Recent presidential elections in the United States have been marked by widely divergent landslide victories. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson led the Democrats to a sweeping victory over Barry Goldwater. In 1968 Richard Nixon captured the White House for the Republicans in a contest that was close only because George Wallace ran as a third-party candidate and siphoned off a large share of the conservative vote. With Wallace eliminated from the 1972 race, Nixon easily won a lopsided re-election victory over George McGovern. Early in the campaign the 1976 election also appeared to be heading towards an overwhelming victory, this time for the Democrats. Yet, Jimmy Carter won by only two percentage points.

The argument of this paper, which is conducted at two distinct levels of abstraction, has four parts. First, I consider how the disputed character of the concept of freedom bears on the definition of liberalism. This will be done by examining the contrasting accounts of the concept of freedom advanced by Felix Oppenheim and Sir Isaiah Berlin: my conclusion is that the contestability of the concept of freedom does not constitute an insuperable obstacle to formulating a working definition of liberalism. Secondly, I consider the general thesis that some, if not all, of the central concepts of social and political thought have an essentially contestable character, and look in particular at the application of this thesis to the concept of the ‘political’. Thirdly, I consider some aspects of the theories of distributive justice advanced by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, concluding that the supposedly contractarian mode of argument adopted by each of these writers is insufficient to yield the distributive principles specified, which must rather rest upon definite normative commitments and quasi-empirical assumptions about man and society. Fourthly, I explore the prospects of a procedural approach to questions of distributive justice, and I claim for such an approach a special congruence with basic liberal principles regarding equality and freedom. The substantive result of these arguments is that, within the conceptual framework of the liberal tradition, a just distribution is any that emerges from background economic and political institutions protecting equal freedom. The methodological or metatheoretical result is that, in virtue of the contestability and indeterminacy of the constitutive concepts and regulative principles of political discourse, my arguments fail to be demonstrative, having a persuasive and dialectical rather than a deductive form. If my arguments can be sustained, these are features of the paper it shares with every other essay in social philosophy.

The principles that we use to evaluate social and political institutions have affinities for one another whose precise nature is hard to establish. We sense that a person who holds a particular principle of freedom, for example, ought for consistency's sake to hold corresponding principles of authority, equality and so forth, but we are hard put to it to explain what ‘corresponding’ means here. My intention in the present paper is to examine what kind of connections may exist between the principle of democracy and various principles of social justice, and in doing so to throw some light on the evolution of liberal thinking from the classical liberalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the modified form of that doctrine that is prevalent in the West today. I shall try to show that changes in the liberal theory of social justice have been intimately connected to changing attitudes towards democracy as a form of government.

It is common knowledge that party support in England is strongly polarized along class lines. But how strongly? And is the degree of class polarization increasing, decreasing, or approximately constant? It is to these questions that this article is devoted.

Traditionally, and for some good reasons, elections in Communist one-party states have been treated as relatively unimportant phenomena, essentially ‘massive demonstrations of ritualized affirmation’, or simply a test of the Communist party's mobilization powers. The absence of competing political parties and consequently opposing goals and programmes does clearly mean that such elections are very different from those in liberal democratic states. They do not and cannot, for example, resolve the often crucial question of political succession.

Alienation, if sufficiently pervasive and profound, poses obvious dangers to a democratic political order. But obvious dangers are not the only dangers. Indeed, allegiance may pose at least as serious a threat to democratic politics as alienation, as I shall attempt to show in this paper.

Rapidly changing economic conditions and the acceptance by governments of the responsibility for those conditions have together provided one of the most volatile and perplexing policy contexts for governments in the post-war era. The volatility of economic policy is inherent in its potential for change over the short run. It can take several years before changes are approved and implemented in order to deal with failures in social welfare programmes, transport services, or redistributive taxation provisions. In contrast, the instruments of economic policy may be altered on a daily, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis as conditions change.

Outbursts of strike activity in many industrial societies during the late 1960s and early 1970s focused considerable attention on relations between labour, capital and the state in advanced capitalist systems and led to many inquiries into the sources of the ‘new’ labour militancy. The events of May–June 1968 in France, the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969 in Italy, and the nation-wide strikes of the coal miners in 1972 and 1974 in the United Kingdom (the first since the great General Strike of 1926) are the most dramatic examples, but sharp upturns in strike activity in Canada (1969, 1972), Finland (1971), the United States (1970) and smaller strike waves in other nations also contributed to the surge of interest in labour discontent.

While political controversies over the legitimacy of monetary interventions in Western economies were settled decades ago, the widespread acceptance of fiscal interventions as appropriate tools for achieving economic stability and economic growth is much more recent and much less pervasive. Even the pre-Depression classical economic model specified a role for government monetary policy: ensuring an appropriate stock of money. While institutions of monetary policy making now enjoy both a long history of utilizing monetary policy instruments and a low level of ideological conflict over the legitimacy of those interventions, the institutions of fiscal policy making enjoy neither. Though some governments had begun to practise fiscal interventions before the Second World War, the widespread use of such instruments is, by and large, a post-war phenomenon. Thus, governments have generally had less experience in learning ‘how to do it’.

The most characteristic, distinctive and persistent belief of American corporate executives is an underlying suspicion and mistrust of government. It distinguishes the American business community not only from every other bourgeoisie, but also from every other legitimate organization of political interests in American society. The scope of direct and indirect government support for corporate growth and profits does not belie this contention; on the contrary, it makes it all the more paradoxical. Why should the group in American society that has disproportionately benefited from governmental policies continue to remain distrustful of political intervention in the economy?

It is of course possible to attribute at least some of the public distrust of government by members of the business community to political posturing; continually to denounce government is a way of assuring that the policies of government reflect corporate priorities. Wilbert E. Moore suggests:

When businessmen did, and do, make extreme, ideologically oriented pronouncements on freedom from political interference, it is surely fair to say that they do not mean to be taken with total seriousness…Often, in fact, the sayers and the doers are not the same people… [T]he extreme spokesmen of business ideology are more often lawyers and public relations men than they are practicing executives…These are generally men, who like professors and Congressmen, ‘have never met a payroll’.

As a consequence of Truman's Point Four Program of 1949, the provision of economic assistance to independent low-income countries became the official policy of the United States. In the early and mid-1950s economic development assistance, though growing, received relatively little attention as the Korean war turned the USA's foreign aid in the direction of military assistance. However, by the start of the 1960s, the transfer of economic assistance from high-income to low-income countries had developed into an institutionalized relationship. Economic assistance was clearly distinguished from military assistance and administered separately; the USA's monopoly of aid was decreasing as other high-income countries, partially under the USA's pressure, were establishing their own aid programmes; and the volume of aid and the number of recipients were increasing.

For more than a decade natural scientists have been prominent amongst dissenting Soviet intellectuals. Much effort is expended in the Soviet Union in attempting to stimulate commitment to official values amongst the great mass of the population, and only a tiny minority of Soviet citizens is prepared publicly to question the party's image of Soviet society. Nevertheless amongst the scientific intelligentsia signs of widespread alienation are clear. Even when they fall far short of public dissent, natural scientists are constantly criticized in the party journals for a lack of adequate partiinost' or party spirit.

Profound changes in American public policy have occurred only rarely and have been associated with ‘critical’ or ‘realigning’ elections in which ‘more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community’. Since the appearance of V. O. Key's seminal articles on critical elections, an increasing number of political scientists have attributed great importance to such elections. Schatt-schneider views the structure of politics brought into being by critical elections as systems of action. Thus, during realignments, not only voting behavior but institutional roles and policy outputs undergo substantial change. Burnham, perhaps the most important analyst of realignment patterns, alleges the existence of an intimate relationship between realigning elections and ‘transformations in large clusters of policy’.

This paper is concerned with the distribution and foundations of public support for the political regime in Canada. Support for the regime historically has been a matter of concern to Canadian elites. The recent provincial electoral victory of the Parti Québécois, a party dedicated to making Quebec an independent nation, has made regime support and maintenance matters of concern to average citizens as well. The analyses that follow are based upon data gathered in a nation-wide survey of the Canadian electorate in 1974. We focus on the following areas: the extent to which socio-demographic and attitudinal variables conventionally employed in studies of political behavior are related to levels of regime support; the relationships between the direction and strength of partisanship and support for the political regime; the relationships between attitudes toward key political institutions and political actors and the level of regime support; and finally, the effects of major structural and cultural factors (i.e. federalism and regionalism) on support for the regime. From the perspective of comparative political analysis, research in these areas allows us an opportunity to comment on and expand the base of the existing empirical research on regime support. From the more particular perspective of Canadian politics, our analysis may help to clarify the impact on regime support of ethnicity, regionalism, federalism and a British-model parliamentary system.

In this article we take advantage of a two-wave panel study of two biologically-linked generations in order to examine some prevalent conceptions about the persistence of political orientations. The nature of the study design, outlined below, is particularly suited to addressing questions about individual-level continuities as they are affected by life-cycle, generational and historical processes. Our present discussion is geared to the individual level rather than to the aggregate level of continuity and change. Although many of the terms used are the same, and although it is difficult to discuss the one level without recourse to the other, the purposes and the approaches are fundamentally different. Aggregate analysis concerns itself with net movements and with the directionality of these movements. Individual analysis, as used here, concerns itself with the magnitudes of individual-level movements and has only a secondary interest in the direction of these movements.

Pulzer's dictum – ‘Class is the basis of British party politics, all else is embellishment and detail’ – expresses a consensus about the social basis of partisan conflict in contemporary Britain. Although there are exceptions and important qualifications, recent research confirms the conclusion that social class is the foremost influence on partisan loyalties and a potent factor in electoral behaviour.

The literature on the politics of international business has many of the marks of an academic fashion: it continues to grow rapidly from a low point; it has seen the entry of conflicting ideological traditions into its debates; and it contains a stream of polemical works. Despite these indications of intellectual modishness it also represents something more substantial: an attempt to understand very important and puzzling changes which have occurred in the international system in recent years.

It is now nearly twenty years since Daniel Bell despatched ten theories ‘in search of Soviet reality’. Each of these theories represented, ‘despite some shading or overlap,… a coherent judgement of Soviet behavior’. Considering them side by side, Bell thought, would make it easier to identify their respective merits and shortcomings; and it should also make clear which had ‘“stood up” in explaining events’, and which had not. Bell himself refrained from judgement on this point. In retrospect, however, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that none of the theories that Bell identified – nor indeed any of those that have joined them in more recent years – has yet come close to success. Rather, as the scholarly literature groans under the weight of a steadily-accumulating load of models and paradigms, each one more abstruse and more removed from reality than its predecessor, there must be many who would be inclined to agree with Alfred Hirschman that the continued search for conceptual innovation may well have become a positive ‘hindrance to understanding’.

Traditional theories of government coalition formation concentrate on formal criteria inspired by – if not directly drawn from – game theory. One such criterion is that the coalition which forms must be winning; another is that it should have no surplus members without whom it would still be winning, i.e. it should be minimal; and a third is that the number of parties should be as few as possible. The closest that such theories come to considering the substantive issues affecting the formation of coalitions in the real world is their focus on reducing the ideological diversity of parties within the government. On many occasions, however, such ideological considerations receive negligible attention from politicians, who often ignore size factors altogether.

For political scientists and pollsters the way the individual voted on previous occasions provides an important source of data. In the absence of longitudinal studies, recall of past vote tends to be taken as equivalent to actual vote cast. How accurate is such recall? How far does accuracy decrease with time, where recall concerns not one, but two, previous elections? How far do errors introduce a systematic bias in the conclusions drawn from such data?