THE BUSINESS OF LIVING IS INESCAPABLY HAZARDOUS, EVEN IN THE advanced industrial societies, for all that life within them has now become less nasty, brutish and short. In fact, the very process of technological innovation which has made possible the unprecedented affluence of these societies has also led to quite new dangers. In consequence, securing a reasonable balance between the advantages and disadvantages of innovation has now become an important government objective, and a vital one in the case of any technical development whose potentially dysfunctional effects would be catastrophic. It is with the political issues bearing upon the maintenance of this balance that this article is mainly concerned. Its scope is restricted for reasons of logic as well as of convenience to the specifically physical man-made hazards of industrial societies, and the unique psychological problems which these societies are often said to present are therefore not considered.

WHEN WESTERNERS FIND INDIANS BAFFLING AND EXASPERATING Indians have an explanation: it is because they bring an ‘either-or’ a proach to people who like to operate in terms of ‘both-and’, they see contraries and inconsistencies where Indians are aware only of complexity and compatibility. Without entering into a discussion of this as a general view, it is tempting to say that it could furnish an explanation of the curiously mixed and paradoxical character of the authoritarian regime which has been emer ing over the past eighteen months from that country's so-called ‘Emergency’. Tempting but less than convincing, for several reasons: the forms of authoritarianism in the world are already amply varied; it remains to be seen how far Mrs Gandhi's mixture is viable; above all, it is a mixture which looks and feels pretty strange to many Indians too.

THE OUTCOME OF THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTIONS OF 1974, WITH the multi-party Parliaments which resulted and the disproportionate relationship of seats to votes in the case of the Liberal Party, has revived interest in the question of electoral reform. The progress made since the Kilbrandon Report on the Constitution towards the creation of Scottish and Welsh Assemblies has emphasized the need to consider whether the existing method of electing parliamentary representatives should be used for these new legislatures, or, indeed, for the Westminster Parliament. Decisions to move towards direct elections for the European Parliament, eventually under some generally uniform system for all the member-states of the Community, have strengthened the case for a close examination of the suitability of retaining the British system of single-member seats won by the relative-majority system of ‘first past the post’.

THE ITALIAN ELECTIONS OF 20 JUNE 1976 HAVE BEEN COMPARED TO those of 18 April 1948. Nearly thirty years ago, the Italian electorate, under heavy international pressures, gave 48.5 per cent of the votes and an absolute majority of seats to the DC (Christian Democrats) desisively defeating the Socialist-Communist Popular Front which polled only 31.0 per cent of the votes as compared to their combined percentage of 39.7 per cent only two years earlier (though, in the meantime, the Social Democrats had split from the Socialists and carried with them 7 per cent of the electorate).

NATIONAL EMPLOYMENT POLICIES IN GENERAL HAVE BEEN ESPECIALLY intensively studied from a comparative point of view in the last decade during which unemployment has again become an object of universal concern. But, at least to our knowledge, these studies have been focused more on the economic and social asects of the problems of employment/unemployment, and less on the political aspects, or what we call the politics of employment policies, i.e. how are these policies made, by what kind of institutions and especially through what kind of political processes?