It is gratifying to be able to present to students of political behavior the approach that my colleagues, Jerome Bruner and Robert White, and I worked out for the study of “Opinions and Personality,” since throughout our explorations political scientists had been what the current jargon would call a “salient reference group” for us. As a psychologist and “outsider,” however, I offer these remarks with some trepidation, since the framework that we arrived at in the detailed study of ten men's outlook on Russia was, after all, distinctly psychological; therefore a limited view that embraces but one segment of the processes with which political scientists are properly concerned. Our investigations were long on the description and analysis of opinions, but short on the observation of consequential behavior, political or otherwise. And our study did not even focus on public opinion, in any sense that attemps a close conceptual distinction between the public and the private.

The type of comprehensive conceptual scheme presented by Professor Smith in the foregoing paper is, in the writer's opinion, the most useful framework currently available for studying the relationship between opinions and personality. The paper draws upon a major work by Smith and his colleagues, Opinions and Personality, which has not only been greeted as a “pattern-setter for a new phase of attitude research” but is already having an important impact on political behavior studies.

That political scientists should find the pluralistic theory proposed by Smith congenial, cannot be explained merely by the fact that it is accompanied by an emphatic rejection of the type of simplistic theorizing about personality and opinion already in disfavor with most of them. Rather, its appeal is solidly intellectual, deriving from the fact that it stems from a general (and long awaited!) movement of convergence within the field of psychology.

If justification were needed for taking notice once again of the liberal-conservative distinction, it would be sufficient, I suppose, merely to observe that this division has been injected into the politics of Western nations for at least two centuries and, depending on the nature of one's criteria, perhaps longer.

The distinction between the two camps has not always been sharply drawn, of course, for both have been compelled, as a condition for survival, to hold important beliefs in common. Moreover, each has reversed itself on certain issues, such as government regulation of the economy, casting off old views in favor of beliefs previously cherished by the other. Competing for popular support in elections, and succeeding one another in office, the two camps have, of necessity, taken on many values in common, tempering their programs and adjusting their courses to the practical requirements of political contest. In a system like ours, where the parties have functioned less as ideological movements than as brokerage organizations hoping to attract majority support from almost every segment of the electorate, the distinction has tended to be dulled even further, until, at the actual scenes of daily political struggle, it has often faded entirely.

On March 6, 1957, the Gold Coast, now called “Ghana,” attained fully responsible status within the British Commonwealth. African nationalists, Pan-Africanists and their supporters in other parts of the world hailed the event as a milestone on the road to complete emancipation of the Africans, as proof that the “dark continent” had come of age and that all of its people were now fully capable of governing themselves.

This study of several key factors in the development of political thought and practice in the former colony was undertaken with a view toward an assessment of the stability and soundness of the country's new political institutions and practices. In a more general sense, it may be regarded as a commentary on the process of institutional transfer from colonial (European) to African political control. Since the formal structure within which the transfer took place is classifiable, nominally at least, as parliamentary-democratic, the evaluation may also serve as a commentary on contemporary performance of what, to reflect its second-hand nature, may be termed “colonial-parliamentary democracy.”

Soviet foreign policy has been a subject of extensive and intensive study ever since the painful birth of the Soviet state. All the writings and investigations, except for the purely descriptive, are based in some degree on one or several key premises and assumptions of authors who used them to explain and interpret Soviet foreign policy. This is understandable and probably inevitable in view of the enormous significance of the subject matter, the vastness of observed behavior in time and in space, and the lack of available information on policy making. Consequently, scientific, intuitive, and even merely hopeful thinking has been applied to the evidences of Soviet foreign policy in an effort to find a method of analysis, a frame of reference, a tool of orientation which might permit some systematization of the whole subject.

Clearly, a single seemingly well-constructed theory of Soviet foreign policy which purports to offer a key to broad analysis is too attractive for an analyst to ignore. But however plausible it may seem, it cannot possibly offer the whole answer. Some elements of Soviet foreign policy may be isolated, focalized, dissected, and examined, but others cannot be subject to even speculative, crude estimates.

At least from the time of Socrates, in whose ideal state philosophers would be kings, the appeal to the right man has played a major role in systematic reflections on the control of power. For if the right man does rule, Socrates argued, neither institutional nor other controls—e.g., law—need to be employed. Because he is the right man, he will do the right things: he will rule wisely; he will establish or, where already established, he will perpetuate, that order in human affairs that best approximates or achieves justice and secures liberty.

The problem, then, for those who hold this view in democratic states, is not whether the right man should rule, but how he is to be discovered and how he can be assured the reins of political power. Or, to formulate the problem in negative terms, how can we identify and exclude from power those who are the “wrong” men, those who are likely to rule badly and unjustly, those who—because they are, for example, “authoritarians” at heart—may if they achieve positions of power violate the very principles of the democratic state and thereby endanger its existence?

The Hawaiian Islands, in Mark Twain's words “the loveliest fleet of Islands that lies anchored in any ocean,” offer more than a vista of sub-tropical splendor to the student of government. Hawaii presents also an extreme of centralized administration probably unequaled in any state on the mainland. The century prior to annexation by the United States saw the major islands of the Hawaiian archipelago come under the jurisdiction of a single government which rapidly underwent a metamorphosis from stone-age, native absolutism, through restricted constitutional monarchy, to the status of independent republic. “Adjustment rather than reorganization defines the change in government necessary when Hawaii entered the Union as a Territory.” Allowed by Congress almost all the powers of a state, and wide discretion in erecting its own local structure, the Territory chose to continue the concentrated administration which had characterized government throughout the century of independent rule. Only within the last few years has this centralization been shaken by the introduction of challenging centrifugal forces. Today, Hawaii affords the prospect of an ocean-girt test tube in which can be observed the interplay of these new formative forces with the old causative factors of centripetal tendency; the end product may be a decentralized administration more on the model of the mainland.

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses in the study of urban government today, one fact seems clear: a process of transformation is underway. How fundamental a restructuring of research and teaching is involved is not yet certain, for the tide of debate still runs strong. At the very least however, the new model will be longer, wider and indelibly stamped with the forward look.

The boundaries of urban study are no longer limited to the formal structure and administrative processes of local government; they now embrace the variety of public activities within metropolitan regions, whether local, state, or federal in origin. The ranks of political scientists are augmented by sociologists, economists, demographers, and planners demonstrating renewed interest in the field. And almost every analysis is dynamic in scope and method, designed to anticipate the policy problems yet to come.

This last characteristic deserves emphasis. Few areas in political science seem to have accepted more completely Harold Lasswell's injunction in the Presidential Address of 1956 to scan “the horizon of the unfolding future.”

Cumulative voting is a rough method of proportional representation perhaps more familiar to more Americans as a device for choosing corporate boards of directors, such as Montgomery Ward's, than as a means of choosing legislative representatives. Among American state electoral systems it is unique to Illinois, where it has been in operation since 1870. Like the one-house legislature in Nebraska, it has been admired there but not copied elsewhere. As used in Illinois it retains the district system of representation, but each district is the unit for choosing three representatives, and each voter is allowed three votes. Thus, in contrast with a single-member district system, it aims to secure representation for a substantial minority without jeopardizing the principle of majority rule; and it has done so. If this were all, the Illinois example might remain as a museum piece to be observed by students of comparative electoral methods, or by constitution drafters considering a change in systems.

As it happens, however, Illinois superimposed on this cumulative voting scheme for the lower house a conventional single-member district system for the choice of state senators, and providentially for students of voting behavior, from 1870 through the election of 1954 it used the same district boundaries for both purposes.

This study was undertaken to test the relations between two basic observations which have appeared in the literature of political behavior. First, party identification has been found to be a major factor not only in determining votes but also in shaping ideology. Party appears to serve a “standard-setting” function for its adherents, especially on questions that are most clearly “party-related,” and resultant ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans have been found independently of such demographic factors as socioeconomic status. The second observation stems from studies in the field of stratification that have yielded an explanatory proposition in political analysis: a shift in party affiliation tends to follow a shift in class identification, as indicated by the tendency of suburban America to vote Republican.

Two changes in the personnel of the United States Supreme Court occurred during the 1956 Term. Justice Sherman Minton, appointed by President Truman in 1949, retired on October 15, 1956, at the age of sixty-five, for reasons of health. Prior to his appointment to the Court, Justice Minton had served as U. S. Senator from Indiana and had spent eight years on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. To take his place President Eisenhower gave a recess appointment to William Joseph Brennan, Jr., who took the oath of office on October 16, at the age of fifty. A native of Newark and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and of the Harvard Law School, he had served by appointment in 1949 on the New Jersey Superior Court, was advanced to the Appellate Division in 1950, and was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 1952. Justice Brennan was a Democrat, a Catholic, (the first since Justice Frank Murphy, who died in 1949), and the son of an Irish immigrant; and his appointment was announced just three weeks before the presidential election of 1956.