The action of the French National Assembly in the late summer of 1954 finally ended the hopes of proponents of the European Defense Community Treaty. Today the treaties and protocols of the London and Paris Conferences which proposed the creation of a Western European Union are the objects of official scrutiny. Both Italy and Germany will become members of the Western European Union after the appropriate ratifications of these documents. The restoration of Germany to a status of equality with that of other Western European states and her admission into NATO have been proposed by the Foreign Ministers of the Western powers.

But behind these actions there has lurked a fear which is reflected in many European countries, the fear of a neo-fascist rebirth in Western Germany and Italy. The image of a rearmed Germany, feeding on the industry of the Ruhr and associated with a Nazi revival, frightens many French parliamentarians. In Britain, the Bevanites have expressed left-wing Laborite fears of German rearmament and have associated it with probable fascist direction. Said their leader on November 18, 1954, in a parliamentary exchange: “Do you think the people of this Country will be safer against the prospects of war if German armies and their Nazi officers have atom and hydrogen bombs?” The neutralism prevalent among some groups in Western Europe can be interpreted in part as their reaction to similar questions. And in the United States, there has not been lacking in some quarters a belief that there is a dangerous spectre which is haunting Western Europe and the world, namely a neo-fascist revival on the north side of the Rhine.

Recently a group of scholars, analysts, and diplomatists met for a weekend conference on theoretical approaches to international politics. Their discussion was inspired by the widespread and growing interest in conceptual and theoretical problems illustrated by parallel efforts in the study of politics, economics, law, and human relations. In the field of foreign relations the impulse toward theory comes from practitioners as well as philosophers. Indeed a former Secretary of State maintains that our most urgent need is for “an applicable body of theory in foreign policy.” Practical men with first-hand diplomatic experience point to the need for rational generalizations and intellectual structures to extract meaning from the jet stream of contemporary events. The intellectual processes by which practical judgments are made along a moving front of events clearly demand inquiry and analysis. Theory in the study of international politics perhaps derserves a special priority because of the urgency of the problem and the stridency of the debate generated by competing approaches each claiming to have preempted the field. Perhaps what is called for is a sorting out and assessment of the intellectual factors that go into diverse theories of international politics at varying levels of abstraction and generality. This sorting out was one of the objectives of the conferees. Similarly this paper seeks to review the nature and purpose of theory, its limitations, and the characteristics of the chief types of theory in international politics.

Of all the countries that have so far fallen under the rule of communism, Czechoslovakia is undoubtedly the one whose prewar system of government and ways of life and traditions approximated most nearly those of a typical Western European nation. This is particularly true of the administration of justice. Thus Czechoslovakia furnishes an ideal setting for a case study of the impact of the Marxist-Leninist conception of the administration of justice on a previously Western-oriented community.

Last September 29th, with over forty million voters eligible, Indonesia initiated its first parliamentary election since independence. Although the election of the 260-member, unicameral Parliament concluded November 29th, December 15th sees the voters again casting their ballots—this time for a 520-member constituent assembly charged with drafting Indonesia's first permanent constitution.

The struggle to carry out elections has been a difficult and protracted one. It has required a decade of strenuous effort characterized by armed struggle, domestic insecurity, shortages of trained personnel and equipment, problems of communication between the nation's hundreds of islands scattered over 3,000 miles from east to west, an overwhelmingly illiterate electorate and, recently at least, reluctance on the part of certain influential groups to hasten matters.

Whatever may be the outcome, the intent to hold elections has been present ever since the Indonesian Republic proclaimed its independence from the Netherlands on August 17, 1945. In a decree issued on November 3, 1945, for example, the Government of the Indonesian Republic avowed its intent to execute “the elections for members of the peoples' representative bodies in the month of January, 1946.” The decree in question was issued for the unique purpose of urging the formation of political parties.

Yugoslav federalism does not begin with the federal constitution adopted eight years ago. Federal ideas among the South Slavs followed the stirrings of nationalism and the struggle for independence at the end of the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century as the logical solution for a situation in which the various tribes wished to be united but not unitary.

With the exception of the Serbian Highlanders in Montenegro, who had been enjoying a precarious independence since 1697, the South Slav tribes were divided between the multi-national Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires. They generally showed little political consciousness either as separate tribes or as members of the Slav family. The first integrating movement among them began in the last three decades of the eighteenth century in the shape of vague Pan-Slav ideas stimulated by the Russian advance towards the Balkans. Pan-Slavism appealed both to many South Slav intellectuals and to the illiterate masses, but was too vague and too weak to counteract the various religious, linguistic, political, and historical differences among the tribes. Moreover, the relations between the three major tribes were disturbed by violent territorial disputes: Macedonia was the bone of contention between the Serbs and the Bulgarians, while Bosnia and Herzegovina were disputed by the Serbs and the Croats.

Any account of British government will lay stress on the power and importance of the Treasury. But although the parliamentary side of British finance has been fully described in various works, very little has been written about what goes on in this field within the administration and in particular about the operations of the Treasury. What precisely does the Treasury do and how does it do it?

The typical business of the Treasury is the control of certain activities of other departments. It is, in the words of one of its former high officials, “the traditional coordinating department.” That does not mean that the Treasury coördinates the whole of Government policy. No single staff agency in British administration can claim so large a duty, unless we take in earnest those civil servants who lump together as one entity the Treasury, the Lord President's Office, and the Cabinet Office under the irreverent title of “The Great George Street Front.” Through the Treasury, however, various large aspects of policy are concerted and controlled, and by a study of its operations we may get some idea of how the business of coördination is carried on under Britain's peculiar plural executive.

American political scientists are still teaching courses labeled “Comparative Government” with little or no attention to the government and politics of the largest states of the world today, and they are still teaching something called “Political Theory” or “History of Political Thought” with no more than casual reference to the ideas underlying non-Western civilizations. The neglect of Indian polity is particularly striking and particularly serious, for apart from Western political thought it comprises probably the most extensive and most important body of political philosophy. Moreover, it is an integral part of the Hindu civilization of the past and the present. That civilization, as Radha-krishnan and Toynbee, among others, have pointed out, is alien to Western civilization, although there are many similarities; and the present encounter between the two civilizations comes at a time when both are in a period of crisis and transition. Such considerations are basic to an understanding of the stresses and strains in the relations of India with the Western world. Behind the tensions that arise between the United States and India, for example, lie differences in views of life and modes of thought and conduct, complicated by uncertainty, inner struggle, sensitivity, misunderstanding, and inexperience in playing new and difficult roles.

The appointment of John M. Harlan of New York to the Supreme Court bench came not only as something of a surprise, but as a rather timely and significant one. It is not merely that he is the first justice who is a direct descendant of a previous member of the Court, but that in a fitting sense his appointment may be regarded as a long-overdue tribute to the services his grandfather rendered to the Court and to the nation, and to the causes which the elder Harlan so ably represented.

Of all the more prominent justices in Supreme Court history, John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky has been, for no obvious reason, the most neglected. The recently published biography of Justice William Johnson has restored to his place in history the only other justice who perhaps could compete with Harlan in the lack of attention paid a significant career.

The science of politics is a science of human behavior. It concerns itself with a specific segment of the activities of humans—those which either take place in, or have a clearly discernible effect upon, the formal governmental machinery of the community. The characteristic feature of a political scientist, therefore, is not his unique theoretical framework but his special empirical interest. Two main consequences follow. First, it is trivially true, and widely recognized, that the major concepts of other behavior sciences are necessarily an integral part of the study of political behavior. Second, it is equally true that, within the social sciences, it is the responsibility of political science to develop those elements of behavior theory that are particularly relevant for the analysis of action in the sphere of politics.

Much of current empirical and theoretical work in political analysis is organized around the observation that many political data can be conceived to represent results of mechanisms for decision-making used (consciously or unconsciously) by individuals or collectivities. In a similar fashion, students of a significant number of other types of behavior have tended to formulate their problems within a decision-making framework. When one examines these apparently disparate branches of behavior theory, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there exist potentially fruitful parallelisms among such theories as those of consumer behavior, administrative behavior, price setting, legislative enactments, propaganda, learning, foreign affairs, and social control.

Well-established “facts,” scholars know, are sometimes overtoppled by research. The “Piltdown man” is a recent case in point. So is the “Jukes family,” whose value to hereditists has collapsed under scientific scrutiny. Of considerably smaller magnitude is a case, just discovered, relating to the putative election of state legislators in single-member districts.

“Popular election from single-member districts is the prevailing method by which individual legislators are chosen,” a Committee of the American Political Science Association reports. Every other authority concurs. Multi-member elections, all agree, are atypical.

“With few exceptions,” Ogg and Ray informed students, “senators and members of lower houses are chosen in small, single-member districts.” Among other writers of the older texts, John Mathews cited “the prevalent system of … single-member districts.” Charles Beard asserted that “the rule of one member to each district is generally applied.” The same assertion was made by the Willoughbys, Lindsay Rogers, James Garner, and others. “For the purpose of choosing their own legislatures,” Willoughby and Rogers noted, “the states are divided into senatorial and representative districts from each of which one senator or one representative is elected.”

Every society, sociological research suggests, has its set of myths which incorporate and symbolize its political, economic, and social aspirations. Thus, as medieval society had the Quest for the Holy Grail and the cult of numerology, we, in our enlightened epoch, have as significant manifestations of our collective hopes the dream of impartial decision-making and the cult of “behavioral science.” While in my view these latter two are but different facets of the same fundamental drive, namely, the age-old effort to exorcise human variables from human action, our concern here is with the first of them, the pervasive tendency in the American political and constitutional tradition directed towards taking the politics out of politics, and substituting some set of Platonic guardians for fallible politicians.

The French Economic Council was once called an enlightened economic adviser of the legislature. The sort of advice which it gives and the amount of enlightenment it generates depend on the decisions reached by the members of the economic interest groups that compose the Council as they debate and vote on the specific issues brought before them. The decision-making process can be illuminated by a statistical study of the voting behavior of these interest groups. Such a study also indicates the possible future pattern of behavior of the groups as well as their attitudes towards the particular issues they have debated.

The formal structural framework within which the groups composing the Council reach their decisions is fixed by the constitution and a series of laws and decrees. Under the Constitution of 1946, the Council is empowered to “examine the bills and proposed laws within its purview in order to give its opinion thereon.” The National Assembly is to send such bills to the Council before considering them. The Council of Ministers may also consult the Council, and is required to do so “concerning the establishment of a national economic plan for full employment and the rational utilization” of the material resources of the country.

The political systems of American states have remained, until recent years, a neglected field of study. Students of state government have found it easier to make meaningful comparisons of administration or legislative organization than to capture on paper the dynamic political forces which appear to be unique in each state and often are completely transformed by each group of personalities that wander on and off the political stage. V. O. Key's excellent study of the political forces in Southern states pointed up the lack of similar surveys of Northern states.

In particular, the role of political parties in state legislatures has been largely ignored. The report of the American Political Science Association Committee on American Legislatures points out this problem and also notes that “it has been generally assumed that partisanship counts for less in most state legislatures than it does in Congress.” Professor Lowell's famous study in 1901, which showed a comparatively low level of party voting in all of the five states he studied except New York, provided the empirical evidence for a conclusion that has been widely shared by later writers.

The most widely-held and well-supported theories of electoral choice today relate such choice to group membership, socializing, so to speak, the vote decision. In this process the personality of the individual voter has tended to be overlooked or its influence minimized. In focussing in this discussion upon the relationship of authoritarianism to electoral choice, therefore, we hope not only to contribute to our knowledge of a particular personality pattern in a political context but also, more generally, to restore the individual, as contrasted to the group, to an important place in a theory of the electoral process.

In an electoral situation, as in any other situation, personality factors play a double role: (1) they affect the perceptions of the individual, screening out some stimuli, distorting others, and admitting others intact; and (2) they shape the responses of a person, selecting among the various possible responses those which are most serviceable to basic personality needs. Every personality develops certain attitudes to assist in this process of selecting among the possible responses. For example, interest in the election, sense of duty, sense of political efficacy, or sense of social integration with the community might form the nucleus of the attitudes bearing on the decision whether or not to vote. Identification with a political party, position on current political issues, candidate preference, anticipation of economic or political advantage, prestige considerations, or identification with a partisan social group might affect the vote itself.

The student of American politics has displayed an increasing interest in the states as units of analysis. Since the states share a common institutional framework and cultural base, and at the same time differ in respect to economy, politics, and social structure, they provide excellent material for comparative studies. The political scientist has at hand a group of political units in which some of the most elusive variables are held constant. In the comparative study of American state politics, then, there is the promise that hypotheses about politics in general may be formulated and tested.

The first stage of analysis is classification. Since competition between political parties for public office is a basic concept in the study of American politics, the nature and degree of party competition provide important criteria for a classification of the states. It is the purpose of this paper to point up the difficulties involved in formulating a classification of the states according to their party systems and to suggest possible categories of party competition which such a classification might include.

At Philadelphia in 1787 the authors of the Constitution invented a new kind of federalism. In previous federal governments, the participating states were no more intimate than permanent allies, and citizens retained a primary loyalty to local governments. The federalism of 1787 achieved a converse effect, however, for it subordinated the member governments and created a nation. Likewise, while the earlier federalisms were notoriously prone to muddles in policy and stalemates in action, the American form turned out to give reasonably effective government, even in the short run. For both its nationalism and its effectiveness, therefore, it found favor with constitution makers elsewhere: in the larger Latin American states, in most of the new nations of the British Commonwealth, in the Germany of Weimar and Bonn, even, on paper at least, in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Probably the clearest demonstration of the prestige and utility of the American invention was the revision (in 1848) of the Swiss Confederation into a federalism patterned after the United States. The cantons thereby abandoned the one remaining survivor of the alliance type of federalism, represented in the middle ages by the Swabian, Rhenish, and Lombard leagues, as well as by the Swiss. And so it happens that about half the earth is presently ruled by federal governments—all of them reminiscent in one way or another of the Philadelphia invention.

The presidential election of 1952 offered a unique opportunity for the study of the effect of television upon voting behavior. By happy accident—the FCC freeze on the construction of new television stations—it was possible to find areas of the United States where there were counties within television reception range and also counties otherwise similar to these with respect to their past voting behavior, but outside the reception area. In these areas the presence or absence of television can be regarded, with reasonable safety, as a genuine independent variable; and if television influenced voting behavior, there is some hope of detecting its effects.

The uniqueness of the situation and its utility for testing hypotheses about the effects of television deserve some comment. Ordinarily, one is confronted in ecological studies with an insurmountable confusion of cause and effect. For example, had there not been an “artificial” restriction on the extension of the television network in 1952, we would not be safe in regarding a county without television as comparable with a county having television. For in that case, absence of television would imply remoteness from centers of population of any size, and we could not assume that influences upon voting behavior in such remote counties would be the same as in counties closer to population centers.