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Distributing "raw" data among types or classes is a necessary and illuminating part of the process of research and discovery in any science, particularly in the early stages of the latter's development. But it produces fruitful results only if the types or classes make sense, which they will just to the extent that, inter alia, the variables we fix upon in defining them are the significant ones (for the purpose in view, of course), and that the classes (a) exhaust the phenomena under consideration, and (b) do not overlap.One of the most elementary procedures used in dealing with the raw data of political conflict is that which, taking its departure from the notion of "party systems," seeks to assign each observed instance to one or another of three types: the "one-party system," the "two-party system," and the "multiple-party system." All party systems, it is assumed, belong as a matter of course to one of the three, so that one of the researcher's first tasks in studying the phenomena of party conflict in a given political situation is to find out with which one of the three types he is dealing. Until he has done this—so runs the tacit premise—he does not have his problem in manageable shape.

Bureaucracy may mean many things. So may dictatorship. Until Sulla, the technique of dictatorial interludes provided the Roman republic with a convenient form of political catharsis to relieve the constitutional framework from the strain of military exigencies. Greek depotism was not the style of Caesar; Richelieu'sgouvernement personnel was not an imperialist versionof Cromwell's Commonwealth. Less compelling still are the parallels between Latin America's "strong man" regimes, Japan's "new structure"à laKonoye, and the one-party systems of National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia. It is the totalitarian formula alone to which we intend to address ourselves —dictatorship built upon the masses.

A significant result of the report "Toward A More Responsible Two-Party System" has been the marked growth of interest in the American party system. It is nevertheless true that our knowledge about the way in which party systems function is far from complete. An area promising fruitful research and presenting many hypotheses susceptible of systematic inquiry is that of the role of party organizations in the legislative process.It is the purpose of this article to examine the legislative role of political parties in the Pennsylvania General Assembly; more precisely, to measure their influence in the formation of the state's public policies in one session of the legislature. The most recent completed session at the time of this study was that of 1951—the longest session in state history.In order to evaluate the impact of party upon legislation, the concept of a "party vote" has been used. This is merely an operating definition by which to measure differences in party attitudes on questions subjected to roll-call votes on the floor. The assumption was made that the interests of the parties can be established best by analyzing the voting behavior of their membership. Questions to which partisan significance is attached will find the parties aligned against each other.

The following considerations have grown out of a study of the origins, the elements and the functioning of that novel form of government and domination which we have come to call totalitarian. Wherever it rose to power, it developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country. No matter what the specifically national tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination. Present totalitarian governments have developed from one-party systems; whenever these became truly totalitarian, they started to operate according to a system of values so radically different from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral, or common sense utilitarian categories could any longer help us to come to terms with, or judge, or predict its course of action.

The aim of a 1951 London conference of a commission of the Int Polit Sci Assoc in discussing 17 reports from 15 nations on the political role of women was to 'provide a preliminary survey of the problem which could serve as a basis for a more detailed investigation' In Norway, France, Yugoslavia and the Federal Republic of Germany to be undertaken by UNESCO during 1952-53. The discussion presented was first oriented to the following working hypotheses put forward by Mr. Duverger: (1) more women than men are non-voters; (2) women vote less consistently than men; & (3) women tend to vote for the more conservative parties than men. Other topics presented are: (1) women's part in electioneering; (2) the extent of special party appeals to women; (3) the numerical importance of women as candidates and members of Parliament and of Government; (4) party attitudes to women's participation in legislation and government; (5) the influence of electoral systems on women's representation in Parliament; (6) the extent of women's direct and indirect influence on national political life; (7) the influence of domestic ties; & (8) psychol and financial obstacles to women's participation. Mr. Duverger suggested that serious study of these questions would be facilitated by the institution of separate ballots for men and women. D. Wolsk.

The study of comparative politics has been primarily concerned thus far with the study of the formal institutions of governments—particularly the governments of Western Europe. It has been in this sense not only parochial but also primarily descriptive and formalistic. Its place in the field of political science, while suffering from all the ambiguities and methodological inadequacies of the field in general, has been ill-defined. Is the student of comparative politics primarily concerned with the meticulous description of the formal institutions of various polities or is it his role to undertake comparison? If the latter, what is the meaning of comparison? Is it confined simply to the description of differences among various institutional arrangements? Does comparison stop when we note that England has had a two-party system whereas France has had a multi-party system? Does a description of the institutional arrangements of the Soviet Union reveal in any sense the most relevant factors that account for the differences between it and Western democracies? If comparison is to be something more than the descriptive portrait of formal institutional differences, what should be its aim, scope, and method? Should the student of comparative politics attempt to compare total configurations? If not, then he has to develop a precise notion of what can be isolated from the total configuration of a system or systems and compared, i.e., understood and explained with reference to similar patterns wrenched from the total configuration of another system.

Looking at the post-war period, it seems obvious that the government of the United States will give more attention to foreign affairs than it has in any comparable period of American history. How can the machinery for conducting foreign relations best be organized to meet these increasing responsibilities?The conduct of foreign relations in the modern world is no simple matter. Technical experts, intelligence systems, ability to negotiate, national political stability, a large and loyal staff of public servants—these are but some of the national requisites for effective participation in world affairs. The mobilization and organization of the best staff resources in the country, the negotiation of national policies, and then of international agreements, constitute a formidable task under any system of government.The conduct of foreign relations is, of course, easiest in a completely authoritarian state. It is made immeasurably more difficult by any division of authority. In most non-authoritarian governments, some division of authority has been found desirable, even at the expense of occasional awkwardness of procedure, because thereby the dangers of usurpation of power are minimized. The United States has gone farther than any democratic country in dividing responsibility in foreign affairs. Not only is there the usual distinction between legislative and executive authority, but the independence of the two branches has been so far underlined that the achievement of over-all government policies (as distinct from legislative and executive policies) is extremely difficult unless the party relationships are just right between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Need for Factually Defined Concepts. Most political utterance is necessarily normative in import since it occurs in the process of motivating human behavior. Popularly employed political concepts, appropriately, are frequently of the ideal type in that they tend to denote an hypothetical situation toward conformance with which actual human institutions are being impelled. Ask any student to define a state or a government and he is almost certain to bring in some such notion as "operation in the public interest," which might or might not be judged applicable to an actual situation. It is safe to say that ninety per cent of the time such concepts as state, government, court, law, administration, political party, and many others are used in this normative sense, not only popularly but in learned circles.Without desiring the exclusion of the normative from the social sciences, the writer believes that rigid conceptual clarity in distinguishing norm and fact is necessary for the progress of these disciplines. To attain this goal, the technical requisite is a system of concepts having an understood reference of a purely factual character. The absence of such factually defined concepts is noteworthy in political science, and largely unrecognized. Although most of our studies are factual in nature and the intended reference of concepts is usually factual, definition is largely subconscious and when brought to the surface is likely to have normative form, particularly a form borrowed from legal norms.True definition is appropriate in such disciplines as logic and mathematics and in physics, which has attained since the seventeenth century to the explanation of phenomena by hypothetical systems employing purely postulated entities like electrons and atoms. A set of pure definitions gives postulates from which theorems are derived by rigid deduction. What is put into the definitions comes out in the theorems.

Next to Hegel and Nietzsche, Fichte is the German philosopher most frequently blamed as one of the principal inspirers of the National Socialist ideologies of state despotism and the superiority of the German people. Indeed, it is not difficult to find in Fichte's work any number of passages which might be interpreted in such a way as to corroborate these views. In the writings of his middle period, around 1800, Fichte arrives at a despotism of reason which in its practical application might be even more consistently restraining than the rule of our modern dictators. In his programmatic speeches for the restoration of the German nation, he ascribes to his people a divine mission which has shocked many of his interpreters. Therefore we cannot be surprised that historians who, in accordance with the demands of their profession, lay more stress on the effects of thoughts and actions than on the intentions which motivate them, attribute to Fichte a good share of responsibility for the ideology of the National Socialist party and its hold on the German people. Yet these historians are right only with regard to the external form, while the intended aims of the two systems of thought are diametrically opposed to one another.On the whole, Fichte is a moral idealist whose principal concerns are the political and inner freedom of the individual, the right and duty of the individual to contribute his best to the welfare and the cultural progress of his nation, the independence of all nationalities, social security, and an acceptable standard of living for every human being. These demands are based on a genuine respect for the dignity of man and the desire to contribute to the rule of humanitarian values in all human relations. The National Socialist, on the contrary, is fundamentally an egotistic materialist, a ruthless Herrenmensch, with a deep-rooted contempt for freedom, equality, and all humanitarian values.

Let us begin with a frank acknowledgment: the American fondness for new structural forms is both virtue and fault politically. Since our proneness to frequent alteration of governmental structures engenders a certain self-distrust, we place upon our actions the restraint found in our tortuous constitutional amending process. Still hankering for change, however, and finding the amending process too rigid, we bend and twist the meaning of the fundamental law with amazing casuistry. The defect as well as the virtue of this practis obvious. On the one hand we change a structure before it has been thoroughly tested, having mistakenly hoped, in the first place, to achieve complete reform by structure and law alone. On the other hand, no one can deny that this willingness to change and experiment with new forms and institutions has contributed to governmental and political progress. City manager government, popular initiation of legislation, direct nomination of party candidates, the organization, control and operation of regional areas like the T.V.A. and the Port of New York Authority, and many recent creations in governmental structure and operations— all these, despite certain difficulties and weaknesses, have contributed to the general advancement of the theory and practice of government. Disappointment, of course, has often followed reform. Too much has been promised, and performance has fallen short of expectations. Bitter disillusionment has often brought reaction. And yet, no one can seriously maintain that in the long run we have not progressed. It is true that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pressure for regulation and control of utilities did not result in a wholesale reform of big business and its practices. Yet, while big business might have been forced to adopt methods less brutal and less careless of the public interest, it was at least kept from returning to its older "public-be-damned" attitude. If some few reforms have been totally ineffective, most of them have been a decided improvement on the older, less efficient, less popularly responsive systems which they replaced.