Of all the freedoms cherished by liberals, perhaps none is more cherished than freedom of expression. Most would accept that some limits should be placed upon that freedom, but what sort of limits those should be and how far they should extend are matters of controversy. That controversy is all the greater when the purpose for which free expression is limited is itself one which is as potentially compromising to liberalism as the prevention of offence to people's feelings. In this paper I shall examine the relative claims of free expression and offended feelings by focusing on a subject which juxtaposes the two particularly clearly: blasphemy.

One of the preoccupations of students of Soviet and communist politics in the past decade or so has been the problem of system change. There can be no doubt that in a number of fundamental respects the Soviet Union today bears little resemblance to the totalitarian model bequeathed by Stalin. In particular, despite the well publicized attempts to stifle vocal opposition, the abandonment of the capricious and widespread use of terror has brought about a radical modification in the life of the mass of the population and party membership. Equally significant has been the rise in living standards, over the past decade especially. Perhaps also of relevance to the average citizen, envious of and apprehensive towards foreigners – particularly Chinese and Germans – is the Soviet leadership's tangible success in reaching some form of accommodation with the country's main ideological adversaries, and the rise in prestige stemming from the USSR's achievements in space and in the international sports arena. Hence, for probably the majority of Soviet citizens, taking a broad view, Harold Macmillan's British election slogan of 1959 would be quite apposite: they have never had it so good.

A common feature of authoritarian regimes throughout history has been the creation of an elaborate mystique around the leader. This has consisted, in general terms, of the building up of the leader into a figure of superhuman dimensions dwarfing all the lesser mortals who surround him. Although such a cult often pandered to and was inflated by the egoism of its principal, its presence across millennia and cultural differences suggests a systemic basis for its development. Leader cults have rarely been the result simply of a desire for personal glorification or public worship on the part of a leader, significant though such factors may be in any particular instance, but have resulted in large part from structural features of the political system in question. The Soviet political system is clearly relevant in this regard, having been characterized by the existence of exaggerated cults of the leader for much of its sixty-two-year history. By analysing two of these cults, those of Stalin and Brezhnev as embodied in the images of the two leaders projected through the party press, it will be possible to isolate those structural aspects of the Soviet political system which encourage the emergence and growth of a leader cult.

The title of this paper derives from two sets of observations. The first, from Lipset and Rokkan, asserts that Western party systems reflect (or, at least, reflected in the mid-1960s) a congealment of political conflicts dating from the 1920s or earlier. The second, taken generally from the growing concern about political ungovernability, suggests that contemporary party systems are losing their capacity to structure choice effectively in Western polities. Since it is one of the defects of frozen food storage that any food, no matter how well frozen, will eventually become unappetizing if not downright unwholesome, it is worth enquiring whether the two sets of observations are interconnected. In a fast-changing world, party systems reflecting the shape of conflict over past problems may appear to the voter as out of touch with newer problems. Indeed, the party systems observed by Lipset and Rokkan have all been challenged subsequently by new forces.

Modern democratic theory stresses the need for citizens to be able to think in abstract ways about political objects and the political system. The underlying assumption is that those with a richer guiding conceptual framework participate more, monitor and process fresh stimuli in a more systematic fashion, and are less bewildered by a complicated political environment. These are generally conceded to be good qualities for the citizen and the state. To observe that women have a less developed sense of ideological sophistication is to conclude that their political lives are at least different, if not indeed more impoverished.

This article is a contribution to the debate between ‘empirical’ and ‘classical’ theories of democracy. It draws attention to a hitherto neglected aspect of that debate, namely the historical process by which a word like ‘democracy’ gains its commendatory overtones. To call a state a democracy was not always to praise it; the argument here is that an understanding of how this came about can clarify some of the issues involved in considering whether or not states are properly to be called democracies. Although the methods used derive from linguistic philosophy, the purpose is to direct attention towards the values and aspirations of historical agents using the term, rather than to a purely conceptual analysis of it.

A recent unusual event in the First Division of the English (Association) Football League provides an interesting example of how a game that is normally zero-sum can be converted into a non-zero-sum game. The political implications are, I hope, obvious. If politics consists of zero-sum games such as Diplomacy, Marx's conception of class conflict, or some non-Marxists' conceptions of ethnic, language, or boundary disputes, then no long-run co-operation between the players is possible and war is a seemingly inevitable continuation of policy by other means. If it consists of non-zero-sum games such as Prisoners' Dilemma, most non-Marxists' conceptions of class conflict, or some Marxists' conceptions of ethnic, language, or boundary disputes, then there is scope for co-operation as well as for competition. The present example, originally developed as an undergraduate teaching aid, may be of some general interest.

Studies of the domestic sources of Israel's foreign policy have tended to treat Israel's parties as homogeneous blocs of opinion. Israel's political parties are implicitly arrayed in such analyses on a left-to-right continuum. This begins on the left with the New Communist List (RAKAH) and extends through the Israel Communist Party (MAKI), MOKED, Haolam Hazeh Koah Hadash, the Civil Rights Movement, SHELI, the United Workers Party (MAPAM), the Labour Party (formerly Ahdut Haavoda), Israel's Workers List (RAFI) and the Workers of Israel Party (MAPAI), the Independent Liberals, the Democratic Movement for Change, the National Religious Party, the Likud (composed of the state list, the Liberal Party, Laam, the Free Centre, the Greater Israel Movement, Shlomzion and Herut) and finally ends on the right with the ultra-orthodox Agudath Israel (AGI) and the Workers of Agudath Israel (PAGI). The left-to-centre part of this continuum is presented as moderate in varying degrees on questions relating to Israel's most cardinal external question, namely the terms of accommodation with the Arabs. The right-to-centre part of this same continuum is associated with hawkish views, which also vary in their degree of militancy.

In an ingenious piece of aggregate data analysis Stan Taylor finds a significant relationship between the percentage of the coloured population in a constituency, and the percentage voting for the National Front amongst whites, in the two general elections of 1974 (‘The Incidence of Coloured Populations and Support for the National Front’, this Journal, IX (1979), 250–5). He tests two alternative models of this relationship. The first is a linear model which postulates a white ‘backlash’ of increasing magnitude with further concentrations of coloured people; the second is a curvilinear model which postulates maximum National Front support in areas of moderate concentrations of coloured people, the argument being that people in this situation may feel most threatened by the possible future influx of coloured people. It is an elegant exercise in model building and testing, which finds the non-linear model consistent with the data for the February 1974 election, and the linear model consistent with the data for the October 1974 election.

In a disingenuous piece of aggregate data analysis Paul Whiteley suggests that, because he found that the correlation between two variables in a local election held at one point of time in one city was spurious when a third was controlled for, this implies that the relationships between two variables, one calculated on a different basis, in two general elections which took place three years earlier and covered a wide area of England, will also be spurious when an additional variable is introduced into the analysis. It is an inelegant analysis in model building and testing, in so far as it cannot explain the findings it purports to explain. Unfortunately it is also a textbook case of making causal inferences from variables associated with each other for reasons that lie outside the scope of the model.

I heartily approve of research based upon poll data, in which I include specifically the contribution by Paul Whiteley, ‘Electoral Forecasting from Poll Data: The British Case’ (this Journal, IX (1979), 219–36). I note with pleasure the fact that the author has relied heavily upon Gallup data for the testing of his time-series model. There is one specific objection that I have to the detail of the contents of this paper. I refer to the sentence bridging pages 231–2, in which he states: ‘the large inaccuracy of the 1951 forecast is not, in fact, due to the model so much as Gallup data, which were extremely inaccurate in that year’. There is a footnote which states that this was inferred from the residuals of the forecasting model. The error quoted is 8·3 per cent. This does refer to the last pre-campaign poll, admittedly. The last campaign poll, the only one that could be compared with the result itself, shows, according to Gallup records, a deviation of 2·2 per cent. The bland assertion of Mr Whiteley that our results were inaccurate in that year is totally unsupported by any evidence of a practical kind. Instead we have the statement that the fit of the model was rather bad on this occasion. Remembering that public opinion, including support for a specific political party, is known to change radically between elections, between local elections and by-elections, and so on (I confine myself here to actual elections – I do not depend upon poll data to substantiate my case) and knowing that among the causes of this are political events, and events of a social and economic nature which affect the mood and attitude of the electorate, it does not surprise me that a purely mathematical model does not necessarily fit from time to time. Indeed elsewhere in the article the author mentions the possibility of shocks affecting public opinion and the degree to which these shocks are effected in the auto-regressive scheme that he has put forward.

Norman Webb, the Director of Social Surveys (Gallup) Ltd. takes me to task for asserting that the Gallup Poll was unusually inaccurate in 1951 (this Journal, IX (1979), 231–2).