Relating the notion of political community to those of discrimination and legitimacy — and, consequently, setting up a typology which will contrast communities by the criteria they use to distinguish members from non-members and by the location they give to legitimacy, placed either in a ruler or in a process — will be made easier if we consider first of all certain striking similarities which exist between the most private of social groups, the family, and the most public, the state, similarities which probably facilitate the transfer of the ideological constructs formed in infancy and childhood into the political expectancies and assumptions of adulthood. Let us distinguish communities defined through the brothers from communities defined through the father: communities centered around a leader from those centered on themselves. These contrasts will suggest to us a natural/ artificial continuum along which political communities can be ranked, those most resembling the family in their ideas about legitimate authority and legitimate membership being closer to the ‘natural’ end of the continuum. I will explain later the reasons for this distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, but I must at the outset make it absolutely clear that the use of these terms does not in any way imply an evaluative preference on my part.

The White House was once – and will be again – a great place for a young man to work. I did it myself and have never been sorry. Fate was kind and my age was right: it was Harry Truman's White House and I worked for Charlie Murphy – Charles S. Murphy, to give him his due. He was the President's Special Counsel, successor to Clark Clifford in that post and one of Truman's senior aides. Working for Murphy and with him for the President was a fine experience, as unlike Egil Krogh's or Gordon Strachan's as day from night. What made it so is illustrated by a story. And this story is a starting point for looking at the presidency now, by light of Watergate.

Advocates of the welfare state often appeal to social justice as the moral basis of their claim that distribution of scarce resources ought to be made in proportion to the needs of potential recipients, at least to a certain minimum level of satisfaction. More generally, it is commonly assumed that need is certainly one and perhaps the main factor which ought to determine any just distribution of benefits and burdens. Thus, when the Labour Government abolished medical prescription charges under the National Health Service in 1964 the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, defended this step in the House of Commons by saying that it was ‘unjust’ to put such ‘burdens on the old and sick’ and he went on to cite the principle ‘from each according to his means, to each according to his needs’.

What difference does it make that Britain has a monarch? ‘Some political scientists,’ as Edward Shils and Michael Young remarked at the time of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, ‘tend to speak as if Britain is now an odd kind of republic which happens to have as its chief functionary a Queen instead of a President’.2 Shils and Young felt that the intensity of public interest in the coronation quite clearly belied such a commonsense and demystified interpretation of British politics. Two decades later, signs of lively interest in the monarch still abound, as do the many royal activities that sustain that interest: the investiture of the Prince of Wales, the BBC film of the Royal Family, the London walkabout of the Royal Family, the engagement and wedding of Princess Anne. Even controversies over such matters as the size of the Civil List appear to enhance interest in the monarchy. Yet in this era of empirical political studies there has been little systematic analysis of the impact of the monarchy on Britain. The evidence is especially weak about the impact of what Bagehot considered to be the monarchy's most important function — not the occasional and subtle royal initiatives at

One of the most striking features of British general election results is the large variation in turnout from one constituency to another. In the 1970 election, for instance, turnout in Britain ranged from 44–9 per cent in Stepney to 85–3 per cent in Cornwall North. Moreover, the variation in turnout has become greater in recent years. While the mean turnout in general elections has tended to fall, the standard deviation of turnout has increased steadily from 5–3 in the 1955 election to 6–9 in the 1970 election. With the exception of the Nuffield studies, however, there have been few attempts to investigate this variation. Political scientists have concentrated instead on describing and attempting to explain differences in turnout between different social and demographic groups.

Let me state at once the paradox referred to in the title. In nearly all capitalist countries, including Britain and Australia, most important trade unions are partisan in politics. That is, they openly, and as a matter of permanent policy, support a particular political party against its rivals. In a few countries, again including Britain and Australia, they actually become a part of such a party, through affiliation. If we look at the affairs and activities of the trade unions, there is little to suggest that this is an unpopular policy among their members.

Administrative centralization has been a fact of life in France since Louis XIV. Political analysts have alternately praised the system as ‘the envy of all Europe’ and condemned it as ‘a glittering example of “blockage” in our society’. Very few of them have, however, made any serious effort to study the impact of centralized structures on local governments. The literature is remarkable for the absence of empirical research on the exercise of power by elected local officials in France.

Both the classical Romans and the classical Fascists of Mussolini referred to the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum, ‘our sea’. The rugged peninsula of Italy cuts the sea in half, making Italy, at least by geography, a Mediterranean country. At the same time, it is a European country, a central actor in the long history of both the Mediterranean and Europe. When the center of Europe gravitated toward that sea, the peninsula was near the center of the world and Italy was a major link between Europe and the Middle East, North Africa, and the Moslem world. As the focus of Europe moved north and west, Italy became more marginal; but as a Catholic country it remained oriented largely to Europe. The Christian and Moslem sides of the Mediterranean developed in different directions.

Leaders and activists in most Western political parties, appreciating Schattschneider's adage1 that parties are controlled by those who control nominations to public offices, jealously guard their right to choose parliamentary candidates. They realize that candidates play a crucial role in shaping voters’ images of the parties as well as in formulating the party policies. Not surprisingly, candidates are usually recruited through rather oligarchical procedures. Extra-parliamentary party leaders normally pick the nominees in closed private meetings and then submit their choices to rank-and-file party members and/or delegates who nearly always grant their approval. Such procedures reduce the role of party members to one of docile acquiescence, and completely exclude party voters.

The introduction of more rigorous policy analysis into comparative politics reveals an important discontinuity in empirical democratic theory. The problem is not an entirely new one, but the dilemmas presented in looking more carefully at sub-national political systems, and in trying to compare sub-national systems cross-nationally, lend new urgency to this issue. On the one hand, policy studies of budgetary change and resource allocation over time in industrial democracies show that change occurs very slowly; indeed, the budgetary performance of most such governments can be predicted with very small errors given modest longitudinal information. On the other hand, the institutional infrastructure of the industrial democracies is geared to making major shifts in political control, presumably in response to popular preferences and with some notion of desired adjustments in governmental performance: yet the choices actually confronted by governments almost never take such simple politically determined forms; policy choices instead take the form of relative gains and benefits, trade-offs in expected impact of marginal resource changes, and gradual increases as new expenditures and investments can be absorbed in the public sector.

The project on which this paper reports is aimed not only at increased understanding of the United States federal budget process, but also at predicting government expenditures in total and by bureau with a view to their determination within United States national econometric models. Estimates of likely expenditures using standard econometric techniques are poor, both in absolute terms and in comparison with our own work. Management of the economy should be improved by the use of predictors based on considering budgeting as a political process that is responsive to economic and social conditions. Use of mathematical models in the social sciences should be furthered, not by arguing their hypothetical utility, but by demonstrating that they work. The proof is in the prediction.

My title is plagiarized from an article written by Trotsky's friend Adolf Ioffe for the second anniversary of the October Revolution.The ‘first proletarian government’ was not the Council of People's Commissars, approved by the Second Congress of Soviets at the time of the seizure of power ‘for the administration of the country up to the convening of the Constituent Assembly’, and described in the enabling decree as ‘the Temporary Worker and Peasant Government’. Before long the Council of People's Commissars (CPC), under Lenin's chairmanship, was indeed to become the key executive body in the Soviet regime, but some weeks were needed to acquire the necessary staff and procedures and even longer to establish effective control over the inherited machinery of administration and to convert it to the CPC's own purposes.

Appointments and removals or resignations of leading personnel in the Soviet Union constitute the raw data analysed in this article. These career movements are not examined in the ‘kremlinological’ manner, as individual transfers related to a particular policy change or factional struggle. The scope here is both more limited and more general — more limited in that the job transfers considered are confined to one union republic; and more general in that the raw data embrace all transfers of the republic's elite over a period of seventeen years. The aim is to discover both general career patterns and changes in these patterns over time, and to assess the significance of both.

In the study of power structures, whether of the local community or the national society, three main approaches have been proposed: the reputational, the sociology of leadership and the issue approaches. Of these the least popular in practice is the last-named, which would attempt to discover ‘who rules?’ through an analysis of actual decision-making in a series of issues. This is particularly true of studies of national power, where evidence on how high-level political decisions were made is cited only to illustrate or exemplify an argument.² Although some studies of local community power have relied primarily on the issue method, studies of national power have almost invariably utilized the sociology of leadership method,³ and no systematic comparative analysis of a sample of national issues has been made. Since even those writers like Bachrach and Baratz who have raised objections to ‘the assumption that power is totally embodied and fully

The results of this analysis may be reduced to four inter-related findings. First, evident throughout the paper is the similarity of activists at all three schools. Cross-national similarities consistently predominate over differences. The same patterns of relationships are found everywhere. This fact, among other things, enhances the credibility of our findings.

Public support for the existing institutions of government depends in part on public perceptions of the alternatives. This assertion will not come as news in those parts of the world where changing the regime is a regular part of political life. In France, for example, where regimes have been numbered to distinguish them from each other, it is common knowledge that public evaluations of the Fourth Republic depended on comparisons with the Third, that especially in its early years the Fifth Republic was frequently judged by comparison with the Fourth, and that in particularly sophisticated circles these more or less contemporary regimes have been frequently compared with the First and Second Republics.

This article is an account of a tentative attempt to solve a problem which arose in the course of an investigation of the career mobility of CPSU obkom first secretaries. At the outset we were only vaguely aware that a problem meriting investigation existed and, even now, all we would claim to be doing is presenting a report of the progress made so far towards its solution. Given, however, that research into the obkom tier is being carried on by an increasing number of scholars, we present such information as we have so far; and also recount the false starts and errors we made in the hope that this will be an aid (if only in a prophylactic sense!) to others working in the same area.

My primary purpose in this review is to provide a detailed critique of the internal logic of Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Before doing this, however, I should like to consider briefly the phenomenon of which it is an exemplar: the ‘in’ book. For this raises some general questions of interest.

'Life is all opposites, and a child born with a silver spoon may have to swallow many spoonfuls of bitterness.’ (The childhood nurse of Sir Henry Page Croft MP, quoted in My Life of Strife by Sir Henry Page Croft — later Lord Croft.)