When the turn of fate brings to a man the honor of speaking on this occasion, he is likely to review the remarks of his predecessors. Their practice, I find, has been, in the main, to address themselves to one or the other of two kinds of themes. They discourse either upon a substantive problem within their own specialty or upon a matter of common concern to us as members of the same profession. As our interests have become more diverse, the second alternative seems to have been followed with greater frequency. My decision to consider in my remarks the state of our discipline has, therefore, the support of precedent if not the merit of prudence.

The burden of my argument may be stated briefly and bluntly. It is that the demands upon our profession have grown more rapidly than has the content of our discipline. We are, in a sense, the victims of our own success. The achievements of our profession arouse expectations that our discipline enables us to meet only imperfectly.

So many discussions go astray because the same words are used in different senses by adherents of different points of view that it seems imperative to start practically every discussion by clarifying the meanings of terms. Yet this problem is easier posed than solved. We in academic life owe understandable allegiance to erudition and to elegance of expression, and all too often we take a definition to be adequate (in the sense of clarifying meaning) if it sounds well. More is required, of course. Clarification of meaning (whether couched in formal definitions or in illustrative examples) takes place only if the terms defined are actually geared to the experience of the people concerned. This is a serious problem, because the experiences of people, although they overlap, can be widely disparate. Particularly among us in academic life the disparity may be quite wide. For our experience is very largely the experience of thinking, and thinking is tempered by language in the broadest sense, that is, by the way ideas are organized. And various ways of organizing ideas are imposed on us by our disciplines. Discipline means constraint. Discipline is essential for any organized activity. And so in academic disciplines, “discipline” means constraint on the mode of thought. It prescribes the repertoire of concepts, the patterns of classification, the rules of evidence, and the etiquette of discourse.

The dangers that arise when norms and personal values intrude upon scientific work are familiar to every political scientist—so familiar, that nowadays the dangers are likely to be shrugged off with undeserved contempt. “The ‘cult of objectivity’ has passed in social science,” one writer has recently proclaimed; and David Easton declares, less dramatically, that even though he assumes that “factual and moral propositions are logically heterogeneous, this does not mean that in practice it is possible to discover a proposition which expresses only a sentiment or states only a factual relationship.” In context, such remarks may be perfectly innocent. They stir up embarrassing associations, however, and merge with certain streams of thought that would wash away the distinction between facts and values, in the belief that this is the way to make values respectable again, or as a consequence, perhaps, of a failure of nerve—which may be only fatigue—in the defense of “objectivity.”

In a recent essay, Richard Snyder has stated that: “[A] paradox in political science is the lack … of any systematic attention to the analysis of the decision-making behavior of judges.” It is not my purpose to argue either for or against the particular frame of reference for decision-making analysis advocated by Snyder. I do believe, however, that he has correctly identified the approach—the analysis of judicial decision-making as an aspect of political behavior—which is most likely to command the focus of interest and activity of the coming generation of political scientists whose substantive concern is with the study of political problems in the area of our discipline traditionally known as public law.

The concept “political behavior” remains sufficiently novel within the public law fraternity to impose something of an obligation to make clear what I have in mind in using the term. I shall borrow from David B. Truman who, in a Brookings Lecture not long ago, defined the “behavioral sciences” as “those bodies of knowledge, in whatever academic department they may be found, that provide or aspire to provide ‘verified principles’ of human behavior through the use of methods of inquiry similar to those of the natural sciences.”

I want to dissent initially from the rather constricting frame of reference that Schubert has established in his paper. He has every right in the world to set rhetorical snares, but I have no intention of walking into them. If I may summarize, Schubert asserts that he is a spokesman for a radical new direction in the study of public law, claiming that the old ways are moribund. He further urges that we should look with envy at the creative function of the social psychologists who supplied the Supreme Court with the banners it carried in Brown v. Board of Education while we were bumbling around with historical and philosophical trivia. He concludes that instead of wasting our time with talmudic disputations on whether the Supreme Court reached the “right” or the “wrong” decisions in specific cases, we should settle down to build a firm “scientific” foundation for our discipline.

Not the least amusing aspect of this indictment is that I find myself billed as the defender of the ancien régime, as the de Maistre of public law. Therefore, for the benetfit of the young and impressionistic, let me break loose from Schubert's rhetorical trap: I too think that much of the research done in public law—and, for that matter, in political science generally—has been trivial.

Past voting turnout studies almost always have been static analyses. Usually they have described the relationship between participation rates and the demographic attributes, attitudes, and social experiences of members of the electorate. Since each such study ordinarily is based on a single cross-sectional survey or on statistics referring to the Election Day period alone, both turnout and its determinants are derived at the same point of time, only simultaneous correlations are possible, and the analyst cannot show how turnout is affected by temporally prior conditions.

The development of multi-wave panel interviews in modern social research permits the study of attitude change, decision-making, and action over time. By re-interviewing the same respondents at intervals, political sociologists already have discovered much about how voters decide their candidate choices during the course of an election campaign. A panel design permits such process analysis not only of candidate preference but also of turnout and non-voting.

The coattail effect in presidential and congressional races was long supposed to show that the winning presidential candidate led his party to victory by adding votes to the ticket all along the line. The fact that the same party almost always won control of both houses of congress and usually also a majority of the governorships at stake at the time of a presidential victory made this a plausible theory.

More recently, the sweeping nature of such an explanation has been challenged. The first criticism of the simple theory noted that even when a presidential candidate wins, congressional candidates in some districts lead the president. In these cases, presumably, the congressional candidates' coattails are more effective.

A second criticism pointed to the paradox in the assumption that if a presidential candidate leads his party by a wide margin, he is an effective candidate for the party ticket. The greater the margin, presumably, the stronger are the presidential coattails. But large margins, on the contrary, must indicate that the presidential candidate has not been able to transfer all of his votes to the congressional ticket; and so it would seem that the attraction of his coattails is minimal if this margin is great. Thus the most significant symptom of the coattail process is straight ticket voting.

Rural overrepresentation and metropolitan underrepresentation in state legislatures have long been standard targets for the criticisms of students of state and local government. As Murray Stedman, for example, puts it, “Rural minorities control many state legislatures and thereby penalize urban majorities. The virtual serfdom of the urbanite to the rurally controlled state legislatures in many areas is a recurrent plaint in the writings of political scientists.” Commenting on the tendency of state legislators to form blocs reflecting individual localities and their local and regional interests, Alfred DeGrazia concludes that “every American state with any considerable urban population has undergone protracted conflict between rural and urban blocs, often regardless of party lines.” Textbooks on municipal government, and state and local government, universally condemn urban underrepresentation in state legislatures and say, or imply, that the result is consistent defeat or frustration of urban interests in the legislative arena. My purpose here is to introduce a note of factual skepticism into a portion of the discussion.

The significance of inter-party competition for variations in electoral behavior has recently been recognized in a number of political studies. The objects of this article are, first, to refine the concepts of safe and competitive electoral districts, and second, to replicate some propositions relating inter-party competition to the number of contestants in primary elections in Indiana.

Most preceding studies of inter-party competition have examined behavior in large electoral jurisdictions, rarely one smaller than a congressional district and often an entire state. Generally they have examined behavior relating to a single office, usually the governor's or a congressman's, and have assigned every electoral-situation to either a “safe” or an “unsafe” category. They have varied in the tests applied to differentiate the latter. Most tests have determined safeness on the basis of one election; they have differed in the selection of that election and in the size of the majority thought to indicate safety.

This study aims to analyze some features of voting behavior in a particular state party system and to illustrate new methods of analysis of election data. In this paper we use the gross election statistics for Michigan counties and cities to relate recent voting trends to the ecological characteristics of counties and to investigate the effect of certain variables on voting in cities.

A closer scrutiny of Michigan election results is warranted at this time because major interest groups in this state no longer place a high premium on “keeping out of politics.” Traditionally, interest groups in American state and national politics are supposed to avoid any open and continuing commitments to particular party organizations or factions. Labor and business groups in Michigan, however, skirting the Taft-Hartley and corrupt practices acts (which purport to limit union and corporate political activities), have either modified or abandoned their past policies in this respect. The Michigan CIO fully accepts a partisan role and since 1948 a liberal-CIO coalition has controlled the Democratic party organization.

Many modern theorists of political parties see the party system not only as an adjunct to democracy but as a necessary precondition of it. In an almost complete reversal of classical doctrine, these theorists argue that competition between parties, preferably two, is the very life blood of democracy. This paper attempts an evaluation of this thesis, which may be called the “organizational theory” of democracy, as it applies to conditions in three counties in a southern state.

Three cases do not warrant conclusions extrapolated beyond our data, for any truly rigorous evaluation would require more cases in more different types of situations. This limitation particularly holds for extrapolations to national governments, since we can not assume that parties operate similarly at all levels. However, the choice of three units of local government makes possible a more intensive coverage of the events, men and patterns of politics. Furthermore, they are sufficient for present purposes, for if the organizational theory is to be accepted as completely explanatory, it should apply to all cases. Otherwise it must be viewed as partial, limited to special cases, in need of further elaboration and refinement, or, at worst, incorrect.