In September, 1973, about 2,000 workers of the Zmaj factory in Belgrade went on strike. Politika, a Belgrade daily newspaper, reported that the director of the firm, surprised to see so many workers gathered in front of his office, believed (at first) that ‘they were protesting against the counter-revolutionary oppression in Chile’. He was shocked to discover soon after that the workers were not demonstrating in support of Allende but, instead, were demanding higher wages. The director should not have been so taken aback. The Zmaj strike is only one of the approximately 3,000 incidents of industrial conflict that have taken place in Yugoslavia since it experienced its first post-war strike in 1958.

The literature on Indian electoral behaviour portrays parliamentary elections since independence as a series of critical, realigning and restoring contests in which voters are repelled by and attracted to the Congress party in great waves. The model is examined from the perspective of voter mobilization. Not only is the established view misleading, it often fails even to describe accurately what actually happened. Significant differences in voting behaviour are found separating the Hindi and non-Hindi speaking areas of India. District-level voting trends are explored within the framework of a multiple regression model applied comprehensively across all of India's general elections and administrative districts. Persistence of democratic politics is to a considerable degree due to the contained volatility of the Congress and opposition party coalitions.

Why do some elites endure whereas other die? This is a question to which many historians and social theorists have addressed themselves in trying to explain the severe conflicts that have plagued particular societies. It is, of course, a truism that certain societies are more prone to conflicts and to instability than others. But even within such societies there often lies, beneath the all too evident turbulence, a considerable stability of certain groups and institutions. The change that occurs in the wake of crises often distributes its impact on different sectors of society so unevenly that sweeping changes sometimes completely by-pass, or are successfully resisted, by certain groups. The result is that some groups and institutions manage to preserve their dominant positions and their privileges even while the society as a whole is experiencing crises, instability and change.

The relatively recent proliferation of books and articles on Spain and Portugal is obviously a consequence of the profound socio-political changes that have occurred in those countries over the past decade. The range and variety of this growth area of academic literature has been considerable. It is almost as if after more than forty years of dictatorship, everybody wanted to acquire, in a few years, the knowledge they had been deprived of before. New journals newspapers, books and booklets appear and disappear from bookstores and newspaper stands with amazing rapidity, revealing the importance of the anxieties and frustrations created by so many years of intellectual and physical repression and censorship. In the light of this publishing explosion this article will attempt to review the major contributions to the debate on the Spanish and Portuguese transitions to democracy, with the intention of delineating the most prominent issues and themes (political, social and economic) involved.

The standing of the public choice approach to politics is ambiguous. Most people now accept that there is something in it, even if the ‘something’ is restricted to Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values, Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy, Olson's The Logic of Collective Action, and (perhaps) Riker's The Theory of Political Coalitions. The Logic, for instance, is a cult abbreviation propagated by Olson himself but accepted by others. Three new adjectives (Downsian, Arrovian and Olsonian) are now established, although I have not yet found ‘Rikerian’. By analogy (Keynesian, The General Theory), the language seems to denote acceptance. But the seminal works (they are always seminal, as dawn in the Odyssey is always rosy-fingered) came out between 1951 and 1965; so where are their successors? Why have they had relatively little impact on student texts and informed public opinion? In short, what has been going on?

A very great deal, in fact. The first generation proposed bold hypotheses; their successors have put enormous efforts into refining them and proposing new ones, and (unfortunately) rather limited efforts into testing them. There have been four main lines of development. It would be impossible to review all four critically in a single article; therefore I make only fairly brief comments on the first three and devote most of this article to the fourth, which I think is one of the most promising and of the greatest interest to political scientists.

Peter Morriss's attack on R. J. Johnston's Note takes some side-swipes at us. We are allegedly ‘not quite up to par’, because (i) we are said to advocate the Banzhaf index; (ii) we are accused of ignoring a simpler route to our conclusion.

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?

Within six months of taking office in February 1974 Labour had funded three worker co-operatives: Meriden, Kirkby Manufacturing and the Scottish Daily News (SDN). All three ventures were the subject of considerable economic and political controversy. The Conservatives attacked them as ‘wasteful projects’ which would only encourage ‘creeping militancy’; the Daily Telegraph referred to them as a ‘diet of sub-Trotskyism’. Michael Heseltine, Conservative spokesman for Industry, attacked Labour's support for the three co-operatives, suggesting that they encouraged ‘others to follow these illegal precedents, commit national resources to wasteful projects, and create a growing sense of injustice among the overwhelming majority of hardworking, law-abiding citizens who totally fail to understand why creeping militancy should attract government support at their expense’. There was criticism too from less obviously partisan sources: the Sixth Report of the Committee on Public Expenditure, for example, concluded that worker co-operatives were non-viable and thus a waste of public money.

Messrs Dennis, Lindberg and McCrone have written an interesting article 1 in which they draw the conclusion that those of us who have written textbooks about British politics should modify some of our generalizations about British attitudes and traditions. But before we all rush to revise our next editions, I should like to raise some critical questions about thearticle. I will enumerate these to meet the editor's request for brevity, (i) Why are we not told anything about the composition of the sample? It has been shown that political attitudes among British children are related both to the social class of their parents and to the type of school attended, 2 and without any indication of the class background or schools of the children interviewed it is rather difficult to assess the results. It would also be helpful to know exactly when the survey was conducted.

Relating the notion of political community to those of discrimination and legitimacy — and, consequently, setting up a typology which will contrast communities by the criteria they use to distinguish members from non-members and by the location they give to legitimacy, placed either in a ruler or in a process — will be made easier if we consider first of all certain striking similarities which exist between the most private of social groups, the family, and the most public, the state, similarities which probably facilitate the transfer of the ideological constructs formed in infancy and childhood into the political expectancies and assumptions of adulthood. Let us distinguish communities defined through the brothers from communities defined through the father: communities centered around a leader from those centered on themselves. These contrasts will suggest to us a natural/ artificial continuum along which political communities can be ranked, those most resembling the family in their ideas about legitimate authority and legitimate membership being closer to the ‘natural’ end of the continuum. I will explain later the reasons for this distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, but I must at the outset make it absolutely clear that the use of these terms does not in any way imply an evaluative preference on my part.

Theories of policy formation derived from the experience of one country are not always easy to apply in another. This is particularly true of policy making in British cities, where scholars have often found that the relevance of theories developed in the United States is strictly limited. This paper seeks to explore two approaches that have been influential in orienting theory-building in American local politics – the ‘elite’ approach and the ‘pluralist’ – and to examine their relevance to policy analysis in urban Britain. Our contention is that both of these approaches, if reformulated so as to apply to policy-making processes in different arenas of decision, afford valuable insights. Data collected in three Greater London boroughs, which were attempting a vast reorganization of secondary education, suggest that distinctly British patterns of pluralist and elite-oriented policy-making behavior are related to particular types of governmental outputs.

One of the salient characteristics of the British first-past-the-post electoral system is the amount of bias which it produces. Parties with large percentages of the votes (i.e. 25 or greater) almost invariably get even larger percentage shares of the parliamentary seats, whereas those with smaller vote percentages tend to get very few seats. That bias largely reflects the superimposition of a geography of constituency boundaries on the geographies of party support, so that different sets of constituencies can produce different levels and even directions of bias, as is clearly illustrated in studies using US data.See, for example, R. L. Morrill, ‘Ideal and Reality in Reapportionment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 63 (1973), 463–77. More generally on bias in electoral systems, see D. W. Rae, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws, 2nd edn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971); and R. Taagepera and M. S. Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).

How do politicians use moral appeals in their rhetoric? Previous research suggests that morality plays an important role in elite communication and that the endorsement of specific values varies systematically across the ideological spectrum. We argue that this view is incomplete since it only focuses on whether certain values are endorsed and not how they are contextualized by politicians. Using a novel sentence embedding approach, we show that although liberal and conservative politicians use the same moral terms, they attach diverging meanings to these values. Accordingly, the politics of morality is not about the promotion of specific moral values per se but, rather, a competition over their respective meaning. Our results highlight that simple dictionary-based methods to measure moral rhetoric may be insufficient since they fail to account for the semantic contexts in which words are used and, therefore, risk overlooking important features of political communication and party competition.

The literature on deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) establishes a link between political dissatisfaction and support for DMPs. However, little is known about the sources of political dissatisfaction that trigger this support. Our research tackles this specific question and claims that citizen dissatisfaction is rooted in a position of ‘losers of representative democracy’, which leads citizens to be more open to reforms that move away from the representative model. Building on the literature on loser's consent, we focus on the effect of voting for a party not associated with the government and of descriptive and substantive (under)-representation in support of DMPs. We rely on a comparative survey conducted across fifteen Western European countries. Supporters of opposition parties and those who are badly represented, both descriptively and substantively, are more supportive of DMPs. These findings have important implications for understanding the public appeal for deliberative democracy instruments.

This study examines whether (and how) parties adapt to party system saturation (PSS). A party system is oversaturated when a higher effective number of parties contests elections than predicted. Previous research has shown that parties are more likely to exit when party systems are oversaturated. This article examines whether parties will adapt by increasing the nicheness of their policy platform, by forming electoral alliances or by merging. Based on time-series analyses of 522 parties contesting 357 elections in twenty-one established Western democracies between 1945 and 2011, the study finds that parties are more likely to enter – and less likely to leave – electoral alliances if PSS increases. Additionally, a small share of older parties will merge. The results highlight parties’ limited capacity to adapt to their environments, which has important implications for the literature on party (system) change and models of electoral competition.

This article, based on empirical research conducted in Hungary, interprets and assesses some aspects of the revolutionary changes that happened in Eastern Europe in 1990. The lack of distinction made between the apparatus and the nomenclatura represented a serious impediment to the understanding of both the nature and the dissolution of communist power. Some results of a survey conducted among the party apparatus in Budapest in the autumn of 1988 are presented, including an analysis of the professional and family background of political ‘instructors’ and their value preferences, the reconstruction of the type of career path that joining the apparatus represented for an individual, including the function of privileges and constraints; and the stages in the career of the apparatus itself, including its final dissolution. Finally, a distinction is made between two different ‘legacies’ of communism: the salvaging of the nomenclatura and the lasting impact of the earlier activity of the apparatus on all segments of the population. The widespread image of the thaw after a deep freeze is contrasted with that of a vacuum and its dangers.

Perhaps we political scientists and sociologists should have left ‘legitimacy’ to the constitutional and international lawyers. Such a view is certainly suggested by the present cacophany of our definitions, taxonomies and applications of the term. When the contributors to a book on political legitimation in communist states, representing by no means the full range of scholarly views on the social and political systems of these countries, can variously characterize the political legitimation of the USSR today as dominated by ‘goal-rational’, ‘traditional’ or ‘paternalistic’ legitimation, or as a combination of ‘heteronomous-teleological’ and ‘autonomous-consensual’ or of ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ modes of legitimation, we evidently have a long way to go before our shared understandings of political legitmation could be adequate for the comparative study of political systems or for analysing political change.

It has already been demonstrated that part of the success of the Liverpool Liberals in local elections can be attributed to split-ticket voting by Liverpool electors. In May 1979, when city council and Westminster elections took place simultaneously, substantial proportions of voters went into a polling booth and voted for different parties at local and national level. This note attempts a further investigation of the basis of Liberal support in Liverpool local elections. Its main purpose is to test two hypotheses.

1. ‘Liberal voting displays a weaker causal linkage to the socio-economic structure of Liverpool wards than does voting for the other two parties.’

2. ‘Liberal voting is much more directly related to ward turnout than is voting for the other two parties.’

‘I don’t give a s— about the lira.‘These, as well as comparable sentiments about the pound sterling expressed by a recent U.S. President and preserved on tape for posterity, may symbolize a growing American lack of interest in Western Europe. In turn, European views of the United States may now be less exalted than at any time in the past three decades. In a period when misunderstandings, apocalyptic visions and contradictory judgements abound regarding the future of European unity and European-American relations, it is worth examining some evidence of recent European elite attitudes in order to facilitate more reliable judgementsor at least less impressionistic ones.