If there is a consensus on ‘consensus’ amongst political scientists it is that it occurs where there is a high degree of ‘trust’ amongst members of a political system. It may not always be clear whether such trust must be found amongst the citizens at large or only amongst the elite or between citizens and elite. Nor is it always certain whether ‘trust’ is a condition for consensual politics or an aspect of it. Nevertheless ‘trust’ would appear essential in a liberal democracy or a polyarchy. The section on ‘Trust’ in Robert A. Dahl's Polyarchy is indicative of this current concern. He argues that ‘mutual trust favors polyarchy and public contestation while extreme distrust favors hegemony’. This is for three reasons. Firstly, the mutual communication required in a polyarchy best occurs where men trust one another. Secondly, men need to trust one another if they are to associate together in the achievement of those objectives which they cannot gain by their own individual action. Thirdly, a feeling of trust prevents political disputes from turning into severe enmity.

In the twenty-odd years since the declaration of a state of emergency in Kenya in October 1952, the analysis of the phenomenon known as ‘Mau Mau’ has undergone a fundamental revision. The initial interpretation, advanced by the colonial authorities and their apologists and by a few (mostly British) scholars, explained ‘Mau Mau’ as a fanatic, atavistic, savage religious cult consciously created and manipulated by a group of unscrupulous, power-hungry leaders. It was said to be rooted in a mass psychosis affecting an unstable tribe freed from the anchoring constraints of tradition. It was also said to have had no direct links to socio-economic conditions in the colony or to the policies of the Kenya government. This interpretation, popularized by a large and sensational journalistic literature, went virtually unchallenged for more than a decade. During this period ‘Mau Mau’ and its antecedents were largely ignored by social scientists. As late as 1965, Gilbert Kushner could report that a search of major anthropological journals revealed, at best, only peripheral mention of Mau Mau. Where ‘Mau Mau’ was explicitly considered, the basic premise of the official explanation was generally accepted, and the phenomenon was treated as a nativistic cult or revitalization movement.

Tocqueville described the eventual progress of equality as inevitable; today its prospects seem less assured. The main engines of equality's modest advance are to be found in contemporary welfare states, where politics concerns who gets what and why. Governments are deeply concerned with these matters even when beguiling themselves, as well as the rest of us, into overlooking the cumulative results of their actions. By shoring up and gradually reshaping stratification systems, they help provide frameworks within which we live and plan our futures. Ordinary citizens are more attuned to the facts of inequality than to speculations about its origins. This essay investigates when and how citizens learn about stratification in England and the United States.

Despite the greatly enhanced interest in processes of political change that political scientists have shown in recent years, there are still areas that have received attention in only the most speculative manner. Modernization, political development and comparative history are becoming established subdisciplines, reflecting ‘the change to change’. But the political processes involved in the transformation of advanced industrial societies have as yet received only cursory empirical treatment.

By the late 1960s the shift of the Labour party away from its traditional base among the urban working class appeared to be gaining momentum. The opinion polls showed a marked swing of working-class sentiment away from the party, and the policies advanced during the period, especially with regard to prices and incomes and industrial relations, hardly seemed designed to satisfy the redistributive concerns traditionally imputed to the working class. Indeed the government's overriding concern with the problem of the economy during a period in which the Labour party had a large majority over all other parties in the House of Commons was seen by one commentator as the final act of a tragic farce entitled ‘The Decline and Fall of Social Democracy’. Clearly this conclusion was drawn somewhat prematurely: in the 1970s there is fragmented evidence to suggest that the Labour party has regained the votes of a number of its traditional supporters who had previously defected, just as there is evidence that the ‘left’ of the party is asserting itself. However, the events of the early 1970s are not sufficient to refute the proposition that some kind of fundamental change either has occurred, or is occurring, in the relationship between the Labour party and its traditional supporters. Even if the curtain has yet to fall, there is no reason to believe that the play has not begun.

Local Conservative associations have traditionally run their affairs independently and have successfully resisted interference from Central Office. Far from constituting a ‘centralized machine’ (as authors such as McKenzie, Beer and Crossman have maintained) the main feature of Conservative organization has been its decentralized, voluntary character. Nowhere has resistance to control by the party headquarters been more determined than in the major provincial cities. Here, confederations of city constituency associations, financed mainly by local business interests, have virtually excluded the Central Office area agents from participating in constituency organization. Attempts by successive national party chairmen to bring the city associations into the Central Office orbit have regularly been rebuffed. Consequently, Central Office's recent success in integrating the city associations into its area office organization marks the end of an era. It raises the question of whether the Conservative organization is at last becoming as centralized as many commentators have long supposed it to be. This note describes recent developments and assesses their significance.

Various commentators have expressed their subjective impressions that ‘the environment’ emerged suddenly as a political issue. That the number of groups, journals and books relating to ‘the environment’ has dramatically increased is indisputable. What is not clear, however, is whether the increase has been in the awareness of relationships between problems which could then be subsumed under the general heading ‘the environment’ or whether increased attention has been paid to the component problems. It is possible that the interest in issues such as water pollution, resource conservation and air pollution was of long standing and that the only change was a growing popularization of the label ‘environmental’ by those who wrote about the subject in the press. The object of this study is to test the latter hypothesis by means of a content analysis of The Times.