This paper is concerned with representation. More specifically, it is concerned with the theory and practice of representation in the American national conventions of 1972 – with how the conceptions of representation that dominated the parties in 1972 are related to older views and institutions. In what ways was the Democratic convention of 1972 representative, and of whom? In what ways was the Republican convention representative, and of whom? How is the representation of biological traits related to the representation of opinion? Why is it so difficult to construct a representative national convention? These are the questions discussed in this paper.

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.

This paper began by reviewing several major conceptual and methodological difficulties surrounding the measurement of political alienation/allegiance and proceeded to describe the level and the sources of alienation (as measured by our preliminary indicator, the PAI) within the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. We defined political alienation as a relatively enduring sense of estrangement from or rejection of the prevailing political system and emphasized the importance of distinguishing this attitude from disapproval of incumbent officeholders.

The conjecture to be discussed in this paper is that liberal representative democracy suffers from internal contradictions, which are likely to increase in time, and that, on present indications, the system is likely to pass away within the lifetime of people now adult.

‘I don’t give a s— about the lira.‘These, as well as comparable sentiments about the pound sterling expressed by a recent U.S. President and preserved on tape for posterity, may symbolize a growing American lack of interest in Western Europe. In turn, European views of the United States may now be less exalted than at any time in the past three decades. In a period when misunderstandings, apocalyptic visions and contradictory judgements abound regarding the future of European unity and European-American relations, it is worth examining some evidence of recent European elite attitudes in order to facilitate more reliable judgementsor at least less impressionistic ones.

Our analyses have enabled us to test several important theoretical propositions advanced by two outstanding scholars, Anthony Downs and Donald E. Stokes. Our data do not support the Downsian position that it is possible to array parties along a single left-right continuum. The factor analyses suggested that a left-right factor underlies the perceptions some individuals have of the positions Canadian parties take on some specific issues. However, the left-right factor that emerged from the analyses was not always what conventional wisdom supposed it to be, with the NDP on the left, the Liberals to the left of center, the Conservatives to the right of center and Social Credit on the right.39 Nor was it in accord with the structuring of parties that places the NDP on the far left, both the Liberals and the Conservatives in the same right-of-center position and Social Credit on the far right.40 Moreover, the left-right factor most often underlies the perceptions of MPs. To a lesser extent it underlies the images of the upper stratum of the public. It least often underlies the perceptions of average Vancouver and Winnipeg citizens.

In this analysis we have used a procedure based on estimating likelihoods, from background characteristics, of someone's - or something's - belonging in some category of a dependent variable. We have tried to demonstrate the applicability of this procedure to the specific task of distinguishing activists from ordinary electors in five divergent British localities, with a view to its general use in the prediction and description of initial participation and of activist dropout. The conclusions are:

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.

In a valuable recent article, Brian Barry has given us an extended commentary on the logic of Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which Barry rightly regards as a good example of that phenomenon of American political science,

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.

One of the most firmly established pieces of Australia’s political conventional wisdom concerns the influence of the economy on the level of support for the government. When all is well, the government can look forward to continued office by courtesy of a grateful electorate. When unemployment is high or inflation galloping, its prospects become gloomy and political leaders are tempted to delay the date of the next general election as long as possible in the hope that something will turn up.

To this point I have presented a variety of available observations on what I take to be several types of most relevant indicators of support for the party system in the United States. I have paid special attention in this analysis to the trends in public opinion regarding the parties over time. Given the fragmentary nature of the available indicators, when they are considered in combination they do reveal some fairly common general tendencies. First, these data show that public support for the parties, both in historical and cross-institutional perspective, is relatively weak. Attitudes toward the parties and the evaluations of the importance of the party institution show, with few exceptions, a general state of low public regard and legitimation. More importantly, even the areas such as party identification or a preference for keeping party labels on the ballot, relatively strong points of support a decade ago, have shown a significant decline since that time. The decline is greater for some aspects of public evaluations of parties than for others. But this downward trend, especially beginning in the years i960 to 1964, is fairly uniform across the various areas that we have touched upon. There are a few exceptions to these trends - such as one aspect of contributor support, willingness to contribute money. Yet, even at the point of measurement when people are most willing to contribute, those who are positively supportive are far from a majority. Thus, the improvement here does not really offset the many other kinds of losses the party institution has suffered in public regard over the past decade.

In the 1969 Irish general election, the outgoing government party, Fianna Fail, was once again returned with a majority of seats in the Dail Eireann; it had been in power since 1957. All but one of the remaining seats were distributed between Fine Gael and Labour, which fought the election as separate parties. In 1973, Fine Gael and Labour agreed to form a coalition to fight the coming election and won a majority despite the fact that Fianna Fail received a higher percentage of first-preference votes in 1973 than it had in 1969. 1 This raises the question of how a political party can increase its total share of the vote yet lose seats in parliament.

Abraham Kaplan in his ‘paradox of conceptualization’ draws attention to the fundamental problem of concept-formation: ‘The proper concepts are needed to formulate good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts’. On this view, concepts are neither right nor wrong but are more or less useful; their utility is determined by the twin and mutually dependent requirements of empirical precision and theoretical importance. ‘Empirical precision’ has to do with a concept's ability to ‘carve up’ the world of phenomena without unnecessary ambiguities; ‘theoretical importance’ has to do with the utility of a concept in the development of statements of wide explanatory and predictive power.

The phenomenon of the Labour middle class is much neglected in studies of political behaviour, and its importance is often dismissed without either statistical evidence or theoretical justification. Whilst there has been considerable research into the characteristics of and differences between ‘traditional’ Labour and ‘deferential’ Conservative working-class voters, our knowledge of the other side of the coin of class-party deviancy remains sketchy. The purpose of this Note is to attempt to explain something of this not insubstantial part of the electorate, to show how it differs from the Conservative middle-class electorate, and to argue that one can break down the Labour middle class itself and identify two distinct types of Labour supporter.

This Note is concerned with the problem of how to distribute votes in an assembly so that all interested groups are ‘fairly’ represented. It is clear that in many cases present arrangements are open to criticism. For example, in the United Nations General Assembly both China (population 732 million) and Norway (4 million) are represented by one vote. The situation at the British Labour Party annual conference is in direct contrast to this. Here votes are allocated to the individual unions and constituency Labour parties in proportion to their membership (rounded up to the nearest thousand), so that the Transport and General Workers' Union (membership 1,000,000) exercises 1,000 votes, whereas the 25,000 members of the National Union of Seamen are represented by only twenty-five votes. Since the total number of votes at the conference is about 6,000, it might be felt that the large unions exercise a disproportionate amount of influence.

It is some fifteen years since Dahl and his associates inaugurated the ‘issue’ approach to studying power; it is therefore somewhat surprising that two recent articles by Christopher Hewitt1 comprise the first attempt at applying this method to Britain. But over the past decade and a half Dahl's approach has come in for some severe criticisms; it is unfortunate that Hewitt does not update the method to meet some of these criticisms - indeed his articles are, in some respects, a step backwards from Dahl.

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.