The psychometric model, developed by Glendon Schubert, is a widely accepted way of conceptualizing judicial decision making. It entails the representation of justices' ideal points in a multidimensional space. A vector (representing the ordering of the justices derived from scalogram analysis) is projected through this space to aid in interpreting the underlying attitudinal dimensions of interagreement. Despite the apparent rigor of this model it contains certain indeterminacies, as no mathematical procedure has been used to determine the location of the scale vectors. Consequently ad hoc. hand procedures which may yield suboptimal solutions have been developed.

This article provides solutions for the problem of fitting scale vectors to multidimensional configurations. These solutions are developed for the problem where the scale analogue is treated at the measurement level of interval or ordinal values. In order to demonstrate the advantages of using these procedures, we undertake a reanalysis of Schubert's results (for which he used ad hoc procedures). In one-half of the cases analyzed, the results reported by Schubert are suboptimal when evaluated in terms of the coefficient he sought to maximize. The mathematical solutions and the associated computer programs give greater rigor to the psychometric model and provide a response to the criticism that scale fitting in the psychometric model is subjective and inconsistent with the premises of the behavioral approach to judicial decision making.

Small in size but great in influence on Latin American intellectuals, Uruguay has been regarded as the most progressive of the twenty countries of its heterogeneous area. The “western” nature of its political system invites the application of recently devised analytical concepts, and preliminary analysis suggests that many of these concepts can be exemplified in its highly developed political institutions.

The titles of books devoted to Uruguay seem to suggest an approach to the millenium there: Uruguay, South America's first Welfare State; Uruguay, Portrait of a Democracy; and Utopia in Uruguay, among others. They imply that despite the feudal obscurantism of the colonial era, and the incapacity and abuses of the nineteenth century, that country has achieved redemption of a sort. Yet the idealist who seeks his goal there may be disappointed. Despite all the hopeful arguments that a stable middle sector based on professionalism and technical proficiency may prove the strongest ally for democratic practice and progress (and hence for the Alliance for Progress), an examination of this particular specimen may suggest the opposite. Or worse, Uruguay may actually offer an example which is simply irrelevant.

Current conditions in Uruguay suggest many problematical questions. All must be considered within the context of a democratic, social welfare-oriented system which has produced the highest average level of living in Latin America commensurate with national resources. Has emphasis on political and personal freedom created conditions in which political institutions perform functions quite different from those normally allotted them in traditional institutional analyses? If this is so, are these institutions actually dysfunctional, even within the unique Uruguayan context? To what extent have the demands of interest groups created this dysfunction, and to what extent have they defeated efforts to undertake institutional improvement or correction? Does Uruguayan political experience demonstrate any special and transferable genius which can be employed by the sister republics to their own advantage?

Throughout the history of Indian politics in the 20th Century runs a curious and disturbing thread. Both before and after the achievement of independence in 1947, large segments of the Indian populace felt that the institutional means of redress for grievances, frustrations and wrongs—actual or fancied—were inadequate. Since the British withdrawal a fuller panoply of democratic procedures for influencing government has been introduced, but a basic suspicion persists that government is still alien and elite—although now the separation is based upon indigenous social division rather than upon foreign conquest and race. The fact is that the gaining of independence has marked very little change in the use of the more direct and agitational modes of public suasion. The Congress Government has been treated to an almost constant tattoo of demands supported by the same techniques popularized during the independence struggle, such as hunger-strikes, black-flag demonstrations, the courting of arrest, impeding of public business, and violent riots.

To discuss all of the points at which we seem to disagree would be an unwarranted imposition upon readers of this Review, many of whom, I fear, will not have read the book in question. Consequently I propose to stick to the central issues so far as possible, for to a considerable extent these transcend the book itself; and therefore some purpose will be served even for those who have not read the book.

One of the happier educational products of the war was the widespread self-examination it encouraged among American colleges. With the wartime slump in enrollments, those members of the faculty who remained on the campus were commonly given the task of planning the postwar educational programs of their respective institutions. We are now in that postwar period, and much of this admirable effort has been dropped to grapple with the heavy enrollments the schools were presumably planning to meet. But in many schools, whether the curricula underwent any major operations or not, there remains a ferment of doubt and argument over the adequacy of what they are doing.

This ferment is not likely to die out soon. Colleges which brushed aside the polemics of Mr. Hutchins at Chicago a decade ago are still agitated by the Harvard Report on General Education. Harvard, like the College of the University of Chicago, is proceeding to make major departures from the prevailing practices of American colleges. Columbia College has paced the adoption of integrated courses in Western Civilization. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, guiding light of American technical schools, has discovered that engineers should also be liberally educated men and has made curricular changes designed to do something about it. The University of Florida and Michigan State College have moved sharply in the same direction, more or less independently, by creating basic colleges through which all would-be technicians and specialists must percolate before burying themselves in their chosen profession. Other schools are instituting comprehensive courses, tightening up the elective system, and otherwise taking steps to insure that general education is not lost in the scramble to prepare for a job.

The theoretical models developed to deal with the interaction of sociological and psychological factors in the formation of political behavior indicate a wide divergence of opinion. At one extreme area group of scientists, mainly psychiatrists and anthropologists, who see most social phenomena as deriving from the subjective experiences of the individual. The specific traumata inherent in different methods of upbringing and in the resulting renunciations imposed upon the child are regarded by them as the formative basis for customs, religions, social attitudes, and so forth. Some specific examples of their point of view may be found in attempts to explain war as an expression of the destructive instincts, or capitalism as a manifestation of the anal syndrome. But at the other extreme are proponents of the view that the social structure is independent of the single individual and that individual behavior can be explained and predicted in terms of membership in classes and groups as they have developed historically, mainly on the basis of mode of subsistence.

Failing to agree with either of these extreme points of view, one may argue that any speculation about the causal interrelation of sociological and psychological factors in the group and in the individual must recognize the fact that these factors have been artificially isolated and abstracted and that no exclusive factual primacy can be given to any of the aspects in a pattern so closely interwoven.

Political science is at the parting of the ways. Its foundations have been undermined by the claims of law and jurisprudence, into whose hands it has been deliberately surrendering itself for the past half-century or more, and now its chief strongholds are under fire from the neighboring fields of sociology, economics, and ethics. So severe and so persistent have these attacks become that the time has arrived when the political scientist must decide whether he will allow his subject to be absorbed in any one or all of these various fields, or will attempt to reëstablish it as a distinctive discipline.

The reasons for this state of things are not difficult to discover. They quite obviously lie in the fact that in the pursuit of their basic problem—the search, namely, for the nature and source of sovereignty—political philosophers have so generally followed two equally futile and fruitless paths: either the path of pure speculation leading to a supernatural or metaphysical theory, or the path of legal analysis, leading ultimately to the juristic theory of the state. Indeed, during these recent years political theory has been so increasingly “under bondage to the lawyers” that it is little wonder that a reaction has come, and that thinkers in their determination to find the reality behind the formal juristic conception, are now repudiating not only the legal, but even the political, character of the state.

Most theories of bureaucratic politics depict state bureaucracies as a conservative force in the political system. Their resistance to radical politics and innovative programs is attributed to certain typical traits of bureaucratic structures and career patterns. I summarize the arguments for bureaucratic conservatism, and then describe how civilian bureaucracies serving military regimes in Japan (1937–45), Peru (1968–75), and Egypt (1952–70) invalidated those arguments by promoting radical policy programs through the three devices of supraministerial bodies, low-ranking ministries, and new specialized agencies. I conclude that middle theories of bureaucratic politics may prove more fruitful than grand theoretical attempts to encompass all bureaucracies in a single set of propositions, and that structural and occupational explanations of bureaucratic behavior need to be modified by a greater appreciation for the role of individual bureaucratic leaders.

The age old contest between the proponents of natural law and their opponents continues unabated, and a solution does not seem in sight. The reason, it seems to me, is simply that representatives of either side often quite literally do not know what they themselves, as well as their opponents, are talking about. Instead of arguing for their respective theories and against those of their antagonists, they knock down straw men. And since there are periodic “revivals” of natural law, and of its denial as well, the game continues endlessly. Yet, I believe it is sufficient to state the issue clearly to realize that the advocates of natural law adhere to an incorrect epistemological view, and that political thought must dispense with natural law because it is a mistaken doctrine.

While recent scholarship has provoked renewed interest in the Education of Cyrus as an important work for our understanding of the origins of classical political philosophy, it has yet to produce a coherent interpretation that preserves the unity of Xenophon's vision of political life. Following a short review of three recent books on the subject, I argue that the obstacles in the way to such an understanding can be resolved by focusing on the underlying causes in Xenophon's account of the transformation of a republican regime into a universal empire and, in particular, on the various deficiencies and self-contradictions of the republican conception of the common good. I show how an understanding of Xenophon's analysis of virtue within both republican and imperial political orders can lead to a fruitful confrontation with the thought of his most famous student, admirer, and antagonist, Machiavelli.

“Dissident minorities” are members of marginalized groups who dissent from the consensus group position on matters seen as critical to their group’s collective liberation. This paper articulates the distinctive political status—powers, vulnerabilities, and obligations—of dissident minorities. Dissident minorities may be especially vulnerable to slurs or ostracism as “self-hating.” But they also can wield significant public influence by positioning themselves as exceptional and exemplary members of their group. Both the powers and vulnerabilities of dissident minorities, in turn, converge around the prospect of “tokenization”—the use of the dissident minority’s dissident opinion by majority group actors as a means of discharging a stipulated obligation to engage with the minority group writ large. While dissident minorities should be free to hold and advocate for their divergent positions in public spaces, they retain a distinctive obligation to not offer themselves out as adequate replacements for engagement with the broader group.

How should political scientists navigate the ethical and methodological quandaries associated with analyzing leaked classified documents and other nonconsensually acquired sources? Massive unauthorized disclosures may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, but they are fraught with dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. This paper critiques underspecified research designs and opaque references in the proliferation of scholarship with leaked materials, as well as incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading journals. It identifies provenance as the primary concept for improved standards and reviews other disciplines’ approaches to this problem. It elaborates eight normative and evidentiary criteria for scholars by which to assess source legitimacy and four recommendations for balancing their trade-offs. Fundamentally, it contends that scholars need deeper reflection on source provenance and its consequences, more humility about whether to access new materials and what inferences to draw, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

Constitutions empower people to ask judges for binding orders directing state agents to remedy rights violations, but state agents do not always comply. Scholars propose that by making it easier to observe noncompliance, courts can leverage public pressure for compliance when it exists. Yet, exposure to information about noncompliance might lead individuals to accept high levels of noncompliance and reduce support for judicial remedies. We estimate the rate of noncompliance with judges’ orders via a rigorous tracking study of the Colombian tutela. We then embed this rate in three survey experiments fielded with online national quota samples. We show that people find the noncompliance rate in the tutela highly unacceptable regardless of a variety of mitigating factors. We also show that public reactions to this information depend on prior expectations, a finding that stresses the importance of scholarship in cognitive psychology for studies of compliance in law and politics.

A growing body of evidence attests that legislators are sometimes responsive to the policy preferences of citizens in single-party regimes, yet debate surrounds the mechanisms driving this relationship. We experimentally test two potential responsiveness mechanisms—elections versus mandates from party leaders—by provisioning delegates to the Vietnamese National Assembly with information on the policy preferences of their constituents and reminding them of either (1) the competitiveness of the upcoming 2021 elections or (2) a central decree that legislative activities should reflect constituents’ preferences. Consistent with existing work, delegates informed of citizens’ preferences are more likely to speak on the parliamentary floor and in closed-session caucuses. Importantly, we find that such responsiveness is entirely driven by election reminders; upward incentive reminders have virtually no effect on behavior.