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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From Ebenezer Howard's turn-of-the-century concept of garden cities ‘new towns’ have evolved. The growth of new towns is not a fad. The first British new town, founded by Howard and planned by architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker in 1903, was Letchworth. There has been a steady increase in the establishment of new towns in several countries since, and proposals for many more in the future. In Britain, twenty-nine towns were designated between November 1946 and July 1973. The final projected populations of the New Towns range from 13,000 in Mid-Wales to 420,000 in Central Lancashire New Town. Most have final projected populations in the 60,000–120,000 range. In the United States, the National Commission on Urban Growth, composed of U.S. Senators, Representatives, Governors, Mayors and County Commissioners, proposed that at least 110 new American cities be developed, with the aid of federal funding. And at a recent meeting of the International Association of Housing Science representatives of the Association's forty member countries were told that worldwide housing demands in the next thirty years will require the creation of 3,500 new cities.

Studies of patterns of voting change during the election campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s generally arrived at two conclusions: (1) the electorate is highly stable in its voting choice so that few votes change over the course of the campaign; and (2) those votes that do change are more or less random in their net impact on the distribution of party support. Butler and Stokes' more recent study of the national campaigns in 1964 and 1966 showed that the British electorate continued to be highly stable in its voting choice and that the most that could be said about the overall pattern of voting change was that it marginally benefited the opposition rather than government party. The authors then gave no further consideration to the campaign period and, emphasizing its practical and theoretical lack of importance, dropped the section on the national campaign from the second edition of their book. Thus, the campaign continued to be most noteworthy for the stability of aggregate voting patterns and was neglected in more recent studies of electoral change.

One problem to which we must address ourselves before constructing any deductive model of voting behaviour is why people vote at all. On the face of it at least, this seems to be a stumbling block, given the theoretical problem that, compared with the costs of voting, the benefits to be expected are very small; and given the empirical problem that large numbers of people turn out to vote when they cannot possibly hope to influence the result, while others stay at home on the few occasions when a close result is expected. The most common attempted solution amounts to saying that people like voting, or at least that they feel guilty about not voting. This solution can be traced from the early work of Downs to the more recent and rigorous analyses of Riker and Ordeshook. Motives such as citizen duty, the satisfaction of belonging to a democracy, the satisfaction of supporting a particular party, and so on, are ascribed to voters. Each voter is then assumed to conduct a ‘calculus of voting’ in which he or she weighs up these benefits against any inconvenience involved in going to the polling booth. For many the net effect will be positive and voting will therefore be rational.