The elitist-pluralist controversy is a long and complex one and most participants in the debate will readily acknowledge that there are several distinct though related questions ‘at issue’. It is equally apparent that a great variety of concepts has been used by those who have written on the subject and that the definition and usage of these concepts is in no way standardized.

In an important contribution to the improvement of data analytical techniques in political science, Budge and Farlie examine the predictive success of various background characteristics in determining political activism [Ian Budge and Dennis Farlie, ‘Political Recruitment and Dropout’, this Journal, v (1975), 33–68]. The authors use the framework of Bayesian statistics, in which the subjective probability that a given individual will be a political activist is revised in the light of sample information about the background characteristics of activists to give a posterior (i.e. after the information or event) probability that the individual is an activist. Unfortunately, as the authors admit, they do not utilize fully all the components of the Bayesian approach.

By the late 1960s the shift of the Labour party away from its traditional base among the urban working class appeared to be gaining momentum. The opinion polls showed a marked swing of working-class sentiment away from the party, and the policies advanced during the period, especially with regard to prices and incomes and industrial relations, hardly seemed designed to satisfy the redistributive concerns traditionally imputed to the working class. Indeed the government's overriding concern with the problem of the economy during a period in which the Labour party had a large majority over all other parties in the House of Commons was seen by one commentator as the final act of a tragic farce entitled ‘The Decline and Fall of Social Democracy’. Clearly this conclusion was drawn somewhat prematurely: in the 1970s there is fragmented evidence to suggest that the Labour party has regained the votes of a number of its traditional supporters who had previously defected, just as there is evidence that the ‘left’ of the party is asserting itself. However, the events of the early 1970s are not sufficient to refute the proposition that some kind of fundamental change either has occurred, or is occurring, in the relationship between the Labour party and its traditional supporters. Even if the curtain has yet to fall, there is no reason to believe that the play has not begun.

Local Conservative associations have traditionally run their affairs independently and have successfully resisted interference from Central Office. Far from constituting a ‘centralized machine’ (as authors such as McKenzie, Beer and Crossman have maintained) the main feature of Conservative organization has been its decentralized, voluntary character. Nowhere has resistance to control by the party headquarters been more determined than in the major provincial cities. Here, confederations of city constituency associations, financed mainly by local business interests, have virtually excluded the Central Office area agents from participating in constituency organization. Attempts by successive national party chairmen to bring the city associations into the Central Office orbit have regularly been rebuffed. Consequently, Central Office's recent success in integrating the city associations into its area office organization marks the end of an era. It raises the question of whether the Conservative organization is at last becoming as centralized as many commentators have long supposed it to be. This note describes recent developments and assesses their significance.

Over a number of years, and with concerns as far apart as democratic theory and organizational behaviour, many commentators have studied the patterns of recruitment in local government and the contents of the job that elected officials take upon themselves. Most of these analyses have convincingly shown a tendency for political actors to possess a higher average socioeconomic status than the population from which they are drawn. One student is explicit in saying that ‘politics is a middle-class job and the training appropriate for middle-class jobs is also a training for politics’. What has not, however, been subject to such extended consideration is the question of differences among groups of legislators themselves. This Note attempts to restore the balance by reporting briefly on a limited and exploratory investigation of patterns of leadership/influence in one Scottish local council.

Rudolf Klein's article not only brings together many current theories of policy analysis and of public expenditure but also creates the anxiety that the use of phrases such as ‘public expenditure’ might turn what are obstinate and worthwhile issues into abstractions. Klein's opening statement that ‘public expenditure is quite the most visible and quantifiable measure of government activity’ gives us due warning that public expenditure is being regarded as an independent category, the characteristics and behaviour of which are capable of definition and analysis in their own right. But public expenditure is meaningful only if it is treated as a summation of multiple decisions (and on one dimension only) and of institutional relationships.

Whiteley's comment presents a ‘full’ Bayesian argument for the identification of councillors. A Bayesian analysis is a procedure by which an individual can make coherent judgements between hypotheses in terms of conceptual gambles. It is important to recognize that the coherence is between the individual's prior and posterior beliefs when presented with evidence and is not to be interpreted as the agreement between the decision and the correct decision. There is in the argument no appeal to the probability of a correct decision as a relative frequency concept. In many circumstances the correct decision may be undecidable so that a frequentist approach would be inapplicable anyway. Two Bayesians who disagree on their prior beliefs concerning a finite number of hypotheses will disagree on their posterior beliefs when presented with the same data provided that no hypothesis is declared impossible by the data.

Various commentators have expressed their subjective impressions that ‘the environment’ emerged suddenly as a political issue. That the number of groups, journals and books relating to ‘the environment’ has dramatically increased is indisputable. What is not clear, however, is whether the increase has been in the awareness of relationships between problems which could then be subsumed under the general heading ‘the environment’ or whether increased attention has been paid to the component problems. It is possible that the interest in issues such as water pollution, resource conservation and air pollution was of long standing and that the only change was a growing popularization of the label ‘environmental’ by those who wrote about the subject in the press. The object of this study is to test the latter hypothesis by means of a content analysis of The Times.

The strong relationship between social class and partisan choice is one of the most extensively documented facts of British political life; but that relationship declined markedly during the 1960s, as Butler and Stokes have shown. Their lucid documentation of the declining class–party nexus is among the major findings of the second edition of their book, and, as class-based partisanship is particularly low among the young, many might conclude that the relationship between class and party will continue to decline in future. It would, however, be premature to reach this conclusion.

If the study of politics is about trying to make sense of what governments do (or think they do) then, surely, it is not only legitimate but necessary to consider the totality of public expenditure. For this is, in fact, what governments do worry about. They do have policies aimed at controlling total public expenditure at particular levels, and these policies in turn affect how much money is spent on individual programmes. To this extent there is, indeed, a common unit of currency: if Department X gets more than Department Y, both the success of the former and the failure of the latter will be measured in millions of pounds.

Definitions of the political party in the context of Western competitive electoral politics have usually centred on the notion that the critical function of the political party is power-seeking or power-wielding. In practice, of course, Western parties of the unpaid voluntary kind cannot be solely concerned with power-seeking in the sense of vote-getting; they must also take the opinions and wishes of their own activists into account, at least to some extent. Thus, Epstein's emphasis on the nomination and electoral functions of political parties, although fundamentally correct, should not be allowed to obscure other central preoccupations of party leaders, in particular the problems they often face in attempting to keep an organization in being between elections without recourse to extensive material payoffs in the shape of patronage or regular salaries for large numbers of activists.

In summary, we do find that levels of services and expenditures are more closely related across time than they are in cross-sectional studies and that, further, these relationships are functionally specific. At the same time, however, it would appear from these data that the extension of services precedes the expansion of the budget. It may, therefore, be argued that the extension of services can be used as a rational means of expanding the budget available to an agency rather than as a response to the increased availability of funds. This expansion may also be seen as a function of demand creation on the part of the agencies in increasing these services.

A second point to be made is the importance of differentiating different categories of service. For those indicators of service that concern output or a service rendered, expenditures and policy are positively related. For those indicators of service that are more related to impacts – or needs – there is a negative relationship – i.e. lower quality associated with higher expenditure. Therefore, we find that the policy-making system of Sweden may have been making policy in relation to important objective changes in its service environment. It further leads us to expect quite different relationships between services and expenditures dependent upon the type of service measure being used.

The research site and the measures of services used here are obviously different from those of Sharkansky. However, these findings do speak to the general theoretical point of the connection between public expenditures and services. They demonstrate the need to examine this important research question within a more dynamic framework and in a variety of social and cultural settings. Sharkansky's findings for the American states should be tested, for example, in an examination of the same question for sub-national units in Sweden and other European systems. Through the gradual accretion of these findings, we can elaborate theoretically the linkages between expenditures and policy outputs.

The proper role of the values of the doer in the doing of political theory is a continuing and vexed problem. Is the holding of values an encumbrance or an integral part of the process? Recently Lukes has made a determined effort to argue, in the case of one particular concept, ‘power’, that theoretical and value disputes cannot in principle be disentangled: ‘I shall argue for a view of power (that is, a way of identifying it) which is radical in both the theoretical and political senses (and I take these senses in this context to be intimately related). The view I shall defend is… ineradicably evaluative and “essentially contested”.’ The notion of ‘essentially contested’ is defined by reference to Gallie, and although the above quotation may be ambiguous, Lukes' later usage makes clear that he is claiming that it is the concept of power (and not his metatheoretic statement about it) that is ‘essentially contested’. This claim is technically mistaken and the mistake, I would argue, is substantively pernicious.