Irving Janis's work on groupthink has attracted considerable attention from those who seek to explain foreign-policy decision making. The basic argument – that excessive esprit de corps and amiability restrict the critical faculties of small decision-making groups, thereby leading to foreign-policy fiascos – is both an appealing and a stimulating one. In addition, it is also an argument that is capable of being tested against empirical evidence. Thus, Frank Heller has suggested that groupthink may be very useful in explaining British policy during the Falklands Crisis. The purpose of this note is to indicate the utility of the notion of groupthink in explaining one recent foreign-policy fiasco, the attempt by the United States to rescue its hostages in Tehran.

At a time when the nuclear power industry in many Western countries faces political and economic obstacles to expansion, commitment to assertive development of nuclear power continues to intensify in the Soviet Union, as well as in most East European countries. Although in 1980 nuclear power provided only about 5·1 per cent of electrical generating capacity in the Soviet Union, the 11th Five Year Plan (1981–85) projected an increase to 14 per cent, or to approximately 38,000 MW (megawatts) of installed capacity. Although longer-run projections are less definite, it appears that by 1990 authorities hope to achieve between 80,000 and 90,000 MW of nuclear generating capacity. A similar commitment to nuclear power exists in most CMEA countries, particularly in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). As of 31 December 1982, the GDR's 1,830 MW of nuclear generating capacity was the highest in Eastern Europe (outside the Soviet Union), although Bulgaria has overtaken the GDR in terms of proportion of electrical capacity provided by nuclear power (16 per cent for Bulgaria and 11 per cent for the GDR in 1980). According to projections, Czechoslovakia should increase its nuclear capacity from 880 MW in 1980 to between 3,100 and 3,600 MW by 1985, while the GDR plans to raise its capacity to 2,270 MW.

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of his argument, T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions continues to have a significant impact on the way in which economics and other social sciences view themselves. Indeed, it could be said that Kuhn's influence has been much the greater on the more methodologically disposed social sciences than upon the natural sciences to which his original thesis was addressed. However, since the first flush of enthusiasm for Kuhn amongst the social sciences there has emerged, as Keith Tribe has noted, a growing unease with the thesis on the grounds that it is ‘not capable of doing the work that it is called upon to perform’. Nevertheless, despite these new found doubts Kuhn's ideas still provide – to use a ‘Kuhnian’ expression – a powerful ‘framework’ through which changes in economic theory, such as the ‘Keynesian Revolution’, may be understood. Because consideration of such matters has been primarily the preserve of economists preoccupied with the development of techniques of economic analysis, rather than of students of politics concerned with the history of ideas, other issues, such as Keynes's notion of theoretical change and revolution, have in the analysis of the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ been neglected. Indeed, as Axel Leijonhufvud has observed, the absence from the debate on the structure of scientific revolutions of philosophically disposed case studies from economics and other social sciences has itself left social science ‘unsure about what exactly we can learn from it’.

The so-called cube ‘law’ has become ‘part of the political folklore of Great Britain’. Indeed it seems also to have passed into the general folklore of political science, having been applied to electoral systems having single-member constituencies contested by two major parties in the United States, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and South Africa.

The study of urban politics has undergone considerable change over the last ten to fifteen years. During the 1950s and 1960s the ‘community power’ approach became well-established in American political science as the dominant form of analysis of local politics, although it was less marked in Britain. In contrast, and in part as reaction, to the ecological determinism and naturalistic explanation of the Chicago school in urban sociology that preceded it, power and decision making were seen as key features in explaining urban processes. Intentionality and human action were afforded explanatory dominance. In turn, however, this approach came under sustained critique as part of the ‘anti-behaviouralist’ or structuralist resurgence in Western social science in the 1970s which attributed causal primacy to structural determination and system contradictions, not actors or voluntarism. Yet structural approaches face methodological problems of functionalism and circularity, and in constructing tests of empirical adequacy and falsifiability. Some of the more interesting, recently-published work in urban politics seeks to maintain a non-behaviouralist, more structuralist interpretation of local policy outcomes within empirically-grounded analyses that allow space for politics and power. Dunleavy, Friedland and Saunders provided three of the best examples of such an approach, and have each sought to understand either a particular policy, or a set of policies in a particular locality, through frameworks which in varying degrees incorporate structuralist assumptions. They seek to apply objective cost-benefit analyses of public policies as empirically refutable hypotheses and accept the necessity of objective criteria for assessing whether or not interests have been met in any given situation. This article examines the extent to which these selected ‘non-behaviouralist’ interpretations of urban politics have successfully been applied to empirical contexts. A central element in this examination is a consideration of the way in which business is seen as a major influence in local politics.

This review evaluates the success of output studies in explaining intranational variation in the policies of local governments. Output studies address the central question of political science: why do different governments adopt different policies? It is therefore important to examine the contribution of output studies to our understanding of the reasons for policy variation and the role of politics within the relevant causal processes.

In comparative politics, the units of analysis are usually countries. For many variables, this does not raise any particular measurement problems, because they can easily be aggregated at the country level. For other variables, however, measurement at the country level is a much more severe problem. The prevailing decision mode in a country is perhaps the most conspicuous case. In the last ten to fifteen years, this variable has gained key importance in several theories, most prominently in the theories of consciationalism and corporatism. Yet, these theories are plagued by perennial measurement problems. As an illustration, we use the case of Switzerland, but our argument should apply to other countries as well.

Major inter-election vote shifts are characteristic of present-day American and British elections. In American elections since 1960 the presidency has changed parties on four of the six occasions. In British elections since 1959 the government has changed parties on four of the eight occasions. Students of both election systems ask whether these large and frequent shifts portend either major realignments or the weakening of the parties. The purpose of this Note is to analyse inter-election changes in the United States and Great Britain and to highlight and explain their differences.

In contrast to the United States, where analyses of the political behaviour of blacks number in the hundreds, if not more, substantial studies of the political attitudes and behaviour of Britain's non-white minority are fairly scarce. As non-whites have become more visible in the political arena, however, attention by academics has increased. But as yet there have been few countrywide, empirical, and systematic investigations of the political behaviour and attitudes of this population. Our Note uses multivariate methods to investigate the extent of political participation of Britain's non-white minorities in the 1979 election. We focus on a wide variety of political activities and a few selected issue concerns. We attempt to place our findings in the context of some theories of ethnic politics that have developed to explain black political behaviour in Britain and in the United States.