This paper deals with political decision making in face-to-face groups. We begin by considering the range of decision modes available in group situations. It may seem that there is a choice between only two: a group may resolve a conflict either in a competitive way through the application of the majority principle or in a co-operative way in the sense of accommodation and amicable agreement. However, there is a third decision mode which is often overlooked in the literature: decision by interpretation. We have coined this term in a recent study of intra-party decision making in the Swiss Free Democratic party. The purpose of the present paper is to describe the main properties of the new concept and to demonstrate that its application goes far beyond intra-party decision making and the cultural context of Switzerland. In a broader project about political decision modes in general we have put the concept of decision by interpretation into a theoretical context, examining both its causes and consequences. Here, we shall limit ourselves to a few considerations about the direction in which we have developed the theory.

‘The public does respond to candidates who offer a choice rather than an echo. But unfortunately for the candidate who offers the choice, the public seems to choose the echo.’ So concluded Nie, Verba and Petrocik when they studied electoral strategy in the United States. Goldwater and McGovern broke the consensus but paid a heavy price for introducing issues into American politics.

The position of first secretary of a provincial committee of the Chinese Communist Party – the highest ranking cadre at provincial level – was not originally one of major importance within the leadership in 1949 when the People's Republic of China was established. However, it has become so since largely as a result of the increase in the importance of the provincial level in the party–state system. The increased political significance of the first secretary was demonstrated most dramatically during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–69) when the provincial level was severely affected by the attack on the party–state system. Unlike their counterparts at the centre or sub-provincial levels almost all the provincial first party secretaries in office on the eve of the Cultural Revolution lost their positions as the attempt was made to completely reorganize the provincial level.

Those who study political participation will find that recent investigations have been lacking neither in scope nor methodological sophistication. Participation, once conceived of in rather narrow terms (usually focusing exclusively on voting) and whose study was restricted to certain geographic areas only (the United States and Western Europe), is now taken to include a wide range of activities across the globe. Similarly, the causal factors of participation have been expanded as well, so that currently they include the social-psychological, socio-economic, demographic, structural, historical and cultural. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of inquiry, little progress has been made in the development of theory.

In 1968 there appeared in New Left Review an essay by its editor, Perry Anderson, which attracted considerable attention. Detecting in the student unrest then at its height ‘stirrings of a revolutionary consciousness’, Anderson was concerned to identify (and of course attack) the main elements ofthat British cultural conservatism which, in his view, the burgeoning revolutionary consciousness must overthrow. In brief, his view was that British intellectual life was dominated by a ‘“White”, counter-revolutionary emigration’ from Eastern and Central Europe – men who had fled the instability of their own societies for the continuity and order of the British tradition. Among them Anderson listed, as the dominant influence in social theory, Karl Popper. This was an accolade of sorts, but by no means any kind of intellectual tribute, for Anderson went on to dismiss Popper as nothing more than a ‘fluent ideologue’, incompetent alike in sociology and political theory.

Arms races have been the subject of many and various explanations, but of few formal theories which manage to combine the virtues of plausibility and parsimony. Perhaps the best known is Richardson's, to which interesting modifications have been proposed by Smoker, Saaty and most recently Hamblin et al.2 Common to all these models is the assumption that arms races can be explained by an action-reaction process between the two nations involved.