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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.

A method is proposed of determining the ideological groupings in a US legislative body, & is illustrated by reference to the House of Representatives of the 79th Congress. Some of the legislators' roll-call votes during a session define his 'public ideology' for the session; those excluded for this purpose include roll-calls, the voting on which was substantially unanimous, & those conducted on mainly party lines. The voting behavior of Representatives of the 79th Congress on related aspects of the same major issue was sufficiently consistent to be `scaleable' according to Guttman's technique; & by using their varying positions on a number of scales for selected major issues it is possible to classify legislators into a relatively small number of `ideological groupings'. It is possible for further res to isolate the pol'ly or theoretically relevant variables that differentiate the members of one ideological grouping from those of another. IPSA.

Inasmuch as the initiative & the blanket primary on the one hand, as methods of direct intervention by the voters in pol'al affairs, & the activity of the State legislature on the other hand are in a certain sense rival techniques for making pol'al decisions, it might have been expected that the partisans of each would have been hostile toward the other. Interviews with 515 Washington voters showed that this was not the case: those favorable to either of these institutions were inclined to be favorable to the other. The uninformed & pol'ally naive probably constitute a considerable portion of those holding either favorable or unfavorable opinions; they are just 'for' or 'against' gov in general. IPSA.

An analysis of the voting behavior of members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 2 types of situations: (1) involving _primarily ideological considerations, & (2) involving primarily party loyalty, reveals signif diff's between the Republican & Democratic leadership. The D-leadership is distinguished from the rank & file of the party primarily by a greater fidelity to party discipline; R-leadership, on the other hand, is distinguished by conservatism rather than by strict discipline. IPSA.

The activities of the CIO Political Action Committee (PAC) in the Detroit area lend support to the hypo that there is an increasing trend toward a closer affiliation between the Democratic Party & organized labor. The pol'al arm of the CIO is constantly in close accord with the Democratic Party even though important diff's of opinion sporadically arise. Because the PAC mainly endorses & supports Democrats, there is considerable apprehension among both CIO & non-CIO Democrats that the PAC may ultimately give the appearance of dominating or may in fact dominate the party to such an extent as to alienate other important & necessary groups. The overall effect of PAC's pol'al activities in terms of party alternatives has been to force a realignment of Republican forces. Republicans view the Democratic party as the party of labor & themselves as the representatives of the business approach to gov. The PAC in Wayne County demonstrates in any case no desire to adopt the PAC's national policy of non-partisanship. IPSA.

This study relates voting trends to ecological characteristics of Michigan's counties (Ur, farm-Ur, farm, mineral, & forest upper & lower), & investigates the effect of certain variables on voting in cities. It is warranted by the fact that labor & business groups in Michigan have abandoned their past policies & are taking fully partisan roles in pol'al activities. After locating the ecological areas of Republican & Democratic strength it was possible to find, contrary to what was expected, that voters outside industrialized areas have not bolted the Democratic Party because of its identification with labor. The 2 parties seem to be too firmly established in state politics to cause voters to desert either of them because of a reshuffling of party control. On vote variations within cities 5,000+, the finding was that the size of the place is not a reliable guide, but rather its occup'al composition, a multiple r analysis being needed. IPSA.

A sample survey of 1,614 R's during the 1952 presidential election indicated that 69% of the Mc R's preferred the Republican candidate, & 30% preferred the Democrat, whereas 54% of the We R's preferred Stevenson & 43% preferred Eisenhower. Class status was determined from an index based on different combinations of occup'al, income & educ'al status. Though 'Mc' & 'Wc' are admittedly arbitrary & ambiguous concepts, it would seem that they have some legitimacy, for 93% of the R's regarded themselves as belonging to one of these two groups. When the R's were asked how they thought their own class would vote, the diff between the two groups was accentuated: 73% of the Mc R's believed that their own class would vote Republican, & 88% of the We R's judged that their class would vote Democratic. Me R's intending to vote Democratic, & We R's intending to vote Republican showed a definite tendency to project their own choice on their class as a whole, though this was less marked in the case of the latter than in the case of the former, no doubt because the relation between the Democratic party & the We is too generally recognized to be overlooked. Particularly interesting is the finding that most voters, whether Mc or Wc, who expected their own class to vote Democratic tended to explain this fact by reasons of interest, whereas those who judged that their class would vote Republican were more prone to give non-interest-oriented explanations, such as that the Republican Party was against corruption or would change things. In any case, while American parties are not 'class parties' in the continental sense, class & party interact closely in determining the voting behavior of the American electorate. (IPSA).

The US system of elections permits the voter to divide his vote between candidates of opposing pol'al parties. A national cross-sectional survey of the US electorate conducted directly after the November 1956 presidential election by the Survey Res Center (U of Mich) found that about 40% of the voters 'split their tickets' in that election. An analysis of motivations deriving from party loyalty, candidate preference, & issue partisanship shows that ticket splitting is most common among voters whose pol'al interest is weak or whose motives are conflicted. Straight ticket voting results either from the attempt of indifferent voters to vote with the least possible effort or, more commonly, from the determination of motivated voters to implement their pol'al orientation in the most effective way. AA-IPSA.

Many local pol'al units in America are dominated by the electoral strength of a single party; evenly balanced competition between the 2 parties is frequently the exception. One-party dominance of politics militates against the effectiveness of minor party motivations in producing minor party votes & increases the effectiveness of major party motivations in producing voting support for the major party. One-party dominance of politics is associated with divisiveness, lack of unity & a signif'ly high degree of heterogeneity among rank & file minor party voters with respect to felt partisanship for candidates & issues. The same is not true of Party Identification; it appears to be the one factor of those examined which sustains the minor party vote, independent of the partisan complexion of the local pol'al environment. (AA-IPSA).

The political systems of American states have remained, until recent years, a neglected field of study. Students of state government have found it easier to make meaningful comparisons of administration or legislative organization than to capture on paper the dynamic political forces which appear to be unique in each state and often are completely transformed by each group of personalities that wander on and off the political stage. V. O. Key's excellent study of the political forces in Southern states pointed up the lack of similar surveys of Northern states.In particular, the role of political parties in state legislatures has been largely ignored. The report of the American Political Science Association Committee on American Legislatures points out this problem and also notes that "it has been generally assumed that partisanship counts for less in most state legislatures than it does in Congress." Professor Lowell's famous study in 1901, which showed a comparatively low level of party voting in all of the five states he studied except New York, provided the empirical evidence for a conclusion that has been widely shared by later writers.