Suchergebnisse

PROFESSOR LAZARSFELD ONCE REFERRED TO SOCIOLOGY AS BEING IN A sense a residuary legatee, the surviving part of a very general study, out of which specializations have successively been shaped.The same might be said of political science. In the West the first deliberate and reflective studies of political life were made in Greece at the end of the th century BC, and in the succeeding century. The histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, some of the pamphlets attributed to Xenophon, above all the normative and empirical studies of Plato and Aristotle were among the direct ancestors of contemporary political science. Parallel examples are to be found in the intellectual history of China, India and Islam. It seems that at certain stages in the development of great societies questions of legitimacy, power and leadership assume supreme importance; and intense intellectual effort, using the best analytical tools available, is devoted to the study of man as brought to a focus in the study of politics.

Like Rachel, Jacob's beloved but still childless bride, who asked herself and the Lord each morning, "Am I?," or "Can I?," so presidents of this Association on these annual occasions intermittently ask, "Are we a science?," or "Can we become one?" My predecessor, David Truman, raised this question last September applying some of the notions of Thomas Kuhn in his recent book on scientific revolutions. I shall be following in Truman's footsteps, repeating much that he said but viewing the development of the profession from a somewhat different perspective and intellectual history. My comments will be organized around three assertions.First, there was a coherent theoretical formulation in the American political theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Second, the development of professional political science in the United States from the turn of the century until well into the 1950's was carried on largely in terms of this paradigm, to use Kuhn's term. The most significant and characteristic theoretical speculation and research during these decades produced anomalous findings which cumulatively shook its validity.Third, in the last decade or two the elements of a new, more surely scientific paradigm seem to be manifesting themselves rapidly. The core concept of this new approach is that of the political system.

From the Rice Thresher Archive, a collection of newspaper articles published in the student newspaper for Rice University. Genre: News

A report of a study by participant observation of the decision-making process in the Free-Democratic Party in the Berne Canton in Switzerland from Jan 1969 to Sep 1970. In May 1970 the parliament of the Berne Canton was elected. It is investigated whether the time distance to election day has any influence on the decision-making process in the Free-Democratic Party. The starting hyp's are: (1) The more the decision-makers anticipate the reactions of the voters, the more they anticipate that the result of the election will change their balance of rewards & punishments in a positive or negative way. (2) The more the decision-makers anticipate that the result of the election will change their balance of rewards & punishments in a positive or negative way, (a) the more they perceive their pol'al role as important, (b) the more they perceive their pol'al role as depending on the result of elections, (c) the more they anticipate that the next election could change their pol'al role, & (d) the more they perceive their pol'al party as an important group of reference. Further hyp's deal with the question of whether the time distance to election day has a conservative or a progressive influence on the decision-making process. Because the coding of the data is still in progress, the paper presents only the preliminary hyp's without any data. However, the hyp's are discussed re their relevance for democratic theory. AA.