Realerpolitik: The Texts are Getting Better

...At the core of behaviorism are its self-consciously scientific studies-the quasi-objective, heavily quantitative measurements of voting behavior and legislative decision-making...

...Although it makes no more than a passing effort to discuss the real costs of running for public office, the text’s 1969’ edition devotes more than two pages to detailing the sinceabolished provisions of the Corrupt Practices Act of 1925-provisions which even Young, Ogg, and Ray admit were then “very imperfectly met...

...Yet one of the strengths of the Irish and Prothro text-and a clue to what allowed it to endure throughout a decade of turmoil-is the subtlety of many of its arguments...

...Neither would they illumine the impotence of the Senate’s doves or the cowardice of the average bureaucrat...

...Words such as “ideology ,” “repression, ” “masses, ’’ and “elites,”-once thought to apply only to totalitarian societies-are now shamelessly used in descriptions of the United States...

...Within a relatively short time, a sizable number of academics shifted their attention to the top of the social pyramid, where the elite few are supposed to control political power...

...Carrying the argument further, Irish and Prothro contend that “internal democracy in political parties is not essential,” because “even if the parties were internally autocratic, the desire to win elections would force them to offer attractive candidates...

...At times, the book’s reluctance to take a stand is akin to Clay Whitehead’s view of journalistic objectivity...

...Yet in trying to create a logically consistent text, Dye and Ziegler end up stretching elitism just too far...

...Pluralism is the liberal faith that decisions in America are the result of competition and compromise between conflicting interest groups...

...The blacks...

...There is, in these texts, a further suggestion that the locus of power has quite literally passed from sight, having moved a way from those institutions that traditionally claimed to be its source...

...Vastly different in tone is Thomas R. Dye and L. Harmon Ziegler’s The Irony of Democracy, which might be described as the new “hot book” of the political science world...

...At times this orgy of description is reminiscent of Voltaire’s Dr...

...the elitists use them to point out the high salaries of corporate executives...

...Dye and Ziegler, published in 1970 and subtitled “An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics,” starts out bluntly : Elites, not masses, govern America...

...At times, it seems that the academics’ newfound zeal for scientific rigor stems from efforts to convince themselves that they are really scientists...

...do the official agencies through which the pressure groups and the parties operate...

...Facts themselves, in a bloodless, nuts-and-bolts parade, seem to represent government in the same way that “Gas, Food, Lodging” signs symbolize entire cities on interstate highways...

...But now, although its share of the market is still hefty (if steadily declining), it seems like a relic of another age...

...Unlike natural science, political science undergoes its revolution not when new facts turn up, but when new values and attitudes emerge...

...Most fundamentally, the view it presents has some recognizable connection to political reality...

...During the 1950s this fact-filled, descriptive text, which reads like an overgrown hign-school civics book, was to introductory political science what today Samuelson is to economics-the home base, setting the discipline’s standards and biases...

...It has outlived virtually all the systems of popular government in the recorded history of this planet...

...Where would political direction come from, if not from the ebb and flow of competing institutions...

...Similarly influential was the development of sophisticated studies indicating that class lines were as rigid in the United States as they are in Europe...

...It is probable that those students who grew up in the sixties have made a substantial contributialn to their own good fortune simply by refusing to buy the Panglossian view of the United States government that political scientists were accustomed to peddling...

...Chapter titles like “Elites and Masses: The Shaky Foundations of Democracy,” and phrases like “working authoritarianism” convey the message...

...The tone of the newer book is also different...

...The book describes itself as “an explanation of American political life based on an elitist theory of democracy,” and announced its central theory : To conclude that the nation’s future depends upon an enlightened citizenry...

...The virtue of behaviorism is that it tries to reproduce the political process rather than airily describing how government is supposed to work...

...The traditional text uses statistics to inform the student about the gross tonnage of American steel companies...

...they do not eliminate it...

...reflects the symbols rather than realities of American politics...

...First, the pluralists’ laissezfaire approach virtually insures that the powerful, moneyed interests will prevail over poor or disorganized groups...

...The other, while recognizing the wounds that the elite can inflict, concludes that “a well-ordered society governed by educated and resourceful elites” is better than mob rule...

...Nor...

...4 47-page chapter on Congress, for example, cites more than 40 studie:s and contains 101 footnotes...

...There is then a failure both in diagnosis and prescription...

...Rather than remaining aloof, introductory courses in government have been fundamentally transformed by a decade of social flux...

...The new technique, “behaviorism,” was the logical outgrowth of the profession’s insistence on calling itself a “science,” rather than more modestly stating its objectives as “doing politics” as at British universities...

...Small chance...

...Irish Humor Nevertheless, the first, and still the most prominent, of the behaviorist texts, The Politics of American Democracy, by Marian Irish and James Prothro, is a quantum leap forward from Young, Ogg, and Ray...

...Piecemeal Politics By the end of the sixties, critics were lining up to attack both pluralism and the tame liberalism with which it was linked...

...They also criticize most domestic policy as mere “incrementalism,” a niggardly way of achieving whatever is politically expedient...

...Lu.ke Popovich is on the staff of The Washington Monthly...

...In spite of differences in their approach to the study of power in America, scholars-political scientists and sociologists alike-agree that “the key political, economic, and social decisions are made by “tiny minorities...

...This pluralism is the source of the junglecode realism in Irish and Prothro’s promise to analyze “every institution and policy...

...The problem with this approach is not its rigor, but its tendency to provide scientific evidence for what should be obvious from a stroll down the street...

...While American government clearly does not follow the civics-book outlines of Young, Ogg, and Ray, neither is it the symbolic sham depicted in Dye and Ziegler...

...The new answer, to reflect a growing cynicism about government, is the Elite...

...Still, they both agree that “there is no reason to be complacent about the future of American democracy.’’ Goodbye, Dr...

...The classic tome, Essentials of American National Government, written by the late Frederic A. Ogg and P. Orman Ray and revised by William H. Young, was first published in 1932 and is now in its 10th edition...

...Since one of the authors, James Prothro, was a pioneer of behavioral research, it is no surprise that this text shows the best and worst aspects of the method...

...The Pentagon Papers abound with examples of this misplaced emphasis: the Army’s reports toted up the rice and ammunition figures, but overlooked such non-statistical elements as the will to fight...

...Pangloss...

...Especially in this industrial, scientific, and nuclear age, life in a democracy, just as in a totalitarian society, is shaped by a handful of men...

...But so few persons take an active part in politics that roles of leadership are amazingly easy to come by...

...The ambitious young man with talent but without connections finds more opportunities to “make a name for himself” in politics than in private business...

...Certainly the history of the 1960s-as an elite continued the Vietnam war regardless of popular opinion-was a factor...

...Textbooks are especially important because they provide the nucleus of all but the most avant-garde introductory courses in government...

...Nevertheless, real progress has been made...

...Displays at the last American Political Science Association convention demonstrated vividly that there are textbooks for virtually every approach to political science, but conversations with book vendors and teachers revealed that there are currently three major types of introductory texts on the marketthe traditional, the liberal pluralist, and the new “ultra-modern” elitist...

...The values that surfaced during the sixties dictated a more realistic approach to the study of politics...

...Many of these discussions are provocative-Dye and Ziegler seems to be that rare text that might actually stimulate classroom discussion-but some of the conclusions strain credulity...

...Young, Ogg, and Ray’s students learned little about the seamy side of American government...

...The text lists its biases at the end of each chapter and takes a free hand with the historical/constitutional background which Young, Ogg, and Ray treat with such reverence...

...represented by interest groups...

...If done well, an introductory course in political science can provide the framework for a lifetime of intelligent observation-and occasional participationin the political process...

...Easily quantifiable aspects of politics, like election returns, are overemphasized at the expense of more nebulous qualities like beliefs or values...

...None of these texts would explain the complex of values and pressures that created the moon program or made Robert McNamara fool himself with numbers...

...Almost every assertion in Irish and Prothro is buttressed by a footnoted reference to a relevant academic monograph...

...There is none of the insight into the culture of the executive branch that characterizes George Reedy’s The Twilight of the Presidency or the kind of understanding of life on the Hill that distinguished James Eloyd’s “A Senator’s Day...

...Why has elitism suddenly become so attractive a theory...

...Conceived as a great experiment in self-rule, it has survived a terrible ordeal by combat, progressively widened its popular base, deployed its strength around the globe as a world power of the first rank, and now stands as leader of the free world and model for many heretofore subject peoples striving for self-expression and self-rule...

...In the preface, they say “one author values radical reform as a means of establishing a truly democratic political system,” adding that “the anti-democratic sentiments of the masses can be changed...

...By 1971 this doctrine had developed enough to produce a thoroughly elitist text, Thomas R. Dye and L. Harmon Ziegler’s The Irony of American Democracy...

...Nothing could be further from the truth...

...Even the title, Essentials of American National Government, is instructive, since the book’s 556 pages and mountains of statistics make it clear that nothing less than all the facts are essential...

...Realerpolitik: the texts are getting better by Luke Popovich Although it is self-evident that the political world changed drastically during the sixties, most of us outside academia nurture the quaint illusion that the teaching of government has somehow remained static since our last bout with Poli Sci 111...

...The strife of the sixties presented two objections to pluralism...

...A common failing of all these books is their lack of feel for what it’s really like in government...

...Aire they talking about the poor...

...The vast chasm between the traditional and elitist approaches is made clear just by comparing the opening sentences of two archetypal political science texts...

...The best example of the role of the unorganized interests,” according to Young, Ogg, and Ray, is “the attack on corruption in government...

...The two authors disagree as to whether elitism is good or bad...

...With pluralism on the wane, what could take its place...

...from the point of view: ‘Who gets helped...

...Against the backdrop of the recent Nixon-McGovern debacle, it is hard to accept notions like “elections are primarily a symbolic exercise for the masses to help tie them to the established order...

...While the politicalization of the campus has become a mass-media cliche, the politicalization of the teaching of politics has been noted only rarely outside academic journals...

...The evidence for this assertion is a series of behavioristic studies illustrating that most voters know nothing about candidates or issues, that only the college-educated elite believes in the civil libertarian values of the First Amendment...

...The young...

...In their discussion of the congressional seniority system, for example, the authors devote one paragraph to the abuses of the system and the next one to its defense, coming down on neither side...

...If behaviorism is the method in The Politics of American Democracy, pluralism is the model...

...The pluralist considers concentrations of power inevitable and argues that the: individual is...

...The authors go on to say, “It is the irony of democracy that the responsibility for the survival of liberal democratic values depends upon elites, not masses...

...Like many other new texts, Irish and Prothro not only revises the traditional recipe of 99 parts fact sweetened with one part commentary, but it also adds a new ingredient: cartoons from The New Yorker and lyrics by Judy Collins are slipped in for spice...

...If done poorly, an introductory course provides just another set of misconceptions to be discarded during that difficult transition from academia to the “real” world...

...The student who has Dye and Ziegler or Irish and l?rothro is a lot better off than the one who is stuck with-as for years allmost everyone was-Young, Ogg, and Ray...

...Their extended discussion of “How a Bill Elecomes a Law” leaves little room for a congressman carrying the ball for the highway lobby or a senator receiving a campaign contribution in exchange for introducing a private immigration bill...

...The tone is set in the book’s first paragraph, subtitled “The Great Experiment ”: The American system of government is now nearly 200 years old...

...To prove that more members of Congress show up for votes when party whips are active than for routine balloting, the book cites a 1964 study by Randall A. Ripley entitled, “The Party Whip: Organization in the United States House of Representatives...

...But before the descriptive approach to political science could be abandoned, another method had to be developed to take its place...

...There are roseate tendencies, as when the text intones, “The office of the President, with its awesome responsibilities and solitary dignity, has accumulated a tradition and a prestige through the years that lift the men who fill it beyond their realized talents.’’ But the real problem is that this text’s approach no more conveys the essence of how politics really works than a table of altitudes in the World Almanac gives a sense of the grandeur of the Himalayas...

...In portraying the surface of American government, the text relies on description and statistics, consigning current academic research to neat bibliographies at the end of each chapter...

...It is difficult to appreciate how vast the transformation in political science texts has been without an extended look at what was, until a decade ago, the standard text, Young, Ogg, and Ray...

...Because of its genetic limitations and conceptual blinders, it’s not surprising that the text quickly lost favor in the 1960s...

...For example, dedication to the belief that the individual is represented by conflicting pressure groups does not blind the authors to the realization that the wealthy and already powerful tend to be the best organized: What is disturbing is the upper-status bias of the entire [pressure group] system...

...With so many of the real reasons for what is wrong in government thus ignored, it is not suprising that these books have so little to say about how we can get things straightened out...

...The “invisible hand,” which pluralists assumed would descend from the Capitol Dome to guide political conflict, could not prevent chaos...

...Whlo gets hurt?’ ” The authors’ faith in pluralism and their conviction that democracy still prevails in an era of increasingly powerful institutions is never more apparent than in their discussion of political parties and the opportunities they provide: Many observers roundly condemn American political parties for being oligarchical...

...Pangloss It is clear that the difference between the old and new government texts is of another kind, and is more significant, than that between old and new physics books...

...The political parties decrease the extreme nature of the bias, but...

...These introductory courses not only serve as the discipline’s lowest common denominator, but also reach far more people than more advanced, and often more subtle, courses...

...As products of this trend, the new texts show a commitment toward trenchant social criticism...

...After discussing special interest groups, the text ackaowledges that “there are a large number of genuine and deeply felt interests in society which are rarely expressed and almost never organized...

...The authors treat the cold war as an exercise in self-deception and say that ideas of rational decision-making in government are “largely an intellectual fiction...

...Second, critics charge that the pluralist stress on competition leads only to piecemeal compromise while no one cares about what is right, just, or good for the general welfare...

...A frequent criticism of political scientists is that when they try to emulate natural scientists their first step is to adopt the technician’s lame imagination...

...Dye arid Ziegler’s students learn little else...