Legitimacy may be defined as that political condition in which power-holders are able to justify their holding of power in terms other than those of the mere fact of power-holding. According to one view such justifications are increasingly tenuous due to the conditions under which the modern state has arisen and the means it employs in order to persist. Theories of legitimacy typically view power from two aspects – from that of its origins and from that of its ends. More concretely, this invariably involves, on the one hand, some discussion of the degree to which a regime of a government.can be said to rest on democratic consent and, on the other, of the extent to which the regime or government guides its actions by some notion of the common good or public interest. Neither of these focuses, in Schaar's view, are likely to provide adequate justifications for power under modern conditions: ‘criticism and hard events have done their work: both concepts have been reduced to rubble’.

Of the studies by British sociologists in the last decade focusing on the determinants of working-class attitudes to the class structure, those of Michael Mann and Anthony Giddens must, I think, be seen in retrospect as the most imaginative. While much effort at the time focused on what in the event turned out to be the rather minimal implications of the impact of certain variations in work and community milieux within Britain on workers' conceptions of class, Mann and Giddens took as their point of departure the well documented differences in the radicalism of the labour movements of different Western capitalist societies and sought to develop a theory that could account for them. Why should it be, they asked, that in countries such as France and Italy workers were sufficiently disenchanted with capitalist institutions to give relatively enduring support to parties that were at least formally committed to revolutionary objectives, while in countries such as Britain and the United States they gave their allegiances to parties that seemed largely to accept the existing structure of society?

In a critical review of the state of comparative politics fourteen years ago, Joseph LaPalombara noted important gaps in our information on politics even in the presumably well-researched Western democratic countries. As an illustration, he contrasted the wealth of information on American interest groups with the surprisingly few solid studies of interest groups in countries such as Britain, France, Italy or West Germany. Despite, or perhaps because of this information gap, specialists in comparative politics were prepared to make sweeping generalizations about politics in this or that foreign country that a United States specialist would never dare to make on the basis of the wealth of research data available on politics in the United States. In the years since LaPalombara's critique, few have picked up his challenge to fill these information gaps, particularly the lacunae in our knowledge of interest group politics outside the United States. This lack of information has not discouraged scholars from proposing high-flown generalizations and models on interest group-government interaction in Europe. Sometimes, as we shall see, scholars studying interest group-State interactions have thought they found what Sartori labelled ‘travelling universals’ in certain interest-group patterns existing in struggling, non-democratic Third World countries which they then assumed to be present in the modern industrial democracies of Western Europe.

During the past fifteen years, several economists, historians and sociologists have propounded a sectoral model of economic growth and change in the United States. According to this analysis, as large-scale, monopolistic enterprises began to emerge in the late nineteenth century, different investment considerations and labour market requirements were also evolving. A dual economy was beginning to be formed. The large-scale capital sector, and the small-scale capital sector each had its own economic environment of conduct. Each sector tended, too, to develop its own corresponding labour market, with monopoly sector or ‘core’ firms holding out certain economic advantages for employees: money, job security, benefits, and opportunities for advancement within the firm. Thus, the work experience in these two sectors increasingly diverged. Even if the large-scale capital sector did offer economic advantages, growth tended to be capital-intensive, and the growth of employment in this sector slowed down, and then stopped by the end of the Second World War. Employment shifted to trades and services, with lower wage rates, and, of course, to the public sector, which currently employs nearly a third of the American workforce.

Recent developments in the political behaviour of the British electorate have called into question the once-prevalent view that class was what counted when it came to voting and all else was ‘embellishment and detail’. Two streams of thought dominate the recent literature. One notes the continuing prominence of social class in the context of voting behaviour, but stresses the extent to which class is no longer expressable as a simple function of occupation (manual and non-manual), but instead requires paying attention to such aspects of lifestyle as tenancy patterns. The other, best exemplified in Dunleavy's recent work, pays less attention to individual lifestyle and emphasizes instead the extent to which changes in the occupational structure (particularly sectoral location and unionization) have altered the political meaning of workplace (‘production’) locations. The theoretical interest in sectoral location arises from the growth of public sector employment since the early 1960s and the increase in public sector labour militancy in the early 1970s. According to this view, partisan choice is influenced by sectoral location and by union membership, which is itself not a matter of lifestyle nor a simple extension of social class, but is bound up with sectoral (public/corporate/small private) location of occupation.