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.

‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry’, was penned by Jeremy Bentham in 1825, but could as appropriately appear in most contemporary treatments of social choice and rationality. Political economists still use the felicific calculus; they search for ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ by exploring means and consequences of aggregating individuals' preferences to form social choices among competing values. The values are assigned equal weight. The origins and processes of development of individual preferences are taken as ‘givens’, i.e. as irrelevant to the problem of social choice. What counts is rational behaviour, which is said to exist when action is ‘correctly’ designed to maximize goal achievement, ‘given the goal in question and the real world as it exists’.

The relationship between citizens and leaders is the core concern of democratic theory and the primary focus of students of democratic politics. Competitive elections are typically assigned the principal role in structuring this relationship. They are a means by which the public can make government officials accountable and influence the policy directions of government. The case for how elections should link public and leaders is a familiar one. Not so obvious is the strength of this link, particularly the extent to which mass electoral forces may make for fundamental changes in the behaviour of leaders and the policies of governments.

This article seeks to throw some light on what is perhaps a deceptively simple question: is the central administrative bureaucracy which governs Scotland from St Andrew's House in Edinburgh in any measurable way distinctively Scottish, as opposed to the mere manifestation in Scotland of the standard U.K. civil service? Do the Scottish Departments display characteristics not found in Whitehall, and is there a ‘Scottish administrative style’ for such Departments? Answers to these questions are not only interesting in their own right but clearly have some relevance to the devolution debate. For example, if Scottish administration is recognizably ‘different’, this might be regarded as evidence that a greater degree of effective devolution than is assumed already exists; if Scottish administration shows no distinctive features at present, one might speculate what changes devolution to an Assembly would engender. We shall make some brief comments on this point at the close of this article.

Two models of local policy formation can be set forth. Although they are complementary rather than competing models, for heuristic purposes it is useful to present them as contrasting approaches. Since the first, the bargaining model, is well known, I shall concentrate in this paper on elaborating and applying a second, unitary model of policy making. The paper is divided into four main parts. After briefly identifying the limitations of the bargaining model, the first part develops the theoretical rationale for the unitary model. The second part uses the model to analyse empirically differences in the revenue sources for national, state and local governments. Part 3 does the same for expenditure policies, and, in the course of the analysis, distinguishes among three types of public policy – developmental, allocational and redistributive. In the final part, hypotheses deduced from the model are tested by means of a regression analysis of state and local expenditures.

In the last two decades, the prevailing orthodoxy in comparative studies has been the sociological view that public policy outcomes are primarily a reflection of what can loosely be described as ‘environmental’ factors: the demographic structure of the population, the incremental logic of policy programmes, and, most important of all, the level of economic development. This paper has two main objectives: first, to demonstrate that the sociological orthodoxy is methodologically and empirically unsound in its central tenet that politics does not matter, and, second, to provide a more detailed, and political, explanation of the particularly high levels of public welfare provision that characterize the Scandinavian countries.

The declining association between occupational class and political alignment in Britain has now been documented by a number of studies. For the political analyst the decline of a previously important cleavage must raise complex questions of causation. One of the most important possible explanations for such a change is that a new cleavage has arisen or grown in political significance so that its influence on political alignment cross-cuts that of the previous cleavage, blurring its impact and exposing sections of the population to contradictory or cross-pressuring influences. But political commentators in present-day Britain have apparently ruled this out as an explanation of the declining electoral influence of occupational class. Crewe, for example, remarks:

It is difficult to think of any social cleavages or fundamental changes in the social structure in the last twenty years that could have affected national partisan alignments in any way comparable to the substitution of the religious cleavage by the class cleavage in the first three decades of this century. Glacially slow changes in the British social structure have undoubtedly taken place. The emergence of coloured immigrant communities, the growth of white collar employment (and of white collar ‘trade unionism’), the movement of agricultural workers to the towns and their displacement by commuters and the retired rich, a further secularization and a growing disparity of income between the organized and unorganized working class are all cases in point. But in all these cases, shifts in party support have been small, often only temporary, and always localized; no shift in the social structure has produced an enduring, nationwide realignment of party support since 1945.

When public programme demands exceed resources, tradeoffs between different public policies occur; that is, one policy gains while another loses in the allocation of these resources. Tradeoffs are most easily measured in terms of budgetary expenditures. If the budget is expanding, the consequences of tradeoffs are less severe than when the budget contracts or remains stable, and budgetary decisions involve zero-sum games. However, the concept of tradeoff is still relevant in an expanding budget since decisions are made about how the additional resources are to be allocated, and while all policy areas may gain, some obviously will receive more resources than others.

The history of the Supreme Court tends to be divided into historical slices coterminous with individual Chief Justiceships. One speaks of the Taft Court, the Hughes Court, the Stone Court, the Vinson Court, and the Warren Court. Behind these titles lies the implication that they can be differentiated in terms of something more than merely temporal variation; the Chief Justice himself must be the catalyst which is supposed to make each era special. But, in what senses can a period of Supreme Court history be thought of as specifically associated with its current Chief Justice?

Since the 1960s, when the concept of totalitarianism began to be critically assailed, Western, and particularly academic, interpreters of the Soviet Union have increasingly moved in the direction of a new convergence. Many scholars have portrayed the political systems of the Soviet Union and of Western countries as increasingly alike, viewing them through the common perspective of ‘pluralism’. Basically, it has been said, conflict and differences of opinion are characteristic of all these political systems. To be sure, the conflicts and differences may be expressed through rather different institutions, and with somewhat different styles or nuances in each case, but they are there just the same.

The relationship between ministers and the senior civil servants with whom they are in closest contact has long fascinated students of British government. For all the attention lavished on it, however, the relationship remains obstinately elusive and unsusceptible to clear categorization and analysis. The problem is partly one of finding a suitable frame of reference. Despite their well-established limitations, the Weberian model of an instrumental bureaucracy and the closely-related ‘politics-administration dichotomy’ still loom surprisingly large in academic analyses of bureaucratic behaviour. But the attempt to specify roles appropriate to civil servants, on the one hand, or ministers, on the other, runs the risk either of proving inadequate in face of the empirical evidence or of leading to the conclusion that one of the groups – usually the civil servants – is usurping the other's role or roles. Elements of the latter can be seen in the concern evinced in recent years about the power of civil servants vis-à-vis ministers in Britain. (Discussion of minister-civil servant relationships has, indeed, been almost entirely confined to aspects of power – particularly that of the minister's ability to get his way on policy.)

Until the establishment of regional governments in the early 1970S, Italy was a formally centralized, unitary state. Both the legal and formal administrative frameworks within which local officials worked were such as to support the prevailing scholarly view that, in such a centralized state, the possibilities for local autonomy and initiative were very limited. The formal role of local governments after the Second World War continued to be that which had been specified by the Fascists in legislation designed to complete the centralization of the Italian state. Such a role left little room for local independence and initiative. Administratively, most decisions had to be approved by officials in Rome. Moreover, the policies and finances of local governments were closely supervised by the Prefects, who served as agents of central government.

Central both to formal theories of coalition formation and many, actual, collective decision-making processes is the distribution of some reward, or payoff as it is commonly called, among those participants able to control a decision. The payoff constitutes an object of value for the players, or the stakes of the game, the disposition of which becomes a primary focus of bargaining among them. It is usual to assume that participants in coalition-forming contexts are rational actors, and this is often interpreted to mean that they pursue strategies intended to maximize their individual shares of the available payoff. Theories based upon this general structure have furnished a variety of important propositions, focusing mostly upon the composition of winning coalitions.

Observers of the American political scene might at times wonder why the 95th Congress, with nearly two-to-one Democratic majorities in both houses, did not take positive action on many of President Carter's important legislative proposals in 1977 and 1978. After all, it was argued when Carter was inaugurated at the beginning of 1977, the return of common party control to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would bring to an end the legislative-executive confrontations of the Nixon-Ford years. Thus, was not the unwillingness of Congress to approve his major programs an indication that Carter was inept, or even perhaps incompetent, as a legislative leader? If Lyndon Johnson could obtain swift approval of an extensive legislative agenda from the 89th Congress (1965–66), which in partisan composition was quite similar to the 95th Congress, why could Jimmy Carter not achieve comparable results?

It is not uncommon for the case-study approach to the study of policy making to be criticized for failing to produce broad generalizations or concepts applicable to systems as a whole. For example, in discussing policy making and political culture in Sweden, Anton argues that case-studies of decision making do not offer an adequate or realistic view of the process. In doing so he suggests that we should shift our focus of concern ‘from the single decision (whatever it is), to the structure of relationships between participants and the norms which serve to maintain or change those relationships through time. The focus shifts, in other words, from decisions to systems of decision-making’. Whilst not disputing the need for studying the general properties of decision making in a given political system (or indeed the need for the comparative study of policy making in different systems), this article will suggest the value of studying individual policy areas – in this case, transport – as opposed to both individual decisions and entire political systems, as a means of testing broader propositions such as those formulated by Anton.

In this paper I shall present a very simple version of a bargaining model based on assumptions of limited information and limited capacity to make rational decisions. The justification for my work lies in the inadequacies both of the formal models in the microeconomic literature and of accounts of bargaining and other conflicts where power or closely related concepts lie at the basis of the discussion.

Forecasting elections has long been regarded by political scientists as an interesting problem in its own right. But it assumes special importance for those countries that do not have fixed election dates. In Britain, for example, it is up to the prime minister to choose the date, within the statutory five year limit. Correct timing can clearly be crucial to the outcome, and the prime minister can be expected to go to considerable lengths to ensure that the election is called for the date most favourable to his party. But there lies the prime minister's problem: elections must be called three to four weeks before polling day. With what degree of accuracy can the result be forecast at the time the election is called?

A small but interesting literature on election forecasting has emerged in recent years. The forecasting techniques used in this literature vary widely, from crude extrapolation to sophisticated model building. Up to now the emphasis has been on election night forecasting, in which the basic problem involves extracting the maximum amount of information from electoral returns, in order to forecast the outcome a few hours before it is finally known. For obvious reasons the techniques utilized in this context are of little use prior to election day.

Although Michael Oakeshott has written on such a wide variety of subjects as religion, jurisprudence, education, science, aesthetics and history, Ishall concentrate in this essay on his political philosophy. As a political philosopher Oakeshott has been concerned with two basic themes: firstly, to develop a conception of the nature of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular; and secondly, to develop a substantive theory of politics. Accordingly I shall divide this essay into four sections. In the first three sections I shall outline his discussion of the two themes, and in the fourth, assess their adequacy.

For decades political scientists have been fascinated with the problem of establishing a formal mathematical relationship between the popular votes cast for a political party and the number of parliamentary seats it holds. The most famous attempt at solving this problem, known as the ‘cube law’, was formulated more than sixty years ago by James Parker Smith. Since then a large number of papers in support of the cube law have been published. Perhaps the most cited paper is by Kendall and Stuart. The cube law also has been stated to apply to parliamentary elections in New Zealand, the United States and Canada. But doubts about the cube law have also been expressed by Brookes, Eldersveld and just a few years ago by Tufte.

One of the richest data sources for the study of public opinion is the Survey Research Center's panel study conducted in the late 1950s. Because the SRC interviewed its national panel of Americans three times over a four-year period, the SRC panel data allows the analysis of changes in survey responses over time. The most remarkable discovery from the SRC panel was that panelists changed their reported opinions on policy issues with considerable frequency when asked the same policy questions in different years. Moreover, the amount of observed change in the individual responses varied little with the time interval between responses. That is, the correlations between responses to the same issue item in 1956 and 1958 or in 1958 and 1960 (two years apart) were almost as low as the correlations to the same issue item in 1956 and 1960 (four years apart).