This research is addressed to the problem of constructing scales of political attitudes within the British House of Commons. Our aim, broadly, is to produce measures that will enable us to distinguish between backbenchers of the same party – for example, a Right-Left scale applied to the Labour party – and to relate these data to biographical variables and other measures of political behaviour. Moreover, by observing the relationship between Members' positions on different scales, and changes over time, we hope to learn more about the belief-systems of Members of Parliament.

It is probably accurate to say that one of the major growth areas in political science over the last decade has been the analysis of public expenditures. Beginning with what now seems prehistory and the original Dawson and Robinson article, a growing number of books and articles has sought to explain the growth of public expenditures, especially of expenditures on the social services. Despite the numerous criticisms of these studies, they have added immensely to the discipline's knowledge of public policy processes, if for no other reason than that the critics themselves have been forced to engage in the types of research that they believed were really necessary to determine the causes, processes and consequences of expenditure decisions.

A major new study by Professor Gabriel Almond is a significant event in our discipline. Whether one believes that The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, i960) set comparative politics on the sure path of a science or set it back a decade, there can be no denying the influence of the so-called ‘functional’ framework set out in Almond's introductory essay. Crisis, Choice, and Change may well have the same degree of influence. Whether or not this is a prospect to be welcomed depends entirely upon the aspects of the book that make an impact. This essay is written in the conviction that the main drift of the book is disastrously misdirected but that part of it – the quasi-game-theoretical analysis of coalition formation – is valuable for what it tries to do, though seriously defective in execution. Since there is obviously a risk that these deficiencies could discredit the whole notion of applying game-theoretical concepts to the analysis of real political situations, my object will be, while drawing attention to the defects, to suggest that they are not inherent in game-theoretical treatments.

Analyses of elections, whether academic or journalistic, are permeated by terms drawn from physics. We discuss the inertia or volatility of an electorate, the momentum of a campaign, pressures and cross-pressures, party actions and reactions, the impact of short-term forces. Although imprecise, these borrowings convey genuine information about the characteristics of an election, and they would be difficult to replace.

The purpose of the research on which this paper is based was to investigate by social survey methods some of the political attitudes of schoolboys (aged between 8 and 16 years of age) who were living through violent years in the history of Northern Ireland. Political attitudes were studied against the social characteristics and backgrounds of a large sample of schoolboys during the fifteen months prior to the announcement of direct rule from Westminster in 1972. This paper focuses upon affect towards the Stormont Government during the last two years of its existence.

This paper is based upon data collected in a survey of public attitudes toward the energy crisis, and toward U.S. energy policies, in several California communities in mid-1975. The authors believe that some of the information obtained in this survey makes possible a significant, though by no means conclusive and exhaustive, comparison of two models of civic ‘affect’. Following the usage of Almond and Verba, we take ‘affect’ to be ‘feelings about the political system, its roles, personnel, and performance’.

K. I. Macdonald (this Journal, vi (1976), 380–2) asserts, first, that my claim that the concept of power is essentially contested is ‘technically mistaken’ and, second, that the mistake is ‘substantively pernicious’. Unfortunately, he does not succeed in showing what the mistake is – nor indeed what makes it ‘technical’, rather than just a mistake. He does not even try to show why this alleged mistake is pernicious – let alone substantively so.

The class composition of the local environment has been shown to affect both Conservative and Labour voters and type of housing has been strongly associated with the ties between class and party. Studies of contextual influences on individual political behaviour(s) have consistently shown the potent mediating effect of increasing levels of social homogeneity. In Britain, it has been demonstrated that the class–vote relationship is strengthened for the numerically dominant class as the social milieu becomes more homogeneous, while the political significance of housing policy is reflected in the relationship between differences in type of occupancy and class–party ties.

An attempt to rationalize policy outcomes in voting bodies has been made by Rae and Taylor (this Journal, 1 (1971), 71–90). In that work the assumption is made that all voters' preferences are representable by ‘city block’ type utility functions. The principal result obtained in that case by the writers is that for an odd number of voters there is always a unique equilibrium point under simple majority rule, independent of the distribution of individual optimal points and independent of the dimension of the policy space. Unfortunately, the Rae and Taylor result is not correct. In particular their result holds for a one or two dimensional policy space but not in cases where the policy space has three or more dimensions. The proof given by Rae and Taylor is correct for n = 2 but is false for n ≥ 3.

Steven Beackon's ‘Labour Party Politics and the Working Class’ (this Journal, VI (1976), 231–8) highlights a common problem in political science research, an inadequate concern for the validity of measuring instruments.

On the basis of six statements, the first three of which are claimed to be of an explicitly class character whilst the other three are not, Beackon classifies Labour party activists into those who perceived the party as a class party and those who did not. The weak discriminatory power of these statements is evidenced by their failure to assign fully 39 per cent of the respondents to either category. This third group of activists was labelled ‘Ambivalents’. An assessment of the measuring instrument's face validity, however, suggests that this ambivalence is due not so much to these activists' ambiguous perceptions of the party as to the shortcomings of the instrument itself.