This Note is concerned with a neglected aspect of American party politics in the last decade: the sources of development or decay in local and state organizations. In the wake of much research into the transformation of the American electorate during this period, it might seem surprising that changes in organizational politics should have attracted such scant attention. Nevertheless, this is easily explained once it is recalled how virtually all American politics textbooks analyse parties. In the first place, they compartmentalize problems about parties into ones affecting either ‘the party-in-the-electorate’ or ‘the party organization’ or ‘the partyin-government’. One consequence of conceiving parties in this way has been to obscure an obvious fact: party organizations both affect and reflect electoral decomposition, and they partly define the potential for cohesion between a party's public office-holders. When the concept of party is taken to be a ‘confederate’ trinity of concepts, it is only to be expected that rigid boundaries will be established separating what are seen as being the major problem areas of electoral politics from those of organizational and governmental politics. Secondly, party organizations in America are usually dismissed as ‘disorganizations’. They are bodies that perform the minimum necessary electoral functions, but are incapable of becoming anything more and could scarcely be anything less without ceasing to exist. From this perspective both the alleged decline of party machines and the rise of amateur politics are merely interesting phenomena, ones that are unconnected in any important ways with the party-in-the-electorate or the party-in-government.

In an innovative and carefully argued article (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, this Journal, V (1975), 363–83) on the Irish Single Transferable Vote (STV) system in the 1969 and 1973 Dail elections, A. S. Cohan, R. D. McKinlay and Anthony Mughan state a proposition that requires further analysis. They argue that ‘the optimal number of candidates for a party is equal to the largest number of seats that the party might hope to win’ in a constituency, instead of the more common practice of nominating a larger number of candidates. The reasoning behind this proposition is that the nomination of fewer candidates means a greater concentration of the party's vote on these candidates and hence fewer vote transfers and less potential wastage of votes.

In recent research Verba and Nie and Hansen have provided systematic evidence on the positive effects of mass participation on other aspects of the public policy process. Specifically, Verba and Nie demonstrated that for data on American communities, a curvilinear relationship exists between the level of mass political participation and the extent of elite-mass agreement on ‘policy agenda’ items. The effect of this relationship is such that the highest agreement, or ‘attitude concurrence’, is found in those communities with the highest levels of participation. Working with the same data, Hansen3 showed that the competitiveness of elections also influences concurrence independently and that there was an interaction effect of participation and competition on policy-agenda agreement. The interaction was such that attitude concurrence was highest in communities with especially high levels of both participation and competition.

The sharp drop in the Conservative and Labour parties' combined share of the poll in the two 1974 parliamentary elections is perhaps the most important development in British electoral politics since the rise of the class alignment of partisanship. From an average of 91·8 per cent between 1950 and 1970, the share of the vote won by these two parties dropped sharply to an average of 75·3 per cent in 1974, a figure substantially below their previous low point of 87·5 per cent in 1964. The Liberal party's share of the vote increased almost threefold over the same two periods, jumping from an average of 6·8 per cent between 1950 and 1970 to an average of 18·8 per cent in 1974.

Most explanations of variations in electoral support for the National Front involve some consideration of the importance of resentment and fear of coloured people among whites, the level of which is conditional upon the local incidence of coloured populations. Some writers, notably Harrop and Zimmerman and Whiteley, have suggested that National Front support, in so far as it can be explained by white ‘backlash’, may be considered as directly related to the relative size of the coloured population in different locales. Their argument is that, the higher the proportion of the population which is coloured, the greater the extent that their presence will be resented, and the higher the level of National Front support. Other commentators have advanced a rather different interpretation. Although agreeing that the National Front will do worst in areas with small or non-existent coloured populations, they argue that the party might do better in areas with moderate-sized coloured populations than in those with large ones. The existence of a moderate-sized coloured population, it is held, indicates that the area is ‘vulnerable’ to further migration or immigration, particularly where there are large coloured communities in neighbouring areas, and that whites may express their ‘exaggerated fears of the likely effects of immigrants moving in’ by supporting the National Front. These fears are regarded as being more important in mobilizing National Front support than the actuality of living in an area with a very large coloured population.

In a recent exchange in this Journal, K.I. Macdonald took issue with Steven Lukes's claim that power is an essentially contested concept. Macdonald claims that in arguing that power is essentially contested Lukes locates disputes about power in the concept itself rather than in the divergent uses of that concept. Macdonald's claim is that there are at least two types of dispute about concepts: disputes which arise from within the concept and disputes which arise in the differing values ‘from which the concept depends’. In the case of power, Macdonald argues, the dispute lies between contending perspectives and values and not within the concept of power itself. Whilst not denying that there are essentially contested concepts, Macdonald is clear that the concept of power is not essentially contested but reflects a contest between differing value positions. Macdonald argues that whenever a concept is ‘truly essentially contested the proper ground for the contest is the essence of the concept. Our disagreements inhere in that concept’.

In dealing with the question of the overnomination of candidates in Irish constituencies, Lijphart and Irwin have found that overnomination does tend to injure a party's chances of electing more candidates given the vagaries of proportional representation with the single transferable vote. They conclude that ‘this favourable ten-to-one ratio appears to entail strong support for the proposition that overnomination can be dangerous and should be avoided’. My disagreement with them is not in their methods and findings, but in their interpretation of the significance of those findings.

The National Front is England's fourth largest party in terms of electoral support. The number of candidates it has fielded at local and national elections has increased at each successive election since it was founded in 1968. It has not, however, been extensively studied by academic researchers. Walker has provided a historical account of the development of the National Front. Scott has examined the activities and attitudes of one local branch. Nugent and King have compared it with earlier right-wing political organizations, particularly the British Union of Fascists. But rather less is known about the National Front's electoral support.

Following the exchange between Shackleton and Marsh on the work of Olson and its applicability to the case of the Confederation of British Industry, I wish to criticize some of Shackleton's points and develop some of those made by Marsh. I intend to ignore some of Shackleton's criticisms of the methodology Marsh and I employed in our book (for example, our use of semi-structured interviews, a respectable technique in elite interviewing) and instead to concentrate on substantive questions of more general interest.

A small, but apparently expanding, area of research in the United States has developed around the issue of whether divisive primary elections harm the general election prospects of the winners of such primaries. The subject matter is important, being of interest to students of intra-party democracy, party organization and voting behaviour. Unfortunately the research reported in major American political science journals has been directed, with one exception, towards a trivial question, at the expense of the more complex and interesting ones. The purpose of this Note is to explain why this question is not even a poor substitute for them, and to suggest the problems towards which research in this area should be directed.

There is an error in Table 1 of my recent article, ‘Class and the Vote Before the First World War’ (this Journal, October 1978, p. 445). The ‘N’ column for middle-class Anglicans should indicate a total of twenty-four cases, with eighteen Conservative identifiers and just six respondents in the ‘Other’ partisan category. These adjusted figures correspond to the percentages which are printed correctly in the adjacent column.