) Analysts of policy formation who limit their attention to overt conflict miss many exercises of power. (5) The pluralist-elitist dichotomy is not a useful distinction.

The last two points call for further discussion. I do not know of any researcher who has disputed the fourth point. In his study of New Haven, Dahl employed three indices of power, “of roughly the same strength.” One of these was: “When a proposal initiated by one or more of the participants is adopted without opposition.”

In his recent book, Moral Principles in Political Philosophy, Felix Oppenheim provides a useful examination of the assumptions of well known figures in the history of political philosophy concerning the logical status of moral principles. Classifying them as cognitivists (if they view fundamental moral principles as either true or false) or noncognitivists (if they view moral principles as neither true nor false), Oppenheim attempts to exhibit the inadequacy of the cognitivist point of view and, importantly, the adequacy of the noncognitivist position. My critique aims at demonstrating the inconclusiveness of Oppenheim’s arguments against cognitivism. Oppenheim presupposes the availability of a plausible and workable criterion for determining when a sentence counts as a statement (statements are for Oppenheim entities which are true or false and, thus, “cognitively meaningful”), but he fails to provide any attractive candidate for that position. Further critical discussion revolves around the following related questions: Is there adequate positive support for the noncognitivist view? Does it allow for the rationality of fundamental moral commitments? And can Oppenheim really justify his case that, far from being irrational or pernicious, noncognitivism is naturally associated with certain humanistic ideals, such as toleration of those of differing moral and political viewpoint?

Professor VanDeVeer has given a scrupulously fair account of my defense of noncognitivism (N), and has raised questions which are both searching and stimulating.

His most basic criticism is that I fail to demonstrate N—the thesis that the utterance of a moral principle expresses the speaker's moral commitment, but does not affirm or deny that something is the case, and therefore does not result in a statement which is true or false. To provide adequate positive support for N would involve me—so he claims—in complicated problems of the theory of meaning. My reply is that I do, and can, rely on the very theory of meaning which, as Hempel states it, is generally accepted by contemporary philosophers of science, namely that

… a sentence makes a cognitively significant assertion, and thus can be said to be either true or false, if and only if either (1) it is analytic or contradictory—in which case it is said to have purely logical meaning or significance—or else (2) if it is capable, at least potentially, of test by experiential evidence—in which case it can be said to have empirical meaning or significance.

Given this basic principle (which Hempel says [p. 101] “is not peculiar to empiricism alone”), and given my demonstration that moral principles are neither analytic nor empirical, it follows that they are not cognitively either true or false.

I do not think that Professor Oppenheim and I are any nearer agreement, but perhaps the various forks in the road are clearer. I will try to be as fair, as clear, and to the point as Oppenheim has been. I will consider most, but not all, of his replies and will do so in the order he has followed.

Oppenheim concedes that he is relying upon the principle that a sentence is cognitively significant if and only if (briefly) it is logically significant or empirically testable, and he claims that this principle is generally accepted by contemporary philosophers of science. I do not think it is generally accepted; indeed, on the page after the one quoted by Oppenheim, Carl Hempel states that he feels “less confident” that such a criterion can establish “sharp dividing lines” between “those sentences which do have cognitive significance and those which do not.” The proper estimate of the current situation is, I think, that whether a general criterion of “cognitive” meaning can be had, and if so, just what it is—are notoriously unsettled questions. If any estimate is correct, it is that among philosophers of language there is widespread suspicion of the neat distinctions between analytic/synthetic, a priori/a posteriori, cognitively meaningful/meaningless which prevailed prior to and during the 1950's. The work of W. V. O. Quine and Noam Chomsky has only muddied the waters further.

This study sets forth the post-1945 development and present status of Japanese constitutional and procedural law on court-mass media relations, while analyzing aspects of the interaction between law and sociopolitical thought and behavior. A recent and dramatic illustration of the issues is provided by the Hakata Station Film Case: A Fukuoka court's subpoena (August 29, 1969) for newsfilm taken during a student-police encounter occasioned conflict between Japan's mass media and courts; the dispute was resolved by a film seizure (March 4, 1970) three months after the Supreme Court had upheld the subpoena's constitutionality. The media maintain that Article 21 of the Constitution (freedom of expression) gives them the right to determine when their used or unused television film or still photographs may be employed as court evidence, even in the absence of privileged communications. This and other court cases considered, arising from Japan's perennial demonstrations, illustrate a strong tendency toward in-group unanimity, new problems in news and evidence gathering, and the operation of a non-Western legal system influenced by Japanese, European, and American traditions.

The few case studies of participation in local elections display distinct patterns, but the measurements lack comparability with each other or with national election voting studies. By application of the methodology, variables, and categories of the presidential election studies to a Toledo city election, the composition of the electorate is compared with that in presidential elections and some sharp contrasts which appear to have significant implications are observed. Some data calculated from Merriam and Gosnell's classic Non-Voting reveal some developments since 1923. From two prominent characteristics of municipal elections, nonpartisan form and low turnout, a few hypotheses about participation in city elections are deduced and examined. The data support the general proposition that most of the psychological, demographic, and socioeconomic variables display comparable amplitudes in city and presidential elections, but their significance is much greater in city elections, because the low voting level makes their impact proportionately greater.

The core of welfare economics consists of the proof that, for certain classes of goods, perfectly competitive markets are efficient in that they provide Pareto optimal allocations of these goods. In this paper, the efficiency of competitive elections is examined. Elections are modeled as two-candidate zero-sum games, and three kinds of equilibria for such games are identified: pure, risky, and mixed strategies. It is shown, however, that regardless of which kind of equilibrium prevails, if candidates adopt equilibrium strategies, an election is efficient in the sense that the candidates advocate Pareto optimal policies. But one caveat to this analysis is that while an election is Pareto optimal, citizens can unanimously prefer markets to elections as a mechanism for selecting future policies.

The confusion in this paper appears to be caused by the author's failure to appreciate fully a lengthy footnote (footnote 5) in my article. In this note a distinction was made between announcing or failing to announce a mixed strategy. The results from either of these approaches will be Pareto optimal ex post but not ex ante. Thus, if a price system works (which it usually does not), the citizens ex ante should prefer it to the vote unless they are risk positive.

My paper had the narrow goal of pointing out that no attempt had been made to compare the price system and the voting mechanism in the case where the price system is efficient. It then showed that given risk aversion, it was possible that society would prefer the price system. The weaknesses in the article were in the model—particularly in specifying how to embed it in a dynamic context and how to give a mixed strategy (concealed or declared) a more plausible interpretation. My model was adequate for the type of counter-example I was constructing. I would have been happier had the author “bought” far less of my model and tackled the problem of improving its sophistication for a more constructive purpose.

First, Shubik's comment distinguishes between ex ante and ex post judgments about markets and elections. He claims that given his assumptions, both markets and elections are efficient ex post, though elections may not be efficient ex ante. I agree insofar as in my last paragraph I state, “If … we ask … ‘For some forthcoming sequence of one or more social decisions, do citizens prefer elections to markets?’ our answer is ‘Possibly no.’”

But Shubik's essay contains no distinction between ex ante and ex post judgments. Shubik begins, “it is demonstrated that if all the conditions for the existence of a competitive equilibrium are satisfied, then simple majority voting to determine the distribution of goods may be less efficient than a price system” (page 179). Shubik notes later, “if they [voters] are riskneutral or risk-averse, then, whenever the ‘political noncooperative game’ has no pure strategy solution, the result will not be Pareto optimal” (page 180). These two statements indicate that Shubik's judgment is ex post and not ex ante, and ex post he is wrong.

Second, to complicate matters further, Shubik fails to distinguish correctly between mixed and risky strategies by the dictates of these concepts' theoretical definitions. I show that if these concepts are correctly interpreted, then a Pareto efficient allocation occurs no matter what form the candidates' electoral strategies take. Manifestly, an ex ante comparison of markets and elections by the Pareto efficient criterion is meaningless, as ex post they are both Pareto efficient.