The extraordinary discrepancy in the popular vote for President Eisenhower and the vote for Republican Congressmen in the 1956 election dramatized a privilege which the American electorate exercises almost uniquely in the democratic world, the right of voters to split their ballots between the candidates of opposing political parties.

The fact of ballot splitting in American elections is of course a commonplace but it has not been widely studied and it is not well understood. The aggregative statistics from the 1956 election make it apparent that millions of voters must have chosen President Eisenhower and a Democratic congressman but they do not tell us how many voters split their ballots in the opposite direction or how many voted for president but not for Congressman, and they give us only the vaguest indications of what was in the voters' minds when they crossed party lines in marking their ballots.

The Senate of the United States, like other institutionalized groups, operates in accordance with a complex of norms for members' behavior which are understood by few outsiders and perhaps not completely by all senators. Formal written rules governing the behavior of members take into account the division of functions between the two major parties and the operation of the Senate's institutionalized sub-groups, the committees. These are supplemented by unwritten rules that are often more consequential. Members have generally accepted notions of the way the Senate as a body ought to perform its public business and regulate its internal affairs, and the way members ought to behave toward the Senate and toward each other.

Senatorial behavior would be difficult enough to study if this were all, but it is not. For one thing, the norms are by no means undifferentiated for the entire membership. Within the Senate a number of identifiable official and unofficial “statuses” (or “positions”) besides that of United States Senator can be distinguished, each carrying with it a “role” in the form of the behavior expected by the Senate and the public of the person occupying that status. The leadership positions in the two parties and the committee chairmanships come immediately to mind as examples of official statuses.

Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, the study of American city government is faced with desiccation upon a sea of plenty. While the literature of municipal government continues to grow, fed by bureaus of government research and the teaching concerns of political scientists, there is very little in this literature that is of substance sufficient to rise above the level of specialized reporting and into the general stream of political science. Indeed, if the pages of this Review be taken as an index of the research concerns of our discipline, then municipal government would seem to be a stagnated area of political science, for not one article on this subject has appeared in this journal for over six years.

Textbooks in public administration customarily conclude with a section on administrative responsibility. The charitable inference is that this location betokens the saving of the best till last, rather than the appendage of an afterthought. Herbert Kaufman might explain it as the preoccupation of the past generation of political scientists with the legitimation of the efficient exercise of administrative power to subserve the goals of the social state, with a consequent sublimation of the emerging problem of the control of large, professionalized bureaucracies. However that may be, it does seem clear that, with the exception of administrative decisions which adversely affect “civil liberties,” most political scientists have been content to let lawyers and defenders of the free enterprise system worry about the restraint of administrative action.

The topic of party finance is a subject about which not a word appears in any of the official reports and party conference records issued by the Christian Democratic Union in the course of the decade during which it has become established as West Germany's governing party. Like their colleagues in most middle class parties the world over, the leaders of the CDU apparently believe that silence is golden when it comes to answering Socialist taunts on this score. They are content to let the Socialists remain the only German party to publish reasonably full accounts of their sources of income, which, as the SPD does not fail to point out when attacking the “hidden masters” of the government parties, are predominantly derived from membership dues. The parties of the “Bonn coalition,” on the other hand, have been extremely distrustful of both publicity and legislation affecting this sector. In 1952 the first Adenanuer cabinet felt called upon to reject a draft Parties Law prepared by officials in the Interior Ministry, and since then the government has presented no bill to translate the Basic Law's Article 21, which regulates the parties' position, into the required legislation. Thus the constitutional provision that “parties must give public reckoning over the sources of their means” remains in practice a dead letter. Not that the sources of the non-Socialist parties' funds are really kept successfully secret, for every politically informed German knows roughly how the system works. But party officials still believe it best not to acknowledge their sources publicly. “The German Michel just wouldn't understand about those things,” as a CDU functionary put it.

In a recent issue of this Review John P. Roche developed an explanation of the motivation behind the exercise of self-restraint by the United States judiciary. He related the scope available for the exercise of judicial power to the working of the American party system, i.e., to the extent to which the Court found itself faced by “cohesive majorities.” Almost in passing he drew a comparison between the British and the American position. “No cohesive majority, such as normally exists in Britain,” he said, “would permit a politically irresponsible judiciary to usurp decision-making functions, but, for complex social and institutional reasons, there are few issues in the United States on which cohesive majorities exist.” The purpose of this essay is to test that thesis, and the concept of cohesive majorities, in the setting of Australian politics and judicial review.

At its national congress, September 15 to 27, 1956, the Chinese Communist Party, among other items of business, elected a new group of leaders officially known as the Eighth Central Committee. For some time to come this group of men and women will have a highly influential role in the affairs of their party and of the Chinese nation. What they say and do may also affect the course of world events.

What kind of people are they? What are their social and educational backgrounds? How long have they been in the Communist movement? By what roads have they been able to reach the summit of their party hierarchy? What kinds of influence can they exert in the various fields of national affairs? To what extent did their election to the central committee represent a “status mobility” within the party? Answers to these and similar questions should illuminate some broader questions: (1) whether the Chinese Communist Party is really led by the working class as the Communists themselves have claimed; (2) what are the typical features of the Chinese Communist leadership; (3) how the characteristics of that leadership have been conditioned by those of Chinese society; and (4) what are the strengths and weaknesses of the Communist leadership? This paper is addressed to these questions.

The data for political studies are most commonly drawn from history, either in accounts of lives, events and institutions, or in the writings of earlier systematic students. But to probe the meaning and relationships of ultimate ends like justice and truth, no actual happenings are needed; imaginative fiction and drama can supply the food for thought. Why then should we not as reasonably and profitably look for lessons in political wisdom in the works of our greatest poet? In this essay I have sought to find and expound such a lesson in Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear.

According to that profound student of Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, the most difficult task of statesmanship is that of providing, not for the foundation, but for the perpetuation, of political institutions. If the political institutions are the best, to perpetuate them is not only the most difficult, but also the greatest of all the tasks of the statesman.

The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to two aspects of the political ideas of the sixteenth century Reformation which were important to the development of the Western tradition of political theory. First, like all great transformations, the Reformation stimulated the rethinking of much that had been taken for granted. In terms of political ideas, this centered around a developing crisis in the concept of order and in the Western traditions of civility. The criticism of the papacy by the early reformers had really amounted to a demand for the liberation of the individual believer from a mass of institutional controls and traditional restraints which hitherto had governed his behavior. The medieval church had been many things, and among them, a system of governance. It had sought, not always successfully, to control the conduct of its members through a definite code of discipline, to bind them to unity through emotional as well as material commitments, and to direct the whole religious endeavor through an institutionalized power structure as impressive as any the world had seen. In essence, the Church had provided a rationalized set of restraints designed to mould human behavior to accord with a certain image. To condemn it as the agent of the Antichrist was to work towards the release of human behavior from the order which had formed it. This liberating tendency was encouraged by one of the great ideas of the early reformers, the conception of the church as a fellowship bound together by the ties of faith and united in a common quest for salvation. But the Genossenschaft-idea lacked the complementary notion of the church as a corpus regens, a corporate society welded together by a viable structure of power. The inference remaining was that men could be fashioned to live in an orderly community without the serious and consistent application of force.

Does conservative political thought have a place in America today? The answer to this question depends upon the general nature of conservatism as an ideology: its distinguishing characteristics, its substance, and the conditions under which it arises. By ideology I mean a system of ideas concerned with the distribution of political and social values and acquiesced in by a significant social group. Interpretations of the role and relevance of conservative thought on the contemporary scene vary greatly. Underlying the debate, however, are three broad and conflicting conceptions of the nature of conservatism as an ideology. This essay deals with the relative merits of these concepts.

The central fact of the twentieth century for America is its involvement with the world, and for a nation bred in the psychic and geographic isolation of a uniform liberal faith this has evoked the dialectic battle of a pair of impulses: the effort to intensify “Americanism,” to retreat to the comfortable womb of ancient fetishes, and the effort to transcend it, to move out maturely into a welter of national experiences where the fetishes have lost their magic. It would be comforting if we could say that this battle has been clear cut, that it has been fought out by Good Men and Bad Men, much as the battle between “conservative” and “radical” has been fought out in the nationalist histories of the Progressive scholars. But this has not been true, if only because the issue itself has been hidden from sight and the men who have grappled with it, as in some Hegelian tale, have served purposes beyond their understanding. The struggle against the constraints of “Americanism,” that peculiar blend of liberalism and nationalism that only America has produced, has been as confused as the record of the twentieth century itself.