“The great advantage of the American,” Tocqueville once wrote, “is that he has arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution….” Fundamental as this insight is, we have not remembered Tocqueville for it, and the reason is rather difficult to explain. Perhaps it is because, fearing revolution in the present, we like to think of it in the past, and we are reluctant to concede that its romance has been missing from our lives. Perhaps it is because the plain evidence of the American revolution of 1776, especially the evidence of its social impact that our newer historians have collected, has made the comment of Tocqueville seem thoroughly enigmatic. But in the last analysis, of course, the question of its validity is a question of perspective. Tocqueville was writing with the great revolutions of Europe in mind, and from that point of view the outstanding thing about the American effort of 1776 was bound to be, not the freedom to which it led, but the established feudal structure it did not have to destroy. He was writing too, as no French liberal of the nineteenth century could fail to write, with the shattered hopes of the Enlightenment in mind. The American revolution had been one of the greatest of them all, a precedent constantly appealed to in 1793.

The purpose of this paper is to make plain two facts: first, that the essential qualities of American federal organization were largely the product of the practices of the old British empire as it existed before 1764; second, that the discussions of the generation from the French and Indian war to the adoption of the federal Constitution, and, more particularly, the discussions in the ten or twelve years before independence, were over the problem of imperial organization. The center of this problem was the difficulty of recognizing federalism; and, though there was great difficulty in grasping the principle, the idea of federalism went over from the old empire, through discussion into the Constitution of the United States. By federalism is meant, of course, that system of political order in which powers of government are separated and distinguished and in which these powers are distributed among governments, each government having its quota of authority and each its distinct sphere of activity.

We all remember very well that, until about thirty years ago, it was common to think of the United States Constitution as if it were “stricken off in a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” About that time there began a careful study of the background of constitutional provisions and especially of the specific make-up of the institutions provided for by the instrument.

The massive demonstrations of May and June 1960, which forced the resignation of the Kishi Cabinet and the cancellation of President Eisenhower's trip to Japan, alarmed Americans as much as they elated the Chinese Communists. The complacent American view of Japan as a sturdy conservative force loyally allied to the United States through a wise and benevolent Occupation and generous economic aid was rudely shattered. Coming at a time when student unrest precipitated the overthrow of governments in South Korea and Turkey—also allies—it was natural that many Americans saw communist plots and a Japan in the grip of a “revolutionary situation.” But if they were wrong—and it has taken a great deal of soul-searching for informed opinion to understand fully what happened—they were no less wrong than the Chinese Communists, who read the situation in much the same way. After a two-week trip to Japan in August 1960, Liu Ning-i, Chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, reported jubilantly that the revolutionary situation in Japan was well advanced. “The Japanese people's future is full of brightness and hope,” he wrote.

The five papers which follow were prepared during the summer of 1951 by the Social Science Research Council's Interuniversity Summer Seminar on Political Behavior. The seminar, which met at the University of Chicago, was attended by seven persons, who accept joint responsibility for the papers: Samuel J. Eldersveld, University of Michigan; Alexander Heard, University of North Carolina; Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard University; Morris Janowitz, University of Michigan; Avery Leiserson, Vanderbilt University; Dayton D. McKean, University of Colorado; and David B. Truman, Columbia University. Ralph M. Goldman met with the seminar as an associate, and later Elizabeth Wirth Marvick assisted in preparing some of the materials.

The papers, one product of the seminar's work, were written to define and illustrate what the participants feel to be a significant contemporary development in political research. The first paper, “The Implications of Research in Political Behavior,” outlines some of the requirements, characteristics, and implications of political behavior research. It is followed by plans for three research projects, “Party and Administrative Responsibility: Council-Manager Government,” “Political Participation in a Metropolitan District: A Study of Group Influence on Political Activity,” and “The Roles of Congressional Leaders: National Party vs. Constituency,” drawn up in accordance with these specifications.

The purpose of this essay is to consider what kind of compromise is produced by party government. Its method is to discover what kind of compromise was produced by the socalled Settlement of 1688, the compromise which laid the foundation for party government in Britain. It will be suggested that the kind of compromise which laid the foundation for party government is the kind which party government, in turn, chiefly produces.

I. THE PROBLEM

Ever since the first regularly scheduled public radio-broadcast in 1920, Congress has played a unique and central rôle in the control of radio-broadcasting. As an agency for legislation, it has created the regulatory mechanisms under which the radio industry functions, and it has written the laws which govern this important area of communications. Congress, in fact, has set the pattern within which the various groups and interests operate, subject, of course, to the working rules of the capitalist order. In doing so, Congressmen have been at the beck and call of millions of constituents interested in radio as listeners or broadcasters, as educators or clergymen, as big or little business men. In caring for all of these varying interests, Congress has concerned itself with a few broad problems: what is heard on the radio, who shall control what is heard, who is able to hear what goes over the air, and who profits from radio. But Senators and Representatives are not merely the puppets of various pressures; they have a distinct political interest in programming, profits, and control. They have in radio a potent molder of public opinion—a powerful instrument which can help them to victory or defeat in the next election—and they have used it and will continue to use it to serve their personal fortunes, their parties, and their platforms.

The field known as “political science” is in many ways a peculiarly American discipline. Although it plays a minor rôle in some European universities, and none in the rest, this particular field of the social sciences is of great importance in the United States. Besides a mounting interest in the study of government on the undergraduate level in this country, there has been a steady growth of professional training for the public service in special schools of public administration and in international affairs and diplomacy, both closely related to and usually staffed in part at least by political scientists.

To the non-American inquiring as to the reason for this special development, no exhaustive answer can be given at the present time. But mention may be made of a number of factors which have contributed to this phenomenal and persistent growth. In the first place, political science, backed by the ancient tradition of Aristotle's Politics, has a central appeal to young men and women seeking an integrated and over-all approach to the “great society” of a free and intensely democratic people. The pride Americans used to take in their political “institutions,” which was noted by many a foreign traveller, has in this age of democratic disillusionment found an uneasy refuge in academic study of the history of political thought and institutions. The well-known practical, or rather activist, tendency of American scholars has turned many an economist, such as John R. Commons, to legislative halls and thus has pushed the problems of government into the center of attention. Historians with similar propensities, like Charles A. Beard, came to enrich the work of political science.

A wealth of recent research in comparative politics examines how spatial variation in historical conditions shapes modern political outcomes. In an article in the American Political Science Review, Homola, Pereira, and Tavits argue that Germans who live nearer to former Nazi concentration camps are more likely to display out-group intolerance. Clarifying the conceptual foundations of posttreatment bias and reviewing the historical record on postwar state creation in Germany, we argue that state-level differences confound the relationship between distance to camps and out-group intolerance. Using publicly available European Values Survey data and electoral results from 2017, we find no consistent evidence that distance to camps is related to contemporary values. Our findings have implications for literatures on historical persistence, causal inference with spatial data, Holocaust studies, and outgroup tolerance.

A majority of Americans spend a substantial amount of time at work where they have little to no say over many issues—a phenomenon that philosophers have likened to a “private government” that resembles a dictatorship. Is this because Americans are indifferent to or even prefer to work for firms that resemble dictatorships? To answer this question, we field a conjoint experiment on a nationally-representative sample of Americans to isolate public preferences over “corporate regime type.” We find that Americans prefer workplace democracy. In a second experiment, we find that most Americans support workplace democracy even after being exposed to framing emphasizing democratization’s costs. The results suggest that social scientists must look beyond public opinion to understand the lack of workplace democracy in the United States. This article forges new ground by applying a political science lens to corporate governance—a field ripe with politics but bereft of political science.

How does the gender composition of deliberative committees affect citizens’ evaluations of their decision-making processes? Do citizens perceive decisions made by gender-balanced, legislative bodies as more legitimate than those made by all-male bodies? Extant work on the link between women’s descriptive representation and perceptions of democratic legitimacy in advanced democracies finds the equal presence of women legitimizes decision-making. However, this relationship has not been tested in more patriarchal, less democratic settings. We employ survey experiments in Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia to investigate how citizens respond to gender representation in committees. We find that women’s presence promotes citizens’ perceptions of the legitimacy of committee processes and outcomes and, moreover, that pro-women decisions are associated with higher levels of perceived legitimacy. Thus, this study demonstrates the robustness of findings from the West regarding gender representation and contributes to the burgeoning literature on women and politics.

Recent work suggests that solidarity between people of color (PoC) is triggered when a minoritized ingroup believes they are discriminated similarly to another outgroup based on their alleged foreignness or inferiority. Heightened solidarity then boosts support for policies that benefit minoritized outgroups who are not one’s own. Available experiments on this pathway vary by participants (e.g., Asian, Black, Middle Eastern, and Latino adults), manipulations (similar discrimination as foreign vs. inferior), and pro-outgroup outcomes (support for undocumented immigrants, Black Lives Matter). We report a pre-registered mini meta-analysis of this solidarity mechanism. Across five experiments (N = 3,252), similar discrimination as foreign or inferior reliably triggers solidarity between PoC, which then substantially increases support for pro-outgroup policies. This mediated pathway is robust to possible confounding and emerges across studies and planned contrasts of them. We discuss what the viability of this mechanism implies for further theoretic and empirical innovations in a racially diversifying polity.

In the literature of law, there has been comparatively little discussion as to the nature of political representation. A representative democracy has been defined as “a form of government where the powers of the sovereignty are delegated to a body of men, elected from time to time, who exercise them for the benefit of the whole nation.” And a representative form of government has been defined as “a government conducted and constituted by the agency of delegates, or deputies, chosen by the people.”

Judge Thomas M. Cooley, speaking for the Michigan supreme court, said: “A representative is one chosen by a principal to exercise for him a power or perform for him a trust. In that sense, the mayor of a city is a representative for some purposes, the members of the common council for others, and the members of the board of education for still others … the right to be represented implies a right, not merely to name the person, but also to designate the trust that shall be confided to him.” On this basis, it was held that a board of park commissioners established by the state legislature with certain powers, and recognized by the common council of the city, could not be vested afterwards by the legislature with additional powers previously exercised by the council.

Somewhat similar is the position of an English judge as to the authority of a representative in a legal proceeding. “A solicitor is the representative of his client, but counsel is not, for counsel has the whole conduct of the case, and can act even against the instructions of his client.” It was accordingly held that a solicitor is a representative within S. 17(4) Bankry Act, 1883, and must be “authorized in writing” to entitle him to question a debtor at a public hearing.

When in the early thirties Harold Lasswell declared that “political symbols and practices are so intimately intertwined with the larger array of symbols and practices in culture that it is necessary to extend the scope of political investigation to include the fundamental features of the culture setting”, he was very much a voice in the wilderness. Today Lasswell's words have almost become commonplace in the vocabulary of political science. In this, as in many other current concerns, Lasswell's early work has rightly been judged seminal. It substantially contributed towards the prolific expansion of the academic boundaries of political enquiry within the last three decades, in particular to the growth of interest in psychological and sociological approaches. Increasingly students of political behavior in both ‘established’ and ‘emergent’ nations have come to realize that purely formal and legalistic conceptual frameworks are inadequate to provide meaningful answers to such problems as persistence and change, socialization, political cohesion, and the complex bases of political authority and legitimacy. This realization, though it has made political science a more rather than less problematical undertaking, nonetheless has had the result of adding new dimensions or perspectives to its analytical vision. Indeed, in the course of this development the very notion of the political has undergone a profound re-appraisal.

The influence of political literature has often proved elusive to empirical political science, partly because of the subjectivity of literary response, and partly because of social science methods which are largely incapable of dealing with subjective phenomena in a satisfactory way. A distinction is made between the experimental methods of expression which focus on objective responses, and the methods of impression which focus on subjective responses. Experimental methods are then applied to interpretations of Golding's Lord of the Flies, to the effects on imagery of reading Mazlish's In Search of Nixon, and to reactions to Burdick's The Ninth Wave. An illustration is also given of the experimental study of literary response in the single case.

As we are moving into the terminal phase of World War II, it is inevitable—and entirely proper—that we allow our thoughts to wander ahead in an initial exploration of the matters on our national postwar agenda. Many of these matters relate to ends and center on policy alternatives. Others focus primarily on means and involve questions of approach. The latter include problems of governmental structure and machinery within the framework of our political system. Such problems present themselves in both the legislative and executive departments. With respect to the executive branch, we must seek to evolve an appropriate organizational form that will enable the federal government to sustain effectively an economy of high-level production and employment. In this effort we are confronted in part with a task of constructive innovation, in part with the need for reëxamination of prewar working hypotheses and wartime experience. It would be a promising venture to return to the work of the President's Committee on Administrative Management and appraise its proposals in the light of later developments. In any such enterprise, attention must doubtless be given to one conception closely associated with the recommendations of the President's Committee: that of the Executive Office of the President.

Political scientists interested in non-Communist systems have paid considerable attention to demands (expressions of opinion that an authoritative allocation with regard to particular subject matters should or should not be made by those responsible for doing so) coming from the intra-societal (domestic) environments of these political systems. The importance of intra-societal demands, including citizen demands, for non-Communist systems is well established. Researchers interested in the Soviet political system have paid relatively little attention to intra-societal demands, especially demands coming from those whom David Easton would call citizen gatekeepers, i.e., citizens who convert their wants into demands by articulating them.

The reasons for the neglect of research in this area are obvious enough. Quite apart from the problem of gathering useful data, there exists the question of whether demands from the intra-societal environment, and in particular citizen demands, are really important for a “totalitarian” system. Nothing like the politically autonomous interest groups of the Western democracies exist in the Soviet Union. Whatever demands come from the intra-societal environment are therefore largely grassroots demands from the populace, and there is reason to doubt that Soviet authorities feel compelled to heed such demands when formulating policy. Lenin's assertion that the Party is the vanguard of the proletariat was clearly a rejection of the idea that the masses should direct the Party. His successors have continued to assert that the Party leads the masses, and not the masses the Party.