Who has the right and responsibility to determine the content of education about foreign affairs? Should the Department of Education (DOE) seek to influence what the schools and universities teach? These questions are the subject of a smoldering debate sparked by the regional office of the DOE in Denver, Colorado. Answers to them would tell us a great deal about the environment for making foreign policy.

There can be no doubt that in the United States, knowledge of foreign policy problems is extremely low. Surveys regularly show that in comparison to students overseas, American students lag in their awareness of other cultures. In a study of 30,000 10- and 14-year-olds in nine countries, undertaken by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Americans ranked next to last in their comprehension of foreign cultures. According to a recent New York Times poll, 44 percent of Americans questioned did not know that the Soviet Union and the United States were allies during World War II. Only 14 percent of American respondents in the same poll were aware that the United States had joined Britain, France and Japan in the invasion of Russia to fight the Bolshevik forces in the civil war of 1917 (“Flawed,” 1986). While there is also ignorance in the Soviet Union and other countries about the United States, the place to tackle the problem of provincialism is at home.

Consider an election in which all the choices are dismal, albeit some perhaps even more dismal than others. How should voters in such an election choose whom to vote for or whether or not to vote?

It has been suggested (Riker and Ordeshook, 1973; cf. Weisberg and Grofman, 1981) that a voter is unlikely to vote if no choice exists whose election would yield him any appreciable degree of delight. Such a voter is alienated from the system. Consider, now, an election whose outcome is virtually certain. The conventional wisdom is that such certainty as to outcome should depress turnout, since ceteris paribus, voters who come to see their vote as making no difference should be less likely to vote than when they saw themselves as having a chance, however remote, to influence the outcome.

The activities of feminist and other women's organizations at the 1988 Democratic convention were driven by an over-riding desire to elect a Democratic administration in November. There was universal agreement that the Reagan years have been disastrous for women, and that four more years of Republican rule will, at the very least, result in a Supreme Court that will limit women's options for decades to come.

This goal more than anything else explains the relative quiescence of the 15 organizations' that formed Women's Central and held the usual women's caucus every day of the convention. Indeed when Ellie Smeal and Molly Yard, past and current Presidents of NOW, expressed some mild disaffection with the amount of attention feminist issues and representatives received from the Dukakis campaign, it was quickly countered with a press conference by heads of six Women's Central organizations to extol the fact that women were now insiders. And Kate Michelman, executive director of NARAL, lauded Vice-Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen's voting record on abortion even though he opposes federal funding.

The sense of unity and common purpose these women expressed was not artificial, because, to a greater extent than ever thought possible, when contemporary feminists first made demands at the 1972 convention, women were insiders. The Dukakis campaign emphasized that women held a large number of the top positions—including campaign manager Susan Estrich. Texas Treasurer Ann Richards, a member of the NWPC, was a bit hit as the keynote speaker.

Forty-six years ago political scientist E. E. Schattschneider (1942, p. 1) declared, “[P]olitical parties created democracy … and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties.” When he wrote these famous words in Party Government Schattschneider had in mind the robust condition of the Democratic and Republican parties in his native Connecticut. In a 1980 position paper, the Committee for Party Renewal echoed Schattschneider: “Without parties there can be no organized and coherent politics. When politics lacks coherence, there can be no accountable democracy. Parties are indispensable to the realization of democracy. The stakes are no less than that.”

The Committee for Party Renewal urges state legislators and party leaders to re-evaluate local party organizations and adopt measures to revitalize them. Led by the Republican National Committee playing catch-up by the 1980s, the national parties have been busy revitalizing themselves. It is time to begin party building efforts in the states and return state parties to positions of primacy in policy-making.

It is widely asserted that socialist economies are equalitarian. The distinguished Yale political scientist Charles E. Lindblom labels this proposition undeniable:

It is in communist provision of … some degree of equality in the distribution of income and wealth that the communist claim to approximate the humanitarian vision … seems undeniable. On these fronts communist systems have to be credited with great accomplishments, on the whole probably greater than those of the polyarchies [capitalist democracies] (Lindblom, 1977, p. 226).

Lindblom's influential work, Politics and Markets: The World's Political Economic Systems, expresses the conventional wisdom in academic circles that communist regimes trade freedom and economic prosperity for a leveling of economic benefits, and that capitalist nations opt for freedom and economic prosperity at the sacrifice of equality. Capitalism achieves higher economic growth rates by providing individual incentives for work, productivity, initiative, and enterprise; these incentives necessarily entail inequalities. Socialism, by eliminating private ownership of the means of production, achieves a leveling of wealth and income.

Approval voting (AV) is a voting system in which voters can vote for as many candidates as they wish in a multicandidate election—one with more than two candidates (Brams and Fishburn, 1983). Like plurality voting (PV), in which voters are restricted to casting just one vote, the candidate (or candidates) with the most votes wins, with each candidate approved of receiving one full vote.

The salient difference between AV and PV in multicandidate elections is that voters, by indicating that they approve of more than one candidate under AV, can help more than one to get elected. This feature of AV tends to prevent a relatively extreme candidate, who may be the favorite of a plurality of the electorate but is anathema to the majority, from winning. Whereas under PV an extremist can win if two or more moderate candidates split the centrist vote, under AV centrist voters can prevent the extremist's election by voting for more than one moderate. Insofar as the moderate candidates share the votes of their centrist supporters, then one will be elected—and the proverbial will of the majority will be expressed.

A standard warning by professional sovietologists to Americans making approaches to the Soviet Union is that amateurs lack the language skills with which to grasp the subtleties of discourse, they lack the training in the culture and history, they misunderstand the use of ideology in Soviet thinking, and they are overly optimistic concerning the ability of the Russians to change. Yet, an American peace-oriented movement, Beyond War, working with a committee of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, has published a book, both in Russian and English, which defines the terms of survival in the nuclear age. It has won praise from “realists” such as Alexander Dallin, Robert Conquest, George Breslauer, and William Colby. The book, Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking, has also received praise from such respected Soviet professionals as Georgi Shakhnazarov, a Vice President of the International Political Science Association.

Homelessness is an issue which has emerged as an important one, locally and nationally, over the last six years in a classic “agenda setting” fashion. Public awareness has increased, and public policies developed (at every level of the political system), as the number of homeless persons has increased, and changed character to include more young people, women and children, and intact families. This awareness has been stimulated by events as different as the Community for Creative Non-violence in Washington, D.C. inviting members of Congress to join them in sleeping overnight on outside vents and steam grates to “experience” homelessness to now-annual surveys by the U.S. Conference of Mayors of member cities to gauge the seriousness of the problem and to undergird the requests of increasingly desperate mayors for assistance. The U.S. Congress finally passed the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act in July, 1987, to make $355 million available to states and cities under 15 different program elements, after six years of cutting federal outlays for assisted housing by a cumulative 60 percent from what it would have been based on an FY 1981 baseline budget.

Local government reactions to homelessness have been quite varied. Los Angeles passed an ordinance in December, 1987, at the request of its Venice Beach residents, prohibiting overnight sleeping on beaches. New York City initiated a policy of street “sweeps” intended to forcibly remove and treat 500 of the most severely mentally ill people on the city streets in the next year.

The monograph, Biotechnology: Public Policy and the Social Sciences—Critical Needs in Teaching and Research [Biotechnology], emphasizes the need for social scientists to increase their participation in public policy regarding biotechnology through research, teaching and policy recommendations. The authors (Robert H. Blank, Lynton K. Caldwell, Thomas C. Wiegele, and Raymond A. Zilinskas) persuasively argue that critical issues are at stake here. Although scientific methodology and definitions underlie important choices regarding biotechnology, we face issues that go beyond scientific inquiry and expertise. Recombinant DNA research raised concerns in the late 1970s, which were sufficiently addressed through the NIH guidelines. Now commercial developments in biotechnology are posing other quite significant social and ethical issues. The idea that nonscientists should become actively involved in science policy is not new, but the message bears repeating. It has been standard practice in our society for technical experts to claim exclusive authority in broad areas of decision-making involving technical matters. Only recently, for example, have we begun to insist upon full disclosure from our doctors, and reclaim the right to make important decisions about our own lives and bodies. Technical experts cannot fully address ethical and social concerns. Moreover, in the area of biotechnology, experts have strong interests, both intellectual and financial; they are not likely to make unbiased decisions. These choices properly belong to the political realm.

Bertrand de Jouvenel, who died a year ago this March, at the age of 83, is best known to American political scientists for three books—On Power (1945), Sovereignty (1957), and The Pure Theory of Politics (1963)—and several essays, among them “The Chairman's Problem” and “The Nature of Political Science.”

I almost met Bertrand de Jouvenel in the summer of 1964, when I was 20 years old, a political science major at Oberlin College, and the editor of a student political magazine called The Activist. I was also a student of Wilson Carey McWilliams, a prolific source of article ideas for the magazine, and a reliable guide to the academics and journalists who we often tapped for free copy. Since I was about to spend two months in France, and since Carey had been de Jouvenel's student at Berkeley when de Jouvenel was a Visiting Professor there, why not take a letter of introduction and get an Activist article from one of Europe's most famous political scientists?