If political science is both the study of public decisions and a dismal science (along with economics), it is because public decisions are often inherently difficult and unpleasant. Public life often presents decision makers with unwelcome trade-offs, with choices they would rather not have to make. This volume has examined the decisions of Western European party leaders in a variety of situations of goal conflict. Clearly, these choices induced a great deal of agony, they were often controversial, and they may have caused a fair amount of regret. In many cases, they may have puzzled the immediate observer and called for an explanation.

This book has examined a number of such hard and critical choices. In each of these cases, as outside observers, and sometimes with the considerable benefit of hindsight, we can identify the objective dilemmas faced by parties considering, for example, government participation, coalition termination, or constitutional reform. Such analytical efforts are helpful, but they still leave us at some distance from the world of party leaders themselves. And such descriptions are themselves of limited value if they do not help us understand the situation in anything like the framework adopted by the relevant actors in the parties themselves.

Political parties are by no means all alike, nor are the choices their leaders make. Hence, generalization about their behavior is an endeavor fraught with difficulties. While the behavior of political parties has always been of central importance to political scientists, the progression of our understanding of these matters has sometimes been slow.