In order to understand the dynamics of contemporary government, we must consider what government does as well as why it grows. This is true whether theories seek to explain past growth or are hypotheses about future developments. Political science has a unique responsibility to address this problem, because it is the discipline for which government is central. Whereas economists and sociologists can produce models that treat political change as epiphenomenal, political scientists must identify what it is that changes when government changes.

For some time we have been engaged in a large scale study of various leadership strata in the United States. Our goal is to clarify similarities and differences in background, ideology and personality among members of such strata. We are also interested in the relationship between these variables and the manner in which members of different leadership groups perceive ‘reality’. This article reports preliminary findings on two groups – leading business executives and top level journalists. Our work has been partly informed by hypotheses developed by social scientists as diverse as Max Weber, Harold Lasswell, Joseph Schumpeter, S. M. Lipset, Alvin Gouldner, Jurgen Habermas, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell and others.

The bandwagon was the caravan in a circus that carried the band, and usually took the lead in a procession. It has come to stand as a symbol for a party or a cause which is successful; we talk of people wanting to climb on to a bandwagon when their desire to be associated with the winning party or cause is strong. A ‘bandwagon effect’ is the label given by social scientists to a situation where the information about majority opinion itself causes some people to adopt the majority view for whatever reason; conversely, an ‘underdog’ effect is held to exist if the information causes some people to adopt a minority view. Processes of this kind are of theoretical interest because they affect the possibility of stable prediction in the social sciences; if the very act of predicting that one party will win an election can be a self-fulfilling prophecy then the natural scientific model of the social sciences may be compromised. Bandwagon processes are also of practical importance to pollsters, since the professional nature of their trade might also be compromised if their predictions could be shown to be interfering in political reality. These effects have therefore received a fair amount of attention in the literature. The main context studied has been the effect of exposure to an opinion poll on the general public. In this article, I shall first examine the existing evidence for poll effects of this kind, and then present and discuss a study of such effects.

During the past decade, political researchers have devoted growing attention to women's political involvement and, to a somewhat lesser extent, their political attitudes in Western cultures. This interest has been a response in part to contemporary feminist movements and, more specifically, to the increasingly visible role of women as social activists, partisan elites and governmental decision makers in Western European and North American society.

Realignment theory is a recent but flourishing sub-branch of the study of American political parties. Over the last thirty years, the original suggestions of its inventor, V. O. Key, have been elaborated and refined in several directions and through several phases, gradually being modified to take variations in historical circumstances more carefully into account. Problems of the same kind often occur, and are likely to prove even less manageable, when efforts are made to apply the theory to another political system and culture as authors from both countries (and from neither) have in recent years tried, more or less explicitly, to use it to explain developments in the British party system. Some techniques travel quite well, and some useful insights can be obtained by looking afresh at familiar patterns in the light of similar experiences elsewhere. But the differences between the two nations and states preclude any rigorous attempt to apply a theory derived from the history of one country with a view to explaining the experiences of the other.

Irving Janis's work on groupthink has attracted considerable attention from those who seek to explain foreign-policy decision making. The basic argument – that excessive esprit de corps and amiability restrict the critical faculties of small decision-making groups, thereby leading to foreign-policy fiascos – is both an appealing and a stimulating one. In addition, it is also an argument that is capable of being tested against empirical evidence. Thus, Frank Heller has suggested that groupthink may be very useful in explaining British policy during the Falklands Crisis. The purpose of this note is to indicate the utility of the notion of groupthink in explaining one recent foreign-policy fiasco, the attempt by the United States to rescue its hostages in Tehran.

In comparative politics, the units of analysis are usually countries. For many variables, this does not raise any particular measurement problems, because they can easily be aggregated at the country level. For other variables, however, measurement at the country level is a much more severe problem. The prevailing decision mode in a country is perhaps the most conspicuous case. In the last ten to fifteen years, this variable has gained key importance in several theories, most prominently in the theories of consciationalism and corporatism. Yet, these theories are plagued by perennial measurement problems. As an illustration, we use the case of Switzerland, but our argument should apply to other countries as well.