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Academic Ideology and the Study of Adjudication*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Glendon Schubert*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii

Extract

This paper proposes a theory about the differences in perspective that political scientists bring to bear upon their teaching, research, and writing. It also suggests a method which can be used to study such differences. The particular empirical example discussed relates to only one of the subfields of political science, but this report may encourage parallel investigations into the structure of professional academic values in other component areas of the discipline. Such a result would not merely confirm or refute the applicability of the theory as a generalization about political science; it also would enhance our present meager and unsystematized understanding of the extent to which our professional knowledge is affected by our quasi-professional (personal) biases. The development of such understanding evidently ought to be assigned a high priority in any normative schedule of goals relating to the social ecology of scientific inquiry.

The phenomenon of analyst value predisposition is by no means peculiar to social science, and most certainly it is not idiosyncratic among political scientists. Psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins recently has called attention to the universality of the problem of academic ideology in all scientific work:

At the growing edge of the frontier of all sciences there necessarily is a maximum of uncertainty, and what is lacking in evidence is filled by passion and faith, and hatred and scorn for the disbelievers. Science will never be free of ideology, though yesterday's ideology is today's fact or fiction.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1967

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Charles B. Poland, a doctoral candidate in political science at Michigan State University, for his assistance in preparing the data for computer analysis, and in related statistical tasks; and I wish especially to thank the twenty-six political scientists, all of whom are identified in the paper, for their participation in the research described: this is a report of what is in a most real sense our common labor, and I am deeply indebted therefore to these colleagues in the field, whose cooperation made it possible.

References

1 “Affect and the Psychology of Knowledge,” at p. 73 in Tomkins, Silvan S. and Izard, Carroll E. (eds.), Affect, Cognition, and Personality (New York: Springer, 1965).Google Scholar Of. ibid., pp. 75, 97.

2 “On the Interdependence of Law and the Behavioral Sciences,” Texas Law Review, 43 (1965), p. 1098.

3 See Schubert, , “The Future of Public Law,” George Washington Law Review, 34 (1966), pp. 593614.Google Scholar

4 Pritchett, C. Herman, “Divisions of Opinion Among Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1939–1941,” this Review, 35 (1941), pp. 890898Google Scholar; and The Roosevelt Court: A Study in Judicial Politics and Values, 1937–1947 (New York: Macmillan, 1948).

5 Tanenhaus, Joseph, “The Uses and Limitations of Social Science Methods in Analyzing Judicial Behavior,” (a paper read at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 09 1956; mimeographed)Google Scholar; Kort, Fred, “Predicting Supreme Court Decisions Mathematically: A Quantitative Analysis of the Right to Counsel Cases,” this Review, 51 (1957), pp. 112Google Scholar; Schubert, , “The Study of Judicial Decison-Making as an Aspect of Political Behavior,” this Review, 52 (1958), pp. 10071025Google Scholar; and From Public Law to Judicial Behavior,” in Schubert, (ed.), Judicial Decision-Making (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), pp. 13.Google Scholar

6 A recent survey of the profession reports that when asked to evaluate the significance of research contributions in seven fields of the discipline, political scientists ranked public law (sixth) and political philosophy (seventh) as “least significant.” See Somit, Albert and Tanenhaus, Joseph, American Political Science: A Profile of a Discipline (New York: Atherton, 1964), pp. 56, 58.Google Scholar

7 Roche, John P., “Political Science and Science Fiction,” this Review, 52 (1958), pp. 10261028.Google Scholar

8 Berns, Walter, “Law and Behavioral Science,” Law and Contemporary Problems, 28 (1963), pp. 185212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Mendelson, Wallace, “The Neo-Behavioral Approach to the Judicial Process: A Critique,” this Review, 57 (1963), pp. 595603.Google Scholar

10 Shapiro, Martin, Law and Politics in the Supreme Court (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964)Google Scholar, chapter 1; Herbert Jacob and Kenneth Vines, “The Role of the Judiciary in American State Politics,” in Schubert (ed.), op. cit. ftn. 5, supra, at pp. 245–246; and cf. Becker, Theodore L., “On Science, Political Science, and Law,” American Behavioral Scientist, 7:4 (12, 1963), p. 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Judicial Policy-Making (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1965), pp. 158–165.

12 See my “Ideologies and Attitudes, Academic and Judicial,” Journal of Politics, 29 (1967), pp. 3–40.

13 In this instance, the design for the empirical research reported herein was roughed out the day after an oral presentation was made expounding the hypothesis: “Academic Ideologies, Judicial Attitudes, and Social Change,” (a paper read at the 37th annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, November, 1965; mimeographed), especially pp. 1–8 and Figure 1.

14 Figure 1 here is reproduced from Figure 1 of the article cited in ftn. 12, supra, and except for the minor modification of changing Economics from third to first in the sequence of Social Sciences is the same as Figure 1 in the paper. For further discussion of the a priori theory of academic ideologies in relation to Figure 1, with examples of writings which exemplify the three standpoints, see that article.

15 As Harry Stumpf has remarked, “there are a good many scholars who … cry out for a political approach to constitutional law while at the same time denouncing most or all behavioral techniques.” See his “The Study of Public Law: A Plea for Consistency,” (n.d.; mimeographed), p. 6 ftn. 7.

16 Schubert, , The Judicial Mind (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

17 Morris, John, Technical Report No. 40 (East Lansing: Michigan State University, Computer Institute for Social Science Research, 1966).Google Scholar See also Kendall, Maurice G., Rank Correlation Methods (London: Charles Griffin, 1955, rev. ed.)Google Scholar; Siegel, Sidney, Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), pp. 202223.Google Scholar

18 The purpose of quartimax rotation is to simplify the variables (respondents), by making the extreme loadings tend toward unity or zero on every factor; the purpose of varimax rotation is to simplify the factors (the columns of the factor matrix) by making all loadings tend toward unity or zero on each factor. Harman, Harry H., Modern Factor Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960), pp. 294308Google Scholar; Rummel, Rudolph J., Applied Factor Analysis (Evanston: Northwestern University, forthcoming 1967), chapter 13.4.2.1–2.Google Scholar

19 “Bibliography” in Judicial Decision-Making, op. cit., ftn. 5, supra, pp. 257–265; “Bibliographical Essay: Behavioral Research in Public Law,” this Review, 57 (1963), pp. 433–445; Judicial Behavior: A Reader in Theory and Research (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964); “Judicial Behavior,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, rev. ed., forthcoming, 1966–67); Judicial Process and Behavior” in Robinson, James A. (ed.), Political Science Annual: An International Review, Vol. 3 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, forthcoming, 1968).Google Scholar

20 Walter Murphy suggests as an alternative inference “that behavior [al]ists are acquainted with the work of traditionalists more than vice versa because so many of the behavior [alļists were trained in a traditional fashion by traditionalists; but few [if any] traditionalists have been trained by behavioralists”; personal communication to the author, May 4, 1966.

21 In addition, a draft of this report was circulated among some seventy persons, including the 25 respondents who had indicated their wish to see a copy (by inserting a check in the query at the close of the questionnaire form, Appendix B). Twelve of the respondents replied in writing, some more than once and some in considerable detail. Three other respondents conveyed their views to the author orally in direct conversation, as also did several of the persons who had commented in writing on the draft. So the views of 60% of the respondents were taken into consideration, in revising for publication the draft report. Only one person suggested that it would be better to suppress the report of this research.

22 Cf. Collins, Barry E. and Guetzkow, Harold, A Social Psychology of Group Processes for Decision-Making (New York: Wiley, 1964), chapter 2.Google Scholar

23 Cf. Thurstone, Louis L. and Chave, E. J., The Measurement of Attitude (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1929).Google Scholar

24 These groups agree with the clusters apparent in the correlation matrix, except that this factorial configuration shows Krislov to be conventional rather than behavioral, and it also shows two of the four isolates from the correlation clusters (Rosenblum and Vose) to be conventionally oriented.

25 The author is indebted to David Danelski for having pointed out that the first factor also appears to discriminate among the respondents on the basis of age: all persons with negative loadings on VI (i.e., to the left of the middle of Figure 3) are (when this is written, in May, 1966) over 40 years of age, and the average age of these eleven persons is 46.4 years; while half of the remaining persons (i.e., those with positive loadings on VI, to the right of the middle of Figure 3) are under 40, and the average age of these sixteen persons is 39.4 years: personal communication to the author, April 24, 1966.

26 I+/II+ = 1st; I–/II+=2nd; I–/II–= 3rd; I+/II–=4th.

27 Lingoes, J. C., Kay, Kevin, and Spear, Susan, Technical Report No. 29 (East Lansing: Michigan State University, Computer Institute for Social Science Research, 1965).Google Scholar I am indebted to David J. Peterson, then a graduate student at Michigan State University, for assistance in the use of the program to analyze the rho matrix (with Scigliano omitted because of his exceptionally low communality, as evidenced by the principal axis factor analysis). See also: Lingoes, James C., “An IBM-7090 Program for Guttman-Lingoes Smallest Space Analysis—IV” (Computer Program Abstract), Behavioral Science, 11 (1966), p. 407Google Scholar; and two articles by Louis Guttman that have been announced as forthcoming in Psychometrika, “A General Nonmetric Technique for Finding the Smallest Euclidean Space for a Configuration of Points,” and “Smallest Space Analysis with Unknown Communalities.”

28 A counterclockwise rotation of 60° produces the same result as the quartimax rotation of the principal axes: that is, the traditional cluster then is negative on the first dimension, and everyone else is positive.

29 Subsequent to the writing of this sentence, Samuel Krislov has reported that “my self-perception is not so out of line as might appear…. I did not then and, alas, still do not, quite understand the clock metric and what I was trying to indicate was that I was at the middle or the right wing of the behavioral group expecting such stalwarts as yourself to be at ‘5:30’ or so,”: personal communication to the author, April 7, 1966.

30 We can make an equivalent extension to unit length of the vectors in Figure 4a and then observe their rank order. The rho correlations for the small space ranking are .97 with the consensual ranking derived from Figure 3, and .88 with the hypothesized ranking of Figure 2. (Pritchett, Scigliano, and Schmidhauser were deleted from the rankings for these computations, because of their low communalities in either or both of the factor spaces from which the rankings were derived.)

31 Morris, op. cit., ftn. 17, supra.