The arrival of the Alliance on the British political scene has complicated the party system to an extent unknown for over half a century. Elections can no longer be counted upon to produce straightforward and immediate shifts in partisan control of the government. The next election could very well produce a hung Parliament.

For almost a decade we have taken issue with the prevailing view of independent voters. We showed that Independents, as they were usually defined, had nothing in common, and in fact were more diverse than either Democrats or Republicans. Virtually no generalizations about Independents were correct, except by accident, because they comprise three very different kinds of people. Most Independents acknowledge that they are closer to one or the other party. The crux of our argument was that this ‘leaning’ should outweigh an initial claim of independence when deciding how to classify respondents. Our most striking finding was that leaners vote like outright partisans. We interpreted this as evidence that most professed Independents are not neutral between the parties, but are nearly as partisan as avowed Democrats and Republicans. This conclusion had major implications for both mainstream and revisionist views of American politics, all the more so because of the growing numbers of Independents, who accounted for 38 per cent of the adult population by 1978, thus matching the Democrats and leaving Republicans in a distant third place.

Modern British government is government by party leaders in Cabinet. It is still the ‘Crown in Parliament’ which formally takes or authorizes every legislative or administrative action, but of the three major components of the Crown in Parliament – the Commons, the Lords, and the Sovereign – the first is now virtually unchecked. The House of Lords can only minimally delay acts of the Commons, and both the Lords and the Monarch have long since lost their ability to veto (much less initiate) legislation. Since those in the Cabinet control the agenda of the House of Commons, since the Cabinet almost invariably consists solely of the leaders of the party with a majority of seats in the Commons, and since the influence of party on voting in Parliament is very strong, the Commons itself has in essence only retained a veto over the legislative proposals of the majority party's leaders who sit in the Cabinet. As a recent essay on legislation in Britain notes, ‘today's conventional wisdom is that … Parliament has relinquished any capacity for legislative initiative it may once have possessed to the executive in its midst’.

‘The Irish party system is unique. In no other European polity does a small number of programmatically indistinguishable parties, each commanding heterogeneous electoral support, constitute the entire party system.’ This bold statement is merely a particularly forthright expression of a commonly held view about political parties in the Republic of Ireland. This view is understandable given that the formal casus belli between the two major parties was the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921; surely this issue must at some stage have been overtaken by events. In the revised edition of his standard text on Irish politics, Chubb points to the year 1948 as the date by which the ‘issues which had split Sinn Fein were either resolved or increasingly irrelevant’. He goes on to argue that from the 1950s ‘all parties were to a great extent drained of ideology; they overlapped considerably in the policies they proposed; and they competed for the votes of a public increasingly concerned with welfare and consumer politics and less and less with national issues’. What we may call ‘the no-differences thesis’ has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the Irish party system and of the role it plays in policy formulation and the wider political process.

This Note will discuss the impact of random sampling at elections conducted under the single transferable vote (STV) electoral system in multi-member constituencies in the Republic of Ireland. STV, partly because of its popularity among electoral reformers, has received considerable theoretical scrutiny. It has been given an ‘intermediate’ rating in recent assessment of a number of electoral systems, and dismissed as a ‘perverse social choice function’ because it is subject to non-monotonicity. This shortcoming is also mainly responsible for the low degree of acceptance accorded to it by Brams and Fishburn. Nurmi concludes that STV (like other multi-stage systems) performs poorly, with regard to a number of criteria, in comparison with one-stage systems like approval voting. Black complains that STV ‘is a compound of minor complexities and is difficult to remember’. Others have discussed shortcomings in STV and suggested remedies which can be implemented where the counting of votes is entirely computerized.

The aim of this Note is to examine recent local authority expenditure cuts in relation to Saunders's dual-state thesis. Saunders's model has important implications for the long-standing debates on local autonomy from central government and on the party effect in expenditure patterns. The extent to which local political control is a mediating factor in the nature and severity of spending cuts is analysed with reference to a case study of two districts in the Greater Manchester area.