This article discusses the notion of ‘persuasion’ applied to a political method. It proceeds by comparing and contrasting ‘persuasion’ with concepts within the ‘power’ family. There are two sorts of justification for such an exploration of ‘persuasion’, the first positive and the second negative.

The study of global co-operation and conflict has been a central topic of enquiry in the field of international relations. Yet notwithstanding extensive work on these subjects, they are not well understood. Whenever research fails to resolve an intractable problem, it may be because the conceptualization of the dependent variable is fundamentally flawed and/or because the most critical independent variables have been ignored. The purpose of this analysis is to see if, by confronting these two problems, our ability to explain global contention can be improved.

Specialists in communist affairs, as is well known, differ significantly in their interpretation of Soviet-type systems. Such divergence notwithstanding, numerous scholars seem to agree that under ‘real socialism’, Marxist-Leninist ideology is visibly ‘withering away’ as a meaningful category in analysing society at large or leadership groups. In the ‘Bureaucratic Leviathan’ states of the communist world, Maria Hirszowicz writes, interest in Marxism is nowadays either non-existent or very limited. In these polities there seems to be ‘a widespread belief (shared by many enlightened party members) that Marxist methodology does not have much to offer in relation to what is really important in understanding social life in communist countries’. In a similar manner, Robert F. Byrnes indicates that Marxism has lost ‘any relevance or vitality’ and adds that Marxist thought and revisions of it are far more common in France, the United States and the underdeveloped countries than in communist Eastern Europe, where the doctrine or doctrinal approaches seem to have been spurned for practical reasons. In other words, as Wayne S. Vuchinich put it, ideology ‘has been made the servant of realpolitik and thereby it… has been reduced to hollow ritualism’. The validity of such remarks is often corroborated not only by members of the overtly anti-Marxist opposition, such as Solzhenitsyn, but also by former or present-day dissidents, such as Kołakowski or Sakharov.

There are currently two views of the potential link between early learning and adult political attitudes and behaviour. The first holds that the consequences of early socialization persist over the life-cycle and have a pervasive effect on adult behaviour. Much of the research on child and adolescent political socialization adhered to this position. It is supported by studies which find that some orientations and personality dispositions seem relatively stable over time. This approach also finds some support in research which shows that earlier-learned orientations and experiences may influence later attitudes and behaviour, although this has been strongly contested.

The victory of an established major party in the 1983 British general election, with the other established party coming second, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the outcome could easily have been very different. The purpose of this article is to show how the social structure that used to underpin traditional two-party voting has changed its nature in recent years, so that at least since 1974 the potential has existed for the right combination of political forces to reduce one or both traditional major parties either to the status of minor contender, or else to that of a more equal partner in what is no longer a two-party system. In a recent article, Crewe has documented the extreme and unpredictable nature of the volatility that has marked party preferences among the British electorate in recent years. The present article seeks to lay bare the underlying concomitants of that more visible phenomenon.

In much of the comparative literature on social structure and party choice, housing occupies an anomalous position. In Britain, its electoral consequences are undoubted, yet in other advanced industrial societies its impact is negligible. For example, in Britain Butler and Stokes go so far as to suggest that ‘housing has more to do with defining the sub-cultures of social class than all else but occupation itself’. Moreover, recent evidence has indicated that the electoral importance of housing may actually be increasing in Britain, rather than declining along with other traditional class predictors of voting. By contrast, in Australia and the United States, both societies with similarly sized home-owning and rental sectors, housing has never been advanced as a significant determinant of partisan choice.