The description ‘radical’ tends to invoke left-wing images in many people's heads: it has almost become the antonym of conservative. But in the sense of appealing to fundamental principles, the present Conservative Government certainly claims to be radical. Its policies purport to break with the immediate past in British politics and they are said to derive from the principles of monetarism. No area has been subject to a more radical reassessment than that of central-local relations. Conservative policies have been seen as a grave threat to local government. They are said to undermine its constitutional foundations and considerable concern has been expressed about the erosion of local autonomy. This paper attempts to evaluate the distinctiveness of present policies. But in order to assess recent changes, it is necessary to look to the immediate past and to identify any continuities as well as disjunctions in central government's policy. A decade is a short time in the life of a polity but, by insisting that current developments be located in even this confined context, it will become clear that there is, in fact, a large measure of continuity in the relationship between central and local government. Whether the government has been Conservative or Labour, the trend has been towards the increased control of the level and pattern of sub-national expenditure.

Decision making in political executives is an oddly neglected subject in political science. The roles played by both formal institutions and less formal mechanisms in arriving at decisions in political executives are surprisingly understudied. There have been some important comparative studies of political executives but these have tended to focus on the role of the head of the political executive – the president or prime minister. The distinctive nature of cabinet systems as against presidential systems has been well brought out but a comparative framework for the analysis of variations among cabinet systems in the role of decision arenas other than the full cabinet has not been developed. Blondel in his wide-ranging survey of government structures gives only a passing mention to cabinet committees. Accordingly, in seeking to place the roles of cabinet committees in perspective, we have found it necessary to develop our own framework of decision arenas in cabinet systems.

This article examines the political ideology of Canadian elites on the basis of a sample survey conducted in 1977. The six hundred respondents include business executives, politicians, government bureaucrats, labour leaders, lawyers, media executives, and academics. Our purposes are, first, to make comparisons among and examine variation within these sectoral groups; second, to relate ideological cleavages to differences in support for the federal political parties; and, third, to examine the correspondence between more general ideological principles and elite opinions on a variety of specific public policy issues.

The re-emergence and political re-establishment of conservatism in a number of leading western welfare states has provided the empirical dots on the ‘i's’ of the ideology-is-not-dead-argument. Political issues have clearly become more technical, but their resolution has become anything but consensual. The current political dialogue may be tortuously symbolic, masking more than it reveals and more than technicians feel is good for us all, but this is perhaps more an indication of the balance of power between politicians and technicians than a sign of ideological deflation. We are not concerned in the present paper, therefore, with whether ideology is alive and kicking, but rather with who is kicking for what.

William Riker is one of the most influential political scientists at present writing on the theory and practice of democracy. A quick count on my part of the Social Science Citation Index, normally a Siva of academic reputations, revealed nearly one thousand entries under Riker's name between 1971 and the beginning of 1982. Not only is his work frequently cited, it is read long after it is originally published. The Theory of Political Coalitions, probably his best known work, was published in 1962, and is still seriously discussed by those engaged in the empirical study of political coalitions. Moreover, Riker has always been anxious to show the relevance of technical work in political science to the political philosophy of democracy. His work therefore represents not simply an impressive scholarly and academic achievement, but also an important contribution to the more wide-ranging public debate about the nature and value of democracy.

When the SDP was founded in March 1981 it was a product of two main strands of opinion embodied in the persons of Roy Jenkins on the one hand and the ‘Gang of Three’ (David Owen, Shirley Williams and William Rodgers) on the other. Jenkins was the first of the four to talk openly of the desirability of ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics by the formation of a new centre party. During his time as President of the European Commission he had become convinced that a realignment of British parties was necessary and he argued this in the Dimbleby Lecture in November 1979. Initially the ‘Gang of Three’ were hostile to the idea of a new party. They remained deeply involved in the Labour party until the end of 1980, leading the battle against the constitutional and policy changes favoured by the left. When they eventually resigned from the Labour party the ‘Gang’ claimed that this was because the party had changed, not them.