Although the relevance of evil to politics occupies a large part of the history of political thought few modern political theorists have paid sustained attention to the relationship between the political evils of our times and our understanding of the concept of evil. A major exception to this is Hannah Arendt. For Arendt the evils of totalitarianism, genocide and ‘administrative massacre’ have provided the material for the basic questions to which her thinking has been directed. In the posthumously published The Life of the Mind Arendt appears to depart from her concern with the evils of mass society; the work is outwardly a phenomenological account of some aspects of the history of Western thought. It is, however possible to see this work as a metaphysic for her more overtly political work. Viewed in this way it can also be used to deepen understanding of her concept of the ‘banality of evil’. This notion, which she first introduced in her report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, became central to her understanding of one part of the Nazi phenomenon.

The advantage of incumbency has long intrigued students of congressional elections. Whether measured at individual or aggregate levels, by re-election rates or voting margins, the advantage has been striking: simply knowing that there is an incumbent in the contest supplies a major predictor of the vote. The person in office – the incumbent – is overwhelmingly likely to win re-election and to win by larger margins than victorious non-incumbents.

The Soviet political system is usually thought of as an extremely centralized, uniform system. The centre decides, the Republican or local authorities obey. There is little scope for local initiative or autonomy. Yet, at the same time, another image of political life edges its way forward. Georgia was run for many years by its local boss, Mzhavanadze, along lines that clearly were not what the centre wanted; frequent reports appear of muddle, confusion, the non-implementation of legislation or the activities of local ‘family circles’. Somehow we have to make sense of these two aspects of Soviet politics. Is it that the centre chooses to exert its power in some policy areas and not in others, or is it that some are less amenable to control? Are some geographical or cultural regions treated differently from others? How much local autonomy is there? The question of the degree of decentralization in the Soviet system has been raised most recently and explored most interestingly by Hough. This is a contribution to the same theme. It does not provide any grand answers but it does focus attention on a topic that is of key importance in itself and about which we know little: the process of party recruitment. The paper seeks to explore the relationship between central party authorities and the Republican party organizations by looking at the recruitment of the different nationalities.

Although the selection of candidates for elections to the national parliament is an important part of the political process, there is little writing on the way in which this is carried out in the Republic of Ireland. This no doubt springs largely from parties' reluctance to reveal details of this essentially internal matter. In Duverger's words, ‘parties do not like the odours of the electoral kitchen to spread to the outside world’.

Most of the variables in survey-based studies of electoral behaviour are measured only at second hand. Although sex or race can be coded from direct observation, and whether an individual voted can often be ascertained from documentary evidence, researchers must usually rely on respondents' accuracy and truthfulness in reporting attitudes and in recalling past behaviour. Both of these may involve significant biases. Research has shown that many events are underreported by survey respondents, although clearly desirable activities like voting may be overreported. Other work has suggested the likelihood that ‘non-attitudes’ will be reported by many respondents. When these two are compounded, so that respondents are asked to recall previous attitudes or dispositions, the danger of misrepresentation is multiplied.

This paper describes an empirical procedure for analysing the difference between the proportion of votes a major party attracts and the proportion of seats it subsequently wins in a plurality election. This difference will be referred to as the electoral bias with respect to that particular party at the election being analysed:

B = S — V, (1)

where S is the seat proportion and V the vote proportion gained by the party. This bias is the basic concept underlying much of the debate about electoral reform but curiously it has been an under-researched topic in political science literature. Apart from a small continuing debate over the cubic law of seat proportions and some analyses of Australian and New Zealand elections most attention in election studies has been concerned with determining the proportion of votes rather than the subsequent proportion of seats.

Politicians and political scientists have long known that there is a slight tendency among voters to prefer candidates whose names appear at the top of the ballot compared with lower-placed candidates, and hence that ceteris paribus the former have a somewhat better chance of being elected than the latter. When the candidates' names appear on the ballot in alphabetical order, this positional voting bias is usually called ‘alphabetic voting’. It is of special importance and interest in preferential voting systems where the voters may indicate their first, second, third, etc., preferences among a list of candidates, as in the single-transferable vote elections to the Irish Dáil, or where they must do so, as in the alternative-vote elections to the Australian House of Representatives.

In their article – ‘Public Welfare Provision, Scandinavia, and the Sheer Futility of the Sociological Approach to Polities’ – Castles and McKinlay claim to have demonstrated that

two factors contribute to and explain the particularly high levels of public welfare provision in Scandinavian countries [compared to other advanced, industrial democratic states]. The absence of a large right-wing party establishes the initial necessary condition that removes the primary barrier to the development of welfare provision. The historic strength and unity of the working-class movement, reflected in the dominance of social democracy, is the factor which is then responsible for the development of public welfare to its current high level.

On one level, it is something of a pleasure when one's colleagues take sufficient interest in a paper to write a rejoinder. Furthermore, Roweth et al. are to be complimented on writing their rejoinder in a systematic manner. It seems only reasonable therefore, that we should respond to each of their charges, which they label our ‘shortcomings’, by following their format.