In the past, the literature of community power studies has been bedevilled by two interrelated divisions amongst those who have conducted these studies. On the one hand, there has been a complex and bitter dispute about techniques, and on the other there has been a battle between the Sociologists who espoused a stratification theory and saw in all community structures a recurrent pattern of elites, and the Political Scientists who, with almost equal persistence, have found pluralistic structures. In this paper we wish if possible to break with this increasingly barren discussion and to use the study of the town of Ashford in Kent, with which we have been engaged in recent years, in order to illustrate what we hope to be a rather more fruitful approach to the analysis of community power structure. Our contention is that in this field of political science, which has claimed to be extremely scientific in its approach, there has been no real attempt to apply a thorough-going scientific methodology, and, as a result, the discussion has become bogged-down in a dispute about methods, in which the protagonists have become so embroiled that they have lost sight of the basic problem. Important as has been this debate about methods, it has taken attention away from the need to develop a theoretical framework for the study of community power which will enable us to transcend a level of the discussion which has largely been conducted by two ideologically opposed schools of thought, each determined to prove the other wrong.

There have been a number of attempts in recent years to define the subject-matter of political science and to provide a theoretical framework within which the discipline may be expected to develop. Among these, the work of David Easton occupies a leading place.1 This article discusses how successful Easton has been in adumbrating a general theory embracing the discipline. It then offers a rather looser and less ambitious framework within which the theories collectively called ‘political science’ may be placed and their interrelationships perceived.

Tucked inside Thomas Kuhn's masterly little book is a statement to the effect that scholarly endeavours, that have yet to fix upon an accepted paradigm, display continual and often exacerbatic confrontations between rival wings each trying to press upon the other the virtues of their particular mode of scientific procedure. In Kuhn's own words: ‘Because it [the awareness of anomaly] demands large scale paradigm destruction and major shifts in the problems and techniques of normal science, the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity.’ It seems as if political scientists have taken this point to heart. Rarely does an issue of a journal appear without some restatement or reappraisal of the ‘State of the Discipline’ and related problems.² Apart from the obvious point that political scientists must be spending inordinate amounts of time in such debates, and so perhaps neglecting other fruitful activities — a point which my economist friends would characterize as opportunity costly — there is a concomitant danger that the political world may begin to appear only analyzable with the aid of abstruse, esoteric and above all novel paradigms. Theoretical reasoning may be sustained on the basis of novelty rather than perspicuity.

In this paper we extend the probability model of voting which was first considered by Rae. We consider a voting body presented with issues on which decisions have to be made, and we seek the decision rule which maximizes in some sense the correspondence between individual preferences and the collective decisions of the voting body.

In a recent article in this journal1 we reported the results of an experiment designed to investigate, amongst other things, the effect of canvassing and polling-day activity upon the results of local government elections. On the basis of our data we argued that thorough canvassing before polling day and ‘knocking up’ on the day produced an appreciable increase in turnout. We also showed that, in a situation in which only one party organized the election thoroughly, this party would benefit disproportionately from the higher turnout; that is, it would receive an increased share of the vote.

The concept of political deference as an explanation for English voting behaviour has been both a popular one and one that has recently come under attack. Writers who have found it useful in explanation include McKenzie and Silver and Nordlinger. Writers who have attacked it include Parkin and Kavanagh. A somewhat intermediate position is taken by Jessop.

A certain amount of evidence has accumulated in the past few years to show that local election turnout is high in marginal wards. A number of different sources make the point, but the most complete evidence is presented in a recent issue of Political Studies by Fletcher who summarizes the prevailing view when he writes that ‘there was a very strong inverse correlation between the size of the majority in a contest and turnout. The smaller the margin between the victorious candidate and his closest opponent, the higher the proportion of electors voting was likely to have been.’ In an earlier report it was suggested that the closeness of party conflict is the overwhelming influence on turnout. Only three writers fail to discover a high poll in marginal wards.

In the last decade, a large volume of research and speculation concerned with the beliefs and attitudes of the mass and the elite about democracy, has been published.1 Parallel with this trend has been a growing interest in political socialization. It is not surprising, therefore, that some work has concentrated on the attitudes of adolescents towards democracy and the patterns of development of such attitudes.2 The genesis of this interest can be found in the belief that a knowledge of what people in a democracy think about democracy can help us understand its operation and predict its future development. My aim in this Note is to look briefly at two pieces of work which are concerned with English adolescents in order to discuss the intellectual limitations of frameworks devoted to exploring this interest.

In a recent examination of size of place as a factor affecting electoral behaviour, Bealey and Dyer came to the ‘general conclusion’ that ‘the Labour vote in Britain is proportionately stronger in those constituencies which are part of large places’. Is such a relationship between size of place and Labour strength displayed in local elections?