Changes in international competitiveness since the Second World War have favoured Germany and Japan over France, the United States and Britain. This applies to competitiveness in general, but is examined here in three specific industries: steel, motor vehicles and semiconductors. Explanations of changes in competitiveness often focus on economic and cultural variables, but an examination of the three industries shows that a better explanation can be found in the way in which each country organizes its state and its society. State-societal arrangements influence competitiveness mainly through their impact on the speed of diffusion of new technologies. The disparate cases of Germany (strong business and labour, weak government) and Japan (strong business and government, weak labour) suggest that there is more than one path to competitiveness. The literature on competitiveness has focused too much on Japan, and therefore on state industrial policies, as the key to increasing competitiveness. The German case shows that increased competitiveness is possible with a relatively weak state, but only if there is a major commitment to upgrading the skill levels of the work force.

Much has been made in recent years of increasing the choice of the citizen-consumer. This article argues that the concept of ‘increasing choice’ is far more problematic than at first appears and has little intrinsic value in itself. Choice is only to be valued in itself in the sense that the process of choice or decision-making plays a part in our discovery of our own preferences. To justify the introduction of the market process on the grounds of increasing choice is doubly wrong; first, increasing choice is not in itself valuable and, secondly, what is valuable about the market has little to do with choice.

This paper utilizes recent Marxist cultural theory to theorize about the cultural dynamics of racial group conflict in the United States. After laying out a typology of cultural relations between dominant and subordinate groups, the article examines data on African-American cultural penetration of American public culture. The data indicate that since the late 1960s ‘imagerial hegemony’ has yielded to ‘imagerial projection’ for African-Americans. The article concludes by speculating about some interpretations and consequences of this phenomenon.

There has been considerable recent debate about the importance of local context as an influence on political attitudes and voting behaviour in Great Britain. Resolution of that debate has been difficult, because analytical methods have not been available with which to evaluate the relative importance of both individual voter characteristics and the characteristics of their milieux as independent correlates of attitudes and behaviour. The technique of multi-level modelling has been developed by educational researchers to do just that. It is introduced here and illustrated using data for the 1987 British general election. The preliminary results suggest that place clearly does matter as a component of the processes that influence voters' choices.

Converse's ‘Of Time and Partisan Stability’ presents one of the most elegant theories in political science. Analysing the surveys collected in Almond and Verba's five-nation study, Converse explains the micro-level processes that can contribute to partisan stability among mass electorates. If, as Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes argue, partisan loyalties contribute to electoral stability, Converse's theory has important implications, not only for electoral behaviour, but for democratic political stability as well.