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The political use of political sciencePolitical scientists claim for science and for themselves, as scholars, a maximum of independence in their dealings with government and Parliament. At the same time, science finds itself so inextricably bound up with the actual political process that it has become an "establishment" as strong and formidable as religion was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Liberal political scientists put themselves into a contradictory position when they demand for themselves, in the pursuit of their task as scholars, a political status which would protect them from the scrutiny of the elected representatives of the people, a condition which, they would refuse to grant to any other social group, and yet simultaneously in their teaching and writing set themselves up as the ardent defenders of representative and responsible democracy. What must one sacrifice, science or democratic responsibility? Is it necessary to aim at excluding science from the democratic process, at the risk of seeing our society regress towards a pre-industrial age, or should one regard representative and responsible democracy as relevant to questions of minor importance while significant issues which concern the present and future of society are to be dealt with by other political methods?

Studies on participation concentrate on electoral and partisan phenomena. They fail to deal with participation through advisory bodies. So far, the latter have been considered mainly from a legalist or administrative viewpoint, or from pseudo-philosophical premises. Such studies are a disappointment to the political scientist because they do not take into account the full political dimension of participation and because they do not use a political system as an analytical framework. Without adopting a rigorous system, the present study in its central section aims at showing how the development of consultative devices has affected the relative position of three major internal components of the political system: legislative assemblies, administrations, and governments. In the concluding section, an attempt has been made to show how consultation, if studied properly, would similarly affect most other levels of the political system. A particular emphasis has been placed on establishing the relationships of consultation as a mechanism of political input with two other such mechanisms: interest groups and, particularly, political parties.