The totalitarian dictatorships that developed in Europe and Asia in the 1920s and ’30s and the onset of World War II turned political science, particularly in the United States, away from its focus on institutions, law, and procedures. The constitution of Germany’s post-World War I Weimar Republic had been an excellent model, but it failed in practice because too few Germans were then committed supporters of democracy. Likewise, the Soviet Union’s 1936 constitution appeared democratic but in reality was merely an attempt to mask the brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Works of this period focused on the role of elites, political parties, and interest groups, on legislative and bureaucratic processes, and especially on how voters in democracies make their electoral choices. This new interest in actual political behaviour became known as “behavioralism,” a term borrowed from psychology’sbehaviourism. Whereas most earlier thinkers had focused on the “top” of the political system—its institutions—behavioralists instead explored the “bottom,” especially that which could be quantified. The result was that much of political science became political sociology.