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The 1971 APSA Elections
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2022
Extract
For the third consecutive year there was a contest for offices of the American Political Science Association. The 1971 APSA election saw two groups fielding complete slates: the APSA nominating committee, and the Caucus for a New Political Science (overlapping in one Council nominee, Christian Bay) and two groups nominating or endorsing candidates, the Ad Hoc Committee and the Women's Caucus. The Ad Hoc Committee endorsements coincided with the nominations of the APSA nominating committee, while the ten Women's Caucus endorsements went to seven nominees endorsed by the New Caucus (three of whom were women) and four nominees of the APSA Nominating Committee (two of whom were women), the overlap being Christian Bay. (See Table 1).
The 1971 Election had much in common with its predecessors. The principal differences shown in Table 2 are a continuing decline in voter turnout, a slow but continuing increase in the number of women candidates, and the entry of the Women's Caucus into the electoral lists.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1972
Footnotes
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Data processing and analysis were supported by the Research Foundation of the State University of New York, Grant #031–7237A. We wish to acknowledge our thanks to Gordon Tullock and Joseph Tanenhaus for suggesting the undertaking of this project and to our predecessors John E. Mueller, (“The Political Scientist Decides: An Examination of the 1969 APSA Ballots,” PS, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Summer 1970), pp. 311–320), and Charles Taylor and Gordon Tullock (“The 1970 APSA Elections,” PS Vol. 4, No. 3 (Summer 1971), pp. 349–357) from whose work we freely borrowed. Particular thanks also go to Paula Newhouse, without whose programming assistance this project could not have been carried out.
References
1 Albeit with some (!) reluctance, The Ad Hoc Committee's statement read (in part) as follows.
“First, the Ad Hoc Committee believes that almost all of the nominees proposed by the APSA Nominating Committee share the goals and professional orientations that unite Ad Hoc supporters.
Second, although one of the persons (Christian Bay), nominated for the Council by the APSA Nominating Committee, is also the chairman of the Caucus for a New Political Science and presumably shares its desire to use the Association as the action arm of its own political preferences, the Ad Hoc Committee decided, with some reservations to support his nomination to the Council. The desirability of unity and of the depolarization of the profession took precedence this year over the Committee's desire to provide members with a choice on the still vital issue of whether we should elect as officers persons who do not share the basic purposes of the Association as stated in its Constitution and embodied in its practices.”
2 The statement of the Women's Caucus distinguished between three candidates nominated by the Women's Caucus (May, D. James, and Tinker) and seven others who were “nominated for the purpose of endorsement.” In accordance with the APSA Council decision we treat votes for Stiehm, who was erroneously listed on the ballot even though she was not a candidate, as if they were votes for May.
3 The decline in turnout might be attributed to any number of factors. A prima facie case can be made for simple boredom. With unanimous agreement on nominees from the Ad Hoc Committee and the APSA Nominating Committee, predicting the winners in the 1971 election was not difficult, and the novelty of the Caucus insurgency and Ad Hoc “counter revolution” had worn off. Moreover, five Caucusendorsed nominees on the (1971–72) APSA Council (Prestage, Kariel, Mitchell, Robinson, and Rustow) — all of whom had been nominated by the APSA Nominating Committee and two of whom had also been endorsed by the Ad Hoc Committee — had been absorbed without any noticeable detriment to the Council's ability to carry out the basic purposes of the Association as stated in its Constitution and embodied in its practices. We are not, however, claiming an “End to Ideology,” since such predictions are apt to prove embarrassingly premature, and in 1971, as we shall see, ballot patterns still showed the presence of major differences in voter orientations to the two groupings. Also, there were clearcut thematic differences in the ballot statements of PS + AH and New Caucus 1971 nominees.
4 Note, however, there are over three million possible whole ballot patterns even if each voter is assumed to have voted for a full fourteen candidates. As it was, only 60.6% of the voters cast a full fourteen votes, and 8.6% of the voters cast fewer than 10 votes. The mean number of votes cast was 12.8 on the ballot as a whole, 7.1 for the Council races, and 2.8 for the vice-presidencies.
5 Brams, Steven J., “The APSA and Minority Representation,” PS: Political Science & Politics, Vol. 3 No. 3 (Summer 1970), pp. 321–335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 “Minutes of the APSA Annual Business Meeting,” PS, Vol. 5 No. 1 (Winter 1972), p. 34.
7 Personal communications from a member of the 1970–71 APSA Nominating Committee.
8 Cf. Wolfe, Alan, “Practicing the Pluralism We Preach: Internal Processes in the American Political Science Association,” Antioch Review, No. 29 (1969–1970), pp. 353–374.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 For documentation, see Nie, Bent, and Hull, , SPSS: Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, New York: McGraw Hill, 1970 Google Scholar, Chapter 17.
10 Bay's loading on this factor was 275, i.e. Bay scaled with the New Caucus endorsed candidates rather than with those endorsed by PS,AH — but only marginally so: all the New Caucus endorsed candidates loaded positively on this factor and the next lowest positive candidate loading on this factor was .685.
11 A third factor, the next most important, could not be identified (at least by this author). However, this third factor only accounted for under — of the variance. Use of varimax rotation did not significantly alter these results. Although it did bifurcate Factor 1 into a “Caucus” factor and a “PS,AH” factor.
12 Of the nominees endorsed by the Women's Caucus only Roelofs and Bay do not have significant positive loading on Factor 2, and no candidate not endorsed by the Women's Caucus has a significant positive loading on this factor.
13 For reasons having to do with the nature of the mathematical constraints imposed by multi-candidate elections, this estimate of explained variance is marginally too high — exactly how much too high we are not at present sure.
14 I.e., we read the statements over several times.
15 Three of these 13 New Caucus nominees did not submit biographical statements.
16 We might also note that all PS, AH candidates were tenured and 11 out of 13 (12 of 14 if we include Bay) were full professors. Only 9 of the New Caucus nominees were tenured and only 4 were full professors (5 including Bay).