Few events shatter confidence in widely held theory more than failure to predict colossal changes. Just such an instance has occurred in the budgetary politics of American cities. City budgeting can no longer be accurately described in terms of an incremental model that assumes stability, routine decisions and marginal adjustments in public spending and taxation. More than a decade of dramatic and largely unanticipated change – fiscal crises, illegal deficits, new groups demanding public services, severe retrenchment, emergency bail-outs and more – has surely challenged the conventional wisdom.

Political scientists who set out to test theories of coalition formation in parliamentary contexts (notably Browne, de Swaan, and Taylor and Laver) found only limited evidence to support the more classical game-theoretic propositions, which predict the formation of coalitions that command a majority of seats in a parliament but are otherwise as small as possible, in some sense of the word ‘small’. As a consequence, Browne later advocated the laying aside of these size theories in favour of theories that took account of the policy preferences of potential coalition partners, and in two separate studies theories were tested that focused upon the ideological component in coalition formation. Both these studies found theories based on presumed policy preferences to perform better than size theories. A more recent study has shown that the relative performance of theories based on size and ideological considerations depends on assumptions made in conducting the research. This study employed multiple regression analysis to establish that both kinds of theory had parts to play in an explanation of formation outcomes, which were dominated sometimes by size and sometimes by ideology, depending on country and time period. In the course of the analysis an additive combination of size and ideology was found to correlate to the extent of r ≃ 0·4 with formation outcomes, producing consistently better predictions than any existing theory.

The distinguishing features of recent electoral politics in Wales have been the continued predominance of the Labour party and the failure of the nationalist party, Plaid Cymru. Since 1945 Labour has taken between twenty-one and thirty-two of the thirty-six seats at each general election and not less than 47 per cent of the vote. There has been some weakening of Labour's position since the high point of 60·6 per cent in 1966, but the party still secured 46·9 per cent of the vote in 1979, and rode out the Conservative victory in Britain as a whole with the loss of only two seats in Wales. Some variation in the Labour vote can be explained in terms of general shifts in British politics. However the enduring weight of Labour support in Wales in unpropitious times requires further explanation.

The increasing importance of women in politics is a common feature of almost all advanced industrial societies. Women have become increasingly active in most aspects of political life during the 1970s: as voters, as lobbyists and, perhaps most significantly of all, as candidates for election to public office. The traditional prejudice against women in public life, which assumes women to be less suited to politics by temperament and training, suggests that they could be expected to receive fewer votes than men in an election. But it is unclear to what extent this prejudice has been mitigated by the broad changes which have taken place in women's roles in recent years. Can we still expect women candidates to fare less well than their male counterparts?

Such eviddce as there is in Australia suggests that the parties are less likely to nominate women but that, once nominated, women candidates fare neither better nor worse than men. Sawer concludes that ‘the differential electoral fortunes of male and female candidates has always reflected the failure to pre-select women for safe and winnable seats, not any failure to win votes.’ In a similar vein Mackerras argues that ‘the average performance of women is neither better nor worse than that of men. Women will be elected when parties select them for winnable seats.’ Research in the United States and Britain also suggests that a candidate's sex does not matter: Darcy and Schramm found that sex did not matter in the United States, controlling for incumbency and party, and in an analysis of three British general elections, Hills concluded that ‘the gender of a candidate makes only a very small difference to the voters.’