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The field of public policy analysis; centered about practical choices, is being extended by this journal to include useful comparisons among nations or other political units, as well as borrowing or lesson‐drawing. This extension should remain close to the practical orientation of the field, rather than seeking to contribute to those disciplinary theories that lack practical usefulness in the short term (several decades). Implications of this admonition are spelled out in the form of a list of suggested topics for articles in this journal.

Policy studies has been one of the most dynamic parts of the social sciences over the past several decades. There has been substantial growth in the literature, the number of courses, the number of professionals who identify themselves with the field, and, arguably, in the impact on public sector policy and programs. The policy studies field is an eclectic one, claimed by public administrators, political scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, educators, environmental scientists, and many others. The policy studies enterprise, which I define here to include both "policy analysis" and "program evaluation," (more about this later) has struggled with its identity and with its image of itself. Ever self-critical, the field is as willing to hold up its failures as it is its successes. The assessment of the field in these books (as well as others) raises a number of issues: Does the field have an adequate and appropriate impact on decision making? Does it have credibility with both the academic community and policy decision makers? Is it overly vulnerable to political pressure? Or, alternately, unresponsive to decision maker needs? Does the policy studies field enhance the democratic process or undermine it? Can the field usefully address normative issues? Does it have adequate methodological power to answer key questions? Is it focusing on the key questions? Is the field appropriately organized and integrated or is it just a hodge-podge of sub-fields in the social sciences? How effectively do we convey the knowledge and skill in the field to new practitioners and students? In any field of study or practice (and public policy is both study and practice) it is desirable to have a sense of progress, a perception that the field is moving forward. Are we making progress in policy studies? To answer the progress question though, we need ways to gauge positive movement. These books provide clues about what it would mean to achieve progress in policy studies--partly by the criticism they make of the current state of the field, partly by the recommendations the books contain about what should be done, and partly from inferences which may be drawn from them. First, progress requires an effective way to incorporate values into the policy studies enterprise. To paraphrase Fischer in Evaluating Public Policy, the field needs not just to determine whether a goal has been achieved, but also whether the goal is worth pursuing in the first place. How to treat values has been a sticking point in policy studies and the social sciences generally for some time. Second, progress requires an improved process of deliberation and policy decision making. A key subpart is that the relationship between analysts and decision makers be improved. Policy studies typically are intended for "use." A good deal of discussion and inquiry over the years has focused on the extent to which policy studies are in fact used and the impact they do or do not have on decisions. While studies may make a contribution through enlightenment rather than instrumental use, a direct contribution to the deliberations of real decision makers remains the ideal. Decision makers in this case means not only those in "authorized" positions such as legislators and administrators, but citizens and policy recipients as well. Just how policy analysts should relate to policy participants is yet to be agreed upon. Third, progress in policy studies requires an improved linkage among a variety of fields and areas of study and practice. The linkages need to connect not only traditional disciplines like political science and economics, but also sub-areas under the policy studies umbrella like policy analysis, evaluation, auditing, performance measurement, and others. Linkages also should occur across content areas, e.g. learning from experience and analysis in health policy should assist in educational policy, and vice versa. The assertion that policy studies should be multi- or inter-disciplinary is longstanding, but how to achieve it in practice is still a concern. …

William Trumbull [1990] argues that the question of standing-who should be counted-in cost-benefit analysis can and should be settled by reference to the potential Pareto principle. He thus takes issue with our position [Whittington and MacRae, 1986] that the postulates of cost-benefit analysis do not determine standing. Trumbull's argument also raises more general questions as to the relation between cost-benefit analysis and policy analysis. We would therefore like to comment on Trumbull's article, and to expand on our position on the issue of who has standing in cost-benefit analysis, because the issues he raises are important ones for both economists and public policy analysts (and for those of us who try to be both). In his paper Trumbull develops two main arguments. The first is that the term "cost-benefit analysis" should be defined as the strict application of the potential Pareto improvement principle. The second is that the application of the potential Pareto principle requires, on technical grounds, that questions regarding standing be answered in specific ways. For example, Trumbull believes that a cost-benefit analyst must (1) accord standing to future generations and citizens of other countries, and (2) deny standing to criminals, because to do otherwise would be inconsistent with the potential Pareto principle, and thus the result of the cost-benefit analysis would be based on something other than an "economic criterion." We would like to comment on both of these points. It seems to us that the issue at stake is not really "standing" but the nature of economic expertise and its role in policy debate.

The comparison of objective and subjective social indicators can be illuminated by comparing their relations to individual choice, of which migration is an important instance. We have replicated for U.S. states Lowry's (1966) regression model of migration among SMSA's, and added an indirect subjective measure of quality of life in each state. This measure is based on a Gallup survey asking respondents about their preferences among states of the United States as places to live. A measure of collective preference for each state, as viewed by outsiders, is constructed from these responses. This new variable increases R2 from 0.798 to 0.828, and is itself predicted with an R2 of only 0.355 by objective variables. Objective indicators of well-being had increased R2 only from 0.762 to 0.798. We conclude that collective preferences — the subjective measure we have used — play an independent part in predicting migration.

Since the theory of games was first made widely available, with application to economic behavior, its use has been suggested in many other areas, from the global to the individual. Several correspondences between game theory and certain aspects of political process have been noted.The contribution of game theory to substantive knowledge in the empirical sciences, however, has been modest; Luce and Raiffa judge that its impact has been greater in applied mathematics. The area of political behavior—despite the apparent applicability of the notion of conflict of interest—is similarly lacking in studies, although a few notable exceptions exist.

Persistent cleavages in the French body politic are analyzed by multiple regression methods. Religiosity, urban-rural differences, agricultural wealth, and agricultural proletarization are related to various divisions of the multiparty vote at three major elections. Common features of the regression coefficients at the three elections reveal lastings divisions in the electorate, while changes in the coefficients from one election to another reflect the rise of new political groups and the changing characteristics of the old.

Among the causes of the demise of the Fourth Republic, one prominently mentioned has been the incapacity of governments to govern. Not merely cabinet instability as such, but the association of premiers' popularity in the Assembly with their disinclination toward bold policy innovations, is the charge. Stability indeed there was: continuity of ministers under changing cabinets, relative persistence of cabinets (such as those of Queuille and Mollet) that maintained the existing political balance or even defended the Assembly against innovation. Stability, too, of policy: the continuation of the Indo-Chinese war and the Algerian war, for example, long after a policy change might have been considered. Underlying this sometimes artificial stability was the threat that an innovating premier or minister might soon find himself returned to the status of an ordinary denuty.

In the past seventy years, lasting reorientations of the national electorate have taken place in two periods, centering about the presidential elections of 1896 and 1918. Most other presidential elections have involved relatively uniform swings of states or counties toward one party or the other; Louis Bean summarized this phenomenon in his chapter title, "As Your State Goes, So Goes the Nation."' But the occasions when this uniform swing does not occur are of special interest, because if the reorientations persist they can mark the injection of new issues into national and state politics for a generation. Lubell noted the importance of the "Al Smith revolution" which preceded the "Roosevelt revolution" ;2 and Key, naming these phenomena "critical elections," went on to show that Bryan's candidacy in 1896 marked an earlier major reorientation of the electorate.3 He defined a critical election as one in which "the depth and intensity of electoral involvement are high, in which more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community, and in which new and durable electoral groupings are formed."4 Since no sample survey data are available for either 1896 or 1928, the systematic study of voting in these elections must rest largely on analysis of voting statistics. These statistics can be interpreted more fully with the aid of

Macrae Duncan. Une analyse factorielle des préférences politiques. In: Revue française de science politique, 8ᵉ année, n°1, 1958. pp. 95-109.

The houses in which Massachusetts state legislators lived in 1951, when rated according to Warner's models, showed differences as between their owners' political parties but only low associations with the voting record within each party. Socialization into the role of professional party politician reduced this association. Legislators in each party who were over 35 years old, and who had spent relatively little time in public office, tended more than others to "vote their houses."

Roll-call votes are being used increasingly to throw light on various aspects of the legislative process. As long as these votes are neither simply unanimous nor cast purely on party lines, they contain information that can often be rendered more intelligible by the simplification or condensation of many votes into fewer variables or dimensions. The researcher interested in a particular legislative decision can thus profit by seeing whether it exemplifies a more general and repeated type of occurrence. The techniques of analysis used in studying legislative votes are broadly applicable to collegial bodies of many sorts, including municipal, state, and national legislative bodies; party congresses and conventions; the U.S. Supreme Court; and the United Nations General Assembly.Two major questions have been asked which lead to the search for different kinds of simplifying variables in this analysis. One concerns theissuesthat divide a given group of legislators at a given time,i.e., what general matters are being argued about? The second concerns thesubgroupsof legislators within the group selected for study: what are the blocs, factions, cliques, and the like, whose more persistent existence is reflected by the division on a given vote?

The paper argues that ethical discourse is intimately involved in the research literature of social science, and especially of political science, but is relegated to a subsidiary position. It therefore shares some of the vagueness, flexibility, and potential self-contradiction of the discourse of everyday life, rather than being sharpened by rational criticism. The norms governing scientific discourse provide not only for empirical testing, but also for rational criticism in the formulation of theories; an analogous type of criticism is shared by legal discourse. Some of the norms of scientific communication may be transferred to ethics by the specification of rules for ethical argument, requiring that arguments derive from previously specified, clear and consistent “ethical hypotheses.” Within such rules, ethical systems formulated by social scientists and philosophers may be compared critically. Systems amenable to such comparison include those of welfare economics, cost-benefit analysis, and formal democratic theory. The discourse embodying this argument and criticism is particularly appropriate within the normative tradition of political science. Its possible benefits include clarity about our valuations; communication among disciplines that enlarges the perspectives of each discipline; and a more independent, self-conscious examination within the university of the criteria for policy formation.

“… [T]here is no necessary conflict among these three desires of the American social scientist: to be a scientist like physical and biological scientists, to provide useful technical services, and to be significant at the level of policy. The chapters of this symposium are intended to illustrate their compatibility.”This statement indicates a major theme of The Policy Sciences – a volume that marked, as of 1951, the aspirations of a group of leading American social scientists for the policy applications of their disciplines. The harmony of goals that it suggests is no longer evident today.The possible incompatibilities among the goals of pure science, applied science, and policy can be seen by examining The Policy Sciences in two decades' perspective. They are of three major kinds:1. To provide intelligent advice on practical problems, the social science disciplines need to include systematic valuative discourse in a way that natural science does not.2. Applied social science (like applied science generally) differs from pure natural science in stressing valuative dependent variables that may not be closely related to the conceptual schemes of pure science, and independent variables related to alternative choices open to the actor.3. Different roles and channels of influence are appropriate for pure and applied science; and for applied social science in democratic regimes, participation and consent on the part of those influenced are of vital significance.

A major concern of political theorists has been the definition of the proper role of legislators in relation to their constituencies. Yet relatively little analysis has been made of the uniformities of behavior that actually prevail in these relations. Such uniformities, if they could be found, would bear directly on the theory of the party system, on speculation about the nature of representative government, and on the feasibility of proposals for a reordering of party practices.It has been shown that the tendencies of Congressmen to vote with their party or to cross party lines are associated with the similarity or dissimilarity between party policy and presumed interest of constituency. One aim of this study is to test the applicability of this proposition to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, by examination of the relation between roll-call votes and constituency characteristics. The evidence indicates that a similar relation exists in this body, and has been present consistently throughout the last two decades.

The draft constitution for the Association, presented to us by the Constitutional Revision Committee, responds to a widely expressed desire for assurance that our officers are representative of our membership. We live in a time of increasing demands on all of our institutions, including those of the APSA, An important purpose in devising workable democratic forms is therefore to insure that those who make these demands do not feel that they have been unheard because of biases in their institutions of government. Although this is not the only purpose of our constitution, it is an important one, and the central one that the framers of the proposed draft seem to have had in mind. I do not believe that this purpose can easily be attained by other alternatives before us, including our present constitution.

This article examines an area of cost-benefit methodology which has come under increasing philosophical scrutiny in recent years: the appropriate treatment of individuals' preferences. We illustrate some of the difficulties involved in assessing preferences in the context of a concrete example: the evaluation of a rural water supply project in southern Haiti. Four problems in the application of cost-benefit principles are discussed: (1) how to count the social value of private water taps connected to homes if they are preferred for prestige reasons, (2) how to assess husbands' preferences concerning the time savings by wives who previously carried water from more distant sources, (3) how to count preferences based on a respondent's desire to support general community welfare, and (4) how to evaluate a water project when people's preferences may change after the new water system is installed. We argue that policy analysis will be improved by presenting philosophical arguments as to why some preferences should be included in the evaluation and others ignored.