A new revolution is under way in American political science. The last revolution—behavioralism—has scarcely been completed before it has been overtaken by the increasing social and political crises of our time. The weight of these crises is being felt within our discipline in the form of a new conflict in the throes of which we now find ourselves. This new and latest challenge is directed against a developing behavioral orthodoxy. This challenge I shall call the post-behavioral revolution.

The initial impulse of this revolution is just being felt. Its battle cries are relevance and action. Its objects of criticism are the disciplines, the professions, and the universities. It is still too young to be described definitively. Yet we cannot treat it as a passing phenomenon, as a kind of accident of history that will somehow fade away and leave us very much as we were before. Rather it appears to be a specific and important episode in the history of our discipline, if not in all of the social sciences. It behooves us to examine this revolution closely for its possible place in the continuing evolution of political science. Does it represent a threat to the discipline, one that will divert us from our long history in the search for reliable understanding of politics? Or is it just one more change that will enhance our capacity to find such knowledge?

The purpose of this paper is to sketch some of the implications, prospective and retrospective, of the primacy of method in the present study of politics and to do it by way of a contrast, which is deliberately heightened, but hopefully not caricatured, between the vocation of the “methodist” and the vocation of the theorist. My discussion will be centered around the kinds of activity involved in the two vocations. During the course of the discussion various questions will be raised, primarily the following: What is the idea which underlies method and how does it compare with the older understanding of theory? What is involved in choosing one rather than the other as the way to political knowledge? What are the human or educational consequences of the choice, that is, what is demanded of the person who commits himself to one or the other? What is the typical stance towards the political world of the methodist and how does it compare to the theorist's?

The discussion which follows will seek, first, to locate the idea of method in the context of the “behavioral revolution,” and, second, to examine the idea itself in terms of some historical and analytical considerations. Then, proceeding on the assumption that the idea of method, like all important intellectual choices, carries a price, the discussion will concentrate on some of the personal, educational, vocational, and political consequences of this particular choice. Finally, I shall attempt to relate the idea of the vocation of political theory to these same matters.

Without much question, the third-party movement of George C. Wallace constituted the most unusual feature of the 1968 presidential election. While this movement failed by a substantial margin in its audacious attempt to throw the presidential contest into the House of Representatives, in any other terms it was a striking success. It represented the first noteworthy intrusion on a two-party election in twenty years. The Wallace ticket drew a larger proportion of the popular vote than any third presidential slate since 1924, and a greater proportion of electoral votes than any such movement for more than a century, back to the curiously divided election of 1860. Indeed, the spectre of an electoral college stalemate loomed sufficiently large that serious efforts at reform have since taken root.

At the same time, the Wallace candidacy was but one more dramatic addition to an unusually crowded rostrum of contenders, who throughout the spring season of primary elections were entering and leaving the lists under circumstances that ranged from the comic through the astonishing to the starkly tragic. Six months before the nominating conventions, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had been the expected 1968 protagonists, with some greater degree of uncertainty, as usual, within the ranks of the party out of power. The nominating process for the Republicans followed the most-probable script rather closely, with the only excitement being provided by the spectacle of Governors Romney and Rockefeller proceeding as through revolving doors in an ineffectual set of moves aimed at providing a Republican alternative to the Nixon candidacy. Where things were supposed to be most routine on the Democratic side, however, surprises were legion, including the early enthusiasm for Eugene McCarthy, President Johnson's shocking announcement that he would not run, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the flush of his first electoral successes, and the dark turmoil in and around the Chicago nominating convention, with new figures like Senators George McGovern and Edward Kennedy coming into focus as challengers to the heir apparent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

In recent years the welter of data accumulated on American voting behavior has been continually reanalyzed by social scientists interested in building theories of electoral choice. Most of the original data-gathering enterprises were guided by general theoretical frameworks which, for the most part, were not developed to a point where the ensuing analyses addressed themselves unambiguously to the overall conceptions by which they were guided. As a result much of our knowledge about voting behavior is in the form of generalizations about what social and psychological variables account for voting choices while we lack conceptual frameworks which systematically interrelate these generalizations and provide comprehensive and parsimonious explanation. If any one unifying conception has emerged from the original large scale studies it is that the average voter is irrational. This inference has been derived from a variety of empirical relationships coupled with varying conceptions of rationality.

The more recent reanalyses of these data sets have been characterized by a theoretical sophistication that was lacking heretofore. One of these, a theory of the calculus of voting, has applied some formal rigor to the question of the rationality of the decision to vote, selected empirical equivalents of theoretical entities from survey data on national elections, and conducted a successful test of the theory. Unlike traditional approaches to the rationality question which infer the degree of rationality from quantities of information possessed or from correlates of decisions (background, party affiliation, group memberships, etc.), this investigation conceived of rationality in terms of the kind of calculus employed by the individual in deciding among alternatives (in this case whether or not to vote).

In this paper I will endeavor to do the following: (1) test how far certain concepts dealing with individual orientations to politics, previously used in studies of relatively advanced European societies, are appropriate to populations in developing countries; (2) ascertain how far these separate dimensions of individual political orientation cohere as a syndrome, indicating the existence of a general underlying dimension of “participant citizenship;” (3) identify elements among common orientations to politics which cannot be incorporated in this general syndrome; and (4) assess the importance of certain social experiences or forces in inculcating the qualities of participant citizenship in individuals exposed to these influences.

These objectives will be better understood if they are seen in the context of the larger research program of which this report is a part, namely the Harvard Project on the Social and Cultural Aspects of Economic Development. The project is an investigation of the forms and sources of modernization in individuals. Its focus is on the person rather than the society or the institution, and its emphasis is socio-psychological rather than purely sociological or structural. Six countries are represented: Argentina and Chile, East Pakistan and India, Nigeria and Israel. This report will not, however, emphasize national differences, but rather treat each sample as another replication of the basic design. We assume that if something holds true for six such different countries, it must be a powerful connection indeed.

The study of political influence in the West has for the most part focused on the process by which interest groups affect the content of legislation; hence, the input process has occupied the center of attention.

Students of politics in the new states of Africa and Asia who have adopted this perspective, however, have been struck by the relative weakness both of interest structures to organize demands and of institutionalized channels through which such demands, once organized, might be communicated to decisionmakers. The open clash of organized interests is often conspicuously absent during the formulation of legislation in these nations. To conclude from this, however, that the public has little or no effect on the eventual “output” of government would be completely unwarranted. Between the passage of legislation and its actual implementation lies an entirely different political arena that, in spite of its informality and particularism, has a great effect on the execution of policy.

Much of the expression of political interests in the new states has been disregarded because Western scholars, accustomed to their own politics, have been looking in the wrong place. A large portion of individual demands, and even group demands, in developing nations reach the political system, not before laws are passed, but rather at the enforcement stage.

Shortly after World War II a Communist guerrilla army, the Hukbong Magpalayang Bayan (HMB), or People's Liberation Army, became a serious threat to the new Philippine Republic. The Huks, as they are commonly known, controlled large parts of the sugar cane and rice growing areas of Central Luzon and carried out military and political operations in other parts of the islands. Like their Communist counterparts in Vietnam and Malaya, the Huks began as an anti-Japanese guerrilla army. In fact, Huk originally referred to Hukbalahap, a contraction of a phrase meaning People's Army Against the Japanese. As the military arm of the Communist Party, however, their ambitions always exceeded mere anti-Japanese activities.

After the Japanese defeat, successive Philippine governments wrestled with the problem of eliminating the Huks. Policies of coercion failed because the Philippine Army and Constabulary were not up to the task. Policies of conciliation failed because the demands of the Huks were regarded as unreasonable. By 1949 it became clear that the issues dividing the Huks and the government would have to be settled by force. Following the allegedly fraudulent election of President Quirino in 1949 the Huks gained steadily. By 1950 large unit raids were common and a full-scale attack on Manila was envisioned for 1951.

In recent years a growing body of research has used multivariate statistical techniques to examine the relationship between aggregate environmental characteristics and the public policies of state and local governments. This research has been concerned primarily with isolating or demonstrating the social, economic, and political correlates of either public policies (e.g., expenditures, revenues and referenda issues) or governmental structures (viz., form of government, size of election districts and type of ballot).

One advantage of the aggregate approach, beyond the relative accessibility of data, is that it permits a systematic, comparative study of states or cities. On the local level this comparative approach provides a convenient supplement to the earlier case study approach which was concerned with the political processes and issues of particular cities.

A number of hypotheses have been suggested by studies employing either the case study or aggregate approaches. In those observations dealing with government structure, attention is usually directed to the council-manager plan as an example of progressive government. That is, city governments which are reform-oriented are likely to be found in more affluent, better educated, homogeneous, middle-class cities. The notion is that the middle class prefers a more efficient, professional city administration. Conversely, the mayor-council plan is usually associated with older, machine-type politics which allegedly reflects the preferences of the less affluent, less-educated, working class and ethnic minorities who are most concerned about political representation.

Because they are inexpensive and easy to obtain, because they may be available under circumstances in which survey data are unavailable, and because they eliminate many of the measurement problems of survey research, data on geographic units such as counties or census tracts are often used by political scientists to measure individual behavior. This has involved us in the long-standing problem of inferring individual-level relationships from aggregate data, which was first raised by W. S. Robinson in the early nineteen fifties.

In this paper, I shall first discuss the problem raised by Robinson. I shall then review three partial solutions to the problem—the Duncan-Davis method of setting limits, Blalock's version of ecological regression, and Goodman's version of ecological regression. Finally, I shall propose some ways in which Goodman's method may be used so as to reduce the problem of bias in its estimates, and make it a more reasonable tool for reserch.

Our difficulty, as Robinson showed, is that we cannot necessarily infer the correlation between variables, taking people as the unit of analysis, on the basis of correlations between the same variables based on groups of people as units. For example, the “ecological” correlation between per cent black and per cent illiterate is +0.946, whereas the correlation between color and illiteracy among individuals is only+0.203.

Entering the polling booth on Tuesday, November 3, 1964, the typical California voter found himself confronted with an immense sheet of finely-printed green paper, a dirty black rubber stamp, a tiny ink pad, and thirty decisions to render. A few minutes later (the legal maximum is 10) he emerged and numbly surrendered to a clerk his ballot, now slightly embellished, like the fingers of his decision hand, with black ink stains.

Most of his decisions were made on a lengthy array of propositions. In these, questions on an assortment of issues were posed, each couched in language tedious and obscure—as only minds trained in the finest law schools could devise.

This study seeks to gain some knowledge about factors which influence the vote on these propositions. It employs a somewhat unorthodox method: an analysis of the voting patterns on actual ballots. The ballots furnish attractive data because they are, after all, completely accurate records of the results of those minutes of decision-rendering in the artificial privacy of that cramped polling booth.

It would be impossible by this method to generate a comprehensive theory about proposition voting behavior—too much information about the individual voter is forever lost by the secrecy incorporated in the balloting procedure. Nevertheless a contribution can be made in several areas of relevant concern, areas currently dominated more by folklore and mythology than fact or theory.

Political Science, like Leo Durocher, is not distinguished by an excessive concern with losers.

Although the reasons are not difficult to fathom, theories of recruitment and representation which omit systematic examination of those who are rejected, in addition to, those selected, will only imperfectly comprehend the political conditions and consequences this process implies.

This study, part of a broader cross-national examination of legislative recruitment, focuses on a largely-ignored but perennial figure among the ranks of American political losers: those candidates who challenge incumbents for seats in the House of Representatives.

Few elective institutions in American political life have achieved the degree of stability which since the depression has characterized membership in the House. At no time since 1932 has the percentage of first-term members exceeded 26 percent and in the last 15 years, it has been rare when more than 15 percent of those incumbents who actively sought reelection were defeated. The 1964 election was considered a striking anomaly when “only” 80 percent of the membership returned to the 89th Congress. It is not an exaggeration to concede that, collectively, congressional challengers stand somewhere between the Harold Stassens and Norman Thomases of campaign history in their impressive disregard for the first objective of American major-party politics: winning.

The purpose here is to explore certain aspects of the philosophy of science which have serious implications both for the practice of social and political science and for understanding that practice. The current relationship between social science and the philosophy of science (or the philosophy of the social sciences) is a curious one. Despite the emergence of a considerable body of literature in philosophy which is pertinent to the methodological problems of social science, there has been a lack of osteusive ties between the two areas. A justified concern with the independence of social scientific research has contributed to a tendency toward isolation which is unfortunate in view of the proliferation of philosophical problems which necessarily attends the rapid expansion of any empirical discipline. Although in the literature of contemporary social science there are frequent references to certain works in the philosophy of science and to philosophical issues relating to methodology, these are most often in the context of bald pronouncements and shibboleths relating to the nature of science, its goals, and the character of its reasoning. But what is most disturbing about the fact that social scientists have little direct and thorough acquaintance with the philosophy of science is not merely that there has been a failure to carefully examine the many logical and epistemological assumptions which are implicit in social scientific inquiry, since this task might normally and properly be considered to be within the province of the philospher of science.

Professor Gunnell seems to be arguing that if political scientists follow the deductivist path they will almost certainly fall into a bottomless and sterile abyss. My understanding of the deductivist conception of science, and my verstehen about social phenomena lead me to believe that this is a very real risk. The risk derives from the apparent complexity of social phenomena and the relatively limited ability of the human mind to deal with complexity in a rigorous deductive manner. It is just possible that social phenomena are sufficiently complex that they will never be manageable within the neat framework of deductive models. It is precisely for this reason that, at least at this point in time, I would prefer not to have the whole of the discipline tread this path. But why should even one man risk a lifetime of scholarly endeavor against such a possible outcome? Well, if there is another possible outcome to which he attaches a sufficiently high utility, he will take the gamble. I suggest that there is another possible outcome, and hope that, for some, its utility will be sufficiently high to warrant the gamble. That outcome consists in the production of a cumulatively reliable body of knowledge about those social phenomena called political. Consider the worth of being able to reduce the errors of calculation on the parts of voters, office seekers, secretaries of state, etc.

It is impossible to tender a reply to Professor Gunnell's essay, “Deduction, Explanation and Social Scientific Inquiry,” that would be both brief and adequate. It would be impossible to be brief because Gunnell conjures up a tagraggery of issues, none of which he seems prepared and/or disposed to resolve. But no matter how extensive a reply might be, it would still be impossible to conceive it as adequate for I am not sure that I, or anyone else, can determine precisely what he means to say in the essay before us. It is impossible for me to determine with any specificity whatsoever, for example, what it means to say:

Logical empiricism as an approach to the philosophy of science has been concerned with developing formal representations or reconstructions of the logical structure of scientific explanation and with a meta-logical analysis of the language applied to science. In this view there is a very strict correlation between the philosophy of science and formal logic.

I haven't the foggiest notion what a “metalogical analysis of the language applied to science” might mean. I had always understood “metalogic” to refer to discourse employing logic as its object language—just as metamathematics would be a language employed in the analysis of mathematics as an object language.

Since both Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Gregor have limited their responses principally to my specific criticisms of the deductive model, it would seem appropriate to emphasize once more the purpose of this criticism. The issue which I wish to raise, using the discussion of the deductive model as a vehicle, goes far beyond the model itself and even the approach to the philosophy of science which it represents. It should be apparent that there may be little chance of resolving the differences that stand between the respondents and myself regarding either the character of the philosophy of science as a discipline of inquiry or its product, but to some extent these differences can be separated from the more general problem of the relationship between social science and the philosophy of science.

I suggested that there is a significant intellectual lag or gulf between political science and contemporary work in the philosophy of science. This situation need not, in principle, be viewed as odd or even undesirable since the distance between philosophy and other fields of science is at least as great. What is unique about political science is that, although it has lost touch with philosophy, it has to a large extent derived its conception of science and its notion of the procedural rules of empirical inquiry from a restricted body of literature in the philosophy of science, i.e., traditional logical empiricism.