We explore the reasons for the unexpected defeat of Winston Churchill's Conservatives by Labour in the British general election of 1945. Was the outcome a result of Churchill's election campaign errors, as many have supposed, or did the coming-of-age of a new political generation make it a foregone conclusion? Much controversy in the partisanship literature centres on whether electoral realignments result primarily from conversion of existing voters or from mobilization of previously non-voting individuals. In particular, the 1930s US realignment has been the focus of considerable debate. In this article we shed new light on realignment processes by examining the 1945 British realignment that brought the Labour party to power. We find that, in this more straightforward case, the critical impetus came from new voters rather than from converts. Our findings raise questions that need to be confronted in the analysis of other realignments, such as that accompanying the American New Deal. They also shed new light on a much-interpreted episode in British electoral history.

Does political sophistication influence the way in which voters use issues in evaluating parties and candidates? We consider two models of mass-elite linkage: the traditional spatial model, which conceives of issues as continua of policy options, and the directional model, which conceives of issues as simple dichotomies. The traditional model is more cognitively demanding and is the implicit model of journalists and political elites. We would expect, therefore, that better educated and more politically involved voters would rely on it, while less sophisticated voters would follow the directional paradigm. We investigate this hypothesis with survey data from the 1988 presidential election in the United States and the 1989 parliamentary election in Norway. The results show that at all levels of sophistication and in both countries, voters generally follow the directional model.

Explanations of cross-national variation in levels of popular support for democracy can be distinguished by the relative emphasis they place on the importance of economic and political factors. ‘First generation’ theorists emphasized economic variables, including levels of economic development and rising expectations. In contrast, ‘second generation’ writers have focused on the role of political factors, including the mode of the transition to democracy itself and the effectiveness of the institutions and electoral processes which emerge. This article uses national probability samples from Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine to examine potential influences on support for democratic processes in postcommunist Europe. These influences include evaluations of electoral and market performance, experience of economic well-being in the recent past and the near future, and indicators of the perceived responsiveness of the electoral system. Although both political and economic factors are found to be significant, multivariate analysis indicates that political experience is of greater weight than is economic. Moreover, when support for marketization is controlled for, there is very little link from economic experience to support for democracy.

A recent article in this Journal (Patrick Dunleavy and G. W. Jones with others, ‘Leaders, Politics and Institutional Change: The Decline of Prime Ministerial Accountability to the House of Commons, 1868–1990’, 23 (1993), 267–98) demonstrated a clear secular decline in prime ministers' accountability to Parliament. It examined the frequency with which prime ministers from W. E. Gladstone to Margaret Thatcher accounted directly to MPs by answering oral questions and making statements, major speeches and minor interventions in debates. The decline in each of these activities had followed a different pattern. There was a steep fall in prime ministers' participation in oral questions until the late 1950s, but after parliament and Harold Macmillan had agreed that prime ministers would answer questions for 15 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the fall seemed to have been arrested. The evidence from John Major's premiership, which is presented below, shows that, even within this apparently rigid timetable, there has been further decline. The making of statements, after a period of near absence, had revived in the 1940s, but declined noticeably again in the 1980s. Dunleavy and Jones concluded that increases in the number of prime-ministerial statements were associated with international and domestic crises, summits and the relaxation of procedural rules. Evidence from Major's performance reinforces these findings. The long-term trend towards fewer substantial speeches was found to have accelerated in the 1980s, a development which was mirrored in a fall in the number of debating interventions during the Thatcher years. The evidence on these two activities, presented below, indicates a partial return under Major to pre-Thatcher norms – though this revival may be only a temporary phenomenon.

R. J. Johnston produces two striking and counter-intuitive results on bargaining power in a European Union Council of Ministers expanded by the addition of the four states applying for entry in 1994. One is that the ‘big four’ member states, including the United Kingdom, have more power if the minority with power to block a proposal is set at 27 rather than 23. UK Prime Minister John Major damaged himself politically by first insisting that he would veto a proposal to increase the blocking threshold from 23 to 27 and then being forced to climb down from this position. As Johnston notes, this episode ‘led to several calls for his resignation from among his own party's MPs, including one in the House itself’. If British interests, as seen by the Euro-sceptics whom Mr Major was vainly trying to appease, were actually better served by a threshold of 27 than of 23, his actions appear doubly futile. This is apparent by reading across Johnston's Table 1, using either of the indices he proposes.

Garrett, McLean and Machover's critique (see pp. 563–8) of my recent Note on the use of power indices to analyse the UK's stance on qualified majority voting in the expanded European Union Council of Ministers focuses on both my choice of power index and the validity of the use of any such indices.