Relationships between the public and the political elite in Britain are generally thought to be explicable in terms of a ‘strong leadership’ hypothesis, according to which the public responds to initiatives put forward by leading political actors. Reflecting the popular will is not thought to be a highly prized activity among British politicians, who supposedly share the general cultural expectation that the public defers to the wisdom of those more knowledgeable than themselves, the public being content with the opportunity to pronounce electorally on the fitness of the Government at least once every five years. Occasionally voices are heard demanding that more attention be paid to the wishes of the general public, as in recent years in regard to the Common Market and capital punishment, but these demands have so far gone unheeded.

In the literature on new nations, much attention has been given to the threat to nationhood posed by cultural and linguistic variations, rather less to the political repercussions of the regional inequality with which such variations are often associated. Regional disparities in resources and services inherited at independence tend to be compounded by policies which stress growth rather than equity. Given that such imbalances are not easily or speedily corrected by means of compensatory economic policies – even if the will exists – the political vulnerability of governments to regional disaffection is bound up with the question of whether it is possible for a common national outlook to be superimposed upon regional variation. The purpose of this brief Note is to test two hypotheses which relate to this question against Kenyan data and experience.

In the October 1973 issue of this Journal, John Orbell and Brent Rutherford published an article which sought to test the central thesis of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Although I shall try to show that as a piece of research it was fatally flawed, the authors deserve acclaim for their boldness, and for showing the way back to serious comparative government research in the Aristotelian manner. To test the basic principles of constitutions against the claims made for them is so obviously worthwhile that it is inexplicable and sad that their article stands virtually alone. In part its rarity reflects the unspoken assumption in modern political science that, after the behavioural revolution, anyone taking constitutions seriously was bound to be returning to the discredited legalism of the past. This overreaction has had its worst excess in political theory, for we seem all to have forgotten that political theory used to be an attempt to devise constitutional frameworks within which human nature would be led to produce the good life. As a theorist I hope we will return to that, and as an empirical researcher I hope we take up Orbell and Rutherford's lead and start to test such general constitutional claims. There are plenty of examples to go on with, starting perhaps with the claim that the United States Constitution is apt to ‘establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty’.

The ‘paradox’ of swing resides in the expectation that ‘if national influences were completely paramount,. swings would not involve identical fractions of the total vote or electorate in each constituency, but a fraction proportional to the prior strength of the party that was losing ground’. The mass of the evidence is however that swings are virtually equal across constituencies. The intention here is to demonstrate that the ‘prior proportional’ expectation is a mistaken one since it leads to a logical contradiction, and therefore that the phenomenon of equal swing is not paradoxical.

Professor Greenstein has asked me to point out that his article, which I criticized in this Journal ('American Democracy Reconsidered, Part II and Conclusion’, III (1973), 129–67, p. 152), was a slightly condensed version of the original taken from P. Coulter, ed., The Politics of Metropolitan Areas. The original article appeared in The Annals of th American Academy of Political and Social Science, 353 (1964), and included the following

In a recent article in this Journal several conclusions concerning career patterns in the Irish political elite were drawn A.S. Cohan, ‘Career Patterns in the Irish Political Elite’, II (1972), 213–28. First, the revolutionary generation was shown to have effectively passed from the political scene. This was bound to happen with the passage of so many years since the war for independence. Second, the local orientation of the members of the Dail was shown to be very important even if TDs were members of the political elite, i.e., the Government. Third, with regard to a point discussed elsewhere but relevant to the above, the family connections of members of the elite were shown to be particularly important to their careers. The results of the parliamentary election of 28 February 1973 and of the presidential election of 31 May 1973 have in no way altered these conclusions.

Various writers have developed models dealing with the problems facing a political party about to choose its election platform. 1 This Note shows, by means of a simple model, the importance that parties ought, in making this choice, to assign to a particular class of voters. This class consists of a subgroup of the usual ‘floating voters’ (i.e. those who change their vote from election to election). The subgroup consists of those among the floating voters whose votes may be influenced by their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the programs the parties adopt. Such voters may be designated ‘swing voters’. Whether or not such voters exist it is not the purpose of this Note to argue. Certainly political parties - in the importance they attach to their election manifestos and to the promises they contain - behave as though they believe they exist.

Ian Budge 'A Comment on Self-fulfilling and Self-defeating Predictions’, in this Journal, III (1973), 249–50 attempted to show that, despite objections to the contrary, enduring generalizations about political behaviour can be made even while acknowledging the existence of what Sir Karl Popper has called the ‘Oedipus effect’. Interestingly, Budge proceeds, not by questioning whether change in the level of information leads to change in patterns of behaviour, but by showing that under present conditions the amount of information possessed by the vast majority of the population is sufficiently low to preclude marked alterations of behaviour. A critic, however, might point out that Budge's line of argument leaves open the possibility that future changes in the level and accuracy of the information held by the population will lead them to alter their behaviour and that, consequently, the objection has not really been met. The imaginary critic's response highlights the difficulty of dealing with the so-called Oedipus effect when we proceed from the prevailing approach to the study of politics. I wish to indicate why this may be so, and to suggest a possible solution.