This paper began by reviewing several major conceptual and methodological difficulties surrounding the measurement of political alienation/allegiance and proceeded to describe the level and the sources of alienation (as measured by our preliminary indicator, the PAI) within the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. We defined political alienation as a relatively enduring sense of estrangement from or rejection of the prevailing political system and emphasized the importance of distinguishing this attitude from disapproval of incumbent officeholders.

In this analysis we have used a procedure based on estimating likelihoods, from background characteristics, of someone's - or something's - belonging in some category of a dependent variable. We have tried to demonstrate the applicability of this procedure to the specific task of distinguishing activists from ordinary electors in five divergent British localities, with a view to its general use in the prediction and description of initial participation and of activist dropout. The conclusions are:

In a valuable recent article, Brian Barry has given us an extended commentary on the logic of Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which Barry rightly regards as a good example of that phenomenon of American political science,

The phenomenon of the Labour middle class is much neglected in studies of political behaviour, and its importance is often dismissed without either statistical evidence or theoretical justification. Whilst there has been considerable research into the characteristics of and differences between ‘traditional’ Labour and ‘deferential’ Conservative working-class voters, our knowledge of the other side of the coin of class-party deviancy remains sketchy. The purpose of this Note is to attempt to explain something of this not insubstantial part of the electorate, to show how it differs from the Conservative middle-class electorate, and to argue that one can break down the Labour middle class itself and identify two distinct types of Labour supporter.

In a recent article on the comparative method in the study of politics, 1 Arend Lijphart discusses the place of the case study and suggests that there are six types of case study, four of which may be characterized as theoretical, two as atheoretical. The first of the theoretical types is the hypothesis-generating case study. Of studies of this type, Lijphart says: ‘They start out with a more or less vague notion of possible hypotheses, and attempt to formulate definite hypotheses to be tested subsequently among a large number of cases.2 The study upon which this paper is based satisfies entirely the first part of this description in that it began with a ‘more or less vague notion of possible hypotheses’ and it is hoped that the more definite hypotheses which were generated will be worthy of the large-scale testing that will eventually lead to the construction of a general theory of non-partisan civic government in Canada.

L. J. Sharpe's two-part article ('American Democracy Reconsidered’ in this Journal, III [1973], 1–28,129–68) is an important and controversial one. He questions many of the orthodox interpretations of American urban politics, suggests that some of the supposedly well-established observations about British and American contrasts may boil down to bits of conventional wisdom, and raises many points about social justice and democracy, which are at the centre of everyday practical politics but which sometimes slide from view in modern ‘value free‘ social science. The article will hopefully attract the critical attention of American writers, but meanwhile here are some reflections from a slightly different point of view on some of the themes of the article.