Descriptive political conceptions are undergoing a continuous redefinition in the life of society, and unless the student of political processes is on the alert to test his descriptive conceptions in the light of changing reality, he will operate with falsifications and not with simplifications. “Voting,” to choose an instance, is a concept of the greatest complexity. It does not alone consist in the dropping of ballots into urns or boxes or hats, or in the punching of buttons on a machine. These external elements, the _E_’s, in the concept of voting are not the heart of the matter. What count especially are the subjective terms in the constellation of which these externals are a part, and a highly variable part at that. How seriously do people take the responsibility of collecting information about the personalities and issues with which they are confronted and judging these matters in the light of a conception of the public interest? Voting is an entirely different matter when individuals are coerced into casting ballots a certain way and when they are free, leisured, and interested. To call the casting of ballots under all circumstances “voting” is to deprive the term of most of its significance. It is highly probable that the phenomenon which is loosely called voting in Chicago is today quite different from what is was fifty years ago; it is radically true that the phenomenon called voting in London is something different from voting in Cook County.[80] How are we to decide what meaning to assign to particular aspects of the political process as we observe them at different times and places? The ocean of subjective happenings which are related to external movements of a kind often associated with politics is ever changing, and it cannot be described by inventory methods. Not inventory but sampling is essential if empirical definiteness is to be attached to a term. Speaking very generally, two modes of procedure are possible. The first is to begin with the externalities which are a rather fixed feature of a pattern of social behavior with which the investigator is familiar, and to proceed to find out how the subjective features of this pattern change. One may study “balloting” or “modes of punishment” and the like from this point of view. Throughout Western European culture there prevails such relative homogeneity of pattern that research may proceed directly from this starting-point.