The pattern of international relations has always been in flux. The further we are removed from a period, the easier it is to discern its most salient features. So the fifteenth century now emerges as the time of the birth of the nation-state which was to become the key factor in international relations. Yet the supra-national church was not successfully challenged until the next century. Today it is clear that the French revolution completed the conversion of dynastic states into national states. In retrospect the 18th and particularly the 19th centuries are seen as the high point of the world expansion of Europe and the extension of its system of international relations. Now we realize that the Japanese victory over Russia in 1904–1905 marked the beginning of the counter-offensive against Europe. But what emerges sharply now was obscured then by a welter of incident.

Since the publication of David Easton's The Political System, it has become increasingly common for political scientists to speculate as to the basic factors which may be common to all political systems and which, in their varying manifestations, determine the unique styles of political behavior within each. Efforts to identify the basic political phenomena and their complex relationships have generated a variety of cross-national conceptual schemes and propositions. Some authors speak of structural and functional requisites, some refer to equilibrium conditions for system maintenance. Others, employing more traditional concepts, refer to power, legitimacy, ideology, instability, consensus, influence, and bargaining. Regardless of the form these efforts assume, they all posit the existence of factors or dimensions which are common to all political systems.

This article reports the results of a scale analysis of the votes cast by three prominent senators, two Democrats and a Republican, on legislative measures pending during the second term of the Eisenhower administration. My method employed the Guttman scaling technique to identify the ideological issues presented in the roll calls and to rank the senators according to the positions they took on these issues, looking separately at their records in the 85th and the 86th Congresses. My purpose was twofold: first, to distinguish objectively the differences in the public postures the three men assumed as they voted; and second, to look for movement in the stance of each as the 1960 campaign approached.

This paper presents an effort to adapt techniques of content analysis and measurement to the study of relations between a House appropriations subcommittee and the agencies whose budget estimates it reviews. Since Arthur Macmahon's pioneering work on the topic observers have depended on interviews and impressionistic readings of the published record for their evidence. They have identified a variety of attitudes on the part of the committee members, ranging from the obsequious to the pugnacious. And they have noted various techniques of committee control and agency compliance or evasion. They have also expressed varying opinions about the efficacy and utility of congressional oversight.

The existing literature leaves at least one question partially unanswered: how does the subcommittee divide its supervisory and control efforts among the agencies within its jurisdiction? This study deals with this question, and illustrates a method that may have wider application in the systematic study of legislative-executive relations.

One of the most perplexing questions to students of politics since the mid-1950s has been whether western societies are now approaching, or have reached, a condition called “the end of ideology.” Numerous answers have been propounded, both by those who regard such a development as desirable and by those who view it with disquietude. But difficulties have arisen because exponents of one view or the other have had recourse to markedly different, and often shifting, concepts of the terms “ideology” and “end.” If this important controversy is to be saved from sterility, social scientists must both reflect more upon the nature of the terms employed and descend from the level of sweeping cultural generalizations to examine the condition of ideology in particular political settings.

It is hardly surprising that most investigations of Soviet bureaucracy have emphasized the unique aspects of that system rather than its relation to broader problems of administration. Yet the importance of Soviet experience makes a beginning in comparative analysis highly desirable. The purpose of this article is to identify some (by no means all) of the ways in which Soviet administrative behavior resembles or differs from administrative behavior in Western Europe, which is assumed here to be the norm of administration in a politically and economically modernized society. Where Soviet and Western European administrative behavior coincide, it is assumed that the behavior arises from requirements of the economically modernized societies which prevail in both the USSR and Western Europe at present. Where administrative behavior differs in the two areas, tentative explanations are sought in (1) the circumstance that the Soviet economy has become modernized more recently and more rapidly than the economy in Western Europe; and (2) the difference between the Communist political system and the pluralistic systems prevailing in Western Europe.

Evaluations of single-party democracy in Mexico have yielded a substantial literature from the researches of contemporary scholars. Their primary subjects of treatment have been the institutionalized agents of moderation and compromise that have made Mexico one of Latin America's more stable political systems. In prosecuting these studies, however, only scant attention has been given to political groups outside the officially sanctioned “revolutionary famity” of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The PRI has maintained a virtual monopoly of elective and appointive offices since 1929 and traditionally has been thought of as affiliating to itself the only politically relevant groups in Mexico.

Modern Mexican political life has always had its “out groups” and splinter parties. Mostly, they have come and gone, leaving little or no impact upon the political system which they have attempted to influence. Howard Cline has contended that opposition groups in Mexico find it impossible to woo the electorate away from the PRI and thus feel forced to adopt demagoguery and other extreme postures which serve only to reduce their popular appeal.

American scholars generally take a dim view of the 1946 Constitution of Japan. Because it carries the imprint of a foreign political philosophy and, more particularly, because it was allegedly imposed through the willful and covert action of an American field commander, that instrument, they feel, is off key and should be rewritten. Their case was well stated some years ago by Harold S. Quigley, in these words:

… the SCAP draft Constitution … has been regarded widely in Japan as a foreign imposition not wholly suited to a people of very different legal and social traditions…. [It was] written hastily by men without adequate knowledge of Japanese civilization and with little regard … for the national right of self-determination…. The decision to prepare a constitution was made by General MacArthur, who interpreted directives from Washington liberally. These directives … did not require SCAP to write a new constitution…. they specifically laid down … that the new government should be established “in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.”

This essay has two complementary purposes. It seeks principally to clarify the basis of the political philosophy of Richard Hooker, the great Elizabethan divine, and, in so doing, to clarify as well certain of the limits of political speculation itself. We hear quite often now that reports of the death of political philosophy have been greatly exaggerated. If this is indeed a time of its resuscitation, it is important that its limits be recognized and that inquiry be liberated from doctrines which cannot be based on unassisted reason alone. The ancillary purpose of this study is a contribution to such a disentanglement.

Hooker's political thought itself also repays the attention of modern political scientists, if only as a remarkably comprehensive model of pre-modern or “traditional” society. Hooker wrestles with one of the difficulties which had much to do with ending “traditional” society in Europe and in those places Europe has influenced: the bitter and conflicting claims of church and state, and especially of various churches. Hooker's is a revealing endeavor to solve the political problems inherent in revealed religion, without abandoning—as his “enlightened” successors did—Christianity as a decisive constituent of politics or Aristotle as the secular guide of politics.