At the beginning of his book on Australian politics, David Butler tellingly contrasts an earlier American exploration with his expedition to Canberra. Familiarity with British government had initially led him to ask untranslatable questions about a separate and essentially non-comparable American system. But the same British background, he reports, made for appropriate questions in Australia even though the answers might differ from those received in Britain itself. Australian government, unlike American, could be conceived of as a variant of the Westminster model. It follows that the Canberra model is so different from Washington's that a strictly American background might likewise engender the wrong questions about Australian politics.

Along with other American public institutions, Congress and the federal bureaucracy have fallen upon hard times. Each has been the target of much public scorn. Among academic theorists who have compared the contemporary roles of the bureaucracy and Congress, however, Congress has received the worst evaluation by far. It has often been treated as a more or less quaintly archaic institution, structurally unable to cope with the complexities of national issues. Samuel Huntington delineates several factors which he thinks tend to insulate Congress from an effective national policy-making role. Internally, the institutionalization of Congress has created a system of leadership selection which fragments authority and rewards and reinforces provincial perspectives. Externally, with rare exceptions, electoral turn-over is limited. Thus, the intake of new blood, especially in the House, is mostly dependent upon voluntary departures or biological processes. Equally important in Huntington's view are the characteristics of the congressmen themselves. They are, as many have pointed out, essentially local politicians oriented to local rather than national problems. Their incentives lie in looking ‘homeward’ to local constituencies rather than outward to the nation. Edward Shils has described their orientations as ‘those of the small town society’, suspicious of large organization and wary of complexity. Responsiveness to local interests, not comprehension of complex national policy problems, is the sine qua non of the congressman's political survival.

One of the major unexplored areas in the literature of political science in Britain is the relationship between the attitudes of individual legislators in policy areas and their behaviour in the House of Commons. In the United States, the study of legislative behaviour has benefited from the fact that the unobtrusive measurement of the attitudes of legislators has been possible through the aggregation of roll-call votes. This procedure has provided the foundation for a body of literature upon which a theoretical framework has been constructed for further research.

Adolescents in Western democracies acquire participatory-related dispositions early in life. They believe that it is the obligation of the good citizen to be informed and to take a participatory role in the affairs of his community and in politics. Some children start to participate in political activities as early as the third grade; through the twelfth grade, there is a gradual increase in the number of pre-adults who engage in such activities. Variations in adolescent political participation are large, however; they have been found to be associated not only with age but also with socioeconomic status and background measures, with the adolescent's expressed political interest, with the political interest displayed by the adolescent's parents, with curricular and extra-curricular activities, and with the adolescent's social milieu.

Condorcet's paradox of voting and Arrow's impossibility theorem are by now well known. Inspired by Arrow's treatment of social choice, others have presented alternative proofs of his theorem and different impossibility results. Professor Fishburn has recently treated us to some interesting new voting paradoxes. It is important to have the area of inconsistency among the various treatments explored and clearly mapped out. It is equally important to come to terms with the known inconsistencies in order to construct a solid social choice edifice on safe ground. Coming to terms with the inconsistencies must surely mean deciding between alternative normative conditions when all of them cannot be satisfied simultaneously. This paper attempts to do just that by adding some computational criteria to the standard list of normative criteria and then singling out a subset as being more important (to the author at least) than the rest. Since the ‘important’ criteria are mutually consistent they can be used to derive some properties of democratic decision processes. Simple majority rule, applied in sequential elimination, is distinguished as the best collective decision method. It fails to satisfy the Pareto, or unanimity, criterion – one often regarded as a sine qua non of social choice – but when this condition is added to the author's list an impossibility result obtains. An argument is proposed to counter the suggestion that Pareto optimality be added to the list and some other condition removed.

A major new study by Professor Gabriel Almond is a significant event in our discipline. Whether one believes that The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, i960) set comparative politics on the sure path of a science or set it back a decade, there can be no denying the influence of the so-called ‘functional’ framework set out in Almond's introductory essay. Crisis, Choice, and Change may well have the same degree of influence. Whether or not this is a prospect to be welcomed depends entirely upon the aspects of the book that make an impact. This essay is written in the conviction that the main drift of the book is disastrously misdirected but that part of it – the quasi-game-theoretical analysis of coalition formation – is valuable for what it tries to do, though seriously defective in execution. Since there is obviously a risk that these deficiencies could discredit the whole notion of applying game-theoretical concepts to the analysis of real political situations, my object will be, while drawing attention to the defects, to suggest that they are not inherent in game-theoretical treatments.

The purpose of the research on which this paper is based was to investigate by social survey methods some of the political attitudes of schoolboys (aged between 8 and 16 years of age) who were living through violent years in the history of Northern Ireland. Political attitudes were studied against the social characteristics and backgrounds of a large sample of schoolboys during the fifteen months prior to the announcement of direct rule from Westminster in 1972. This paper focuses upon affect towards the Stormont Government during the last two years of its existence.

The class composition of the local environment has been shown to affect both Conservative and Labour voters and type of housing has been strongly associated with the ties between class and party. Studies of contextual influences on individual political behaviour(s) have consistently shown the potent mediating effect of increasing levels of social homogeneity. In Britain, it has been demonstrated that the class–vote relationship is strengthened for the numerically dominant class as the social milieu becomes more homogeneous, while the political significance of housing policy is reflected in the relationship between differences in type of occupancy and class–party ties.

Steven Beackon's ‘Labour Party Politics and the Working Class’ (this Journal, VI (1976), 231–8) highlights a common problem in political science research, an inadequate concern for the validity of measuring instruments.

On the basis of six statements, the first three of which are claimed to be of an explicitly class character whilst the other three are not, Beackon classifies Labour party activists into those who perceived the party as a class party and those who did not. The weak discriminatory power of these statements is evidenced by their failure to assign fully 39 per cent of the respondents to either category. This third group of activists was labelled ‘Ambivalents’. An assessment of the measuring instrument's face validity, however, suggests that this ambivalence is due not so much to these activists' ambiguous perceptions of the party as to the shortcomings of the instrument itself.