Gabriel A. Almond

Comparative Political Systems

W A f HAT I PROPOSE to do in this brief paper is to suggest how the application of certain sociological and anthropological concepts may facilitate systematic comparison among the major types of political systems operative in the world today. At the risk of saying the obvious, I am not suggesting to my colleagues in the field of comparative government that social theory is a conceptual cure-all for the ailments of the discipline. There are many ways of laboring in the vineyard of the Lord, and I am quite prepared to concede that there are more musical forms of psalmody than sociological jargon. I suppose the test of the sociological approach that is discussed here is whether or not it enables us to solve certain persistent problems in the field more effectively than we now are able to solve them. Our expectations of the field of comparative government have changed in at least two ways in the last decades. In the first place as American interests have broadened to include literally the whole world, our course offerings have expanded to include the many areas outside of Western Europe Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Secondly, as our international interests have expanded and become more urgent, our requirements in knowledge have become more exacting. We can no longer view political crises in France with detached curiousity or view countries such as IndoChina and Indonesia as interesting political pathologies. We are led to extend our discipline and intensify it simultaneously. It would simply be untrue to say that the discipline of comparative government has not begun to meet both of these challenges. As rapidly as it has been possible to train the personnel, new areas have been opened up to teaching and research; and there has been substantial encouragement to those who have been tempted to explore new aspects of the political process both here and abroad and to employ new methods in such research. It is precisely because

The Return to the State

Three important questions are raised by the “return to the state†movement of recent years. First, are the pluralist, structural functionalist, and Marxist literatures of political science societally reductionist, as this movement contends? Second, does the neostatist paradigm remedy these defects and provide a superior analytical model? Third, regardless of the substantive merits of these arguments, are there heuristic benefits flowing from this critique of the literature? Examination of the evidence leads to a rejection of the first two criticisms. The answer to the third question is more complex. There is merit to the argument that administrative and institutional history has been neglected in the political science of the last decades. This is hardly a “paradigmatic shift†; and it has been purchased at the exorbitant price of encouraging a generation of graduate students to reject their professional history and to engage in vague conceptualization.

Clouds, Clocks, and the study of Politics

In its eagerness to become scientific, political science has in recent decades tended to lose contact with its ontological base. It has tended to treat political events and phenomena as natural events lending themselves to the same explanatory logic as is found in physics and the other hard sciences. This tendency may be understood in part as a phase in the scientific revolution, as a diffusion, in two steps, of ontological and methodological assumptions from the strikingly successful hard sciences: first to psychology and economics, and then from these bellwether human sciences to sociology, anthropology, political science, and even history. In adopting the agenda of hard science, the social sciences, and political science in particular, were encouraged by the neopositivist school of the philosophy of science which legitimated this assumption of ontological and meta-methodological homogeneity. More recently, some philosophers of science and some psychologists and economists have had second thoughts about the applicability to human subject matters of strategy used in hard science.

Political Theory and Political Science

Like Rachel, Jacobs 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 Trumans 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 1950s was carried on largely in terms of this paradigm, to use Kuhns 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.

Public Opinion and National Security Policy

This paper is based on a lecture given by the author at the Army War College on January 3, 1956. In it Dr. Almond describes problems of public opinion and national security policy-problems which come of this policys technical character, its element of secrecy, and the gravity of the stakes involved. He prescribes four lines of action for strengthening the democratic political process in the making of security policy. The author is a research associate and Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Center for International Studies of Princeton University.

Corporatism, Pluralism, and Professional Memory

Organizing interests in Western Europe is part of the third wave of interest group studies to appear since the development of professional political science at the turn of the century. The first wave was mainly an American phenomenon; the second an effort to export interest group studies to Europe and elsewhere as part of a movement intended to encourage greater realism and less ideologism in European and comparative political studies. The Organizing Interests team has produced a useful book focused in substantial part on the theme of neocorporatism. The authors have not connected their work with the substantial body of earlier interest group research.

A Comparative Study of Interest Groups and the Political Process.

The first research planning session of the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council was held on April 5–10, 1957 at the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavior Sciences at Stanford, California. The participants included some of the recipients of SSRC grants for field studies of political groups, as well as a number of other scholars planning field research on these problems. The purpose of the Committee in sponsoring planning sessions among its grantees and other interested scholars is to enhance the cumulative value of research efforts now under way or planned for the near future. As a result of the SSRC program, as well as of a number of other organized and individual efforts, we can anticipate in a few years an extensive monographic literature dealing with political groups and processes in a great many foreign countries and a variety of different culture areas. Systematic information on this scale may not only fill in “areas of ignorance,†but offers an opportunity for significant advances in the general theory of politics.

The Study of Political Culture

Though its antecedents go far back to the very origins of political science (Almond and Verba, 1980) political culture theory in its modern form and version arose out of the collapse of Weimer democracy and the rise of Nazism (Verba 1965, p. 131). The effort to find an intellectual solution to this tragic historical puzzle — both the theories and the methods — came primarily out of American social science, then enriched by the creativity of German scholarly refugees form National Socialism (NS). We ought not to forget this strong German—American connection in the origins of modern political culture research. My interest in the subjective aspects of politics were greatly stimulated by the study of Max Weber under the tutelage of Albert Salomon and Hans Spier at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, the ‘University in Exile’ as it was then called. Other scholarly refugees from Germany whom I came to know in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Otto Kircheimer, Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Lazarsfeld, Erich Fromm and Else Fraenkel-Brunswick, among others, drew my attention to the ‘authoritarian personality’ research which came via Frankfurt to New York and Berkeley.

A Suggested Research Strategy in Western European Government and Politics.

If one compares the literature on American government and politics with that which concerns continental Europe, it is quite evident that the two fields of study in the last decades have proceeded on somewhat different assumptions as to the scope and methods of political science. This divergence is of relatively recent origin. Before World War I a substantial number of leading American students in this field had their training in European centers of learning, and brought back with them the rich tradition of European historical, philosophical, and legal scholarship. With noteworthy exceptions the study of continental European political institutions still tends to be dominated by this historical, philosophical, and legal emphasis. The continuity of scholarship in the continental European area has -been broken by the two world wars, by totalitarian regimes, by enemy occupation, and by the persistence of internal antagonism and cleavages. With the exception of a few years in the 1920s, the entire era since World War I has been one of catastrophe or the atmosphere of catastrophe in which scientific inquiry and the renewal of the scientific cadres could be carried on only for short periods, under the greatest handicaps, and with inadequate resources. In the United States, beginning after the First World War and stimulated in some measure by the great European innovators such as Ostrogorski, Bryce, Weber, Pareto, and Michels, the conception of the scope of political science began to undergo a significant change. This development occurred in an experimental and pragmatic way, and with little theoretical explication. As American political scientists discovered that governmental institutions in their actual practice deviated from their formal competences, they supplemented the purely legal approach with an observational or functional one. The problem now was not only what legal powers these agencies had, but what they actually did, how they were related to one another, and what roles they played in the making and execution of public policy. In this respect they were plowing more deeply into ground which had been broken by such English political scientists as Bagehot and Bryce. Once having departed from the legal framework and method, they began to probe into the non-legal levels and processes of politics, and a substantial literature developed including-in addition to realistic and functional analyses of the presidency, the courts, the Congress, and the bureaucracy-studies of non-legal or semi-legal institutions and processes such as political parties, pressure groups, public opinion, and political behavior.

Model Fitting in Communism Studies

The interaction between political theory and area studies in the last several decades has taken the form of model fitting — crude, clumsy, and, sometimes sanguine at the outset, increasingly deft and experimental as time went on and experience accumulated. Soviet, East European (and now Chinese) political studies, of all area studies, have been more open to this model fitting process. This may very well be due to the scarcity of data about communist societies, and the effort to enhance insight through experimenting with different theoretical perspectives.