I need hardly remind this audience that one of the characteristics of our field is the large number of old and quite elemental questions—elemental but by no means elementary—for which we have no compelling answers. I don't mean that we have no answers to these questions. On the contrary, we often have a rich variety of conflicting answers. But no answer compels acceptance in the same way as a proof of a theorem in mathematics, or a very nice fit between a hypothesis and a satisfactory set of data.

Whether the obstacles that prevent us from achieving tight closure on solutions lie in ourselves—our approaches, methods, and theories—or are inherent in the problems is, paradoxically, one of these persistent and elemental questions for which we have a number of conflicting answers. For whatever it may be worth, my private hunch is that the main obstacles to closure are in the problems themselves—in their extraordinary complexity, the number and variety of variables, dimensions qualities, and relationships, and in the impediments to observation and data-gathering.

However that may be, a question of this sort often lies dormant for decades or even centuries, not because it has been solved but because it seems irrelevant. For even when no satisfactory theoretical answer exists to a very fundamental question, historical circumstances may allow it to be ignored for long periods of time. Even specialists may refuse to take a question seriously that history seems to have shoved into the attic. What seem like fundamental controversies in one age are very likely to be boring historical curiosities in the next. And conversely it is my impression that a great many of the elemental political questions regarded as settled in one age have a way of surfacing later on.

Until astonishingly recent times American national government played a marginal role in the life of the nation. Even as late as the eve of World War I, the State Department could support itself on consular fees. In most years revenues from tariffs supplied adequate financing, plus a surplus, from all other responsibilities. In 1800, there was less than one-half a federal bureaucrat per 1,000 citizens. On the eve of the Civil War there were only 1.5 federal bureaucrats per 1,000 citizens, and by 1900 that ratio had climbed to 2.7. This compares with 7 per 1,000 in 1940 and 13 per 1,000 in 1962—exclusive of military personnel.

The relatively small size of the public sphere was maintained in great part by the constitutional wall of separation between government and private life. The wall was occasionally scaled in both directions, but concern for the proper relation of private life and public order was always a serious and effective issue. Americans always talked pragmatism, in government as in all other things; but doctrine always deeply penetrated public dialogue. Power, even in the United States, needed justification.

Throughout the decades between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression, almost every debate over a public policy became involved in the larger debate over the nature and consequences of larger and smaller spheres of government. This period was just as much a “constitutional period” as that of 1789–1820. Each period is distinguished by its effort to define (or redefine) and employ a “public philosophy.”

There is a great deal of political activity which can be explained adequately only by taking account of the personal characteristics of the actors involved. The more intimate the vantage, the more detailed the perspective, the greater the likelihood that political actors will loom as full-blown individuals influenced by all of the peculiar strengths and weaknesses to which the species homo sapiens is subject, in addition to being role-players, creatures of situation, members of a culture, and possessors of social characteristics such as occupation, class, sex, and age.

To a non-social scientist the observation that individuals are important in politics would seem trite. Undergraduates, until they have been trained to think in terms of impersonal categories of explanation, readily make assertions about the psychology of political actors in their explanations of politics. So do journalists. Why is it that most political scientists are reluctant to deal explicitly with psychological matters (apart from using a variety of rather impersonal psychological constructs such as “party identification,” “sense of political efficacy,” and the like)? Why is political psychology not a systematically developed subdivision of political science, occupying the skill and energy of a substantial number of scholars?

The relative intractablility of the international environment poses a problem for the foreign policy of all nations. Purpose and power meet with cross-purpose and countervailing power, and most foreign policy projects face external restraints that the makers of policy can neglect only at the risk of failure. Foreign policy—the more or less coordinated strategy with which institutionally designated decision-makers seek to manipulate the international environment—generally meets with tenacious resistance, if not insuperable obstacles.

To regard foreign policy and statecraft from this perspective, however, implies a good deal of determinism. In its more extreme analytical applications, this viewpoint reduces the pursuit of foreign policy goals to a contest between statesman and environment that is already settled by the insurmountable restrictions of the international “system.” Nations are implicitly delegated to play out the roles that the international system has “assigned” to its “actors” to maintain system stability or equilibrium. Domestic political variables are largely neglected in this analytical perspective. Foreign policy aspirations are assessed primarily in terms of whether a nation has adequately “internalized” system “rules”—that is to say, whether a polity has adjusted to the contingencies of the international system, which seems to move toward a preordained historical or analytical telos. The strictures of necessity, imposed by the international environment, take analytical precedence over considerations of preferences and the possibility of choice.

In its broadest conception, a political system is a means through which the wants of the members of a society are converted into binding decisions. To sustain a conversion process of this sort a society must provide a relatively stable context for political interaction, a set of ground rules for participating in all parts of the political process. We may describe this context variously as a constitutional order, a set of fundamental rules, or customary procedures for settling differences. But however this context is defined, it usually includes three elements: some minimal constraints on the general goals of its members, rules or norms governing behavior, and structures of authority through which the members of the system act in making and implementing political outputs. To these goals, norms and structures we may give the traditional name “political regime” or constitutional order in the broadest, nonlegal sense of the phrase.

We may hypothesize that if a political system is to persist, one of its major tasks is to provide for the input of at least a minimal level of support for a regime of some kind. A political system that proved unable to sustain a regime, that is, some relatively ordered and stable way of converting inputs into outputs, could not avoid collapsing. Each time a dispute arose it would have to seek to agree on means for settling differences at the same time as it sought to bring about a settlement of the substance of the issue, a virtually impossible combination of tasks for a society to engage in continuously.

Games are paradigms of many political events, especially those that involve partial or complete conflicts of interest among the participants. As paradigms, they display in relatively simple social interaction the same fundamental forces found in the more complex interactions of the grander political events whose structure they share. This is the feature of games that makes them attractive vehicles for both theorizing and experimentation in the social sciences. The scientific expectation is that, by studying the quasi-political interaction of games—where the variations among institutional, psychological, and ideological components of behavior are minimized—one will be able to understand more profoundly the basic political activities of bargaining, forming coalitions, and choosing strategies. This more profound understanding is a consequence of obtaining answers to the following questions:

(1) What is the mathematical solution, that is, what amount of utility can players be expected to obtain, when it is assumed that players are rational and wish to maximize utility?

(2) What is the strategy (or method of playing) that will ensure players of achieving the solution?

An answer to the first question indicates what may be anticipated as the outcome of political events. If we know it, then, if also we can assume players are rational maximizers of utility, we can predict the political future with some confidence. An answer to the second question (about strategies) permits political engineers to give advice to politicians about how to behave successfully.

The poverty of philosophy, for Marx, was its formalism. The social sciences, in contrast, are blessed with the ability to adjust theory to experience. In our study of Marxist movements, however, we lack precisely the marxian flexibility we need to overcome a patrimony of ideology, misinformation and rigidity. Writers like Duverger and Selznick, for example, talk about “devotee parties” and “organizational weapons” without considering that their terminology may in some cases be misleading.

The devotee party, writes Duverger, “represents a change from the conception of the party as a class; it is the party conceived as the elite.” Its members pledge their “whole human being” to the party while its structure focuses upon “unceasing propaganda and agitation,” to the detriment of parliamentary activity. Duverger leaves no doubt that his archetype of the devotee party is the Communist Party. What he never asks, however, is whether a Communist Party may be anything but a devotee party.

With a similar focus, Philip Selznick describes “the combat party,” whose peculiar property is its “competence to turn members of a voluntary association into disciplined and deployable political agents,” and its “adoption of subversion” and “penetration and manipulation of institutional targets.” While the model is most relevant in societies in which Communist doctrine is remote and unappealing to the population, Selznick, like Duverger, holds that it “provides a fair interpretation of the Communist vanguard or combat party, wherever it is found.”

The Supreme Court of the United States, whose decisions not only define constitutional law but vitally affect national policy, has long held both an honored and a controversial place in American life. In no area do its decisions bring it more honor or more controversy than in the field of religion; for, as a member of the First Congress under the Constitution said, “the rights of conscience are, in their nature, of peculiar delicacy, and will little bear the gentlest touch of governmental hand. … Thus, the same decision of the Court may be hailed by some as a great landmark in the struggle for religious liberty, and denounced by others as a serious invasion of liberty of conscience. For although it may be pleasant to dream of religion insulated from governmental touch, the dual membership of citizens in the state and in religious bodies insures that conscience and government will touch at some points with inevitable friction, and, to the conscience so touched, it makes little difference whether the governmental hand is that of a local school board, the Congress, or the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Court has recently been attacked as antireligious, or at least as callous to our religious heritage, because of its decisions invalidating a state-prescribed prayer and state-prescribed Bible reading in public schools. The first of these decisions prompted the more excited outcry, but the two, at first singly and then together, have precipitated a renewed debate about the proper constitutional relationship between the state and religion.

When the laws of social dynamics are codified, surely the First will be that people see what they want to see. Given its universality, the First Law is no less applicable to scholars than anyone else. As political scientists, seeing what we want to see in a colleague's work, we find it “insightful,” “constructive,” and “important”; alternatively, not seeing in it what we want to see or, even worse, seeing what we don't want to see, we find it “turgid,” “misleading,” and “trivial.”

So it is with Hanrieder's formulation. Since it is only a bare outline and contains no data, no one is likely to regard his article as a definitive statement, but reactions to it are likely to be quite varied and conflicting. Some readers, especially those who worry about the prevalence of a malady they call “methodologism” in political science, will see in Hanrieder's effort to develop the concepts of compatibility and consensus yet another case of the quibbling over words that is the prime symptom of this affliction. After all, such critics will point out, compatibility and consensus are, respectively, only thirteen- and nine-letter words and to claim great explanatory power for them without elaboration is to substitute the form of language for the substance of thought. In a similar manner those long committed to a particular framework for examining foreign policy phenomena will preserve their commitment and wonder why Hanrieder makes so much fuss about the need for a new formulation when the available conceptual equipment seems capable of handling the convergence of national and international politics. After all, these analysts will conclude, Hanrieder himself says that researchers should be less inclined to create new schemes and more ready to build on existing ones; why, then, does he not follow his own advice?

On the other hand, analysts who are themselves perplexed by the convergence of national and international politics are likely to be more sympathetic to Hanrieder's effort, if not to its result. They may have doubts as to whether Hanrieder's unqualified claims for the concepts of compatibility and consensus are justified, but they will see his article as a serious attempt to confront a genuine and difficult problem.

Long periods of one-party domination, increased average tenure in office for Representatives, and the institutionalization of patterns of succession to the Speakership, have all contributed to a tendency toward leadership stability in the 20th-century House of Representatives. The election of Sam Rayburn (D., Texas) and John McCormack (D., Mass.) to the offices of Speaker and Majority Leader in 1940, of Joseph Martin (R., Mass.) to the office of Minority Leader in 1939, and of Leslie Arends (R., Ill.) to the position of Republican Whip in 1943, mark the beginnings of the longest tenures in these four positions for any incumbents in the history of Congress. When changes in top leadership occur—as with the overthrow of Minority Leader Charles A. Halleck by Republican Representative Gerald R. Ford, Jr., in 1965, or the succession of Majority Leader McCormack to the office of the Speaker in 1962 following the death of Rayburn—the consequences are considerable. In the case of revolt, individual careers are made and broken. The organization and policy orientations of a congressional party may be extensively altered. While orderly succession has less dramatic impact, it too has a significant effect on “who gets what, when and how.” Some members move closer to the seats of power and others fall out of favor. Key committee assignments, and hence the development of entire legislative careers, are likely to ride or fall on the outcomes.

Among the crucial facts of our time are the profound differences in “modernization” or “development” that characterize contemporary nation-states. Despite a lack of complete agreement about the nature of these differences, it seems clear that variations in incomes, literacy levels, and rates of human reproduction are intimately involved. Development also affects so many other social characteristics that it has become a major preoccupation of social science in all of its branches.

The purpose of this paper is to specify modernization levels of states in the American federal system, and to relate variations in development to other aspects of the state political systems. The quest is a natural one in view of the evident concern for development shown by political activists in the states, the emphasis placed upon it in many textbooks and monographs that deal with problems of state government, and the potential relevance for more general theories about all political systems. Problems of development are undoubtedly more pressing in poor nations, but it is not inappropriate to study modernization in an advanced setting. As Siegfried has noted, modernization tends to be an American phenomenon: it is the United States “which is presiding at a general reorganization of the ways of living throughout the entire world.”

Questions and answers about development have been formulated in a variety of ways, reflecting a variety of analytic concerns. Scholars concerned with poverty, for example, tend to ask (not unnaturally) “What produces economic growth?” The answers have frequently consisted essentially of single causes: e.g.—technological innovation (Adam Smith), population growth (Smith and Ricardo), the Protestant ethic (Weber), the achieving motive (McClelland), empathy (Lerner). The question can, of course, be phrased more broadly: “What causes a civilization to flower?” This query elicits some of the same answers, but others in addition: climate (Huntington), leaders or luck (Muller), cultural diffusion via trade (Buchanan and Ellis), race (Wax), challenge of the environment (Toynbee).

In modern political systems, parties undertake the prime responsibility for nominating public office holders, while interest groups attempt to influence public policy by seeking access to the centers of governmental power. Yet recent developments in the selection of state judges have given a private interest group, the Bar, a role in choosing members of the Bench which, in essence, parallels that of traditional party organizations. A Plan developed by the American Bar Association and the American Judicature Society, first adopted by Missouri in 1940, grants the legal profession a direct, formal role in the selection process; under its provisions, commissions, composed of lawyers, judges and laymen, nominate panels of names from which the governor of the state makes his judicial appointments. As the system works in actual operation, the Bar becomes the key group in the nomination process, since the lawyers and judges on the commissions possess superior knowledge about potential candidates for judgeships, and also outnumber the lay members of these bodies. Beyond this, the Plan restricts the discretion of the governor, who must make the ultimate appointment from among the three nominees. It also protects judges from ordinary political forces once they are in office, because subsequent judicial elections are in reality plebiscites in which appointees run “on their records” with no opponents.

The construction of an empirical theory of democratic political development is dependent on the formulation of causal propositions which are generalizations of the developmental process. To date, several essential steps in the process of constructing such a theory have been taken. First, concept formation and clarification by students of political development has led to an emphasis upon political democracy as one of the dependent variables for the field. Second, the gathering and publication of quantitative indicators of social, economic, cultural, and political phenomena provide a firm basis for subsequent empirical inquiry. Finally, correlational analysis has identified numerous variables which are closely associated with the development of democratic political institutions.

The next major task is the formulation and testing of empirical models of democratic political development which provide a basis for inferring causal relationships by distinguishing between spurious correlations and indirect and direct effects. The accomplishment of this task would enable us to derive explanatory propositions concerning the process of democratic political development.

It has been argued that political democracy in nation-states is dependent upon certain levels of social and economic development. Some authors (Lipset and Cutright) argue that a particular complex of social and economic requisites appears necessary for the institutionalization and maintenance of democracy. Others (Lerner and Pye) suggest that national political development of any form is predicated upon the development of a system of communications sufficiently sophisticated to overcome the parochialism of traditional society. Still others (Almond and Verba) find social factors such as education crucial for the development of those attitudes deemed adequate for active citizens of democratic polities.

By definition, political democracy in nationstates requires some minimal level of citizen participation in decision making. Historically the most effective method of institutionalizing such participation is through some form of representative government. This mechanism permits groups of citizens with common preferences to support representatives who will, in turn, attempt to schedule those preferences for decision by the government. Groups of representatives will form coalitions in an attempt to insure that their common preferences will be enacted into public policy. Because preferences in society are likely to vary in direction and intensity, the successful implementation of political democracy imposes two requirements. One, communication of preferences among competing groups, must be widespread. If they are not, it will be difficult for groups with shared preferences to combine their resources such that “majority” preferences can be successfully implemented. Indeed at a more basic level, communication is necessary for the identification and articulation of common preferences. Second, groups within the citizenry holding competing preferences must be socialized into the procedural norms of the system. Most important is the acceptance of the norms of compliance so that groups which “lose” on any given issue (enactment of a preference set) do not withdraw from the decision system or opt to overthrow it. In short, two primary conditions for the maintenance of any system of political democracy are, (1) communication among members of the political system and, (2) socialization into the “rules of the game.”

Midterm congressional elections have been subjected to relatively little analysis. This is surprising because these elections exhibit three quite striking features which, when taken together, call for further explanation. First, every midterm House election since the Civil War, with the exception of 1934, has brought a net loss of seats to the President's party. Second, in the large majority of elections the net loss has approximated the gross loss. The in-party (i.e., the President's party) seldom has captured seats from the other party to offset its own loss. And third, although the in-party's loss has been persistent, the number of seats lost has varied widely.

Attempts to incorporate midterm elections into a broader interpretive framework of American election studies usually stress one of the first two features outlined above. The fact that only the in-party loses—and that its losses are mainly in marginal districts—has led commentators such as V. O. Key Jr. and the authors of The American Voter to interpret these midterm elections as part of the stable, long-term trends in voters' party allegiance.