Communist China entered the “constitutional stage” of its experience on September 20, 1954, when the Constitution of the Chinese People's Republic (CPR), adopted by the first National People's Congress (NPC) on that date, was promulgated. The ordinary Chinese citizen could detect no immediate effect of this event upon the conditions of his daily life, and he had no reason to believe that things affecting him would be done very much differently in the future than in the recent past. He could understand from the incessant propaganda of the preceding months that the “transition to Socialism” was moving toward its climax. The new Constitution promised him no surcease from the incitements and pressures of the interminable “mass movements”—for “land reform,” “suppression of counter-revolutionaries,” “Resist America, Aid Korea,” “3-Anti,” “5-Anti,” “democratic reform,” “national elections,” “On to Taiwan,” and the others. Instead, he would be told that the past was merely the prologue: the pre-constitutional measures of September, 1949—the Common Program, the Organic Law of the Central People's Government (CPG), and the Organic Law of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC)—had only enabled the “people's democratic dictatorship” to lay the foundations for the superstructure of Socialism.

Far and away the most powerful force in the political life of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is the Popular Democratic party (Partido Popular Democrático, or PPD). Since 1945 elected representatives of the party have held the office of Resident Commissioner in Washington and more than two-thirds of the seats in both houses of the insular legislature. Since the election of 1948 the president of the party, Luis Muñoz Marín, has been Governor of the island. Inasmuch as there are no other elective officials in the executive branch, gubernatorial appointees loyal to the party and its program fill all the top policy-making and administrative posts. And because the Governor also appoints all judges, the percentage of Populares on the Commonwealth bench is understandably high.

The party's control over the insular government is a direct result of its extraordinary showing at the polls. Its island-wide candidates have never received less than 60 per cent of the total vote in any election save that of 1940, the first in which a Popular Democratic ticket was on the ballot. In the most recent election, that of November 4, 1952, the Popular candidate for Governor received a record 65 per cent of the votes cast.

“The well-bred, throbbing sound that goes on behind the Bauhaus façade of the United Nations,” notes Alistair Cook, “is not the air-conditioning. It is the pulse of politics.” Ever since its inception in 1919, international organization somehow has been expected to operate above and beyond politics. It was to enshrine the universal aspiration for peace and stability. That “politics” could intrude upon—and indeed shape—institutions set up for the maintenance of collective security is only now being recognized by the public at large. That recognition, in turn, seems responsible for much of the current disillusionment with the United Nations, since its implications sully the pure ideal of solidarity for peace.

Ideologically speaking, our experience with collective security has rested on two basic concepts: the notion of “universal moral obligations” of the League Covenant and the concert of the big powers implicit and explicit in the United Nations Charter. Thus political values held by groups and individuals were translated into legal and institutional terms in the two universal collective security organizations. Both global efforts have failed to result in the peace expected of them; but the institutions rather than the concepts on which they were based have become the object of criticism and attack. No doubt the ideological convictions associated with the advent of international organization generally have militated in favor of the continued purity of the concepts. However, unless the concepts associated with world organization possess at once a high degree of descriptive accuracy and an analytical property permitting a measure of prediction, informed discussion of United Nations issues must be indefinitely postponed.

The membership of the Supreme Court remained unchanged during the 1953 Term. Chief Justice Vinson died on September 8, shortly before the opening of the Term. Governor Earl Warren of California was given a recess appointment by President Eisenhower on October 2, and was sworn in as the fourteenth Chief Justice on October 5. The Senate Judiciary Committee moved slowly, however, and the appointment did not reach the Senate until March 1, 1954, when it was confirmed by a voice vote without opposition.

A week after the 1954 Term got under way Justice Robert H Jackson died, of a heart attack, on October 9, 1954, at the age of 62. For a man who had no law degree, Justice Jackson had done very well in the law. After a brilliant career as a lawyer in Jamestown, New York, he entered the government service in 1934 as General Counsel to the Bureau of Internal Revenue. He was appointed Solicitor-General in 1938, Attorney-General in 1940, and was elevated to the Supreme Court by President Roosevelt in June, 1941. He served as chief American prosecutor at the Nürnberg trial of top Nazi war criminals. Though appointed with the reputation of being a liberal New Dealer, Justice Jackson was actually close to the very center of the Court in many cases where the Justices were sharply divided. He was one of the most gifted opinion-writers on the Court, with a flair for felicitous phrasing and well-turned epigrams. To take the place of Justice Jackson, President Eisenhower nominated, on November 8, 1954, Judge John Marshall Harlan, whom he had appointed the previous March to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Judge Harlan, once a successful New York lawyer, is the grandson of the Justice Harlan who served with such distinction from 1877 to 1911.

In the spring of 1953, with the approach of the regular parliamentary elections, the West German Bundestag began its deliberations on a new electoral law. The original law of 1949 had been enacted for the sole purpose of electing the first Parliament under the new Bonn Constitution. It was therefore necessary for the expiring Parliament to re-enact the old law, to modify it, or to supersede it with an entirely new system.

It soon became apparent that there were wide differences of opinion among the various parties represented in the Bundestag. The Chancellor's party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), presented proposals to establish a single member district system, eliminating proportional representation. The Social Democrats (SPD) presented a draft which largely re-enacted the 1949 law. The official government proposal, which was something of a compromise, leaned very heavily in the direction of the so-called Mehrheitswahl but also had provisions permitting a combination of party lists and additional votes (Hilfsstimmen). It bore some similarity to the law which de Gasperi had pushed through the Italian Parliament shortly before this time, but without the same justification. The various proposals were discussed on first reading on March 5, 1953, and again on March 18. After the report by the Election Law Committee, amended proposals were again discussed on second and third reading on June 17 and 19 and passed on third reading June 25.

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.

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.

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 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.