The rise of pressure-group politics in Britain has stimulated a corresponding growth of academic interest in pressure groups. Some distinguished early case studies were crowned in 1965 with Beer's majestic interpretation, while the last decade saw various accounts of the constitutional significance and merits of group activity. These bursts of academic energy illuminated parts of the pressure-group universe but left others in twilight. We are well informed about the lobbying activities of manufacturing industry, of organized labour and some of the professions. By contrast, there exists hardly any systematic discussion of how the interests of financial institutions are represented in government.

According to Steven Lukes ‘A exercises power over B when A affects A in a manner contrary to B's interests’. Although he is not willing to contend that this general concept of power is altogether beyond reasonable dispute Lukes argues that it is the specific conceptions of power to which this more general concept gives rise when we fill in what is to count as B's interests that pose the fundamental problem for social and political science. For, although the conceptions are, to some degree, assessable in terms of their descriptive accuracy and explanatory scope, they are also ‘ineradicably evaluative’ and ‘essentially contested’. Three important ‘normatively specific conceptions of interests’, implying three corresponding conceptions of power, particularly concern him:

(1) the liberal conception, which relates men's interests to what they actually want or prefer, to their policy preferences as manifested by their political participation; (2) the reformist conception, which, deploring that not all men's wants are given equal weight within the political system, also relates their interests to what they actually want and prefer, but allows that this may be revealed in the form of deflected, submerged, or concealed wants and preferences; and (3) the radical conception, which maintains that men's wants may themselves be a product of a system which works against their interests and, in such cases, relates the latter to what men would want and prefer, were they able to make the choice.

Geographical mobility is a striking characteristic of modern societies. Since migrants are often faced with social, economic and political changes which may affect their political behaviour, population movement is crucial to an understanding of politics.

Perhaps the most important decisions that the United States Supreme Court makes consist of which sorts of issues it will entertain and how, when, and in what forms it will resolve them. Indeed, as Mr Justice Brandeis once remarked, the ‘most important thing [the Court does] is not doing’, i.e. winnowing cases. Yet, until quite recently, few studies focused on the politics of the agenda-building process on the Supreme Court. From the important researches of Tanenhaus and his associates and of Ulmer and his colleagues we know that under certain conditions and in certain cases the justices operate on the basis of a few ‘cues’ in decisions to grant or deny petitions for certiorari – the main mode of obtaining a hearing from the Court. And Ulmer has instructed us that in making choices on certiorari, ‘Supreme Court justices are predisposed to support underdogs and upperdogs disproportionately but, also, are motivated to hide any “bias” that may be at work in determining votes’. So, although we do know more about some segments of agenda building than before, investigations are still at a relatively early stage. Furthermore, few have treated the Supreme Court as an institution that operates across time as well as space or have accounted for variations in its behaviour across that temporal dimension.

I first encountered the work of Harold Lasswell in the late 1950s, when I was a barely awake undergraduate at a university whose reputation for mediocrity was richly deserved. I opened Politics: Who Gets What, When, How to the first paragraph: ‘The study of politics is the study of influence and the influential. The science of politics states conditions; the philosophy of politics justifies preferences. This book, restricted to political analysis, declares no preferences. It states conditions.’ I had never heard of Lasswell, for my political science courses limited themselves to subjects like Congressional seniority and Cabinet responsibility in Britain. One course discussed the law of piracy, a subject I had trouble linking to international politics in the 1950s. Some enterprising instructors occasionally discussed the balance of power, and one even assigned David Truman. But Lasswell was terra incognita to me, as he no doubt was to most undergraduates in those years.

The availability of detailed census data at the level of parliamentary constituencies has promoted the testing of ecological models of voting behaviour in the United Kingdom. To date, most of the testing has used the 1966 Census data, which is inferior to that for 1971 in certain respects. As a result, it has not been possible to test in detail two models – that of ‘embourgeoisement’ and that of the ‘property-owning-democracy’. But the cross-classifications available at constituency level for the 1971 Census allow the relative importance of the two to be assessed.