For more than a decade, a debate has been raging among American political activists, journalists and scholars about the numerous rules changes enacted by the Democratic party since its tumultuous 1968 national convention, and the various legal changes at the state and federal levels that have also affected the Presidential nominating process. The rules changes have included the introduction of fairer practices such as written state party rules for delegate selection; proportional representation of candidates' supporters in the delegations; increased representation of women, racial minorities and young people at the convention; and measures to require nominees to respond in writing to the party platform. The legal changes include the proliferation of delegate selection primaries and the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 and its various subsequent amendments. The debate has centred around the desirability of these changes, which will here be referred to generically as ‘the reforms’, with no normative connotation intended.

I am sure that all of us who have been attempting to make sense of American party politics these last couple of decades welcome Professor Reiter's contribution, and look forward to the publication of his book. As I understand the argument he is making, at least four positions are possible with respect to the recent history of political parties and Presidential nominations in the United States: (1) that no changes have occurred; (2) that long-term secular trends account for all changes; (3) that party reforms account for all changes; and (4) that a combination of longer-term trends and party reforms account for changes. Perhaps in order to hold the attention of readers, Professor Reiter has chosen to contrast positions (2) and (3).

It is possible to agree with Professor Reiter's general argument and still fault some of his data and take exception to his conclusions. There is little doubt that the original sources of the state and local parties' weakness, and of their loss of control over the presidential nominating process, preceded the party and campaign reforms of the 1970s. Reiter is not alone in arguing that the eclipse of state and local ‘king-makers’ slowly began to take effect earlier, as a result of the advent of civil service reforms, presidential primaries, electronic media, new campaign techniques and the nationalization of the electorate. The reforms are indeed only the latest chapter of a long-running saga.

First I would like to thank Professors Polsby and Wekkin for their thoughtful comments on my article. I am also grateful to the Editors of the Journal for providing this forum for us to exchange our views.

Professor Polsby's first comment is that I have misinterpreted his position on the causes of the current sorry state of American political parties. In reply, I shall focus on his book, which provides the most elaborate development of his thoughts on the subject. The passage he cites in his third footnote is one of at least four which seem to agree with the thrust of my argument. however, in the context of a book that is, after all, entitled Consequences of party Reform, these qualifications are peripheral indeed.

Although research on the welfare state is fundamentally comparative and cross-national, empirical observation of the peculiarities of the American case has structured much of the thinking on the subject. Explaining variations in welfare state policy usually begins with the identification of cross-national variations in the initiation, scope or size of national social service programs such as social security, workman's compensation, unemployment insurance, national medical care and public housing. The coverage of the programs that have been established, the number of programs and the size of the benefits distributed are typically found to be smaller in the United States than in other industrialized democracies. The relative lateness of the United States' adoption of major social welfare programs, along with the low percentage of either Gross National Product or government revenue expended in social service programs, constitutes clear evidence that the welfare state is a function of more than the level of national economic development. To the extent that welfare state research devotes itself to explaining the extreme variations represented by American policy performance, its theory often derives from interpretations made of corresponding peculiarities of American popular ideology, social structure, political institutions and history. As a consequence, explaining the welfare state often depends on how one explains America.

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of his argument, T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions continues to have a significant impact on the way in which economics and other social sciences view themselves. Indeed, it could be said that Kuhn's influence has been much the greater on the more methodologically disposed social sciences than upon the natural sciences to which his original thesis was addressed. However, since the first flush of enthusiasm for Kuhn amongst the social sciences there has emerged, as Keith Tribe has noted, a growing unease with the thesis on the grounds that it is ‘not capable of doing the work that it is called upon to perform’. Nevertheless, despite these new found doubts Kuhn's ideas still provide – to use a ‘Kuhnian’ expression – a powerful ‘framework’ through which changes in economic theory, such as the ‘Keynesian Revolution’, may be understood. Because consideration of such matters has been primarily the preserve of economists preoccupied with the development of techniques of economic analysis, rather than of students of politics concerned with the history of ideas, other issues, such as Keynes's notion of theoretical change and revolution, have in the analysis of the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ been neglected. Indeed, as Axel Leijonhufvud has observed, the absence from the debate on the structure of scientific revolutions of philosophically disposed case studies from economics and other social sciences has itself left social science ‘unsure about what exactly we can learn from it’.

This review evaluates the success of output studies in explaining intranational variation in the policies of local governments. Output studies address the central question of political science: why do different governments adopt different policies? It is therefore important to examine the contribution of output studies to our understanding of the reasons for policy variation and the role of politics within the relevant causal processes.

Major inter-election vote shifts are characteristic of present-day American and British elections. In American elections since 1960 the presidency has changed parties on four of the six occasions. In British elections since 1959 the government has changed parties on four of the eight occasions. Students of both election systems ask whether these large and frequent shifts portend either major realignments or the weakening of the parties. The purpose of this Note is to analyse inter-election changes in the United States and Great Britain and to highlight and explain their differences.

In contrast to the United States, where analyses of the political behaviour of blacks number in the hundreds, if not more, substantial studies of the political attitudes and behaviour of Britain's non-white minority are fairly scarce. As non-whites have become more visible in the political arena, however, attention by academics has increased. But as yet there have been few countrywide, empirical, and systematic investigations of the political behaviour and attitudes of this population. Our Note uses multivariate methods to investigate the extent of political participation of Britain's non-white minorities in the 1979 election. We focus on a wide variety of political activities and a few selected issue concerns. We attempt to place our findings in the context of some theories of ethnic politics that have developed to explain black political behaviour in Britain and in the United States.