This book consists of ten essays grouped under what the editor has classified as the normative, conceptual, institutional, behavioral, and methodological dimensions of politics. Two essays are on Latin American subjects.
The essay by Federico G. Gil and John D. Martz is on Latin American integration, covering principally the problems and progress of the Latin American Free-Trade Association and the Central American Common Market. The essay is a well-written, balanced account of integration efforts, synthesizing many of the available articles and books on the subject. The work of the Inter-American Development Bank and some of the 1965 proposals to improve the institutional mechanisms of integration are interestingly described. The specialist will be disappointed that there is not more depth on any particular aspect of integration. Also no theory on the process of integration is developed, and a few important dissertations on the subject seem to have been overlooked.
The essay by Daniel R. Goldrich is a description of a questionnaire research project on the political orientations of Panamanian and Costa Rican secondary-school students that he carried out to determine the extent to which failure to control for response set could affect the overall findings. The author defines response set as the systematic response by the respondent to the format in which the questionnaire or interview items are presented rather than to the intended substance of the items. He demonstrates convincingly how failure to control for response set can lead to substantially invalid interpretation of data, and then shows how a questionnaire can be drawn up to take this factor into account.
