Pendleton Herring, a pioneering student of American politics and influential foundation executive, died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on August 17, 2004, at the age of 100. He had two successive careers, first as a leading political scientist, then as head of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), a capacity in which he played a major part in fostering the burgeoning of the social and behavioral sciences in the post-World War II years.

The American polity's designers proceeded from what John Adams called “the divine science of politics”—an approach very close to that of modern empirical political science. It was rooted in their conviction that truth is best discovered by the systematic investigation of experience; they investigated experience with methods primitive by modern standards but advanced for the eighteenth century; they applied their findings to the design of political institutions; and they regarded all institutions as experimental, to be revised when experience indicates. This faith in political and social engineering has remained ever since a major element in American political culture. It has recently been shaken by Vietnam, Watergate, and other systemic failures; but it is still far preferable to alternative faiths, especially if we today can cool our rhetoric, moderate our expectations, and recapture the pragmatic, experimental mood of those who created “the divine science.”

This paper provides a partial test of the widely-held assumption that preference primaries are the most representative element of the presidential nominating system. It notes that the average voting turnout in presidential primaries is only 39 per cent, compared with 69 per cent in the same states' ensuing general elections. The representative quality of these electorates is examined with data from sample surveys of the 1968 New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries. A comparison of the primary participants with non-participants among each party's identifiers shows, first, that presidential primary electorates are demographically unrepresentative of their nonvoting fellow partisans in age, education, income, and social status. Second, primary participants have no more intense party identifications than do non-participants. Third, participants hold issue positions more strongly than nonparticipants do, and on some issues they even hold positions contrary to those of nonparticipants. Finally, both of the Democratic primaries overrepresented Johnson sentiment and underrepresented McCarthy and Kennedy sentiment. The author concludes that the preference primaries' claim to be the most representative element of the presidential nominating system may not be warranted, especially if and when the national conventions are reformed along lines such as those laid down by the McGovern-Fraser Commission. In any case, 1972 offers a unique opportunity to study the comparative representativeness of local, state, and national party conventions and the preference primaries.

The legal or customary requirement that legislators reside in the districts they represent is one of the principal structural respects in which American legislatures differ from those of most other democracies. Our legislators and party leaders commonly defend the local residence rule by claiming that it ensures that each legislator will know the special problems and desires of his constituents and thus be equipped to represent them faithfully.

Some academic commentators, on the other hand, have argued that the rule is a prime cause of the parochialism which, they say, prevents Congress and state legislatures from formulating consistent and purposive general programs. These critics customarily contrast American practice unfavorably with that in Great Britain, where the last local residence rule for M.P.s was repealed in 1774. In Britain, the argument runs, the absence of the rule not only minimizes localism but, even more, it enables the national party leaders to allocate their personnel resources in the most effective way.

Distributing “raw” data among types or classes is a necessary and illuminating part of the process of research and discovery in any science, particularly in the early stages of the latter's development. But it produces fruitful results only if the types or classes make sense, which they will just to the extent that, inter alia, the variables we fix upon in defining them are the significant ones (for the purpose in view, of course), and that the classes (a) exhaust the phenomena under consideration, and (b) do not overlap.

One of the most elementary procedures used in dealing with the raw data of political conflict is that which, taking its departure from the notion of “party systems,” seeks to assign each observed instance to one or another of three types: the “one-party system,” the “two-party system,” and the “multiple-party system.” All party systems, it is assumed, belong as a matter of course to one of the three, so that one of the researcher's first tasks in studying the phenomena of party conflict in a given political situation is to find out with which one of the three types he is dealing. Until he has done this—so runs the tacit premise—he does not have his problem in manageable shape.