Liberal institutions (freedom of speech and religious worship, for example) will naturally be supported by liberals – that is to say, those with a liberal outlook. But what arguments can be addressed to non-liberals? There are some traditional arguments but these are too limited in scope to provide a general justification for liberal institutions. A recent argument that claims to do the job is to the effect that justice entails neutrality and neutrality entails liberal institutions. However, neutrality is a principle that could appeal to non-liberals only if they had already swallowed a large dose of liberalism, since it requires that they regard their deepest convictions as preferences or personal opinions. It is also doubtful whether liberals are well advised to embrace neutrality.

Political life in the advanced industrial democracies since the Second World War has been characterized by periods of mass mobilization and protest followed by years of relative quiescence and institutional dominance. The individual phases have prompted extensive reflection. Far less attention, however, has been devoted to how developments in one phase might influence the subsequent one. Using data from a 1979 survey of activists of the Italian Communist Party, this article examines how the cycle of protest which swept Italy in the late-1960s and early-1970s was reflected in the distribution of attitudes towards dissent within the different generations of party activists. Our findings clearly suggest that participation in social movements had independent effects on the presence of particular tolerance attitudes and that phases of mobilization affect the distribution of politically salient attitudes among party activists during a subsequent phase of institutionalization. This, in turn, has possible implications for processes of change in the Italian political system.

The ideological differences between the Labour and Conservative parties in the 1980s are greater than at any time in the postwar era. Consequently one would expect party control at the local level to have an increasing effect on local government decisions. Using an approach to cross-time analysis that avoids some of the major shortcomings of other studies, the relationship between party control and local fiscal decisions in English cities between 1974 and 1988 can be traced. The method allows not only an exploration of the direct effect of party control, but also its indirect effects, mediated through grant penalties and rate-capping. Under Mrs Thatcher's administration the impact of party on local fiscal decisions has increased quite substantially.

Recently, Sanders et al. have made the intriguing and counter-intuitive argument that the impact of the Falklands war on Conservative popularity was inconsequential. Their analyses raise important theoretical and methodological issues concerning the time-series analysis of party support. This present article contends that the stepwise regression procedures employed by Sanders et al. are misleading, particularly when predictor variables are highly intercorrelated. Box-Jenkins analyses demonstrate that the Falklands strongly influenced Conservative support, net of the effects of macroeconomic conditions and personal economic expectations. The significance of the latter variable in the models confirms Sanders et al.'s argument about the role of subjective economic variables in party popularity functions. Non-economic variables are also relevant, however, and popularity functions that model them correctly will enhance our understanding of both the economics and the politics of party support.

Clarke, Mishler and Whiteley (CMW) provide an interesting review and critique of our analysis of Mrs Thatcher's first-term popularity. They challenge our findings on two main grounds: (1) that we use orthodox time-series regression techniques inappropriately; and (2) that Box-Jenkins techniques are a superior vehicle for analysing government-popularity time series anyway. In this reply we seek to answer both of these general criticisms. We then outline our current – and, we believe, far more revealing – research strategy for analysing government-popularity data.

‘The first and perhaps most compelling attribute of the modern social structure which we inhabit’, according to James Coleman, ‘is the asymmetry of a large portion of its relations’. What is striking about modern society, however, is not the asymmetry of relations as such. Western societies have often been, and to some extent still are, highly asymmetric; think, for example, of the relations between feudal lords and their serfs, between factory owners and workers, between men and women. What is striking about the modern asymmetry is that the parties involved are completely different classes of entities, natural persons and complex organizations. Our (great) grandparents had to rely for their income, housing and the supply of goods and services mostly on independent employers, landlords, shopkeepers and artisans. We, on the other hand, are dealing with corporations, welfare institutions, public services, housing associations, building societies, banks and department stores. These organizations are not just rational, person-like servants, waiting quietly in the corners of society to be called upon. They also, and predominantly, act on their own account. Complex organizations are a new and powerful breed of social actors; they are corporate actors alongside the traditional, human actors.

Success and even survival in politics frequently depends on the ability of politicians and public officials to extricate themselves from various types of predicaments. Indeed, politicians are particularly adept at extricating themselves, with a wide range of explanations at their disposal to avoid blame for unpopular actions and decisions. However, there has been little systematic research on the effectiveness of various political blame-avoidance strategies. This Note has two purposes. First, a typology of blame-avoidance strategies, or accounts, is developed. Second, the results of an experiment examine the effectiveness of these various accounts in enhancing evaluations of a hypothetical public official are reported.

Political parties are not unitary actors; rather, each contains within its ranks a variety of different ideological beliefs and strategic orientations. Nor are individual political parties wholly isolated; rather, each has friends and allies among the other parties, and, of course, some implacable opponents.

Nurmi has analysed a number of voting procedures with respect to various criteria. It has been pointed out that acceptability voting not only fares as well as approval voting under Nurmi's type of analysis but also may be more intuitively appealing to voters.