There is a generally accepted view among academic observers of British politics that no strong relationship exists between the ideological position of a party's candidate and the vote-winning capacity of his or her party. This is said to be a reflection partly of the electorate's lack of knowledge of particular candidates and partly of the strength of party allegiance. Political developments in the 1980s, however, suggest that there is an a priori case for re-examining this accepted view, at least as far as the Labour party is concerned.

Formal coalition theory has tended to ignore the existence of local government coalitions. Local government studies have tended to ignore the existence of formal coalition theory. Yet local administrations frequently comprise coalitions of parties. There is clearly a need, therefore, to bring the two areas of study together.

This Note reports some findings from a larger study we are embarked upon. Our broader objective is to develop a general theory of the national state's interest in cities in advanced industrial societies. We argue that state officials generally pursue their own interests in the protection and expansion of state power and resources and specifically have interest in the viability of cities, interests that do not simply reflect the interests of private capital or any other societal groups. A broad twofold distinction is made between those state activities necessary for the perpetuation of the state (maintenance of public order, legitimacy, durable political institutions, revenue base) and those necessary for the perpetuation of cities (provision of collective goods, developmental policies and social services). Space limitations preclude a full account and justification of these arguments here. Rather, we present some hypotheses about how such state interests should inform the allocation of funds across cities and report the findings of some initial empirical tests for the United States.

The purpose of this Note is two-fold. First, it shows that Schmitter implicitly includes in his definitions of systems of interest intermediation faulty statements concerning the causal link from institutional forms to power relations between the state and interest groups. Second, it argues that in order to avoid such errors, and benefit in other ways, students of systems of interest representation should remove implicit statements about power from their definitions and explicitly state their hypotheses connecting institutional forms and power relations involving the two actors of those systems.

In a recent publication Reece proposes to substitute for the ‘swing’ method what he labels a proportional-loss model. Although his argument against the logic of the swing method is perfectly valid, this short Note will demonstrate that what he offers as a substitute is just as unsound intellectually.

This Note presents a variety of new evidence on the paths and channels that one pressure group, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), has used to influence or obstruct public policy in Britain over the last decade. Where is pressure applied? At what level? Which departments are most important? What is the role of tripartite organizations? How are policy positions communicated? In addition to these and similar questions the evidence permits a systematic examination of the impact made by a change in the party of government upon the structure of group-government interaction. Two contrasting patterns of interaction, which represent a rapid and sharp change coinciding with the change in government, are revealed. Government decisions themselves appear to be determinants of pressure-group influence and activities – even for a group with such a central position in British politics as the TUC – as well as the other way around; ‘Bentley on his head’ as Harry Eckstein puts it.

A recent paper in this Journal (John Hudson, ‘The Relationship Between Government Popularity and Approval for the Government's Record in the United Kingdom’, XV (1985), 165–86) examined the relationship between government popularity as indicated by the voting intentions series of the opinion polls and approval for the government's record. Among other things it demonstrated that government popularity increased in the quarter prior to an election and declined in the quarter thereafter and that in the two years following the election of a new government the polarization of political allegiances declined (low approval at this time yielded higher levels of government popularity than would otherwise be the case and high levels of approval yielded somewhat lower levels of government support than in other periods). No evidence was found for any other form of electoral cycle of the type suggested in previous studies. The conclusions were based on ordinary least squares estimates and the use of the Cochrane-Orcutt technique, employed because of potential problems with serial correlation in residuals. Whilst this attempt to examine the relationship between these two variables is to be welcomed, especially the theoretical developments hitherto frequently lacking in this area, there are a number of points of concern.