The field of the comparative study of political party systems has been particularly fortunate to have been the focus of quite a number of substantial scholarly team efforts in recent years. Individual case studies are still appearing that follow Robert A. Dahl's model of the “patterns of opposition.” Terms such as “crisis of participation” or Sartori's “extreme pluralism,” from the book edited by Joseph La Palombara and Myron Weiner,2 are widely used in the description of party systems. Even the study of one-party systems and of national integration in developing areas is beginning to settle down to a common terminology that will increasingly allow comparison with the better-explored systems.

Students of politics use statistical and quantitative techniques to: summarize a large body of numbers into a small collection of typical values;

confirm (and perhaps sanctify) the results of the analysis by using tests of statistical significance that help protect against sampling and measurement error;

discover what's going on in their data and expose some new relationships; and

inform their audience what's going on in the data.

The Vietnam teach-ins are passé, but severe questioning and criticism persist in both the popular and semipopular press and, significantly, in the imposing array of books issued by commercial publishers. Unlike the realist-idealist dichotomy of the late 1940's and early 1950's, which was confined to the academic community, the result of our present involvement in an Asian war is a debate of national proportions, not only about Vietnam but about the nature of America's role and responsibility in international life and about priorities in domestic and foreign policies. Inevitably, much of the literature is polemical, hammering on the major theme: the Johnson Administration has led American foreign policy astray; thus alternatives must be sought.

Are there prismatic societies in Africa? That such a question can now be asked is as much a measure of changes in the study of administration as it is a recognition of new patterns of government emerging from African independence. During both the colonial and the current period, students of African bureaucracy have contributed little to administrative theory. Before independence, scholars concentrated on formal studies designed to raise efficiency. Since independence the field has been dominated by studies of political parties, trade unions, and voluntary associations, because these organizations carried on the independence struggle, often over the opposition of the bureaucracy. Behavioral studies of colonial administration and independent Afrir can civil services are badly needed.

There is broad agreement among Western scholars that under the Communists the criminal process in China1 is arbitrary, highly politicized, and responsive to class and status differences among its targets. It is frequently pointed out, quite accurately, that China has no criminal codes and no public-reporter system of judicial decisions and that important substantive laws often are unpublished or, if published, very vague. Theorists of totalitarianism even doubt the existence of legality within such systems.

A useful consequence of America's deepening involvement in Asian affairs is the widespread questioning of the premises that arc assumed to underlie United States policy, but debate stressing the weaknesses of American strategy in Vietnam without placing present dilemmas in a broader perspective is deficient. Similarly, discussion that ignores the distinctive features of the American historical experience, especially its influence on the processes of policy-making, courts irrelevance. Failure to look beyond the confines of the Vietnam predicament may prove as detrimental to observers as to officialdom, yet both find the process of distinguishing the relative importance of internal and external constraints increasingly arduous. In an era of contagious domestic unrest in industrialized countries and ambiguous conflicts in less developed geographical areas, both may be tempted to generalize too broadly from a dominant though still restricted series of events. Such, such are the joys of appraising American foreign policy during the Vietnam anguish.

Professor Bruce Russett has recently produced a book that purports to demonstrate the potentialities of the new “science” of international relations. A careful reading of International Regions and the International System, however, makes it difficult to avoid being impressed by the essential futility of the exercise and, therefore, to escape the conclusion that the book does not direct our attention toward an important new source of knowledge and insight in the field of international relations.

The massive effort in the United States to develop the study of the Chinese Communist regime and movement began in the wake of the postwar upsurge in the development of the social sciences, particularly in the field of comparative politics. Inevitably, it has come under the controlling influence of the exciting intellectual ferment in these disciplines. With the publication of Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (1962) and Franz Schurmann's Ideology and Organization in Communist China (1966), the study of contemporary China can be said to have begun its drive to maturity.