Admired during much of this century, the British party model became especially attractive to American political scientists seeking responsible-party government in the early postwar years. After the mid-1960s, the model's appeal declined as did Britain's national status and the hopes for the democratic socialism often associated with the model. In the 1970s, the model itself seems to have worked in a way unlike that of prior decades. From this intellectual case history, a few broad inferences are drawn about the changing perspectives of political scientists.

The British House of Commons is frequently used in comparative analysis as a model of the kind of legislative institution that ratifies and legitimizes public policy decisions taken by the government. It debates but rarely does it actually legislate. Examination of the House of Commons of the 1970s reveals a very different legislature, one that regularly overturns the government on significant policy matters. Furthermore, backbench members of the government's own parliamentary party frequently join coalitions to defeat the government in standing committee and on the floor. The research describes the development of the House of Commons as a decision-making unit in the 1970s, compares its record during the 1970s to the workings of the Commons over preceding decades, and examines various factors that help explain why the behavior of the House and its members changed so over the recent decade.

At the root of the conflict between Berlin and his critics is a fundamental disagreement over the possibility of certainty and over the relation of human ends to politics. Gerald MacCallum's formalist critique obscures the political question of whose values a free person is at liberty to pursue. Macpherson's attempt to defend positive liberty as not rationalistic is shown to fail because he (a) conflates liberty with its conditions and (b) assumes a rational pattern to human moral development. And Crick charges Berlin with ignoring politics, understood as active participation in the polis. Finally, Berlin's conception of politics as a form of human interaction aimed at creating the conditions of human dignity in a situation where we sincerely disagree over the ends of life is shown to be an effort to liberate us to live life for our own purposes. Yet Berlin's defense of liberty is problematic because it is too skeptical; to overcome this difficulty, a non-teleological yet developmentalist account of human nature and a weakly hierarchical account of human values is suggested.

Many of Locke's early writings have been discovered and published in the last 30 years. Among them are two short tracts in which Locke argues that the power of the civil magistrate should be absolute. Because these early tracts are very different from Locke's later teachings, they have been misunderstood by contemporary scholars who do not see any connection between absolutism and liberal toleration. I explain the connection by reconstructing Locke's critique of religious politics, which reveals that absolutism and toleration are the same in principle despite their great difference in practice. I then use this demonstration to explain Locke's development and to illuminate the foundations of contemporary liberalism.

Is the fact/value distinction incompatible with the possibility of a social science which is both objective and evaluative (or normative)? Does support of the latter require rejection of the former and vice versa? This article presents an indirect argument against the incompatibility of the fact/value distinction and an objectively evaluative social science. My procedure is to show that David Hume, whose is/ought distinction is the locus classicus of the fact/value distinction, is committed both to the view that values cannot be derived from facts and to the view that social science is not (and should not be) value-neutral. Furthermore, Hume's position is free from any logical flaws. My conclusion is that it is false to say that the fact/value distinction entails a value-neutral social science, and that it is therefore utterly unnecessary for critics of such a science to waste their time attempting to “bridge the gap” between facts and values.

Both implicit democratic norms and the reconstructions provided by theorists of rational choice suggest that issue voters are more sophisticated–educated, informed, and active in politics–than other voters. But some issues are clearly more difficult than others, and the voters who respond to “hard” and “easy” issues, respectively, are assumed to differ in kind. We propose the hypothesis that “easy-issue” voters are no more sophisticated than non-issue voters, and this is found to be the case. The findings suggest a reevaluation of the import of rising and falling levels of issue voting and suggest a prominent role for “easy” issues in electoral realignments.

This article, by employing voting simulations in a survey of party activists, examines responses to a woman's claim to party office on the basis of her sex. The degree of acceptance of this claim or the willingness to grant what is called social representation, is contrasted with the respondents' inclinations to select candidates favorable to women's rights, or the willingness to grant what is called opinion representation. Variations in responses to the two simulations are analyzed in terms of attitudes toward gender roles, government intervention and the legitimacy of groups in the political process. Voting in the simulation involving opinion representation can best be understood in terms of the respondent's attitude toward government intervention, while the simulation involving social representation activates the attitude toward groups. Discussion of the findings focuses on the dilemma of group claims for minority representation in a liberal democratic context and the need for better understanding of attitudes toward groups among political elites.

The idea that international politics can be a theoretical science logically homeomorphic to theoretical physics finds its most perspicuous recent expression in a methodological falsificationist program for its realization. But the program is a syllabus of epistemological errors which, upon detailed examination, collapses into incoherence. This article gives particular attention to three aspects of the program: the principle of interdependent deduction, the falsifiability criterion and the critical testing policy. Despite the systematic and resolute efforts on the part of its adherents to fix a methodological grammar for international studies, the program of methodological falsificationism is revealed to be: essentially a complete failure. The main source of the difficulty is located in the failure to appreciate the role of metaphysics in the sciences which, contrary to the standard positivist-empiricist view, constitutes the driving force behind scientific discoveries. Since a monistic metaphysics, however, may be neither possible nor desirable for the social and political sciences, a deconstructive metaphysical program is recommended. The final conclusion that vastly increased attention needs to be given to ontological and metaphysical issues seems completely warranted.

The conceptual and methodological outlines of a new approach to the comparative analysis of social change are expressed in a general time-series regression model which can serve as a framework for developing specific theories of social change for particular variables. The approach seeks to explain the variation over time in a macro-level attribute or action of a social system as a function of a combination of within-system, across-system, and across-time processes: (1) incrementalism or momentum, or the within-system temporal diffusion of the dependent variable; (2) within-system causal development, or the influence of other characteristics of the system itself; (3) spatial diffusion, or the spread of the dependent variable from system to system; and (4) global contextual forces, such as war, depression and shortage of resources. In addition to reconsidering the nature of “the comparative method,” the discussion focuses on the process of diffusion and how it fits in with the other processes, especially from a time-series perspective.

We apologize for errant proofreading in not catching the consistent misidentification of the author, Robert Lyle Butterworth, in the review of his book (APSR 73, September 1979, p. 934).

This essay analyzes selected publications since 1974 on U.S. secret intelligence agencies. Published works divide into four categories: memoirs defending the intelligence system, whistle-blowing exposés, scholarly analyses, and reports from executive and congressional studies. What do these materials reveal about the variables determining intelligence system influence in foreign policy decisions? And what do they suggest about criteria for evaluating intelligence performance and product? The finding is that little conceptual progress has been made towards defining the functions of intelligence. But a substantial amount of new illustrative material is now at hand to explore hypotheses such as (1) that intelligence agencies report what they think leaders want to hear, (2) that leaders take decisions without regard to intelligence reports, and (3) that costs often exceed benefits in covert action overseas. We need to understand better the functions of intelligence and to develop theories about the interrelations of information, action, and power within the context of American democratic values. Towards these ends, the article urges the exploitation of the variety of evidence recently published.