As one looks back on the important developments in political science over the past two decades, there is much to be applauded. While it may be premature to say that we have come “of age” as a scientific discipline, the field is clearly in better shape today than it was in the early 1950s. One indicator is the ratio between mere speculation and observed empirical regularities reported in our journal articles. Another is the decline in the percentage (if not in absolute numbers) of our colleagues who insist that political phenomena are just not amenable to scientific examination. A third might be the dramatic increase in the number of political scientists who have been exposed to training in the techniques and rationale of data making and data analysis. The list could be extended, but we need not do so here.

On the other hand, a stance of comfortable complacency would be very premature. Not only have we fared badly in coming to grips with the knowledge-action relationship in the abstract, but we have by and large done a poor job of shaping the policies of our respective national, provincial, and local governments. Since others as well as myself have dealt—if not definitively—with these issues before, let me eschew further discussion of the knowledge application question for the moment, and go on to matters of basic research. Of the more serious flaws to date, two stand out particularly. One is the lack of balance between a concern for cumulativeness on the one hand and the need for innovation on the other. My impression is that students of national politics (at least those who work in the vineyard of empirical regularities) have been more than conscientious in staying with one set of problems, such as the relationship between political attitudes and voting behavior. But students of inter-national politics have, conversely, tended to move all too quickly from one problem to another, long before cumulative evidence has been generated and before our findings are integrated into coherent wholes.

This paper presents a new statistical method that is well-suited to building and testing theories of change. An exploratory, robust two-way analysis of New Hampshire’s county-level presidential election returns for the past eighty years illustrates how this general technique can help to clarify theoretical concepts as well as to reveal systematic regularities in empirical data.

Because two-way analysis involves a number of novel techniques, this paper is primarily a methodological exposition. It devotes much more attention to step-by-step details of how the analysis was carried out, and the accompanying exhibits contain much more detailed information than normally would be the case for reporting results of such research.

In contrast to classical methods, the techniques presented in this paper are intended primarily for exploration of data rather than for statistical inference. They require very few assumptions about the data, and they are not unduly influenced by extreme or missing values. Graphic and semi-graphic devices keep the analyst close to the data and make it possible to display many numbers simultaneously in contrast to simple single-number summaries which can conceal information. Removing obvious regularities in the data facilitates discovery of other underlying patterns.

The current interest in fertility decline and the demographic transition has led to extensive study of the secular decline of fertility in countries and sub-regions of presently low fertility. Extensive work has been completed or is underway regarding Europe in connection with Ansley Coale’s European Fertility Project. In addition, considerable attention has been paid to fertility in the demographic experience of the United States, and to other areas which have experienced fertility decline. One problem with most historical fertility studies is that they lack data on age-specific fertility and also on fertility differentials. So, for example, the European Fertility Project has relied on a form of indirect standardization, the indices of overall fertility (If), marital fertility (Ig), illegitimate fertility (Ih), and proportions married (Im), to compensate for the lack of age-specific data. There are similar historical data constraints on some types of differential fertility categorizations (e.g., social class, literacy, occupation, nativity).

The persons in this story make up a stem family at a particular point in its life course; that is, they form a domestic group composed of parents (in this case, a single surviving parent) living with one married child who has taken over the family property and has begun rearing offspring of his own. There are a number of variations on this story in the folklore of early modern Central Europe. Each story treats the discords which can arise in such families. For example, in a shorter and somewhat coarser version than that given above, the father was hungry and a pig’s trough replaces the two yards of cloth. Despite differences in language and emotional content, however, the moral is generally the same: parents deserve to share in what they have helped create, and their presence in the family serves to teach intergenerational cooperation and respect to the young. In the version quoted here this point is made especially well by having the child remind the father of his obligations. We are confronted here by a thoroughly socialized child whose invocation of the Golden Rule reestablishes order and harmony in the family’s affairs.

In 1853, the First International Statistical Congress unanimously voted a resolution recommending the establishment of population registers in every country:

Such a register has existed in Belgium since 1846. No other country except Sweden, Finland, and Hungary had much experience with such documents in 1853. The resolution was nevertheless ratified in successive International Congresses, but there was no rush to implement it. Several European countries followed suit, including small German states, the Netherlands in 1856, and Italy in 1864. According to a recent United Nations survey, eleven European countries have population registers that trace their origins to the nineteenth century or before: Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

The following essays originated in a session of the Social Science History Association in October, 1976. Two of the participants, Bernard S. Silberman and Alfred J. Rieber, were asked to prepare studies of bureaucracy in Japan and Russia which also dealt with the problems of political power relationships in developing bureaucracies. A third participant, Cyril E. Black, was asked to compare, criticize, and synthesize the first two papers in a third paper of his own. Briefly, the substantive point of these essays as a group is that they deal with the effect of political decisions in achieving certain changes in economic, technical, and military structures and operations. They focus attention on the effects within a complex apparatus set up to administer those political decisions, the state bureaucracy. The essays themselves reveal, and Black’s synthesis details, that the points of similarity between Japan and Russia as they change across time are as numerous and instructive as are the differences. In this introduction, I will call attention to some aspects of these studies which, although technical, are nevertheless important to the research enterprise they represent.

For the better part of the past generation, social scientists have devoted much of their best effort to the study of modernization. Economists have examined growth and development. Demographers have detailed the demographic transition. Anthropoligists have observed the dissolution of traditional societies. Social psychologists have measured the emergence of achievement motivation. Sociologists have traced the myriad patterns of secularization, professionalization, bureaucratization, and rationalization. Yet for all their effort it seems scarcely an exaggeration to call modernization still the critical enigma of contemporary social science. Its meaning appears to recede ever further from us. Its substance grows more mysterious the more that it is studied, and its origin and evolution become more inexplicable.

Contemporary Denver is a metropolis shaped in the automobile age. When the Denver Planning Commission first warned about the “sinister disease” of decentralization in 1941 and reported “startling evidences of the flight of Denver residents across the corporate boundaries,” 72.4 percent of the population of the five-county Denver area lived within the city itself (Table 1). Thirty-five years later, metropolitan area population had more than tripled, but suburban growth had cut Denver’s share of the total to 35.8 percent. The suburban counties of Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder and Jefferson accounted for one third of all Coloradans, and local residents ranked surburban sprawl as one of three major problems of the metropolitan area.

Since the publication of V.O. Key’s seminal article, “A Theory of Critical Elections,” numerous scholars have worked to add theoretical depth and analytical sophistication to the study of critical elections. On the latter count, efforts have been ambitious and illuminating; on the former they largely have not. Typologies of elections and descriptions of electoral change have emerged from empirical analyses of aggregate vote data. A variety of techniques ranging from straight forwara t-tests to correlation matrices to a particularly rich analysis of variance approach have been employed to uncover patterns of electoral change. But while a good deal of descriptive, analytical headway has been made, the development of a theory of electoral change has lagged behind.

What theoretical overtures have been made, generally regard critical elections both as the products of prolonged malfunctions in the political system and as the means by which the system begins to correct these malfunctions. According to this view, American electoral politics follows a cyclic dynamic. Critical elections mark the beginnings and the ends of adjoining periods (i.e., party systems) in a repeating cycle of stability, disequilibrium, and adjustment.

One of the aspects of Japanese political development most puzzling to historians and political scientists is the seemingly rapid pendulum change from bureaucratic oligarchy to parliamentary cabinet to civil-military bureaucratic forms of government in the period between 1868 and 1945. Generally the argument that has been presented at least by Western observers is that, as Japan proceeded through the modernization process, each major stage of that process was reflected in a political transformation. One recent description states:

Writing more than twenty five years ago, W. S. Robinson assailed the assumption implicit in much empirical work that statistical measures computed for aggregate units—states, provinces, counties, cities, wards, school districts—could be used in place of corresponding measures for the individuals comprising these units. Robinson was not the first scholar to expose the pitfalls of naive inferences from group level data to individual level behavior. But he first brought this problem forcefully to the attention of practicing social scientists. Focusing on the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient (r), Robinson proved that an aggregate level coefficient need not be equal in value to the corresponding individual level coefficient. Blending empirical examples with mathematical demonstration, Robinson showed that when the individual level correlation between being a native American and being able to read was computed for state level percentages of natives and literates, its value changed from .118 to -.526. Thus an investigator relying on correlations computed for the American states would not even correctly assess the direction of the relationship between nativity and literacy. Coining new jargon, Robinson used the term “ecological fallacy” to describe a naive inference from the group to the individual level of analysis.

The reverberations of Robinson’s work are still being felt by those interested in the past behavior of individuals. Historians without access to survey research and experimental techniques must rely on data that have already been collected. Because such data so often pertain to aggregate units, historians frequently must use cross-level inference to estimate the behavior of individuals. Having paid virtually no attention to the methodology of cross-level inference for almost twenty years after the publication of Robinson’s work, historians have suddenly discovered the “ecological fallacy.” Authors dread to see the term “ecological fallacy” scribbled in the margins of their work; to fall victim to this fallacy is to forfeit one’s claim to methodological legitimacy.

Economic history, as a combination of two disciplines, has had a rather curious evolution. This is indicated both by looking at its checkered academic development in the United States, and by contrasting its evolution in the United States with that in England and elsewhere. Whereas in England and most European countries economic history is regarded as a separate discipline, with its own departments and professors, such an academic separation does not exist in the United States. Here, reflecting the dual nature of the subject, economic historians can be found in either history departments or in economics departments, and the nature of academic specialization often means they teach two distinct student bodies, with infrequent communication across disciplinary lines. Separatist tendencies have seemed more pronounced in the past two decades, when there was a marked change in the study of economic history in the United States, a change that has also affected other sub disciplines of history: quantification and model-building have spread into many areas of historical study. But in some measure this movement in economics reflects the recent tendency for economic historians to come from economics, rather than from history departments. Since the causes of the change seem, in part, peculiar to the United States, what I say about recent tendencies in the field may not fully reflect developments in other countries, although there seem to be similar trends emerging, albeit with some lags, in England and elsewhere in Europe.

Most of the major historical interpretations of imperial and Soviet Russia share, at bottom, a common belief that the dominant characteristics of the political system are teleological and dualist, indeed even Manichaean. The purpose of this paper is to suggest an alternative model of politics based on a plurality of groups emerging from the peculiar evolution of the bureaucracy in Imperial Russia. Before taking up the substantive part of the argument, however, I wish to review briefly what I mean by the teleological-dualist interpretation which remains up to the present the reigning orthodoxy in the field.

Professor Pessen’s recent work on antebellum wealth holding and social structure has been devoted to deflating the “egalitarian myth.” On the basis of data gathered in an extensive study of the rich of four large northeastern cities in the antebellum period, Pessen concludes that the egalitarian hypothesis is not sustained. Wealth was unequally distributed and economic mobility was very limited, in the sense that the rich had rich forbears. Although the origins of great fortunes lay with entrepreneurial types, their descendents gradually withdrew from active business life, maintaining general oversight of wealth that grew almost automatically as the result of fortunate early investments, profitable marriages, and the advantages of membership in a small elite.

By now it is received doctrine of long standing that the economies of northwestern Europe were repeatedly held in check by diminishing returns in the Middle Ages. Much of this argument has been focused on the course of economic affairs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This period is commonly pictured as the most dramatic example of the normal tendency for population growth to place increasingly severe pressure on the resource base. The evidence most frequently offered to support this thesis for the fourteenth century is the substantial decline in population to which the Black Death is believed to be a dramatic, but by no means exclusive, contributor. This is not to say that it has been generally believed that no growth occurred in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, many proponents of this view stress that there were lengthy subperiods within the era in which both per capita income and population increased. It is held that ultimately such gains were reversed and pushed back to the level of subsistence, however. The dominant force is seen to be diminishing returns à la Malthus in that population always continued to increase until eventually—intermittent growth notwithstanding—it spread the available nonhuman resources so thinly across the population that further increase in its size was impossible. Probably the best known spokesman for this thesis is Professor M. M. Postan. He has spent a good part of his distinguished career constructing the conceptual model and assembling the historical evidence to substantiate the hypothesis. The essentials of his position are supported by the other widely recognized commentators on the question-Georges Duby, N. J. G. Pounds, Sylvia L. Thrupp, J. Z. Titow, and B. H. Slicher Van Bath. Recently the view has been given a modern, formal specification in the works of Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas and that of Ronald Lee. In recent years some of the components of this explanation have been challenged by scholars such as Barbara Harvey, John Hatcher, Mavis Mate, N. J. Mayhew, and D. G. Watts. The traditional view seems to have survived such doubts, however, as is apparent in the tendency of scholars to continue to couch their investigations of economic affairs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in that framework. The issue is certainly important enough, however, that a comprehensive reexamination of it is warranted.

The papers by Bernard S. Silberman and Alfred J. Rieber raise two categories of problems which interact to illuminate some central issues of comparative social science. One category of issues concerns the relative ability of Japan and Russia in terms of their heritage of political institutions to take advantage of opportunities for development offered by the revolution in science and technology; and the relative capacity of these two countries in this regard as compared both with the earlier-modernizing Western societies and with those in other parts of the world that modernized later. Japan and Russia are one of the pairs of countries that can offer the most fruitful point of departure for wide-ranging comparisons.