This paper is concerned with representation. More specifically, it is concerned with the theory and practice of representation in the American national conventions of 1972 – with how the conceptions of representation that dominated the parties in 1972 are related to older views and institutions. In what ways was the Democratic convention of 1972 representative, and of whom? In what ways was the Republican convention representative, and of whom? How is the representation of biological traits related to the representation of opinion? Why is it so difficult to construct a representative national convention? These are the questions discussed in this paper.

‘I don’t give a s— about the lira.‘These, as well as comparable sentiments about the pound sterling expressed by a recent U.S. President and preserved on tape for posterity, may symbolize a growing American lack of interest in Western Europe. In turn, European views of the United States may now be less exalted than at any time in the past three decades. In a period when misunderstandings, apocalyptic visions and contradictory judgements abound regarding the future of European unity and European-American relations, it is worth examining some evidence of recent European elite attitudes in order to facilitate more reliable judgementsor at least less impressionistic ones.

One of the most firmly established pieces of Australia’s political conventional wisdom concerns the influence of the economy on the level of support for the government. When all is well, the government can look forward to continued office by courtesy of a grateful electorate. When unemployment is high or inflation galloping, its prospects become gloomy and political leaders are tempted to delay the date of the next general election as long as possible in the hope that something will turn up.

In the 1969 Irish general election, the outgoing government party, Fianna Fail, was once again returned with a majority of seats in the Dail Eireann; it had been in power since 1957. All but one of the remaining seats were distributed between Fine Gael and Labour, which fought the election as separate parties. In 1973, Fine Gael and Labour agreed to form a coalition to fight the coming election and won a majority despite the fact that Fianna Fail received a higher percentage of first-preference votes in 1973 than it had in 1969. 1 This raises the question of how a political party can increase its total share of the vote yet lose seats in parliament.

It is some fifteen years since Dahl and his associates inaugurated the ‘issue’ approach to studying power; it is therefore somewhat surprising that two recent articles by Christopher Hewitt1 comprise the first attempt at applying this method to Britain. But over the past decade and a half Dahl's approach has come in for some severe criticisms; it is unfortunate that Hewitt does not update the method to meet some of these criticisms - indeed his articles are, in some respects, a step backwards from Dahl.

In his review article on policy analysis [Hugh Heclo, ‘Policy Analysis’, this Journal, II (1972), 83–108], Heclo describes public policy as ‘necessarily at the heart of the political scientist’s concern’. But because public policy ‘is concerned with metachoices’ – ‘choices as to how others shall make choices in whatever sphere public authority is intervening’ – ‘the study of policy therefore necessarily straddles a number of previously distinct academic disciplines’.‘However, I wonder to what extent political scientists are willing to take part in a ‘coherent “interdiscipline” of policy studies’. Heclo quotes Vernon Van Dyke’s warning that the prospect of this for political scientists is ‘appalling’.2 If we examine firstly what political science has to offer in policy analysis and secondly what policy analysis itself has to offer, I feel that Van Dyke will suddenly find himself with massive support.

Kramer has shown how singularly restrictive are all ‘similarity’ conditions which guarantee transitivity of majority rule by limiting the family of admissible preference orderings (so-called exclusion restrictions). For suppose, plausibly, that social alternatives are points in an open convex policy space S ⊂ Rn, n ≥ 2, and that voters' preferences, {Rl)1=1…‥ l, are representable by continuously differentiable semi-strictly quasi-concave utility functions ul,. Suppose further that at a single point x ε S, any three voters' utility functions have gradients ∇ul(x), ∇uf(X), ∇uk(x), no one of which can be expressed as a positive linear combination of the other two, and no two of which are linearly dependent. Then all exclusion conditions must fail on S.