American presidential politics in the 1960s and early 1970s was marked by the kinds of forces that characterize a period of electoral instability. These forces affected not only individual voters but also the candidates, parties and issues that interact as part of the electoral system. Among them was an increase in ‘issue voting’ which emphasized intra-party polarization on various non-economic issues. The civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, riots in the cities, crime in the streets and other issues provided focal points for increased debate among political leaders and for the responses of an electorate newly mobilized by policy concerns. At the same time, the established political parties were faced with increased partisan defection and ticket splitting, by a rise in the number of political Independents and by the appearance of a threatening third-party movement. Even the styles and personalities of the parties’ presidential candidates contributed to the instability. The candidates presented to the electorate ran a gamut of styles and personalities that included the articulate Kennedy, the folksy Johnson, the impulsive Goldwater and the calculating Nixon. Along with the rise in mass interest in matters of policy came a new questioning of the trustworthiness and integrity of political leaders and the government in general. There also appeared in this period a new politics of confrontation, an influx into the electorate of young voters following the lowering of the voting age to 18, and a budding concern with the issues of ‘acid’, amnesty and abortion that the ‘New Politics’ promoted.

It has been said about the United States that it is now suffering ‘a crisis of regime’. Europe, we have been told, is in little better condition: ‘all over Europe the First World War broke up the structure of society which, before 1914, had provided the necessary basis of confidence between government and governed. There no longer exists, except in a few places such as Switzerland, that general acceptance of the conduct of national affairs that adds to the vigor of government and society alike.’1 These are the kinds of practical political problems to which the concept of political support, as found in systems analysis, has been directed.

We began by reviewing the history of agency and by describing the two major parties' procedures for recruiting and training agents. Not surprisingly, the perceptions that agents have of their roles is not entirely congruent with official perceptions. Approximately 20 per cent of the agents of both parties felt that the performance of various representational functions was the most important part of their job although these tasks are not included in official job descriptions. Moreover, although a majority of the agents in each party believed that their most important job was to build and maintain constituency organizations capable of winning elections, the majority of their time was not spent on this task. Conservative agents seemingly spent a disproportionate amount of time doing routine office work, whereas over 40 per cent of the Labour agents spent much of their time trying to raise the funds that paid their salaries. Large numbers of agents in both parties agreed that raising money in their constituencies was a difficult and largely unrewarding task.

In a recent review article [this Journal, VI (1974), 345–69] Professor Berrington helpfully corrects and refines the statistics contained in Lucille Iremonger's volume, The Fiery Chariot: A Study of British Prime Ministers and the Search for Love and suggests that there may well be something in the idea that prime ministers differ systematically in their psychological make-up from the rest of the population. It is clearly the case that they have been unfortunate in their choice of parents, who have been more apt to die when the putative PM is young than is generally the case. And one cannot sensibly, in the light of theoretical evidence cited by Berrington, object to his proposal that premature bereavement may establish in the child a condition or conditions of mind and a psychological disposition that may well be relieved, made tolerable or even cured by immersion in the life-style of a professional politician. However, there are a number of points worth making about Professor Berrington's endorsement, limited though it is, of Iremonger's thesis.

At the end of his entertaining and thoughtful review [this Journal, iv (1974), 345–69, p. 362], Professor Berrington writes ‘if it is lonely at the top it is because it is the lonely who seek to climb’. But this is to miss a point that undermines the significance of Mrs Iremonger's thesis. It is indeed lonely at the top, and men who have already coped with loneliness are peculiarly fitted to bear the burdens of the Prince. Nor is there a contradiction between the public aloofness of prime ministers and their domestic felicity: those who are surrounded by a close and affectionate family and supported by a devoted wife can afford to do without the gratification of friendship in public life. They make good butchers. This suggests that the ideal characteristics required of prime ministers are not those put forward by Mrs Iremonger and apparently accepted by Professor Berrington. I recall, in loose translation, the words of a chronicler on King Stephen: ‘He was a mild man and good and did no justice’. The world has need of its bastards.

Political socialization research has been characterized by a number of poorly documented but widely accepted generalizations. In particular, it has been assumed that indetgenarational consistency in political attitudes is the usual, if not the inevitable, outcome of the political socialization process in Western democracies.

Cross-cutting cleavages do seem to help moderate social conflict.1 This can be explained in either of two ways. One argument focuses on the logic of electoral competition. Where parties must appeal to an electorate with diverse tastes along many dimensions, politicians must take moderate positions (defined as near the median voter) in most dimensions of cleavage if they are to win. A socialist party which draws its support from both Protestants and Catholics cannot take extreme positions on the religious question without alienating potential supporters and jeopardizing its electoral chances.2

I report with regret that several of the tables in ‘The Queen and the Prime Minister [this Journal, IV (1974), 257–87], contained small mechanical errors, largely affecting percentage distribution by one or two per cent. Should anyone need a ‘laundered’ reprint of the article, please let me know. There is one error of substantive importance: in Table 6 (p, 282) the correct percentage of French and U.S. white children perceiving that a head of state stopped by a traffic policeman would be described as ‘above the law’ is 43 and 31 per cent respectively. English nationalists will be pleased to know that this revised statistic eliminates the ‘finding’that U.S. whites are less likely to evince this sentiment than are English children. The correct statistics will appear in my December 1975 American Political Science Review article ‘The Benevolent Leader Revisited’.