So-called ‘general theory’, or ‘systems theory’, is now nearly friendless among political scientists. The charm it once held as an ordering framework for empirical research has given way to that of the economic models of the rational choice school. While the successor paradigm was self-consciously reacting against the ‘over-socialized’ conception of man underlying systems theory and political sociology in general, much of its broader appeal was founded on similar claims: the promise of a testable, empirical theory, and an aspiration to complete generality. Perhaps these two goals will turn out to be irreconcilable; there is some plausibility in the view that, in practical affairs anyway, the idea of a general empirical theory is a contradiction in terms. In this article, however, I wish to examine a problem for systems theory which is not due to this tension, one which has gone unnoticed, and which has survived the decline and fall of the research programme.

Coalition formation has been the subject of much theoretical and empirical work in the past decade or so. The theories that have been tested all rest, one way or another, upon assumptions about the ways in which the payoff accruing to a particular coalition is distributed among its members. Yet much less empirical work has been done on the process of payoff distribution. Thus some of the fundamental assumptions of coalition theories, at least in terms of their practical application to coalition governments, have been more scantily tested. Several theories of payoff distribution have been recently developed, however. It is the purpose of this article to test the application of these theories to the practice of coalition government in Europe.

The past decade has seen the growth of a considerable literature on the link between government popularity, as reflected by the proportion of the public indicating their intention to vote for the government in opinion polls, and the state of the economy, as represented by certain key variables. The work began in the early 1970s with articles by Goodhart and Bhansali, Mueller, and Kramer. It continued through the decade; some of the more recent contributions can be found in a set of readings edited by Hibbs and Fassbender. However, despite the amount and quality of this work, problems remain. Principal amongst these, as Chrystal and Alt have pointed out, is the inability to estimate a relationship which exhibits any degree of stability either over time or between researchers. Nearly all the studies have been successful in finding a significant relationship for specific time periods, but when these are extended, or when the function is used to forecast outside the original estimation period, the relationship appears to break down.

Committee chairmen in the United States House of Representatives were often very powerful figures until the reforms of the early 1970s – as the numerous tales about those stereotyped villains, the southern Democrats, bear witness. Yet, surprisingly little explicit typologizing about leadership in congressional committees appears in the academic literature despite a growing awareness of the different goals which congressmen pursue and the variety of environments in which they operate. Just two different models of chairmen's power were developed in the context of the pre-reform Congress. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the accepted view, perhaps caricature, was that committee chairmen were autocratic, obstructionist (at least as far as liberals were concerned), conservative, possibly senile, and more than likely representative of constituencies outside the mainstream of national politics. A list of chairmen seen as fitting into this mould would include men such as ‘Judge’ Howard Smith, chairman of the Rules Committee from 1955 to 1967; his somewhat less skilful successor from 1967 to 1972, William Colmer of Mississippi; Graham Barden, the provocative chairman of the Education and Labor Committee between 1953 and 1960; and the authoritative Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee for seventeen years until 1966.

The US House of Representatives underwent a series of reforms in the 1970s which, on paper, changed the institution in fundamental ways. Often, however, institutional inertia is able to transform important ‘paper’ changes into barely discernible actual changes. Have the reforms really led to alterations in the way Congress operates and the policies it produces? To provide a partial answer to this question, we single out one of the reforms – a change in the application of the seniority system in the selection of committee chairmen – and analyse it with an eye towards one hypothesized effect – alterations in the level of party support among key representatives. But by restricting our study in this manner, we are able to provide specific empirical facts which should be of considerable assistance in the important task of formulating more generalized conclusions about the ability of legislative reform to produce real change in the governing process.

At a time when the nuclear power industry in many Western countries faces political and economic obstacles to expansion, commitment to assertive development of nuclear power continues to intensify in the Soviet Union, as well as in most East European countries. Although in 1980 nuclear power provided only about 5·1 per cent of electrical generating capacity in the Soviet Union, the 11th Five Year Plan (1981–85) projected an increase to 14 per cent, or to approximately 38,000 MW (megawatts) of installed capacity. Although longer-run projections are less definite, it appears that by 1990 authorities hope to achieve between 80,000 and 90,000 MW of nuclear generating capacity. A similar commitment to nuclear power exists in most CMEA countries, particularly in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). As of 31 December 1982, the GDR's 1,830 MW of nuclear generating capacity was the highest in Eastern Europe (outside the Soviet Union), although Bulgaria has overtaken the GDR in terms of proportion of electrical capacity provided by nuclear power (16 per cent for Bulgaria and 11 per cent for the GDR in 1980). According to projections, Czechoslovakia should increase its nuclear capacity from 880 MW in 1980 to between 3,100 and 3,600 MW by 1985, while the GDR plans to raise its capacity to 2,270 MW.

The study of urban politics has undergone considerable change over the last ten to fifteen years. During the 1950s and 1960s the ‘community power’ approach became well-established in American political science as the dominant form of analysis of local politics, although it was less marked in Britain. In contrast, and in part as reaction, to the ecological determinism and naturalistic explanation of the Chicago school in urban sociology that preceded it, power and decision making were seen as key features in explaining urban processes. Intentionality and human action were afforded explanatory dominance. In turn, however, this approach came under sustained critique as part of the ‘anti-behaviouralist’ or structuralist resurgence in Western social science in the 1970s which attributed causal primacy to structural determination and system contradictions, not actors or voluntarism. Yet structural approaches face methodological problems of functionalism and circularity, and in constructing tests of empirical adequacy and falsifiability. Some of the more interesting, recently-published work in urban politics seeks to maintain a non-behaviouralist, more structuralist interpretation of local policy outcomes within empirically-grounded analyses that allow space for politics and power. Dunleavy, Friedland and Saunders provided three of the best examples of such an approach, and have each sought to understand either a particular policy, or a set of policies in a particular locality, through frameworks which in varying degrees incorporate structuralist assumptions. They seek to apply objective cost-benefit analyses of public policies as empirically refutable hypotheses and accept the necessity of objective criteria for assessing whether or not interests have been met in any given situation. This article examines the extent to which these selected ‘non-behaviouralist’ interpretations of urban politics have successfully been applied to empirical contexts. A central element in this examination is a consideration of the way in which business is seen as a major influence in local politics.