Presidential addresses in our Association are frequently discourses on the state of our discipline. In the past twenty years nine presidents have reflected on its status, trends and needs. It would be presumptuous for another president to return to the topic now if the moment did not validate the need. After a period of novel developments, accompanied by uncertainties and tensions, there is need to reemphasize our community of interest and our common obligation.

It is a community extending across diversities and an obligation with many components. The study of the science and art of government has many facets which reflect search in that eternal triangle of science, values, and utility.

In the beginning it is well to remark that we are constantly drawn toward two poles in a dual quest. We would like to find verifiable propositions or working assumptions about political activity which, like the law of gravity or the laws of motion, transcend time, and technology and culture variations. We would like even to extend our vision further: just as the biologist seeks for the origins of life and the astronomer for the initial creative impulse for the universe, we want to know if there is a universal plan in history and a destiny for man.

Such cosmic vision must be based on the assumption of some constants in human behavior, such as self-love; or in human relations, such as power; or in natural morality, such as justice. Yet grasp for certainty fades as we wonder whether all such things are relative to environment, and hence whether ecology and the search for the laws of change must be the centers of inquiry. As we contemplate how such great cultural changes as the secularization of thought in the Enlightenment, or such tremendous physical events as the discovery of America have upset the assumptions of thought, and as we try to think of what nuclear energy, automation and the dominion of scientists may mean, we are humble before the task of building an endurable science of politics.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the “behavioral approach” in political science is the ambiguity of the term itself, and of its synonym “political behavior.” The behavioral approach, in fact, is rather like the Loch Ness monster: one can say with considerable confidence what it is not, but it is difficult to say what it is. Judging from newspaper reports that appear from time to time, particularly just before the summer tourist season, I judge that the monster of Loch Ness is not Moby Dick, nor my daughter's goldfish that disappeared down the drain some ten years ago, nor even a misplaced American eight heading for the Henley Regatta. In the same spirit, I judge that the behavioral approach is not that of the speculative philosopher, the historian, the legalist, or the moralist. What, then, is it? Indeed, does it actually exist?

Although I do not profess to know of the full history of the behavioral approach, a little investigation reveals that confusing and even contradictory interpretations have marked its appearance from the beginning. The first sightings in the roily waters of political science of the phenomenon variously called political behavioral approach, or behavioral(ist) research, evidently occurred in the 1920s. The term “political behavior,” it seems, was used by American political scientists from the First World War onward. The honor of first adopting the term as a book title seems to belong, however, not to a political scientist but to the American journalist Prank Kent, who published a book in 1928 entitled Political Behavior, The Heretofore Unwritten Laws, Customs, and Principles of Politics as Practised in the United States. To Kent, the study of political behavior meant the cynical “realism” of the tough-minded newspaperman who reports the way things “really” happen and not the way they're supposed to happen. This meaning, I may say, is often implied even today. However, Herbert Tingsten rescued the term for political science in 1937 by publishing his path-breaking Political Behavior: Studies in Election Statistic. Despite the fact that Tingsten was a Swede, and his work dealt with European elections, the term became increasingly identified with American political science.

Political activity is dangerous. Arising inevitably out of men's ability to influence each other, conferring upon them the benefits of joint endeavour, an indispensable source of social boons, it is also capable of doing great harm. Men can be moved to injure others or to ruin themselves. The very process of moving implies a risk of debasement for the moved and for the mover. Even the fairest vision of a good to be sought offers no moral guarantee, since it may poison hearts with hatred against those who are deemed an obstacle to its achievement.

No apology is required for stressing a subjective dread of political activity: the chemist is not disqualified as a scientist because he is aware that explosives are dangerous: indeed that chemist is dangerous who lacks such awareness.

This feeling of danger is widespread in human society and has ever haunted all but the more superficial authors. Although, to be sure, few have, like Hobbes, brought it out into the open, it has hovered in the background, exerting an invisible but effective influence upon their treatment of the subject; it may be, to a significant degree, responsible for the strange and unique texture of political science.

There are no objects to which our attention is so naturally drawn as to our own fellows. It takes a conscious purpose to watch birds or ants, but we can not fail to watch other men, with whom we are inevitably associated, whose behaviour is so important to us that we need to foresee it, and who are sufficiently like us to facilitate our understanding of their actions. Being a man, which involves living with men, therefore involves observing men. And the knowledge of men could be called the most fairly distributed of all kinds of knowledge since each one of us may acquire it according to his willingness and capacity.

This essay will attempt to define an abstract model of the international system (or, more precisely, a model of the structure of that system), as a supplement to the types presented by Morton A. Kaplan. Before attempting such a construction, it is well to show the utility of the “multi-bloc system” as an alternative to his six models. Kaplan's “balance-of-power” and “unit veto” systems are essentially defined in terms of nation-states as “actors”; and his “universal” and “hierarchical” systems have essentially but one “actor,” though in the former the nation-state subsists as an administrative and local political unit. The two “bipolar” models (“loose” and “tight”) have, by definition, two major bloc “actors,” with uncommitted nation-states on the margin and an “international actor” such as the U.N. playing a limited role in the former model. It is true that his “unit veto” system may have blocs instead of nation-states for “actors,” but by this very token the difference between a system with a multiplicity of states and one with a multiplicity of blocs is not suggested by Kaplan's typology.

The possibility of an international system composed of a multiplicity of blocs has been considered by a number of writers in the past few years. Even before the end of the Second World War, Walter Lippmann wrote:

The question is whether some sixty to seventy states, each acting separately, can form a universal organization for the maintenance of peace. I contend that they cannot, and that single sovereign states must combine in their neighborhoods, and that the neighborhoods must combine into larger communities and constellations, which then participate in a universal society.

Over the last century and a half, the work of the Constitutional Convention and the motives of the Founding Fathers have been analyzed under a number of different ideological auspices. To one generation of historians, the hand of God was moving in the assembly; under a later dispensation, the dialectic (at various levels of philosophical sophistication) replaced the Deity: “relationships of production” moved into the niche previously reserved for Love of Country. Thus in counterpoint to the Zeitgeist, the Framers have undergone miraculous metamorphoses: at one time acclaimed as liberals and bold social engineers, today they appear in the guise of sound Burkean conservatives, men who in our time would subscribe to Fortune, look to Walter Lippmann for political theory, and chuckle patronizingly at the antics of Barry Goldwater. The implicit assumption is that if James Madison were among us, he would be President of the Ford Foundation, while Alexander Hamilton would chair the Committee for Economic Development.

The “Fathers” have thus been admitted to our best circles; the revolutionary ferocity which confiscated all Tory property in reach and populated New Brunswick with outlaws has been converted by the “Miltown School” of American historians into a benign dedication to “consensus” and “prescriptive rights.” The Daughters of the American Revolution have, through the ministrations of Professors Boorstin, Hartz, and Rossiter, at last found ancestors worthy of their descendants. It is not my purpose here to argue that the “Fathers” were, in fact, radical revolutionaries; that proposition has been brilliantly demonstrated by Robert R. Palmer in his Age of the Democratic Revolution.

In an exchange of perennial delight to the Holmesian, the pauky Sherlock, pitting wits against a government detective, condescends to remark on the unusualness of the usual:

“Is there any point to which you would draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night time.”

“That was the curious incident.”

And in asymptotic fashion, the student of politics, intrigued by the burgeoning literature of community power now emerging from the hands of sociologists, searches for the contributions that these writings can make to the study of local government. The political scientist readily discovers that this literature is approaching metaphorical indeterminacy: like an expanding universe, it threatens to outrun his gaze. It contains the substance of competing conceptual schemes, the power elite vs. the pluralism of power. It offers comparative studies, both domestic and cross-cultural, and studies built upon historical dimensions. It even possesses studies designed to torture original hypotheses by invoking the test of predictability. And yet, in reviewing this freshet of publication, the political scientist finds himself asking whether there is, for his discipline, anything unusual in this outpouring.

As he reads, he finds underscored and “discovered” many of the propositions that are stock to his own lumber room: he learns that there is often discontinuity between the real and the nominal holders of political power; and that social values can affect the utilization of that power.

Allusions to the “problem of metropolitan government” are often made in characterizing the difficulties supposed to arise because a metropolitan region is a legal non-entity. From this point of view, the people of a metropolitan region have no general instrumentality of government available to deal directly with the range of problems which they share in common. Rather there is a multiplicity of federal and state governmental agencies, counties, cities, and special districts that govern within a metropolitan region.

This view assumes that the multiplicity of political units in a metropolitan area is essentially a pathological phenomenon. The diagnosis asserts that there are too many governments and not enough government. The symptoms are described as “duplication of functions” and “overlapping jurisdictions.” Autonomous units of government, acting in their own behalf, are considered incapable of resolving the diverse problems of the wider metropolitan community. The political topography of the metropolis is called a “crazy-quilt pattern” and its organization is said to be an “organized chaos.” The prescription is reorganization into larger units—to provide “a general metropolitan framework” for gathering up the various functions of government. A political system with a single dominant center for making decisions is viewed as the ideal model for the organization of metropolitan government. “Gargantua” is one name for it.

Several scholars within the public law field of political science have compiled data on differences in the backgrounds of American judges, but without attempting to correlate these characteristics with differences in the decisions of the judges. Other scholars have compiled data on the different decisional tendencies of American judges, but again without correlating these tendencies with differences in the backgrounds of the judiciary.

The first purpose of this paper is to explore the empirical relationships between one background characteristic and fifteen areas of judicial decision-making. Political party affiliation was chosen as the one background characteristic because it is of particular interest to political scientists, and is an especially useful indicator for predicting how judges on bipartisan appellate courts will divide when they do not agree. The second purpose is to explore empirically the effectiveness of three judicial reforms (judicial appointment, non-partisan ballot, and long term of office) which are frequently advocated as means of decreasing partisan influences in judicial decisions.

C. P. Snow, in his Rede Lecture on the scientific and literary worlds as separate cultures, lists four groups needed by a country if it is to “come out top” in the scientific revolution. First, as many top scientists as it can produce; second, a larger group trained for supporting research and high class design; third, educated supporting technicians; and “fourthly and last, politicians, administrators, an entire community, who know enough science to have a sense of what the scientists are talking about.”

It seems increasingly clear that the growing army of “political” scientists—meaning natural scientists in politics—is more likely to be aided by students of politics prepared to understand the effects of science in political terms than by most of the recent efforts to understand politics in scientific terms. When one looks over the journals in political science, and in related areas of public opinion and social psychology, searching for significant conclusions in articles where much time has been spent on the elaboration of method, it is difficult to avoid V. O. Key's conclusion “that a considerable proportion of the literature commonly classified under the heading of ‘political behavior’ has no real bearing on politics, or at least that its relevance has not been made clear.”

When the political scientist attempts to assess the state of civil liberties in America following World War II, he confronts a voluminous record of episodes and events. Most of the books, articles, and other documents so far available suggest that the fear of communist subversion carried Americans very far from the spirit, if not the letter, of the Bill of Rights. Indeed, it is possible to conclude that the hysteria associated with the name of Joseph R. McCarthy permeated almost every state, city and hamlet in America, and that McCarthy himself, in the words of Richard H. Rovere, “held two Presidents captive, or as nearly captive as any Presidents of the United States have ever been held …” The political scientist may therefore be persuaded that the label McCarthy Era better fits the Nineteen Fifties than the alternative designation, Eisenhower Era.

It may be hoped, however, that his research will not overlook those incidents, however rare, which suggest that fear and suspicion did not entirely dominate the national scene. One such incident, of more than ordinary interest, occurred in Iowa during the early months of 1951. By April, 1951, more than one year had elapsed since the late junior Senator from Wisconsin had produced his famous if elusive “list” of card-carrying communists in the State Department. The Korean War, moving toward the end of its first winter, promoted a mood which was, on the whole, favorable to the Senator's activities. Nevertheless, in April, 1951, the Iowa Senate overwhelmingly rejected a loyalty oath measure which was much less stringent than those that had previously been approved in almost half the states. The action of the Iowa Senate, moreover, was not merely unusual or exceptional in 1951; it appears to be without precedent in recent history. So far as is known, Iowa was the only state in which a loyalty oath measure was defeated by vote in the legislature.

[What follows below is the substance of a document Miss Silva prepared, which was filed on June 6, 1961, with the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, as an Appendix to the petitioners' complaint in the case of W.M.C.A., Inc. et al. v. Caroline K. Simon, Secretary of the State of New York, et al. (61 Civil No. 1559, 1961). The suit seeks declaratory and injunctive relief and alleges that the apportionment and districting provisions of the New York Constitution deny the petitioners and others similarly situated both due process and the equal protection of the laws, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment of the federal constitution. Miss Silva had been employed in 1959–60 as special consultant on legislative apportionment by the State of New York Temporary Commission on Revision and Simplification of the Constitution, which reproduced in two volumes as Staff Report No. 33 (April, 1960) the study she made for it.

Litigation in the federal courts concerning legislative apportionments, from Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549 (1946) to Baker v. Carr, the Tennessee case pending in the Supreme Court at this writing, has been largely preoccupied with questions of federal jurisdiction. The document below does not touch this issue, but rather is confined to the practical effects of the apportionment and districting provisions of the New York Constitution. Man. Ed.]