Recent research on political dimensions in the Scandinavian party systems at five non-electorate “levels” of dimensional analysis (content analysis of party programs, content analysis of expressions of party stances on current issues, positions taken by the parliamentary parties as behaving units, roll call analysis and interviews of individual legislators, and interviews with leaders and members of party organizations) justify the rejection of the unidimensional spatial model of party competition. Data on the social structure, attitudes and opinions, and voting behavior of the supporters of different parties provide indirect information about the dimensions of political cleavage. More directly, the “perceived party dimensions” can be concluded from aggregates of individual assessments for which the parties as such are the stimuli Averaged rank orderings of the parties provide ordinal measures that have been used as inputs for multidimensional scaling techniques.

An experiment of measuring the mutual distances of political parties in Finland used percentages of the second and the two last party choices as measures of party distance. A qualitative analysis of the exceptions to regular orderings along the basic left/right dimension suggested the presence of six additional political dimensions: the producers and agriculture/the consumers and urban industries; the established parties/the temporary small parties; recognized and noted centers/the “forgotten people” (populist dimension); Finnish/Swedish; communism/non-communism; and victorious/losing.

Three developments can be envisaged in future dimensional analysis of multiparty systems: comparisons across countries, comparisons between different levels in the political system, and predictions of emerging political changes.

The environmental “crisis” is now a top priority in many industrialized countries. Perceived of as a threat to a society's resources, the environmental problem raises important questions regarding competing system goals. The problem cuts across traditional political and administrative structures and thus carries several implications for political change. Since the environmental issue has gained political recognition at the same time in many political systems, the auspices for comparative research are good.

This paper contains an analysis of the Swedish response to the environmental problem. The most spectacular changes seem to have appeared in policy content, and in the performance levels of the actors, while the structures of the system remain almost unchanged. A general framework for comparative environmental analysis is developed, followed by a discussion of certain aspects of environmental policy and political change. Drawing from Swedish, American and Canadian data, the complex adaptation processes between innovative agents, public opinion and institutionalized power mechanisms are discussed. Some propositions are offered for further comparative research.

The inadequate results and the lack of progress of all attempts at measuring power are primarily due to two factors: 1) the tendency to focus on a single dimension of the measurement problem, that is, either on the intensity of power in interpersonal relations, or on the distribution of power within a given social system, failing to link these two aspects; and 2) the inadequacy of community power studies to provide comprehensive models, and the continuing stubborn tendency to conceive measurement in strict, quantitative terms, failing to recognize the value of other less exact forms of measurement. The two problems of the intensity of power in interpersonal relations and of its systemic distribution may be tackled simultaneously by representing the actual impact and behaviour of power in a given system rather than measuring it quantitatively. This is done by means of a graphic, curvilinear representation of the power process, which allows the identification of different “phases”, where power has a substantially different nature (authority, influence, force), elicits different responses (obedience, passive resistance, submission), and results in different power relations (anarchy, legitimacy, bargaining, coercion). The curve bears considerable resemblance to the heuristic instruments of classical economics, and – though it is not without limitations – it offers substantial advantages, particulary its capacity to provide an instrument for comparing the power process in different political systems.

Many studies of European party systems have not taken into account fully the complexity and richness of party life on the continent. We need more multi-level, multi-dimensional analyses within a cross-national framework in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the relationships between parties, social structure and regimes. The discussion of some of the lacunae in the existing literature and of various ways of looking at political parties-emphasizes that because of the large number of alternative approaches available to the political sociologist, there is no single source of data, unit or level of analysis suitable for considering all facets of the subject. By crossing back and forth between levels or units of analysis, we may well gain in precision and detail what might be lost in methodological purity.