The argument of this paper, which is conducted at two distinct levels of abstraction, has four parts. First, I consider how the disputed character of the concept of freedom bears on the definition of liberalism. This will be done by examining the contrasting accounts of the concept of freedom advanced by Felix Oppenheim and Sir Isaiah Berlin: my conclusion is that the contestability of the concept of freedom does not constitute an insuperable obstacle to formulating a working definition of liberalism. Secondly, I consider the general thesis that some, if not all, of the central concepts of social and political thought have an essentially contestable character, and look in particular at the application of this thesis to the concept of the ‘political’. Thirdly, I consider some aspects of the theories of distributive justice advanced by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, concluding that the supposedly contractarian mode of argument adopted by each of these writers is insufficient to yield the distributive principles specified, which must rather rest upon definite normative commitments and quasi-empirical assumptions about man and society. Fourthly, I explore the prospects of a procedural approach to questions of distributive justice, and I claim for such an approach a special congruence with basic liberal principles regarding equality and freedom. The substantive result of these arguments is that, within the conceptual framework of the liberal tradition, a just distribution is any that emerges from background economic and political institutions protecting equal freedom. The methodological or metatheoretical result is that, in virtue of the contestability and indeterminacy of the constitutive concepts and regulative principles of political discourse, my arguments fail to be demonstrative, having a persuasive and dialectical rather than a deductive form. If my arguments can be sustained, these are features of the paper it shares with every other essay in social philosophy.

Traditionally, and for some good reasons, elections in Communist one-party states have been treated as relatively unimportant phenomena, essentially ‘massive demonstrations of ritualized affirmation’, or simply a test of the Communist party's mobilization powers. The absence of competing political parties and consequently opposing goals and programmes does clearly mean that such elections are very different from those in liberal democratic states. They do not and cannot, for example, resolve the often crucial question of political succession.

While political controversies over the legitimacy of monetary interventions in Western economies were settled decades ago, the widespread acceptance of fiscal interventions as appropriate tools for achieving economic stability and economic growth is much more recent and much less pervasive. Even the pre-Depression classical economic model specified a role for government monetary policy: ensuring an appropriate stock of money. While institutions of monetary policy making now enjoy both a long history of utilizing monetary policy instruments and a low level of ideological conflict over the legitimacy of those interventions, the institutions of fiscal policy making enjoy neither. Though some governments had begun to practise fiscal interventions before the Second World War, the widespread use of such instruments is, by and large, a post-war phenomenon. Thus, governments have generally had less experience in learning ‘how to do it’.

Pulzer's dictum – ‘Class is the basis of British party politics, all else is embellishment and detail’ – expresses a consensus about the social basis of partisan conflict in contemporary Britain. Although there are exceptions and important qualifications, recent research confirms the conclusion that social class is the foremost influence on partisan loyalties and a potent factor in electoral behaviour.

Traditional theories of government coalition formation concentrate on formal criteria inspired by – if not directly drawn from – game theory. One such criterion is that the coalition which forms must be winning; another is that it should have no surplus members without whom it would still be winning, i.e. it should be minimal; and a third is that the number of parties should be as few as possible. The closest that such theories come to considering the substantive issues affecting the formation of coalitions in the real world is their focus on reducing the ideological diversity of parties within the government. On many occasions, however, such ideological considerations receive negligible attention from politicians, who often ignore size factors altogether.

Douglas Hibbs's article, ‘On the Political Economy of Long-Run Trends in Strike Activity’, is the most recent of several comparative studies of the strike which explicitly reject the narrowly institutional approach characteristic of the ‘industrial relations school’ in favour of a broader socio-political perspective. These new approaches have the advantage of reminding us that industrial conflict is something more than an accident in the collectivebargaining process. Rather, the strike constitutes one working-class strategy – political action is another – in the acting out of class conflict in a capitalist society.

In an earlier article in this Journal (‘The Used Vote and Electoral Outcomes: The Irish General Election of 1973’, V (1975), 363–83) we argued that in elections generally the critical concern of political party leaders is not how many votes they may amass. Instead, they need to be concerned with how many votes of those they receive they are actually able to use to elect candidates. It matters little if party A wins Constituency 1 by thousands of votes if it then loses Constituencies 2 and 3 by only a handful. While we suggested that the concept of the used vote that we devised might have more relevance to the Continental electoral systems than to the British and American systems, it also has some application in the latter cases as well.

In its purest form a collective good is said to possess the characteristics of non-rivalness in consumption and non-price exclusion. Non-rivalness implies that consumption to the full by one person in no way impedes the consumption of that same quantity by others. This does not mean that the same subjective benefit is derived by each individual, but simply that consumption by one individual does not interfere with the benefits derived by another. The characteristic of non-exclusion requires that if the good is provided to one then it is provided to all. It is this attribute in particular which casts doubt on the likelihood that, in a large group, individuals will voluntarily reveal their preferences for the good. Goods which are not perfectly rival but which are price exclusive may be provided in the market by clubs. However, when an individual's consumption of a good is not dependent on his making a contribution to its provision the individual utility maximizer may be inclined to ‘free ride’, in the hope of enjoying the good at no personal expense. It is clear that if all individuals act in the same manner this good is not likely to be provided in the private market.

Ivor Crewe, Bo Särlvik and James Alt (‘Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964–1974’, this Journal, VII (1977), 129–90) have made a major contribution to our understanding of partisan change in Britain. Whereas the declining share of the Conservative and Labour party vote can be documented through electoral statistics, Crewe and his colleagues focused on individual-level change in attitudes toward the parties, and thus provided valuable insights that help explain the dealignment that has occurred. One of their major findings was that the strength of party loyalties has declined among the British electorate. Building a measure of mean partisan strength that captures the distribution of ‘very strong’ identifiers, ‘fairly strong’ identifiers, ‘not very strong’ identifiers, and non-identifiers, they show a continuous decline in the strength of partisan loyalties between 1964 and October 1974. In 1964 the partisan strength of the electorate was 2·19; by October 1974 it had fallen to 1·90 (pp. 162–4). This overall decline is quite substantial, given that their measure of mean partisan strength ranges from 0·0 to 3·0.

Paul Abramson's Note (this Journal, p. 505) is an interesting exercise in comparative data reanalysis. But we do not believe that it effectively refutes our argument that partisan weakening in Britain has been caused by ‘period’ rather than ‘generational’ factors.

Laver is undoubtedly right in suggesting (a) that ideas of rationality are more of a hindrance than a help in explaining electors' behaviour, but (b) that a rational-choice theory of party competition can still be superimposed on an a-rational explanation of voting choice. Since he develops this position through a critique of Robertson's ‘wide’ definition of voter rationality, it is only fair to point out that Robertson's ascription of modified office-seeking to politicians forms the best developed rational – choice theory of party competition. The hypothesis that politicians seek votes by widening their issue-appeals when they think the election is competitive, but stress partisan appeals otherwise, has been validated for British and United States' elections from 1920 to 1974 – a more general and more rigorous check than has been applied to any competing hypothesis. Moreover it has already been incorporated with an a-rational account of voting behaviour in the form Laver advocates. The key elements of this synthesis are:

(1) The location of electors and parties in a party-defined space, i.e. a space where individuals and groups are located in terms of their closeness to the election alternatives (party choices and non-voting). This is analogous to, but quite definitely not, the space produced by party identification, to which there are too many measurement objections.

(2) The division of influences upon voting into predispositions (loyalties, social group traditions, etc.) and cues (current issues, candidates, etc.). Predispositions are associated with electoral stability, i.e. limited and slow movement in the party-defined space. Cues have the potential to produce rapid change and widespread movement of electors, often associated with the appearance of new parties.

(3) Modified office-seeking by politicians. In elections which they expect to be competitive there is thus a premium on the introduction of new cues, while in other elections old partisan appeals will be made to existing predispositions.