Survey researchers have been reporting, for two decades or more, that a citizen's decision to participate in politics is most strongly influenced by his subjective sense of efficacy. Those who feel able to make a great impact tend to participate vigorously, while those who feel impotent tend to withdraw. According to the conventional wisdom all this is mostly inside one's head, with few objective – much less rational – referents. For example, social psychologists, and political researchers under their spell, see subjective efficacy as a mere reflection of ‘ego strength’. The more sociologically-inclined see psycho-cultural values (such as ‘civic orientation’) producing a sense of efficacy which, once again, bears little relationship to one's real influence.

In September, 1973, about 2,000 workers of the Zmaj factory in Belgrade went on strike. Politika, a Belgrade daily newspaper, reported that the director of the firm, surprised to see so many workers gathered in front of his office, believed (at first) that ‘they were protesting against the counter-revolutionary oppression in Chile’. He was shocked to discover soon after that the workers were not demonstrating in support of Allende but, instead, were demanding higher wages. The director should not have been so taken aback. The Zmaj strike is only one of the approximately 3,000 incidents of industrial conflict that have taken place in Yugoslavia since it experienced its first post-war strike in 1958.

Critics of the American House of Representatives frequently cite, in one form or another, a national model of representation as a basis for criticizing both the House and the behaviour of some of its individual members. One of the more familiar criticisms, for example, is that members of the House are so motivated by local or regional concerns and interests that representation in some meaningful national form is rendered almost impossible. So widely is this characterization shared that it is hardly ever asked whether or not members of the House behave in ways that would be consistent and meaningful in terms of a national model of representation.

One of the major issues surrounding the perennial debates over Soviet alliance management is whether the Soviet leadership considers its military position vis-à-vis Western Europe to be a more important determinant of policy than the political stability of its East European allies. Moscow showed itself willing to use force to achieve its objectives in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but analysts are not agreed either on the nature of those objectives or on the wider priorities governing Soviet policy. Before 1968 it was widely believed that security considerations relating to the unity and strength of the Warsaw Pact dominated Soviet thinking. It was assumed that East European regimes would be allowed to undertake some, primarily economic, reforms provided they did not repeat the mistake made by the Hungarians in 1956 of calling for a withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. This belief in the supremacy of strategic considerations led the Czechoslovaks, and many Western analysts, to miscalculate both the extent of the Soviet Union's ideological disagreement with the reform movement and the interrelationships between political and strategic considerations.

There is now a considerable literature about Scottish politics, most of it concerned with nationalism and devolution, but some of it consisting of institutional and administrative studies. The purpose of this article is to review the main books and articles in the field and to assess their successes and failures in accurately portraying and predicting the recent course of Scottish politics. I shall first consider the theoretical approaches which have been used. I shall then give an account of the principal texts, which will be evaluated with particular attention paid to their explanatory and predictive value. Lastly, some suggestions are made about the lines that future research on Scottish politics might take, in the light of the record so far.

Within the last seven years there have been three important, but largely unnoticed, changes affecting the respective powers of the National Executive Committee (NEC) and the Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs). Assessment of these changes is not facilitated by the fact that they are central to an inner party dispute between left-wing and right-wing factions. The political rhetoric which has accompanied them is not a reliable indication of their true import and nature. This paper aims to describe and analyse the three changes and to assess them in terms of their impact on constitutional structures and their likely consequences for factional struggle – but not to make any value-judgements upon them or upon the inter-factional disputes.

In a recent article, Patrick Dunleavy argues powerfully for an independent effect of ‘consumption locations’ on the political process in general, and voting patterns in particular, in Britain (‘The Urban Basis of Political Alignment: Social Class, Domestic Property Ownership and State Intervention in Consumption Processes’, this Journal, IX (1979), 409–44). Through an analysis of the housing and transport markets, Dunleavy suggests that people involved in ‘collective’ modes of consumption (such as council tenants and public transport users) are as a result of their own distinctive interests more likely to incline to the left than people involved in more ‘individual’ modes of consumption (such as home-owners and car-owners). Dunleavy suggests further that since consumption locations are at least partially independent of occupational class, the spread of home-ownership and car-ownership in the post-war period may help to account for the declining electoral influence of occupational class.

Martin Harrop makes a large number of disparate observations connected with some aspects of my paper. In the space available I can do no more than take up those which seem particularly significant or contentious. Four points struck me in this way.

In their article, ‘Some Correlates of Regime Support in Canada’, (this Journal, VIII (1978), 199–216), Allan Kornberg, Harold D. Clarke and Lawrence LeDuc set out to describe ‘the distribution and foundations of public support for the political regime in Canada’ (p. 199). Using the 1974 National Election Study as their data base and regression analysis as their primary technique, they attempt to identify the correlates of regime support and come to grips with the problem of causal sequence.

In their commentary on our paper, Atkinson, Coleman and Lewis, although acknowledging that ‘studies of political support are particularly appropriate in Canada’, are very critical of our effort for two principal reasons. Firstly, they argue that we have presented no compelling evidence that citizens are unable or unwilling to distinguish sharply between regime and the party in power. On the contrary, they note that Shanks and Citrin have concluded that ordinary American citizens routinely distinguish between regime and authorities. Secondly, they claim that rather than measuring regime support, the dependent variable is simply measuring partisan orientations toward the governing Liberal party and its leaders (e.g. ‘evaluation of incumbent authorities’ (p. 403); ‘the party in power and not the regime’ (p. 403); ‘the incumbent Liberal authorities’ (p. 404); and ‘the dependent variable is measuring feelings toward a Liberal party government and not the regime’ (p. 409)).