This is an attempt to operationalize and test the basic proposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan: namely, that Leviathan (or an all-powerful government) makes the life of man less solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

III THE PATTERN EXPLAINED In part I of this paper we described the gross pattern of public policy in our five countries. In part II we looked at how the pattern developed in each of the countries. We noticed that the countries have pursued policies that diverge widely, at least with respect to the size of the direct operating role of the State in the provision of public services. We also noticed that the United States differs from the four other countries far more than they do from each other. These findings will not have come as a great surprise to anybody, although some readers may have been surprised – in view of the common assumption that all major western countries are ‘welfare states’ – to discover just how much the countries differ and what different histories they have had.

Several theorems have been established recently on the existence or location of equilibrium policies in collective decision-making in the case when the alternatives are points in a multi-dimensional space. One of these theorems is founded on an assumption about individual preferences which seems intuitively plausible in the context of political decision-making. We have conducted a number of experiments designed to test this theorem directly. In addition, the resulting data were used to compare the accuracy of this assumption about individual preferences with that of certain alternative assumptions, some of which have also been used in theories of collective decision-making. Before the experiments and the analyses of the results are described, we first briefly present the theorem and the various alternative assumptions to be tested.

In electoral research the examination of the effect on voting behaviour of personal interaction has frequently had a subsidiary place in investigation and an ambiguous status in theory – a situation that has arisen despite evidence suggesting that personal interaction may often be a central factor in structuring voting choice. Typical of this neglect has been the approach to the phenomenon to be discussed here – the effect of neighbourhood structure on voting; for although this was first described at an early stage in voting research and subsequently re-examined several times, it has still to be adequately explained and integrated with other research findings.

In spite of all the research stimulated by the English and Scottish Royal Commissions on Local Government, we still have no clear idea of why people go into local politics, or of what sorts of people become local councillors. A recent study of Glasgow politics threw some light on these questions.1 One of the things it did was to draw attention to the central importance of the political party. Both Royal Commissions ignored the part played by parties, despite the fact that in virtually every large town in Britain the council is dominated by parties.2 One of the major functions the parties perform is the recruitment of candidates and councillors. Indeed, in connection with recruitment the parties are almost the only active agencies.