That men and women differ in their degree of access to and control of political power has long been a significant aspect of political life. Political socialization research has tended to locate the origin of these differences exclusively in the learning process—whereby boys and girls are differentially equipped with the skills and interests necessary for participation as adults (Weissberg, 1974; Dawson, Prewitt, and Dawson, 1977) or children internalize norms of appropriate gender role behavior that are then activated during thE! adult years (Sapiro, 1977; Jennings and Niemi, 1981). Gender is undoubtedly a social and personal construct, but it is also based in biological sex differences—genetic, morphological, and physiological. Biological factors are a potential area of investigation that has remained relatively unexplored, in part because many political scientists have been reluctant to borrow as liberally trorn tne life sciences as they have from their sister social sciences (Schubert, 1976). The emerging field of biopolitics might have provided a corrective to what has been called elsewhere the “oversocialized concept of man” (Wrong, 1961). However, the concern of many politically conscious individuals with the issue of sexist scholarship has rendered biological sex differences a suspect category. Arguing that scientific discourse does not take place in a political vacuum, many feminists have concluded that the introduction of biological variables can only be detrimental to women because scientific practice reflects popular prejudices.

Baer and Bositis's openness in taking biology seriously is welcome and refreshing. For good reasons and bad, social scientists, including those who see themselves as feminist, have suppressed consideration of biological realities. They have tended, implicitly, to accept the notion of tabula rasa-that “blank” creature waiting to be written on by the organized forces of society-that underlies so much political theorizing in the West. As the philosopher Mary Midgley points out in her fascinating book, Beast terpretive account of human thought and action that aims for understanding and probes meaning.) The method understood as scientific, and the authors implicitly endorse it, is one that may broadly be called methodological individualism. One builds from certain rock-bottom particulars- adding them up, or relating them to one another- and the sum of these particulars is one's explanation of a given phenomenon. “Science,” says Hobbes, “is the knowledge of consequences and the dependence of one fact upon another.” I Baer and Bositis implicitly endorse this model, despite the fact that natural sclentists long ago gave up on this understanding of causality. So-although they are absolutely correct to argue that “psychological” explanation alone will not serve, nor will social learning arguments-the particular way in which they draw biology into the picture simply affixes it to the multi-causal scene as another variable or set of variables to be concatenated with many others.

Previous studies at the Program for Biosocial Research at Northern Illinois University utilized an electronic instrument to conduct voice analysis for the purpose of determining the amount of psychophysiological stress experienced by a political speaker. These studies then tested the technique on the speeches of three presidents during international crises: John F. Kennedy during the 1961 Berlin crisis, Lyndon B. Johnson during the crisis in the Dominican Republic, and Richard M. Nixon during the United States incursion into Cambodia.