Ministers are very busy and harassed people. Some of them encourage their staff when presenting their work to make what is complex appear to be simple, to draft papers composed of short sentences and cut up into short paragraphs, so that they can be taken in almost at a glance. This process (which has its dangers) is as far removed as it is possible to be from the deliberate and exhaustive methods of formal scholarship. That is why the proceedings of bureaucrats appear to the academic mind to be so superficial.

Two main themes have been emphasized in recent description and interpretation of English political behaviour. One theme traces the stability of our political system to a widespread attachment to the civic values of submission to authority and an intermittent popular participation. The other theme explains support (at least among the manual working class) for the Conservative party in terms of deference to a traditional elite and/or a pragmatic appraisal of that party's economic and welfare capabilities. Little attention has been paid to the validity of either interpretation or to the relations between them. Accordingly, this paper first reviews the evidence for both themes and attempts to relate them, and then introduces some new survey data to throwfurther light on this problematic subject.

The contribution made by the efforts of local party organizations to the results of elections is much disputed. Butler and Rose, writing on the 1959 General Election, whilst conceding that ‘In seats with a majority of a few hundreds it would be absurd to deny that local organizations can make all the difference to the result’, nevertheless conclude that‘… if all constituency electioneering were abandoned, the national outcome would probably be little altered.’ Similarly, J. W. Grove in his editor's preface to Constituency Electioneering in Britain by D. A. Kavanagh, says, ‘It is clear that although many candidates and party workers derive considerable personal psychic satisfaction from the campaign, their efforts have little if any effect on the outcome.’ On the other hand, however, the authors of a recent study of party organization in a London constituency during the election of 1964, though they confess that ‘… it is impossible for us to say to what degree Labour's victory was tied to the more effective and more efficient campaign organization which the party was able to put into the field’, state in conclusion, ‘… but our research strongly suggests that organization was an important influence in the 1964 election in Baron's Court’.

The majority of studies of local government in England have tended to be either detailed summaries of the statutes that have shaped the structures and functions of local authorities, or else they have been essays upon debatable problems of local government. The heavy stress placed upon the importance of law, and upon the extent of central control, has meant that there have not been systematic attempts to look at local authorities as policy-making bodies in their own right. Instead it has been argued that local authorities act as ‘agents’ administering and executing policies the broad lines of which have been worked out by the Central Government.

Political socialization refers to the developmental process through which political orientations and patterns of behavior are acquired by members of a society. Some persons acquire only limited political dispositions as they mature while others continuously elaborate and revise personal systems of political belief, value, motivation and activity as they pass through childhood arid adult life. In some part socialization of political orientations is conscious self-adaptation to an otherwise confusing social environment. More often, perhaps, it is the result of taking unconscious cues and examples from such convenient sources as family, school, peers and mass media of communication.

The ‘October Revolution’ gave Russia a new political elite, manifesting very limited continuity with the elite that preceded it. This article has focused on the characteristics of this elite not at the top leadership level but at the level of the few hundred who were most significantly politically at the national stage and the few thousand who were most significant politically in the provinces. The data show that the Revolution dramatically widened access to the political elite for the following overlapping categories of the population, whose access had been limited or minimal before 1917:

(a) members of revolutionary parties;

(b) very young adults;

(c) persons drawn from lower social strata, notably workers and peasants;

(d) the poorly-educated;

(e) non-Russians;

(f) women.

Roberto Michels’ book Political Parties has come to be regarded as one of the classics of political sociology. Most recent studies of the internal government of parties, trade unions and pressure groups take it as their starting point: it influences the kind of questions that are asked and the concepts that are employed.

Discontent with the functioning of representative bodies is hardly new. Most of them were born and developed in the face of opposition denying their legitimacy and their feasibility. Most have lived amid persistent unfriendly attitudes, ranging from the total hostility of anti-democrats to the pessimistic assessments of such diverse commentators as Lord Bryce, Walter Lippmann, and Charles de Gaulle. Of particular interest today is the discontent with representative bodies expressed by the friends of democracy, the supporters of representative government, many of whom see in recent history a secular ‘decline of parliament’ and in prospect the imminent demise of representative bodies.

In The Civic Culture, perhaps the best known study of political culture, Almond and Verba say that ‘the relationship between political culture and political structure [is] one of the most significant researchable aspects of the problem of political stability and change’. I want to look at the way this relationship has been treated in one particular area, an area very relevant to questions of political stability and change in our own society; that is, in studies of political participation and apathy, especially research into the sense of political efficacy or competence. This is the area with which The Civic Culture itself is largely concerned, and it is now well established that individuals low in a sense of political efficacy tend to be apathetic about politics; indeed, Almond and Verba consider the sense of efficacy or competence to be a ‘key political attitude’.

The ‘average’ obkom first secretary is likely to be Russian or Ukrainian by nationality and will certainly have a higher education, with a reasonable chance that this has been acquired through, or supplemented by, the Party's own educational system. He34 will be (1966) about fifty years old, having joined the Party around the age of twenty-five in the period 1939 to 1945. First secretary status is likely to have come to him in 1961 or since 1963 and there is a 6:4 chance that he is a full or candidate member of the Central Committee (with the likelihood greatly enhanced if he is first secretary of a Russian obkom in the RSFSR).

A survey of the printed word, including local and national papers as well as weekly journals over the past ten years, would show an increasing proportion of column inches devoted to issues arising out of physical planning — those issues involving such concepts as ‘environment’, ‘conservation’, ‘amenity’ and ‘leisure space’. As a society, we are becoming increasingly preoccupied with our physical environment and on the whole this preoccupation takes the form of fears for the future. Such fears must begin with two propositions: that the environment (or at least some of its important aspects) is changing rapidly and that this is a matter which affects our general well-being.

In this article it is proposed to take another look at what have elsewhere been called ‘sources of diversity’ in British local government. The purpose is to show that across a sample of English and Welsh county boroughs, significant associations can be found between levels of expenditure in certain public service areas and both socio-economic and political variables. In particular, it will be shown that the presence of greater Labour representation on councils is associated in such areas as housing, education, and local health with higher levels and in the case of the police service with lower levels of expenditure.

It is only in connection with electoral law that the terms ‘majority principle’ and ‘proportionality’ are widely used. It seems to us meaningful to apply the two concepts also to the political decision-making process as a whole. In this broadened sense ‘majority principle’ and ‘proportionality’ denote certain models of conflict regulation. The majority model then denotes the regulation of conflict through majority decisions. The proportional model is much more difficult to describe: its basic characteristic is that all groups influence a decision in proportion to their numerical strength. Proportional conflict regulation is easiest to apply when a decision is concerned with several units, all of which are perceived as equivalent to one another. The classical case of this is the parliamentary election, for the parliamentary seats are perceived as equivalent to one another, so that by means of an appropriate electoral law they can relatively easily be distributed on a proportional basis among the different political groups. In Switzerland the election of the government by the parliament gives rise to an analogous situation, in that the seven seats in the Bundesrat (Federal Council) are perceived as equivalent to one another, so that they can likewise be relatively easily distributed on a proportional basis. In most other political systems the application of the rules of proportionality at the level of the government would entail greater difficulties, since the individual governmental posts are perceived as being of different value. The greatest difficulty presents itself when only a single office is to be filled, for example that of President. Here the application of proportional rules is only possible if rotation of office (i.e. proportionality in the temporal dimension) is brought into the reckoning, or if the disadvantage imposed on one group can be compensated by preference given to it in another decision.

This paper is a preliminary exploration of a comparatively under-developed area of international relations. An inventory will be sketched which, it is suggested, includes beliefs about the modern Chinese political system that have been held in Britain in recent years. It is hoped that the provisional findings may help to inform future research strategies into perception and foreign policy.

The central question which this article attempts to raise is how we should understand the social structure that is emerging from the neo-colonial pattern of change in Africa, and what implications it has for politics. In its simplest form, the question is how far a stratification system is developing which is likely to make for class formation, class consciousness, and a politics of class struggle; or how far stratification can be contained within a predominantly peasant society, expressed politically in patron-client relationships.

There is a tendency for quantitative research to be undertaken without sufficient consideration being given to its theoretical justification. An interesting field reveals itself, a hypothesis is generated, a means of testing it is devised and then the research begins. Unfortunately research in political socialization has often been of this type. We need to view political socialization in a wider context, to ask, why do we study political socialization? Unless we can answer this question then it is difficult to judge the validity of work done in the field. Such work must be analyzed in the light of its broader purpose.

The role of the electoral system in the political process is one which has long concerned political scientists. Traditionally, the emphasis has been on the ‘mechanical’ effects that such systems have or are assumed to have, on such features as the number and strength of parties in a given political system. More often the debate became of a polemical nature, fought on the respective merits of one or other of the major electoral systems. The culmination of all this effort was that, until recently, research in this area of the discipline consisted almost entirely of a body of material, basically unsystematic in scope and essentially descriptive by nature. More contemporary research has concentrated on discovering the precise nature of the empirical relationship between electoral systems and party systems, with some degree of success. Our concern in this paper however, is not to contribute to the knowledge of the ‘mechanical’ effects of electoral systems but, in a related fashion, to examine some possible theoretical properties that may have an equal importance for democratic theory.

This paper attempts to survey the present state of what I have called ‘mathematical political theory’. In a strict sense of theory’, this happens to be roughly coextensive with ‘political theory’, but the addition of the word ‘mathematical’ seems necessary (for the time being) to avoid confusion with the other usages of ‘political theory’: the exegesis of the outstanding political philosophers of the past is certainly not political theory; nor is most of what is now called ‘empirical political theory’. However, the scope of the survey is widened in a few places to include some related studies which, although they are not mathematical, are nevertheless ‘analytical’.

John Charvet, in a recent article, charges various ‘attempts to make of equality a substantive principle of society’ with being ‘incoherent and self contradictory’ (p. 13). The unifying theme of Charvet's article is that certain contenders for equality do so in a manner that logically presupposes the assuming away of those elements of social life which entitle us to talk about individuals as ‘human beings at all, i.e. as beings possessing the attributes of humanity’ (p. 2). I wish to show how little justified these charges are.

Contemporary political science is rightly concerned with the complex relationship between the political process and the public policies in which it results. In understanding this relationship, it may be useful to distinguish two complementary aspects of the political process: (1) those which are relevant because they account for the policy preferences of elite-members and, (2) those elements, like voting and bargaining, which are of interest because they determine policy outcomes from given configurations of elite preferences. This paper offers a theoretical model for an important component of this second aspect: it is explicitly addressed to legislative voting processes and the underlying strategies of legislators as these contribute to the determination of policy outcomes. And, for the present, we take preference-formation as given.