The 1970 APSA Elections

The annual election for officers and members of the Council of the American Political Science Association took place between November 2 and 23, 1970, with results reported in the Winter, 1971, issue of this journal. Voting was for one President-elect, three Vice Presidents, one Secretary, one Treasurer and eight members of the Council. There were two candidates each for President-elect, Secretary and Treasurer, five for Vice President and sixteen for Council. These candidates were nominated and supported by a variety of groups and three of these groups—The American Political Science Association nominating committee, the Ad Hoc Committee and the Caucus for a New Political Science—fielded complete or virtually complete slates.This report is an analysis of some of the patterns in the voting. We have worked with constraints, however. Since we received only ballots for the candidates, we were unable to analyze voting on constitutional amendments and resolutions or to look at candidate voting patterns in conjunction with voting patterns on issues. Secondly, there was the limitation inherent in any secret ballot; it was not possible directly to relate voting patterns to attributes of the voters. Thirdly, we did not receive the ballots until early April, 1971. Carding and analyzing them took so much time that we were not able to do all that we had planned. Thus this article is a great deal less comprehensive than we would have liked.