Alan Patten's social lineage account of cultural continuity is the most recent effort to provide multicultural theory with a non-essentialist concept of culture, its continuity and loss that meets broadly liberal normative desiderata. In this essay, I argue that it too fails to offer an alternative to essentialism, to meet standard liberal normative stipulations, and to construct a theory of continuity sufficient to underpin the present claims of involuntarily incorporated communities. That result is theoretically interesting for it shows the deep intractability of the problems at the core of liberal multiculturalism.

Quite generally recognized is the fact that rural local government in the United States has failed to keep pace with the improvements in governmental organization and procedure which have been made in the national, state, and municipal fields. In 1917, the county was referred to as the “dark continent” of American politics—an appellation which might have been applied with equal propriety to the rural subdivisions of counties known as towns or townships. Today, after two decades, it must be admitted that rural government still lags in its rate of progress; yet it is not the unexplored jungle of twenty years ago. In several states, comprehensive surveys have been made with a view to reorganization, and during the past few years the depression has served to stimulate local-government consciousness where previously little interest was displayed in local affairs. In increasing numbers, attempts are being made, in some instances through constitutional amendment but more often by statutory enactment, to render our local areas, organization, and functions more adequate to present-day needs. Various extra-legal developments are taking place also. It is the purpose of this article to summarize the more significant developments in the field of county and township government during the years 1935 and 1936. While not all of these developments, when measured by principles of sound public administration, can be said to be in the direction of progress, a definite trend in that direction is clearly discernible.

The more intensively one tries to study the interesting phenomena of direct legislation the more humble does he become. To look closely, for example, at the two hundred and ninety-one constitutional and legislative measures which the people of thirty-two States voted upon in 1914 is to be impressed with the number and significance of the things about that remarkable election which one cannot possibly know. How superficial at best must be our insight into that complex of social, political, economic and human forces which lay back of the presentation of those measures and the popular decision upon them. It is in full realization of the peril which lies in the way of sweeping classifications and glib generalizations that the conclusions drawn in the course of this brief discussion of the recent experience with the initiative and referendum petition are offered with considerable hesitancy.

The new German Constitution, the Basic Law for the German Federal Republic of May 23, 1949, provides in Article 92 that the highest judicial power shall be vested in a Federal Constitutional Court. Although the Bonn Basic Law thus created a new institution, it is an institution with a precedent in the former Weımar Constitution of 1919. In accordance with the latter, the Constitutional Tribunal (Staatsgerichtshof) had jurisdiction over constitutional controversies within any Land which had no tribunal of its own for the adjustment of such controversies, as well as over controversies, other than civil law matters, among the various Laender or between the Reich and one of the Laender. And the Supreme Court (Reichsgericht), as the highest authority, could establish finally whether disputed Land statutes were compatible with the federal Constitution.

The Basic Law, however, grants the new Federal Constitutional Court considerably wider jurisdiction than that accorded either to the Constitutional Tribunal or to the Supreme Court under the Weimar Constitution. The Federal Constitutional Court must, above all, arbitrate both disputes which may arise among the constitutional organs of the Republic, the so-called “federal constitutional” cases, and the so-called “conflicting rules” (Normenkollisionen) cases—the latter designating disputes involving the compatibility of the written federal law or Land law with the Basic Law, as well as the compatibility of the Land law with the federal law.

Most scholars agree the rise of states led to modern territoriality. Yet globally the transition to precise boundaries occurred most often in colonies, and there are virtually no systematic explanations of its occurrence outside Europe. This article explains how precise boundaries emerged in the earliest context where they were regularly and generally implemented: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial North America. Unlike explanations of modern territoriality in Europe, it argues property boundary surveys became an entrenched practice on the part of settlers and were a readily available response to intercolonial boundary disputes. After independence, settlers who were accustomed to surveys pursued linear boundaries with Britain, Spain, and Russia. Moreover, the article argues that linear borders (delimited linearly and typically physically demarcated), not sovereignty, are constitutive of modern territoriality. By disentangling the literature’s Eurocentric confusion between modern territoriality and sovereign statehood, the article makes possible a global comparative study of the emergence of modern territoriality.

In his ethnography of industrialized slaughter, Every Twelve Seconds, Timothy Pachirat coins a label to describe political interventions that use visibility as a catalyst for reform—the “politics of sight.” We argue that the politics of sight rests on three premises that are all mistaken or misspecified: (1) that exposing morally repugnant practices will make us see them, (2) that seeing such practices will stop us from acquiescing to them, and (3) that owning up to such practices is preferable to keeping them concealed. To develop our argument, we propose an alternative interpretation of Pachirat’s own ethnographic material informed by theories from social psychology—one that leads to a different critique of the politics of sight than the one Pachirat offers and to a different understanding of the conditions under which it can succeed. Methodologically, we seek to illustrate the value of reanalyzing interpretive research through close reading.

Political parties sometimes adopt unpopular positions that condemn them to electoral defeat. This phenomenon is usually ascribed to expressive motives—namely, parties’ desire to maintain their ideological purity. Could ideological parties instead have strategic incentives to lose? To answer this question, I present a model of repeated spatial elections in which voters face uncertainty about their preferred policy and learn via experience. The amount of voter learning, I show, depends on the location of the implemented policy: a more radical policy generates more information. For a party whose ideological stance is unpopular with the electorate, this creates a trade-off between winning the upcoming election so as to secure policy influence and changing voters’ preferences so as to win with a better platform in the future. Under some conditions the party gambles on the future. It chooses to lose today to possibly change voters’ views and win big tomorrow.

“Realism” in systematic political science in this country began to emerge, in a reaction against the inadequacies of legal and institutional description, early in this century. David Easton, remarking the change, cites in evidence Arthur F. Bentley's attempt “to fashion a tool.” By midcentury, it may be said, Bentleyism is tooling the fashion. A recent commentator, deploring the current emphasis on methods and measurements, declares the new orthodoxy has left its mark on the profession no less than on the world and is partially responsible for our failure to identify and solve social problems. Yet, for all the talk about Bentley's influence, and despite the social significance of his ideas, there has been too little study of his theory of politics. I propose to examine his writings as those of a “realist” and to show how his search for both “realism” and a “science of politics” may lead to a surreptitious sanctification of the actual. In short, in this paper I shall argue that the implications of Bentley's cosmology are conservative.

Bentley's political work had an ulterior end; it was not pure curiosity. “My interest in politics,” he said, “is not primary, but derived from my interest in the economic life, and … I hope from this point of approach ultimately to gain a better understanding of the economic life than I have succeeded in gaining hitherto.” The terms of his solution, expressed first in The Process of Government, reflected his understanding of the early twentieth-century midwestern social and economic structure. Influenced by social Darwinism and sociological realism, and rejecting legal and judicial formalism, Bentley advanced what could be called a “functional” theory, based upon what he later called the “transactional approach.”

In 1934, the Soviet Union rounded out the first great cycle in its development. The fruition of the Five-Year Plan, the general collectivization of agriculture, the entry of the Soviet Union into the councils of the nations of the world—these and many other successes of the Communist régime were evidences of great achievement. Peace and order and economic progress had been attained at home; the stability of the government had been clearly demonstrated, and friends had been made abroad. The social and economic structure of the country had been completely transformed, and the Socialist community was now a going concern.

James Barber's predictive theory of presidential behavior has evoked varied reactions, which have ranged from praise for its sensitization of readers to the fact that personality affects presidential performance, to criticisms for the emphasis that the theory places on personality, to questions about the validity of the theory. This article addresses itself to the criticisms and the questions.

Concerning the questions, it shows, first, that in analyzing presidents, Barber assumes the validity of “character”–the core construct of the theory. It shows, second, that Barber's earlier research on Connecticut legislators, from which “character” derives, does not empirically establish the construct.

Concerning the criticisms, the article isolates a possible origin of the psychological reductionism evident in Barber's explanations of presidential performance. The article identifies a similar reductionism in Barber's legislative research and attributes this reductionism to a fallacious extra-empirical argument.

Historically the character of civil-military relations in the United States has been dominated by the concept of civilian control of the military. This has largely been a response to the fear of praetorianism. As recently as 1949, for example, the first Hoover Commission asserted that one of the major reasons for strengthening the “means of exercising civilian control” over the defense establishment was to “safeguard our democratic traditions against militarism.” This same warning was raised in the report of the Rockefeller Committee on defense organization in 1953. While the overriding purpose of the committee's recommendations was to provide “the Nation with maximum security at minimum cost,” the report made it clear that this had to be achieved “without danger to our free institutions, based on the fundamental principle of civilian control of the Military Establishment.” Finally, during the debate on the reorganization proposals of 1958, senators and congressmen used the theme of a “Prussianized” military staff to attempt to slow down the trend towards centralization in the military establishment.

Despite this imposing support, the concept of civilian control of the military has little significance for contemporary problems of national security in the United States. In the first place, military leaders are divided among themselves, although their differences cannot be reduced to a crass contrast between dichomatic doctrines. Air Force leaders who are gravely concerned over the need to maintain a decisive nuclear retaliatory force are by now acknowledging the need to develop a limited war capability.

This study sets forth the post-1945 development and present status of Japanese constitutional and procedural law on court-mass media relations, while analyzing aspects of the interaction between law and sociopolitical thought and behavior. A recent and dramatic illustration of the issues is provided by the Hakata Station Film Case: A Fukuoka court's subpoena (August 29, 1969) for newsfilm taken during a student-police encounter occasioned conflict between Japan's mass media and courts; the dispute was resolved by a film seizure (March 4, 1970) three months after the Supreme Court had upheld the subpoena's constitutionality. The media maintain that Article 21 of the Constitution (freedom of expression) gives them the right to determine when their used or unused television film or still photographs may be employed as court evidence, even in the absence of privileged communications. This and other court cases considered, arising from Japan's perennial demonstrations, illustrate a strong tendency toward in-group unanimity, new problems in news and evidence gathering, and the operation of a non-Western legal system influenced by Japanese, European, and American traditions.

This study shows that a simple, empirically derived rule accounts well for the outcome of multi-ballot, majority-rule conventions in the period 1848-1948 and that the same rule would have enabled one to predict correctly the outcome of all contested presidential nominations since 1952 before any candidate had achieved majority support in the Associated Press'polls of delegates. The rule's success suggests two conclusions about the behavior of delegates: (1) that their guesses about outcomes are based on objective cues, similarly interpreted, and (2) that the trend in voting for candidates, in addition to the level of support they attract, is an important element of such cues. The study's findings also suggest that delegates in recent years do not contrast sharply with their predecessors in their predilection for bandwagon voting.