FUNCTIONALISM AND ITS CRITICS - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

260 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
... the quantity and importance of the objects distributed, the areas
of human life they touch, the particular sections of the population
receiving various benefits, and the relationship between individual
needs and governmental distribution to meet those needs."
To determine the responsive capacity of a regime one must know
what groups are making demands, how these are processed and
what kinds of reactions occur to such demands. 64
In a later essay Almond expanded his attempts at evaluation
somewhat further, and added a system of ethical scores primarily
for purposes of "loosening up the imagination. "61 A justice score
would
consist of a set of per capita rates of regulatory acts over a period
of time, emanating from a particular political system, weighted for
the salience of the areas regulated and the severity of the regulation,
and corrected for opportunities available to the subjects of regulation
to participate in the determination of the content, scope and
intensity of the regulatory rules, and for the procedural protections
in their enforcement. G °
He added suggestions for a liberty score and offered the possibility
of adaptability and other scores.
It is probably unfair to evaluate these efforts at setting up
empirical measures for evaluating polities, given the tentativeness
with which they have been offered. Thus far, however, attempts
to translate them into meaningful research strategies would not
seem too likely to meet with success. One can perhaps develop some
measures of regulatory and extractive capacity, but categories like
responsiveness raise all sorts of issues as to what constitute decisions
and non-decisions, which seem to raise problems of considerable dif -
ficulty, to put it mildly. 87
The ethical scoring system seems even more dubious. Frankly,
I find it hard even to conceive how a justice score might be opera-
63 Ibid., p. 198.
"Ibid., p. 203.
65" Political Development ...," op. cit., p. 467.
86 Ibid.
G7 See Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, " Decisions and Non-Decisions:
An Analytic Framework, " American Political Science Review 57 ( December,
1963), pp. 632-642, and a critique of their argument by Richard M. Merelman,
" On the Neo-Elitist Critique of Community Power, " American Political
Science Review 62 (June, 1968), pp. 451-460.