ELECTORAL BEHAVIOR: A PIONEER STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE.

The article presents a pioneer study of contemporary significance in electoral behavior in reference to a paper on this issue written by Roscoe C. Martin. As far as taste is concerned there was a bias at the outset for selecting an article representing a contribution to an empirically based political science. Martin's piece certainly meets that standard. The article is an early attempt to investigate in a systematic, quantitative fashion a problem that has received considerable attention in more recent volumes of the Quarterly and other scholarly journals, the question of voting behavior in state and local elections. Martin's report of the socioeconomic and institutional factors associated with an Austin municipal election in 1933 precedes the major voting studies conducted on the national, state, and local levels by several years, even decades. But it is not enough merely to say that this study broke new ground in an era when political scientists generally took only marginal interest in studying electoral data; it is also worth remarking that Martin did so in a manner that is still significant for contemporary students of voting.