In his celebrated study of American democracy written in 1888, Lord Bryce reserved his most condemnatory reflections for city government and in a muchquoted passage asserted: ‘There is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States. The deficiencies of the National government tell but little for evil on the welfare of the people. The faults of the State governments are insignificant compared with the extravagance, corruption and mismanagement which mark the administration of most of the great cities'sangeetha.

In their study of the ‘affluent worker’ in Luton,1 Goldthorpe and his colleagues reached a number of important conclusions about the political behaviour of the ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ working class in post-war Britain. They rejected the belief, commonly held by the late 1950s, that a growing proportion of manual workers was beginning to support the Conservative Party as a result of attaining a middle class level of income and material possessions (the ‘embourgeoisement’ theory). In their sample, which was elaborately designed to ensure the most favourable conditions for confirmation of the embourgeoisement theory, they found (i) that the level of stable Labour support was higher than the national average for manual workers; (ii) that there was no evidence of any gradual, long-term shift of support towards the Conservatives or away from Labour; and (iii) that the small minority of Conservatives was distinguished not by a higher than average standard of living, but by a relatively large number of white collar workers among their kin. The notion that there was a necessary connection, among manual workers, between growing material prosperity and increased support for the Conservative Party was therefore decisively rejected.

In the ten years or so since the publication of Hyman's seminal work, 1 students of politics have given increasing attention to political socialization. There has been a proliferation of works utilizing the concept. 2 The notion of socialization has perhaps been most rigorously applied in studies of the development of the political attitudes of children and adolescents, 3 but it has also been employed, if rather more loosely, in the study of adult electors. 4 There is, however, a dearth of material relating to the socialization of party activists at local level. This is not to say that the social and political background and the recruitment patterns of party activists have not been investigated, 5 but the concept of political socialization has not been explicitly or very rigorously employed. The importance of local party organizations and their memberships has not always been self-evident to students of politics and we do not propose to argue the point here. We merely assert that British parties and British politics derive much of their ‘style’ from the character of party activists. This being the case, we feel that the relative lack of information about the socialization of activists represents a considerable gap.

Axelrod has demonstrated the equivalence of a measure of structural propensity to conflict, based on game-theory and applicable to certain types of social interaction, and spatial conceptions of policy agreement. However his spatial model rests on assumptions of interval status not commonly met by data from which consensual interpretations have evolved and against which they have been tested. The generality and rigour of consensual explanations of democratic stability can be enhanced by integration with Axelrod's framework. At the same time consensus hypotheses focus on a question left unanswered by game-theoretic formulations: why do democratic political games continue to be played by existing rules? Following Axelrod's recommendation to integrate conflict of interest with other bodies of theory, 1 this paper assesses points of contact between Axelrod's discussion and one line of consensual reasoning, extends the equivalence between conflict of interest and policy agreement to all levels of measurement, and details the contributions which game-theoretic and consensual formulations can make to each other.

Mathematical languages and computer algorithms are becoming important modes of analysis for theory evaluation in political science. Typically, the process involves (1) translating the major theoretical relationships into a ‘formal’ language for the logical analysis of internal consistency, or, (2) empirically interpreting the formal language in order to make specific predictions, which, in turn, allow evaluation of external consistency with theoretically significant real world phenomena. In this paper I wish to discuss, first, some basic concepts and, second, some aspects of the technology and methodology of these modes of theory evaluation.

The public institutions that support scientific research repeatedly face dilemmas of choice. Limited budgets require a high degree of selectivity in choosing which activities are to be supported. The criteria for selection involve a great variety of factors. Yet the justification for the support of any scientific research is most commonly expressed in such terms as ‘scientific promise’ or ‘relevance’ to some social or economic objective. Such justifications have a great deal of credibility, yet it is too frequently assumed that they correspond to the criteria actually employed in the selective support of specific science activities.

Since the two critiques [Iain McLean, Samual Postbrief, ‘"The Scientific Status of Political Science” — Two Comments,’ II (1972), 383–8] have little in common, I shall answer them separately beginning with McLean's. The main difficulty with McLean's argument is that he assumes that we know, or can know, that there cannot be a science of politics or, better still, laws of political behaviour as rigorous as the laws of the natural sciences. His assumption is supported by familiar arguments: men are not as passive and as homogeneous as silver nitrate; men have free will and could wilfully go against the predictions of the social scientist if only to show him that their behaviour cannot be predicted.