Britain enjoys a textbook reputation as the historic home and model representative of a stable two-party system. From the factors most frequently cited by way of explanation – the electoral system, the absence of cross-cutting social cleavages – it is implied that this uncommon state of affairs is a natural and permanent part of British politics. This reputation is, in fact, somewhat exaggerated. At no time have MPs or parliamentary candidates in Britain been confined to two parties only (in contrast to the United States); and for most of the period since the introduction of the majority male franchise and the beginning of mass parties in 1884 the configuration of party forces in the Commons would be best described as multi-party (1884–1922), three-party (1922–31), or dominant one-party (1931–45). Britain's experience of a stable two-party politics has therefore been both recent and relatively short-lived; it is only since the Second World War that two parties – Conservative and Labour – have alternated in exclusive incumbency of government office on the basis of an evenly balanced duopoly of electoral support and parliamentary seats.

At the beginning of his book on Australian politics, David Butler tellingly contrasts an earlier American exploration with his expedition to Canberra. Familiarity with British government had initially led him to ask untranslatable questions about a separate and essentially non-comparable American system. But the same British background, he reports, made for appropriate questions in Australia even though the answers might differ from those received in Britain itself. Australian government, unlike American, could be conceived of as a variant of the Westminster model. It follows that the Canberra model is so different from Washington's that a strictly American background might likewise engender the wrong questions about Australian politics.

The choice of issues for debate is of central importance in any political system. By deciding what they will decide about, legislators also establish the terms and the most prominent participants in debate and, ultimately, the distribution of power and influence in the society. As Schattschneider has pointed out:

Political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power; the antagonists can rarely agree on what the issues are because power is involved in the definition. He who determines what politics is about runs the country, because the definition of alternatives is the choice of conflicts, and the choice of conflicts allocates power.

It is widely believed that there exists in the United States a phenomenon called ‘clientelism’: that most federal government departments in the USA do not really control the interests with whom they do business but rather are controlled by them; that the interests and the departments between them typically have great influence over the department secretaries appointed by the president; and that in consequence a department secretary is, in reality, more likely to act as the interests' spokesman, or as his department's, than as the spokesman of the president. Thus it is often asserted that ‘cabinet officers are a president's natural enemies’. My aim in this article is to show that this belief, as it relates to the relationship between department secretaries and presidents, is widely held, plausible, but mistaken.

What is the political role of the peasantry? Is it a source of revolution or reaction? For the Third World nations, where this is an issue of special importance, the answer is by no means clear. In the advanced capitalist countries, however, the political impact of peasants has become less ambiguous. Although Lipset once argued that radical consciousness in the United States had shown itself primarily through agrarian struggles, farmers have now evolved into perhaps the most conservative occupational group in America. Harrington Moore, considering the historical place of peasants in the modernization of France, England and Germany, details their revolutionary contribution. But, concerning more recent times, Huggett indicates that, in general, the peasants of Western Europe have expressed themselves politically through the parties of the Right. The contemporary evidence presented here demonstrates that these strong right-wing sentiments on the part of the peasantry persist.

Why do some elites endure whereas other die? This is a question to which many historians and social theorists have addressed themselves in trying to explain the severe conflicts that have plagued particular societies. It is, of course, a truism that certain societies are more prone to conflicts and to instability than others. But even within such societies there often lies, beneath the all too evident turbulence, a considerable stability of certain groups and institutions. The change that occurs in the wake of crises often distributes its impact on different sectors of society so unevenly that sweeping changes sometimes completely by-pass, or are successfully resisted, by certain groups. The result is that some groups and institutions manage to preserve their dominant positions and their privileges even while the society as a whole is experiencing crises, instability and change.

Along with other American public institutions, Congress and the federal bureaucracy have fallen upon hard times. Each has been the target of much public scorn. Among academic theorists who have compared the contemporary roles of the bureaucracy and Congress, however, Congress has received the worst evaluation by far. It has often been treated as a more or less quaintly archaic institution, structurally unable to cope with the complexities of national issues. Samuel Huntington delineates several factors which he thinks tend to insulate Congress from an effective national policy-making role. Internally, the institutionalization of Congress has created a system of leadership selection which fragments authority and rewards and reinforces provincial perspectives. Externally, with rare exceptions, electoral turn-over is limited. Thus, the intake of new blood, especially in the House, is mostly dependent upon voluntary departures or biological processes. Equally important in Huntington's view are the characteristics of the congressmen themselves. They are, as many have pointed out, essentially local politicians oriented to local rather than national problems. Their incentives lie in looking ‘homeward’ to local constituencies rather than outward to the nation. Edward Shils has described their orientations as ‘those of the small town society’, suspicious of large organization and wary of complexity. Responsiveness to local interests, not comprehension of complex national policy problems, is the sine qua non of the congressman's political survival.

The image of voting in the United States developed by political scientists over the last decade differs markedly from the perspective offered in that classic study of electoral behaviour in the 1950s, The American Voter. Whereas the authors of The American Voter painted a rather unflattering portrait of the way in which the voter of the 1950s made his electoral choice, contemporary research has begun to discover some unexpected virtues in the American electorate of the 1960s and early 1970s. Compared to his counterpart in the previous generation, today's voter seems to attach less significance to his party identification, and more importance to his perceptions of the parties' stands on issues with which he is concerned, in deciding which party to support in presidential elections. Indeed, it would perhaps be only a slight exaggeration to suggest that the notion of electoral choice has now become a realistic, and not merely a metaphorical, manner of speaking about the American voter.

One of the major unexplored areas in the literature of political science in Britain is the relationship between the attitudes of individual legislators in policy areas and their behaviour in the House of Commons. In the United States, the study of legislative behaviour has benefited from the fact that the unobtrusive measurement of the attitudes of legislators has been possible through the aggregation of roll-call votes. This procedure has provided the foundation for a body of literature upon which a theoretical framework has been constructed for further research.

The analysis described below forms an extension to the Netherlands and the United States of research on British political recruitment that has already been reported in this Journal. The object of the research is to make quantitative estimates of the influence of personal characteristics in pushing the socially better endowed into active politics, and particularly to measure the extent to which advantages on some characteristics make up for disadvantages on others. These processes are of interest because they determine to a large extent what type of persons will emerge as elective politicians, with possible consequences for agenda-setting and policy-making.

The immodest purpose of this essay is to analyze the traditional arguments for political equality, and, with the help of a case study, to determine when these arguments apply and when they do not.

Adolescents in Western democracies acquire participatory-related dispositions early in life. They believe that it is the obligation of the good citizen to be informed and to take a participatory role in the affairs of his community and in politics. Some children start to participate in political activities as early as the third grade; through the twelfth grade, there is a gradual increase in the number of pre-adults who engage in such activities. Variations in adolescent political participation are large, however; they have been found to be associated not only with age but also with socioeconomic status and background measures, with the adolescent's expressed political interest, with the political interest displayed by the adolescent's parents, with curricular and extra-curricular activities, and with the adolescent's social milieu.

To live is to have problems. However the country as a whole fares, the individual has bills to pay, work to do, children to worry about – to mention only a few of the commonplace problems that people face in their daily lives. Commonplace or not, these are problems that people must wrestle with. They are immediate, inescapable, and serious, far more so for most than the ‘large’ issues facing the country. Students of voting have long suspected that such problems may influence political choices, but key questions remain unanswered. Which personal problems are taken to be political and which non-political? Do personal problems have an impact on voting behavior only if they are taken to be political? When and how do personal problems become translated into political choices? In this paper we shall address such questions as these.

The 1972 Democratic National Convention operated under much-heralded reform rules requiring, in effect, ‘quotas’ of blacks, women and youth in state delegations. The goal of these reforms obviously relates to deep normative concerns – improving representation, ‘democratizing’ conventions, etc. Their success in realizing this goal is obviously an empirical question, and it is one which has attracted considerable academic attention. Among the myriad of commentators, Jeane Kirkpatrick boasts the richest data base and the most subtle theoretical model. Her conclusion is that the reforms were largely a failure, insofar as they did little to improve the representation of Democratic party opinion by Convention delegates. On that point the data speak for themselves. The question to be raised here is simply whether these data really speak to the full range of normative concerns that might motivate quota requirements. This comment will discuss two other goals that convention quotas might serve, quite apart from their impact on representation of opinion.

The first twenty years of the Federal Republic of Germany afford a particularly interesting context for the study of popular evaluation of executive figures. The importance of popular perceptions of executive political authorities has been dramatically demonstrated in contemporary German political history. The role of attitudes toward the leading executive figure in the current democratic regime has been the subject of much speculation. A well-established view suggests that the étatist and authoritarian attitudes that supported previous regimes have been very important in establishing the new one. Most important in this regard is the part played by Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic, in shaping party and electoral politics in the new regime's early years.

This brief paper has two purposes. The first is to suggest some reasons why the study of time is important and should be of interest to political analysts. The second is to present some data which link one aspect of temporal analysis, political impatience, with a range of political orientations and behaviors. Although the magnitude of the correlations reported is not large, the patterns of association suggest a syndrome to which more attention may be profitably turned.

Condorcet's paradox of voting and Arrow's impossibility theorem are by now well known. Inspired by Arrow's treatment of social choice, others have presented alternative proofs of his theorem and different impossibility results. Professor Fishburn has recently treated us to some interesting new voting paradoxes. It is important to have the area of inconsistency among the various treatments explored and clearly mapped out. It is equally important to come to terms with the known inconsistencies in order to construct a solid social choice edifice on safe ground. Coming to terms with the inconsistencies must surely mean deciding between alternative normative conditions when all of them cannot be satisfied simultaneously. This paper attempts to do just that by adding some computational criteria to the standard list of normative criteria and then singling out a subset as being more important (to the author at least) than the rest. Since the ‘important’ criteria are mutually consistent they can be used to derive some properties of democratic decision processes. Simple majority rule, applied in sequential elimination, is distinguished as the best collective decision method. It fails to satisfy the Pareto, or unanimity, criterion – one often regarded as a sine qua non of social choice – but when this condition is added to the author's list an impossibility result obtains. An argument is proposed to counter the suggestion that Pareto optimality be added to the list and some other condition removed.

This article is an examination of the English judicial process as a subject of research. My perspective is that of a political scientist whose major field of interest has been American judicial politics. If my subject were the House of Commons or party politics in Britain, it would be appropriate to focus my examination upon an evaluation of the relevant political science literature. But political scientists thus far have virtually ignored the English courts as an object of study; the limited scholarship done on this set of institutions has been contributed chiefly by social scientists in other fields and by legal scholars. For this reason, my primary goal is not to assess the existing literature on the judicial process. Rather, I wish to communicate this literature to political scientists and to suggest directions that they might take in studying the judicial branch.

Whips have always aroused curiosity. Their peculiar title, which suggests coercion and social control, derives from ‘Whipper-in’, a man who keeps headstrong hounds running with the pack. The packs, that is to say the parliamentary parties, are heterogeneous associations of independent and egocentric individuals, not at all the sort to shy away from dissent and rebellion. Between 1966 and 1970 the Labour Government faced backbench opposition on almost every major policy; the 1970–74 Conservative Government was actually defeated five times by its own supporters. Still, although it may well be true that ‘the golden age of ultra-disciplined parties is past’, when the time comes to march, and regardless of the issues involved, most Members seem ready to follow a lead: remarkably few bolt upon reaching the division lobbies. Even the recent ‘undisciplined’ record must appear to administrators everywhere as very successful social control indeed.