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3 Comp. Pol. Stud. 3 (1970-1971)

handle is hein.journals/compls3 and id is 1 raw text is: DIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS IN CROSS-NATIONAL RESEARCH MICHAEL HAAS MICHAEL HAAS is presently an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii. He has many forthcoming publications, including the following books: International Conflict (Bobbs-Merrill); Statistics (Northwestern); Behavioral and International Relations (Chand- ler); and Philosophy and Political Science (coauthored with Paul F. Kress). THE LOGIC OF DIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS WHAT ARE THE main dimensions of social and political reality? For a geometrician, length, breadth, and thickness are the main dimensions; a physicist, meanwhile, would specify mass, distance, time, and electric charge as major dimensions of his phenomenal world. But the statements of geometricians and physicists would lack adequate logical and empiri- cal foundation: the primacy of the three Euclidean dimensions and the four mechanical dimensions has been merely presupposed and has proven pragmatically useful, though, of course, the dimensions of time and electric charge have been discovered as vital only in our own century (Feigl, 1967). By what logic, then, will the social scientist establish dimensions? How can he claim universality for a set of dimen- sions whose operational measures must be included in a complete set of equations, particularly when he would prefer openness in systems? Physical reality, after all, has been regarded as composed of closed systems without offending the morality of mankind, though modern-day ecologists have pointed out that previous conceptions of the natural world have been too closed, and advocates of religion have felt as well AUTHOR'S NOTE: For research support in this project I am grateful to the University of Hawaii and Northwestern University computing centers. Data were collected with the assistance of Mr. Richard Winters, and data processing at several stages was handled by Mr. Frank Ahern.

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