Since I have been unable to find a formula which might justify simply publishing the welter of mixed responses I have received, I thought I might at least provide those who responded to my inquiry (84.2%) with a basis for assessing our common enterprise.

The profession would appear to be inordinately healthy. There is certainly an abundance of self-restraint, decorum, ingenuity, and determination not to be taken in by mischievous gimmicks. Nelson Polsby was not alone in seeing that the survey was rigged to fail since it would publicize work which, as he put it, ought to enjoy a little benign neglect. A preponderant majority of respondents managed to be evasive by a display of wit and cunning which surely excused the fact that they had resolved to hurt no one. Those who were not masterfully evasive met the issue head-on. In what has suddenly become an especially engaging note, Clinton Rossiter wrote a week before his death:

I would like to oblige, but the overpowering fact is that I would hurt the feelings of a very good friend were I to single out the article or book published during the last quarter century that seems to me to “have received too much attention.” I have been a witness to and target of just a little too much nastiness in our profession in the past couple of years, and I hope you will excuse me from adding, however tactfully, to the sum total of nastiness that seems to pervade this world.

“… [T]here is no necessary conflict among these three desires of the American social scientist: to be a scientist like physical and biological scientists, to provide useful technical services, and to be significant at the level of policy. The chapters of this symposium are intended to illustrate their compatibility.”

This statement indicates a major theme of The Policy Sciences – a volume that marked, as of 1951, the aspirations of a group of leading American social scientists for the policy applications of their disciplines. The harmony of goals that it suggests is no longer evident today.

The possible incompatibilities among the goals of pure science, applied science, and policy can be seen by examining The Policy Sciences in two decades' perspective. They are of three major kinds:

1. To provide intelligent advice on practical problems, the social science disciplines need to include systematic valuative discourse in a way that natural science does not.

2. Applied social science (like applied science generally) differs from pure natural science in stressing valuative dependent variables that may not be closely related to the conceptual schemes of pure science, and independent variables related to alternative choices open to the actor.

3. Different roles and channels of influence are appropriate for pure and applied science; and for applied social science in democratic regimes, participation and consent on the part of those influenced are of vital significance.

Leading articles in both the current issue of APSR (Winter 1969–70) and of PS (Fall 1969) attack an identical quotation from my chapter in “The Public and the Polity” in Contemporary Political Science. In reply to Professor Sheldon Wolin's article in APSR, I wrote a short reply for he clearly misinterpreted the quotation in an otherwise serious article. Professor Surkin's piece, “Sense and Non-sense in Politics” in PS frustrates all my attempts at a short reply, for the issue is not the text of a particular quotation that has become a minor cause célebre, but rather the central thesis of his article that is in error. His is an error that has become sufficiently widely diffused these days that it needs a serious reply.

The issue is the role of value judgments in political science. The common error is the assertion that modern political science has been non-normative and value-free, or at least has aimed at being so. The statement is usually made in criticism of so-called behavioral political science and in favor of a supposed post-behavioral revolution, which is alleged to be seeking a new concern for relevance. Professor Surkin's article is a particular variant on that theme. He states that his purpose is to show that a particular social science methodology, namely, “claimed objectivity and value neutrality” leads to a “non-objective role for social science knowledge in the service of the dominant institutions in American society”. Here is an important set of allegations.

Life is paradoxical. The more responsive the public has been in providing and expanding educational opportunities the more the universities seem to be threatened by hostile forces and instability. The faster the educator and the education-oriented politician run after their constituencies, the more their constituencies seem to feel alienated. So clear has been this relationship between the expansion and the instability that one is tempted to say that the effort was the cause.

This is a distinct possibility. Our remarkable ability to provide physical plant, teachers and quality courses for higher education is admired and emulated the world over. Compared to Europe, the quality is high even as measured by access to professors, despite the complaints one hears. The crunch does not come, therefore, from insufficient response or poor quality. The crunch comes from the change in substantive outputs of the university. That is to say, higher education in America has been undergoing a revolution in the character of its activities.

This revolution in substance or output cannot be attributed to the demands for more education. Demands on the scale of thousands and millions are simply not that specific. Changes in the nature and function of the university were made by donors, legislators, and college administrators. But the primary influence has been that of educational philosophers and educational policy-makers located in the college presidencies and the upper regions of the large bureaucratized philanthropies. Surprisingly enough, business executives have not been that specifically influential.

The profile of Femina Studens rei Publicae which has developed from the gross statistics and the 1969 survey of departments of political science shows that the professional woman in academia is primarily in the lower ranks, often not even on the first step of the promotion “ladder” and is teaching undergraduates. Although her habitat is the small college, there are signs that she may be emerging from it to the faculties of the city and state university. Recently she has been receiving Ph.D.'s at a greater rate of growth than that for men, but she still remains a small minority. In considering the following ratios related to her publications, other evidences of scholarship, and the recognition accorded to her in the profession, it is important to stress that the woman political scientist who is teaching constitutes five percent of the membership in the A.P.S.A. and according to the 1969 survey, 8.4 percent of all faculty in political science in colleges and universities.

In its election for offices in 1969, the American Political Science Association, apparently for the first time in its rarely turbulent history, found the nominees of its Official Nominating Committee challenged by an insurgent group. In order to handle this unprecedented situation, it was decided at the annual meeting to carry out the election by mail ballot and the American Arbitration Association was engaged to administer the operation.

Ballots were mailed to the 13,061 members of the Association in October, 1969. Accompanying them were materials containing statements of belief and biographies for each of the candidates. The response rate was 64 percent.

The ballots carried the contestants indicated in Table 1. For each office the candidates are listed in the Table in the order of their vote result (they were listed in alphabetical order on the ballot) and for each candidate the group endorsements, as they were presented on the ballot, are indicated. Except for the group endorsements, no identifying information accompanied the names of the candidates on the ballots.

The issue of student participation in departmental affairs may first come to the attention of the faculty on the day a front-page story appears in the student newspaper:

“Eighty-five concerned political science majors and minors held a meeting Wednesday to decide whether or not they wanted to have a voice in the affairs of the political science department.

There was not much debate but there was a lot of discussion in trying to decide the answers to such questions as: Do we want merely a voice on the different faculty committees? Do we want a vote on the different committees? Do we feel we should participate on all committees, including the hiring, firing and tenure committee?

It was nearly unanimously decided that the bargaining committee should strive for no less than one-half the vote on ALL committees, including the hiring, firing and tenure committee.”

Or the opening shot in the battle for “participatory democracy” may be fired by way of a mimeographed hand-out:

“The emergence of an undergraduate organization in the political science department is indicative of student recognition of and concern for problems in both the content of courses and in the processes whereby decisions in this department are made …. We do not feel that accepting advisory roles on existing committees is a satisfactory method for implementing such change. We must be the spokesmen for our own interests, and that means being our own representatives.

The concept of representation has been much discussed and debated in the literature of political science. My intent here is not to review or evaluate the different meanings or implications that have been given to this concept but instead to focus on specific voting schemes which would allow the expression of minority (as well as majority) viewpoints in an elected voting body in rough proportion to their numbers of supporters in a larger electorate. As a procedural question, we shall look at representation in terms of the operation of voting rules which allow the preferences of a group to be translated into the election of representatives who would be capable of expressing the group's preferences in an elected body. Whether these representatives, upon election, should faithfully attempt to reflect the views of their supporters (the “delegate model”), or instead exercise their own independent judgments on matters before the body (the “free agent model”), is a normative question which will not be considered in this analysis.

I shall begin the analysis by postulating two abstract requirements that a voting scheme of proportional representation should meet. I shall then suggest a particular voting scheme which meets these requirements, analyze the logical interrelatedness of the requirements, and finally show the application of the proposed voting scheme to the election of officers and Council members of the American Political Science Association (APSA), using the results of the 1969 APSA election for purposes of illustration. The effects which the size of an elected body has on the strategies available to groups seeking representation on it will be analyzed and illustrated in the Appendix.

This is a study of participation in six annual meetings (1964–1969) of the American Political Science Association. Participation was defined to include not only membership on panels but also membership on the Program Committee (i.e., program chairman and chairman of the panel categories-here called subject area chairman). Data on participation were gathered from the programs of the meetings and background data on participation were obtained from the APSA Biographical Directory (Fifth Edition, 1968 and Fourth Edition, 1961) and from other sources.

The study is divided into three parts: multiple participants and two sub-groups thereof, “rule violators” and the leadership group. Multiple participants (MPs) are those who participated in APSA annual meetings two or more times during the period 1964–1969. “Rule violators” (RVs) are those who, contrary to what is stated to be APSA general policy, participated more than one time in any single year. The leadership group includes members of the program committee.

In recent issues of PS, American political and social scientists have been accused – by their colleagues – of subservience to the established order. Of equal concern to the profession should be the paradoxical plight of their Brazilian colleagues who, while pursuing much the same goals and utilizing many of the same techniques of inquiry, find themselves accused – by their government – of subversion, and very actively persecuted for this charge.

The following is a description of the situation of Brazilian social scientists since December 1968. Official censorship, self-imposed prudence and the understandable propensity for foreign journalists to concentrate on the more spectacular and horrifying aspects of Brazil's current regime, e.g. torture, assassination by “political police” or vigilante group, arbitrary arrest and loss of political rights by prominent politicians, make it difficult to obtain reliable documentation. Much of the information I gathered personally during a three week stay in Rio de Janeiro, Sāo Paulo and Pôrto Alegre in May of 1969. This has been updated with the help of Brazilian scholars resident in the United States. For obvious reasons I cannot recognize their efforts personally. I would, however, like to thank Mr. William Wipfler of National Council of the Churches of Christ and Professor Ralph Della Cava of Queens University who are preparing a comprehensive dossier on civil rights violations for proximate publication. Peter Bell, formerly with the Ford Foundation in Rio, has been particularly helpful with information and criticism.

Many of the problems facing higher education are not capable of correction within the classroom setting. Yet, a great deal can be accomplished by an individual instructor in order to combat the often-spoken student criticism that classroom experiences are fundamentally deficient and unsatisfactory. This article offers political scientists a reasonably simple method of increasing student interest and participation in the Introductory American Government course. It concerns the design of a term paper which attempts to gain the active involvement of students through the use of primary source material.

The teacher of an introductory American Government course today is probably very encouraged by enormous student interest in the workings of the political system. At the same time, it is not improbable that he is discouraged by the generally low level of substantive knowledge of current events and historical facts. In addition, he is disturbed to find that students do not read books and rarely read newspapers, that they rely upon television and rumor to support their substantive beliefs. The instructor is, additionally, torn between the pull of current issues as a source of classroom learning, and the commitment to the subject matter and methodology of the discipline, as the focus of classroom attention.

In addition, those who assign term papers to their classes must fight the widespread and probably accurate student presumption that most term papers are added drudgery complementing the deadening succession of textbook assignments and blue-book examinations; that they are time-consuming, dull and irrelevant. Furthermore, students complain, again in justice, that their work is not usually read by the professor teaching them, or if read, is considered in a cursory fashion, so that hours of student effort result in simply a grade and possibly a one sentence comment along with, of course, the correction of a few grammatical and spelling errors.