Opposition Views on the Proposed New Association Constitution: A Régime D'Assemblée for the APSA?—or: Wildavsky's Iron Law of Oligarchy

Extract

The Association's membership, assembled at Los Angeles last September, acted wisely in giving itself another year to reflect on the need (if any) for total constitutional revision. A new charter had been prepared in two versions, one by a committee headed by Professor Aaron Wildavsky, and the other by the Association's outgoing Council. So engrossed had each of these bodies been in its labors, and perhaps in the minor differences between the resulting documents, that their first publication, in the summer 1970 issue of PS, was delayed until just before the Annual Meeting. Nor was either version, as published, accompanied by any rationale or explanation. All anyone had to go by was the bare text of the two proposed charters—which most of us saw for the first time when we picked it up at the entrance of the ballroom of the Los Angeles Hilton, on the way to the session that was to choose between these two alternatives—or the status quo ante.

Professor Wildavsky still has not supplied the missing rationale for the document that he helped to father; and the 1969–70 Council allowed its term to expire without venturing any public justification of its further emendations. Meanwhile, however, two members of the Constitutional Revision Committee, Professors Hawkinson and Rosenblum, claiming “obviously … to speak only for themselves,” have published one modest argument in favor of the Committee's draft (see PS Winter 1971, pp. 6–18). Above all, the membership has now had time to study the two proposed charters and to compare them to the one under which, with gradual historical accretions and deletions, American political scientists have managed to operate for about seventy years. A close reading of the three texts is likely to make a conservative of even the most impetuous of our colleagues.