The debate about electoral reform in Britain has taken a new turn with the latest upsurge in mid-term support for the Liberals, the launch of the SDP, and the immediate electoral success of the Alliance between the two parties. We do not deal here with the durability or consequences of these developments. We are concerned with the electoral system that they put under challenge. This concern is the more important because, as we shall show here, the working of that system altered fundamentally between 1955 and 1979. Before considering how fragile ‘the mould of British polities’ is or whether it should be broken, it is appropriate to reconsider and remeasure the precise shape and texture of that mould, and establish what are the chemical bonds which have determined those characteristics.

February 13th, 1692, is still remembered in the Western Highlands of Scotland. At 5 a.m. a blizzard was raging down the valley of Glencoe but there were soldiers about. They were two companies of the Argylls under Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, peaceably billetted on the MacDonalds of Glencoe for the past two weeks. The MacDonalds, who had newly sworn allegiance to King William of Orange, had treated them well. Sacred bonds of hospitality had been forged – a reassuring sign that enmities were fading between MacDonalds and Campbells and between Highland supporters of the Stuarts and the new Edinburgh government of 1688. But that was illusion. Captain Campbell had received secret instructions the previous day. ‘Sir, You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and to put all to the sword under seventy… This you are to put in execution at five of the clock precisely… This is by the King's special command, for the good and safety of the country, that these miscreants be cut off root and branch…’ At five of the clock precisely the Argylls turned on their hosts. Almost forty MacDonalds were killed on the spot and many more, who scrambled away up the bleak walls of the glen, died of exposure in the blizzard. Crofts were burnt, cattle and goods carried off. That was the infamous Massacre of Glencoe. I shall start from here and gradually follow the moral questions which arise into the arena of politics at large.

For a variety of reasons political science in Britain has made no serious attempt to study courts and judges as political institutions and actors. Or at least this was true until recently. Several works in the last few years, especially Griffith's, Stevens's and a forthcoming book on the law lords by Alan Paterson, have pointed to a much needed change in this attitude. However, none of them have been works of political science, even though they have considered politics. By this I mean two things: they have not principally considered the judges' thoughts as political ideology; and they have not used the techniques and assumptions of rigorous, analytic political science. Indeed one of the few slightly earlier studies of the political role of the courts in Britain, by Morrison, specifically denies that such approaches, especially the statistical approach of jurimetrics, is possible in Britain. This article is an attempt to do the impossible, not so much because the author believes that Morrison's point is necessarily wrong, but because it is never sound methodology to abandon techniques that have been useful elsewhere without trying to make them work on different data sets. But first we must attempt to characterize the judicial role, before we try any study of the politics that may be attendant on judicial ideology.

Legitimacy may be defined as that political condition in which power-holders are able to justify their holding of power in terms other than those of the mere fact of power-holding. According to one view such justifications are increasingly tenuous due to the conditions under which the modern state has arisen and the means it employs in order to persist. Theories of legitimacy typically view power from two aspects – from that of its origins and from that of its ends. More concretely, this invariably involves, on the one hand, some discussion of the degree to which a regime of a government.can be said to rest on democratic consent and, on the other, of the extent to which the regime or government guides its actions by some notion of the common good or public interest. Neither of these focuses, in Schaar's view, are likely to provide adequate justifications for power under modern conditions: ‘criticism and hard events have done their work: both concepts have been reduced to rubble’.

Of the studies by British sociologists in the last decade focusing on the determinants of working-class attitudes to the class structure, those of Michael Mann and Anthony Giddens must, I think, be seen in retrospect as the most imaginative. While much effort at the time focused on what in the event turned out to be the rather minimal implications of the impact of certain variations in work and community milieux within Britain on workers' conceptions of class, Mann and Giddens took as their point of departure the well documented differences in the radicalism of the labour movements of different Western capitalist societies and sought to develop a theory that could account for them. Why should it be, they asked, that in countries such as France and Italy workers were sufficiently disenchanted with capitalist institutions to give relatively enduring support to parties that were at least formally committed to revolutionary objectives, while in countries such as Britain and the United States they gave their allegiances to parties that seemed largely to accept the existing structure of society?

Liberals have regularly associated tradition with constraint. They have spoken of the ‘force’ of tradition or of the ‘despotism’ of custom. Locke drew a contrast between those who let themselves be guided by ‘traditional customs and the fashion of the country’ and those who use their liberty to think for themselves. For John Stuart Mill ‘the love of liberty’ was antagonistic to ‘the sway of Custom’. Tradition and custom are represented by liberals in much the way Machiavelli represented fortuna, as forces which, unless repulsed by independent, free-thinking persons, would inevitably dominate whole societies and epochs. Mill held up China as the warning example. Custom had there become the court of ultimate appeal, the standard of justice, the argument which none could contemplate resisting. Custom had annihilated individuality and with it liberty, along with genuine history. The consequence was ‘stationariness’. Unless the modern pressure of opinion was resisted Europe would become another China. The chief interest of the history of mankind, Mill declared, was the contest between custom and the progressive principle. A free society is in liberal terms an open society.

It is well-known that power relations can exhibit a ‘one plus one equals three’ effect. Two or more units can fuse into a bloc which has more power than the component units before had between them. The most obvious example of this type of synergy (whereby the whole is greater than its constituent parts) would be three people bargaining over the distribution of a fixed kitty, and needing a simple majority to impose any outcome. The three actors can, in the long run, expect one-third of the kitty (and can be thought of as having one-third of the power). If two combine into a single bloc, they will win every time. The new bloc controls all of the power (⅓ + ⅓ → 1) and its constituent members' expectations each increase to half of the kitty. Notwithstanding this, it is by no means the case that all combinations of units into blocs increase either aggregate power or individual expectations. Some combinations can result in a loss of power, although examples of this are slightly more complex, and depend upon some formal index of power for their elucidation. Thus, in the real world of coalition politics, the government coalition which actually forms controls all of the power as a bloc, despite the fact that coalition members do not control all of the power between them if they go it alone. Conversely, two parties can sometimes lose power by combining, particularly when they face a dominant opponent not far short of an overall majority.

As the Reagan administration neared the end of its first full year in office, interpretations of the meaning of the 1980 presidential election were still as varied as the political positions of analysts and commentators. The politically dominant interpretation, promoted by the new administration and its supporters, was that the election provided a mandate to bring about several fundamental changes in the role of government in American social and economic life. In recommendations whose scope had not been matched since the first days of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the Reagan administration set about responding to what it understood to be popular demands for reduced government spending and taxes, expansion of the national defence establishment, limitation of environmental protection in favour of the development of energy resources, and a myriad of other tasks designed to encourage free enterprise by ‘getting government off the backs of the people’. With varying degrees of enthusiasm for the new administration's programmes, scores of Democratic politicians shared the interpretation of Reagan's victory as a new electoral mandate which rejected many of the fundamental policies of Democratic administrations from Roosevelt to Carter. This interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of the 1980 election was expressed by Democratic congressmen of many political colours who decried the bankruptcy of their own leadership and affirmed the victor's sense of mandate by supporting the President's various legislative programmes.

According to Western observers Soviet political scientists have been making substantial advances in recent decades in their understanding of the United States. It is often pointed out, however, that cultural distance causes special problems. Soviet authors, it is claimed, tend to create images of their object of study which are coloured by conceptions of political behaviour specific to their own society. Although this is incontestable, it is worth remarking that American and British observers of Soviet politics and ideology are not exempt from the same kind of failing.

With some notable exceptions, comparative research on the welfare state falls generally into one of two categories: qualitative and generally descriptive case studies and large-scale quantitative efforts at explanation. Case studies have progressed past the point of being essentially journalistic descriptions of the peculiarities of the policy development process or the policies of a particular society. It is nevertheless true that there has been little progress in moving beyond the case study approach towards building a theory about how and why societies make particular decisions about the priorities and organization of their social welfare efforts. On the other hand, while large-scale aggregate analysis yields theoretical statements about the character of ‘the welfare state’, those conclusions are often so general as to be ‘difficult to relate to… how particular substantive problems have been [and might be] handled.’

In a critical review of the state of comparative politics fourteen years ago, Joseph LaPalombara noted important gaps in our information on politics even in the presumably well-researched Western democratic countries. As an illustration, he contrasted the wealth of information on American interest groups with the surprisingly few solid studies of interest groups in countries such as Britain, France, Italy or West Germany. Despite, or perhaps because of this information gap, specialists in comparative politics were prepared to make sweeping generalizations about politics in this or that foreign country that a United States specialist would never dare to make on the basis of the wealth of research data available on politics in the United States. In the years since LaPalombara's critique, few have picked up his challenge to fill these information gaps, particularly the lacunae in our knowledge of interest group politics outside the United States. This lack of information has not discouraged scholars from proposing high-flown generalizations and models on interest group-government interaction in Europe. Sometimes, as we shall see, scholars studying interest group-State interactions have thought they found what Sartori labelled ‘travelling universals’ in certain interest-group patterns existing in struggling, non-democratic Third World countries which they then assumed to be present in the modern industrial democracies of Western Europe.

The existence of fairly strong correlations between newspaper readership and socio-political variables is well known. The interesting question about these correlations is not whether they exist but why they exist. In their analysis of British political behaviour in the sixties, Butler and Stokes put forward three possible explanations.

For at least fifteen years, Britain's industrial problems have been close to the centre of the political stage. A serious and debilitating illness first became chronic and is now, in the eyes of some observers, terminal. The symptoms of the most prominent patients, such as British Leyland, Rolls-Royce and British Steel, are matters of widespread public diagnosis and prescription. Opinions vary widely as to the role of government both in contributing to industrial decline and in promoting industrial recovery but few would deny that dealing with the problems of industry is a task of the highest priority. Nor is it surprising that successive governments have paid a great deal of attention to this task given the role of industry in the British economy and the importance of economic success politically.

Compared with its counterparts in other countries the Soviet Union's national legislature, the USSR Supreme Soviet, has generally received little attention from scholars. The reasons are not far to seek. The Supreme Soviet meets much less frequently than its counterparts elsewhere; its votes are almost always unanimous; its discussion of government legislation is generally perfunctory and confined to details; and it has yet to ask a Soviet minister to resign. Yet, for all these obvious shortcomings, it has become increasingly apparent in recent years that the Supreme Soviet, like the soviets at lower levels of the state hierarchy, has been assuming greater powers and becoming a less marginal participant in the policy process than it was under Stalin or even Khrushchev. This apparent assumption of authority is evident most clearly in the expansion in the number and powers of the standing commissions attached to each of its chambers, through which, as in most modern legislatures, an increasing proportion of its business is conducted, but it is apparent in other ways as well. All in all, as one commentator has put it, the Supreme Soviet's meetings and discussions were indeed ‘perfunctory’ and ‘stage-managed’ for perhaps the first three decades of its existence (1936–66); but since Stalin, and more particularly since Khrushchev, the Supreme Soviet has made a ‘modest – but in terms of past history, impressive – comeback as an institution with more than purely symbolic functions’.

If one were asked to describe the process of policy change in the United States in one word, that word would surely be ‘incremental’. Students of the Congressional process can point to a number of factors which account for delay in changes of policy; it is only recently that they have begun to examine the occasional departures from Congressional intractability in matter of public policy. This paper seeks to further our understanding of how internal legislative conditions can produce or inhibit policy change. While the first scholars to call attention to this phenomenon noted that policy changes followed critical realignments, others have made a more general case for the ability of Congress to pass important legislation, arguing that Congressional potential for policy change depends largely upon the interactive effects of both majority and minority size and unity. Policy changes have been enacted by those Congresses with large and/or cohesive majorities and small and/or disorganized minorities. These conditions often follow realigning elections, but occur at other times as well.

During the past fifteen years, several economists, historians and sociologists have propounded a sectoral model of economic growth and change in the United States. According to this analysis, as large-scale, monopolistic enterprises began to emerge in the late nineteenth century, different investment considerations and labour market requirements were also evolving. A dual economy was beginning to be formed. The large-scale capital sector, and the small-scale capital sector each had its own economic environment of conduct. Each sector tended, too, to develop its own corresponding labour market, with monopoly sector or ‘core’ firms holding out certain economic advantages for employees: money, job security, benefits, and opportunities for advancement within the firm. Thus, the work experience in these two sectors increasingly diverged. Even if the large-scale capital sector did offer economic advantages, growth tended to be capital-intensive, and the growth of employment in this sector slowed down, and then stopped by the end of the Second World War. Employment shifted to trades and services, with lower wage rates, and, of course, to the public sector, which currently employs nearly a third of the American workforce.

The 1980 American national elections produced two highly salient and widely-discussed departures from past tradition. For the first time in forty-eight years, a previously elected incumbent president seeking re-election was defeated. At the same time the Republicans, the traditional minority party, seized control of the upper house. Both events figured heavily in discussions of the American electorate's supposed turn to the right. Much of this emphasis on ideological change may be misplaced. A third, although much less noted, departure from tradition also occurred in 1980: for the first time since 1932, real disposable per capita income declined in the year preceding a presidential election. The importance of such a decline for the electoral fate of an incumbent president has been well documented. Numerous previous studies have indicated a powerful and consistent impact of changes in economic conditions on voting behaviour in presidential elections. The influence of economic conditions on the fate of the president's party in House elections is also well-documented. In the case of Senate elections, however, the literature is curiously silent.

Many students of the United States Congress have contended that the institution is too closely tied to the interests of members' local constituencies. While the responsiveness this charge implies may seem laudable, the localism said to exist, especially in the House, weakens national agents of representation such as the political parties. Institutional features like seniority and the norm of reciprocity are often criticized for the premium they place upon members' success in their local constituencies, and the narrow, particularistic policy which results. Those who prefer a legislature responsive to national interests lament the disproportionate influence of constituencies with well-placed representatives on the committees and subcommittees in the House, and the fragmented, ‘distributive’ character of the legislative process.