Survey researchers have been reporting, for two decades or more, that a citizen's decision to participate in politics is most strongly influenced by his subjective sense of efficacy. Those who feel able to make a great impact tend to participate vigorously, while those who feel impotent tend to withdraw. According to the conventional wisdom all this is mostly inside one's head, with few objective – much less rational – referents. For example, social psychologists, and political researchers under their spell, see subjective efficacy as a mere reflection of ‘ego strength’. The more sociologically-inclined see psycho-cultural values (such as ‘civic orientation’) producing a sense of efficacy which, once again, bears little relationship to one's real influence.

Although the relevance of evil to politics occupies a large part of the history of political thought few modern political theorists have paid sustained attention to the relationship between the political evils of our times and our understanding of the concept of evil. A major exception to this is Hannah Arendt. For Arendt the evils of totalitarianism, genocide and ‘administrative massacre’ have provided the material for the basic questions to which her thinking has been directed. In the posthumously published The Life of the Mind Arendt appears to depart from her concern with the evils of mass society; the work is outwardly a phenomenological account of some aspects of the history of Western thought. It is, however possible to see this work as a metaphysic for her more overtly political work. Viewed in this way it can also be used to deepen understanding of her concept of the ‘banality of evil’. This notion, which she first introduced in her report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, became central to her understanding of one part of the Nazi phenomenon.

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.

Of all the freedoms cherished by liberals, perhaps none is more cherished than freedom of expression. Most would accept that some limits should be placed upon that freedom, but what sort of limits those should be and how far they should extend are matters of controversy. That controversy is all the greater when the purpose for which free expression is limited is itself one which is as potentially compromising to liberalism as the prevention of offence to people's feelings. In this paper I shall examine the relative claims of free expression and offended feelings by focusing on a subject which juxtaposes the two particularly clearly: blasphemy.

In September, 1973, about 2,000 workers of the Zmaj factory in Belgrade went on strike. Politika, a Belgrade daily newspaper, reported that the director of the firm, surprised to see so many workers gathered in front of his office, believed (at first) that ‘they were protesting against the counter-revolutionary oppression in Chile’. He was shocked to discover soon after that the workers were not demonstrating in support of Allende but, instead, were demanding higher wages. The director should not have been so taken aback. The Zmaj strike is only one of the approximately 3,000 incidents of industrial conflict that have taken place in Yugoslavia since it experienced its first post-war strike in 1958.

‘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 advantage of incumbency has long intrigued students of congressional elections. Whether measured at individual or aggregate levels, by re-election rates or voting margins, the advantage has been striking: simply knowing that there is an incumbent in the contest supplies a major predictor of the vote. The person in office – the incumbent – is overwhelmingly likely to win re-election and to win by larger margins than victorious non-incumbents.

One of the preoccupations of students of Soviet and communist politics in the past decade or so has been the problem of system change. There can be no doubt that in a number of fundamental respects the Soviet Union today bears little resemblance to the totalitarian model bequeathed by Stalin. In particular, despite the well publicized attempts to stifle vocal opposition, the abandonment of the capricious and widespread use of terror has brought about a radical modification in the life of the mass of the population and party membership. Equally significant has been the rise in living standards, over the past decade especially. Perhaps also of relevance to the average citizen, envious of and apprehensive towards foreigners – particularly Chinese and Germans – is the Soviet leadership's tangible success in reaching some form of accommodation with the country's main ideological adversaries, and the rise in prestige stemming from the USSR's achievements in space and in the international sports arena. Hence, for probably the majority of Soviet citizens, taking a broad view, Harold Macmillan's British election slogan of 1959 would be quite apposite: they have never had it so good.

A common feature of authoritarian regimes throughout history has been the creation of an elaborate mystique around the leader. This has consisted, in general terms, of the building up of the leader into a figure of superhuman dimensions dwarfing all the lesser mortals who surround him. Although such a cult often pandered to and was inflated by the egoism of its principal, its presence across millennia and cultural differences suggests a systemic basis for its development. Leader cults have rarely been the result simply of a desire for personal glorification or public worship on the part of a leader, significant though such factors may be in any particular instance, but have resulted in large part from structural features of the political system in question. The Soviet political system is clearly relevant in this regard, having been characterized by the existence of exaggerated cults of the leader for much of its sixty-two-year history. By analysing two of these cults, those of Stalin and Brezhnev as embodied in the images of the two leaders projected through the party press, it will be possible to isolate those structural aspects of the Soviet political system which encourage the emergence and growth of a leader cult.

The Soviet political system is usually thought of as an extremely centralized, uniform system. The centre decides, the Republican or local authorities obey. There is little scope for local initiative or autonomy. Yet, at the same time, another image of political life edges its way forward. Georgia was run for many years by its local boss, Mzhavanadze, along lines that clearly were not what the centre wanted; frequent reports appear of muddle, confusion, the non-implementation of legislation or the activities of local ‘family circles’. Somehow we have to make sense of these two aspects of Soviet politics. Is it that the centre chooses to exert its power in some policy areas and not in others, or is it that some are less amenable to control? Are some geographical or cultural regions treated differently from others? How much local autonomy is there? The question of the degree of decentralization in the Soviet system has been raised most recently and explored most interestingly by Hough. This is a contribution to the same theme. It does not provide any grand answers but it does focus attention on a topic that is of key importance in itself and about which we know little: the process of party recruitment. The paper seeks to explore the relationship between central party authorities and the Republican party organizations by looking at the recruitment of the different nationalities.

Critics of the American House of Representatives frequently cite, in one form or another, a national model of representation as a basis for criticizing both the House and the behaviour of some of its individual members. One of the more familiar criticisms, for example, is that members of the House are so motivated by local or regional concerns and interests that representation in some meaningful national form is rendered almost impossible. So widely is this characterization shared that it is hardly ever asked whether or not members of the House behave in ways that would be consistent and meaningful in terms of a national model of representation.

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.

One of the major issues surrounding the perennial debates over Soviet alliance management is whether the Soviet leadership considers its military position vis-à-vis Western Europe to be a more important determinant of policy than the political stability of its East European allies. Moscow showed itself willing to use force to achieve its objectives in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but analysts are not agreed either on the nature of those objectives or on the wider priorities governing Soviet policy. Before 1968 it was widely believed that security considerations relating to the unity and strength of the Warsaw Pact dominated Soviet thinking. It was assumed that East European regimes would be allowed to undertake some, primarily economic, reforms provided they did not repeat the mistake made by the Hungarians in 1956 of calling for a withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. This belief in the supremacy of strategic considerations led the Czechoslovaks, and many Western analysts, to miscalculate both the extent of the Soviet Union's ideological disagreement with the reform movement and the interrelationships between political and strategic considerations.

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.

Although the selection of candidates for elections to the national parliament is an important part of the political process, there is little writing on the way in which this is carried out in the Republic of Ireland. This no doubt springs largely from parties' reluctance to reveal details of this essentially internal matter. In Duverger's words, ‘parties do not like the odours of the electoral kitchen to spread to the outside world’.

The title of this paper derives from two sets of observations. The first, from Lipset and Rokkan, asserts that Western party systems reflect (or, at least, reflected in the mid-1960s) a congealment of political conflicts dating from the 1920s or earlier. The second, taken generally from the growing concern about political ungovernability, suggests that contemporary party systems are losing their capacity to structure choice effectively in Western polities. Since it is one of the defects of frozen food storage that any food, no matter how well frozen, will eventually become unappetizing if not downright unwholesome, it is worth enquiring whether the two sets of observations are interconnected. In a fast-changing world, party systems reflecting the shape of conflict over past problems may appear to the voter as out of touch with newer problems. Indeed, the party systems observed by Lipset and Rokkan have all been challenged subsequently by new forces.

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.

There is now a considerable literature about Scottish politics, most of it concerned with nationalism and devolution, but some of it consisting of institutional and administrative studies. The purpose of this article is to review the main books and articles in the field and to assess their successes and failures in accurately portraying and predicting the recent course of Scottish politics. I shall first consider the theoretical approaches which have been used. I shall then give an account of the principal texts, which will be evaluated with particular attention paid to their explanatory and predictive value. Lastly, some suggestions are made about the lines that future research on Scottish politics might take, in the light of the record so far.

Most of the variables in survey-based studies of electoral behaviour are measured only at second hand. Although sex or race can be coded from direct observation, and whether an individual voted can often be ascertained from documentary evidence, researchers must usually rely on respondents' accuracy and truthfulness in reporting attitudes and in recalling past behaviour. Both of these may involve significant biases. Research has shown that many events are underreported by survey respondents, although clearly desirable activities like voting may be overreported. Other work has suggested the likelihood that ‘non-attitudes’ will be reported by many respondents. When these two are compounded, so that respondents are asked to recall previous attitudes or dispositions, the danger of misrepresentation is multiplied.

Modern democratic theory stresses the need for citizens to be able to think in abstract ways about political objects and the political system. The underlying assumption is that those with a richer guiding conceptual framework participate more, monitor and process fresh stimuli in a more systematic fashion, and are less bewildered by a complicated political environment. These are generally conceded to be good qualities for the citizen and the state. To observe that women have a less developed sense of ideological sophistication is to conclude that their political lives are at least different, if not indeed more impoverished.