It is often said that the foreign policy of the United States is in need of maturing and that the American people and their government must grow up if they want to emerge victorious from the trials of our age. It would be truer to say that this generation of Americans must shed the illusions of their fathers and grandfathers and relearn the great principles of statecraft which guided the path of the republic in the first decade and—in moralistic disguise—in the first century of its existence. The United States offers the singular spectacle of a commonwealth whose political wisdom did not grow slowly through the accumulation and articulation of experiences. Quite to the contrary, the full flowering of its political wisdom was coeval with its birth as an independent nation—nay, it owed its existence and survival as an independent nation to those extraordinary qualities of political insight, historic perspective, and common sense which the first generation of Americans applied to the affairs of state.

This classic age of American statecraft comes to an end with the physical disappearance of that generation of American statesmen. The rich and varied landscape in which they had planted all that is worthwhile in the tradition of Western political thought was allowed to go to waste. It became a faint and baffling remembrance, a symbol to be worshipped rather than a source of inspiration and a guide for action.

Who rules Britain? For the political scientist hunting out the real core of power, the question is hard to answer. Students of British politics have variously concluded that the Cabinet, or Parliament, or the party in power, or the administrative class of civil servants, or the “Big Three” (or Four, or Five)—or some combination of these—actually held the reins of authority. Constitutionally, however, the question is an easy one. Formal power rests with a majority of the Members of Parliament. This majority can pass laws and raise money, can bring down governments and make new ones, can change the Constitution itself.

Those who have ruled Britain in this sense during the past five years have been a few hundred Labor Members of the House of Commons, organized in the Parliamentary Labor Party. Constitutionally, this is the ruling group, every member of which has equal power. In fact, a small minority of Labor Members, grouped in or about the Cabinet, actually make the great decisions of state. At the same time, the large majority of Labor Members not only lack real power but even in their very name —Backbenchers—they appear as the symbols of impotence.

The aim of this paper is to make a modest contribution toward improved understanding of how the political process actually operates in America. It reports the results of some research on individual citizen participation in political activity and describes a tool that may be used for classifying individuals in terms of the amount of political activity in which they engage. Finally it outlines some differences that are observed when attitudes with respect to some public personalities and issues held by the politically active portion of the citizenry are compared with attitudes of the politically inert.

The research study from which the data reported here are derived is one of a long series carried out over the past five years for the Public Relations Department of the Standard Oil Company (N. J.). The primary purpose of these studies has been to find out how the company stands with the American public —to learn what virtues people credit to it and what sins they think it is committing. Research on such topics inevitably involves the question of who among the vast body of American citizens are most articulate in their feelings about big corporations and most concerned to defend or attack them. Since similar questions arise whenever the citizen's role with respect to any public issue comes up, the tools developed for corporation public relations may have much wider applicability and usefulness.

This is a report on the interviews used in preparing Southern Politics in State and Nation. The book, by V. O. Key, Jr., resulted from a study carried on over a three year period at the Bureau of Public Administration of the University of Alabama. Roscoe C. Martin, then director of the Bureau, originated the project, obtained support for it from the Rockefeller Foundation and gave it general supervision.

Mr. Key was assisted by several persons, including this writer. He directed a large share of the project's resources to the task of interviewing participants in southern politics. Forty per cent of the budget was allocated for the salaries and expenses of the two interviewers and for transcribing their reports. Thirty per cent of the time of the senior staff members and twenty per cent of the total time of the whole staff was spent in the field. The decision to devote this large amount of time and money to interviewing rested on the conviction that much significant political information could be obtained only from politicians themselves or from their close associates. It rested also on the belief that accurate observation would eliminate the need for conjecture about many political phenomena.

Some twenty years ago Harold D. Lasswell, in his Psychopathology and Politics, attempted to show by case histories some of the motivations and personality characteristics of certain political types. This book was a pioneer in its field because it applied the psychoanalytic “free fantasy” technique to the field of political science. The case histories were chosen from those in selected hospitals and from the official files of certain psychiatrists. From these case histories, Lasswell was able to obtain information which threw new light on the actions of such political types as the agitator and the administrator. He then developed the formula p}d}r = P; where p equals private motives, d equals displacement onto public objects, r equals rationalization in terms of public interest, } means “transformed into,” and P signifies the political man.

Lasswell's techniques are invaluable for the study of political personalities and motives. It is unfortunate that others have not utilized them more fully and thereby added to the store of knowledge concerning the personalities of politicians; but a partial explanation lies in the fact that the techniques themselves present obstacles to their ready use by political scientists. In the first place, the case histories are usually confidential and difficult to obtain.

It is a lesser question for the partisans of democracy to find means of governing the people than to get the people to choose the men most capable of governing.
Alexis de Tocqueville, in a letter to John Stuart Mill.

Politics by leadership is one of the distinguishing features of the twentieth century. If the eighteenth century enunciated popular sovereignty and direct democracy as a major theme in democratic thought and the nineteenth century was concerned with the challenge of stratification and group conflict, then twentieth century trends have made us sensitive to the role of leadership. The search for the values of security and equality have led to changes in the character of politics. If one were to delineate this newer pattern of a politics by leadership, it would include the following: (1) the shift in the center of conflict resolution and initiative from parliamentary bodies and economic institutions to executive leadership; (2) the proliferation of the immediate office of the chief executive from its cabinet-restricted status to a collectivity of co-adjuting instrumentalities; (3) the tendency toward increased centralization of political parties, with the subordination of the victorious parties as instruments for the chief executive; (4) the calculated manipulation of irrationalities by political leadership through the vast power-potential of mass communications; (5) the displacement of the amateur by the professional politician and civil servant; (6) the growth of bureaucracy as a source and technique of executive power but also as a fulcrum which all contestants for power attempt to employ; (7) the growth of interest groups in size, number and influence, with the tendency toward bureaucratization of their internal structure; (8) the changing role of the public that finds its effective voice in a direct and an interactive relation with the chief executive.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how public opinion research can aid political parties in adopting sound policies and wise courses of action. In view of the crisis brought to a climax by events in Korea, the analysis is confined to how current public opinion research can be used immediately and to how public opinion methodology can be adapted now for more extensive practical application. In addition, since public opinion research throws into focus the critical problems facing political parties, certain of these problems are noted to show the limitations of public opinion research as it can now be used.

Before the 1948 polling difficulties, research in the form of questionnaires showed that politicians had a high regard for public opinion polls. Although apparently no comparable research has been conducted since then on their attitude toward polls, statements of individual politicians have shown that polls have dropped sharply in prestige. At present, public opinion research techniques are perhaps undervalued, as they were once overvalued.

There is a primary misconception about polls which has been fostered in part by the pollsters themselves. Polls are not accurate to a percentage point or within an artificial “margin of error” under certain circumstances.