In the Westminster system the prime minister's active participation in parliamentary proceedings is a key mechanism for ensuring the accountability of the executive. We survey the evolution of the four main prime ministerial activities across the period 1868–1990. There has been a long-term decline in prime ministers' speeches in the Commons, a stepped decline in debating interventions and a significant decrease in question-answering from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. But prime ministerial statement-making increased after 1940, ebbing away again in the 1980s. And the downward drift in question-answering was halted by procedural innovations since the 1960s, which standardized the frequency of prime ministers' appearances and lead to the dominance of ‘open’ questions. We trace the varied impacts of institutional changes and shorter-term political or personal influences. The direct accountability of the prime minister to Parliament has undoubtedly declined, a trend probably paralleled by decreasing indirect accountability. These findings raise fundamental questions about executive-legislature relations in the United Kingdom

Arguments that infer the inevitable decline of European socialist and social democratic parties from the changing class structures of advanced capitalist societies have two major flaws. Firstly, they do not adequately reconstruct the link between citizens' experiences in markets, work organizations and the sphere of social reproduction, on the one hand, and the formation of political consciousness, on the other. Secondly, such propositions do not model the strategic terrain of party competition and intra-party decision making on which socialist politicians devise voter appeals. This article will first present a sketch of an alternative theory of preference formation that does not rely on conventional class categories and then analyse party competition as faced by social democrats under advanced capitalism. It will then test ‘naive’ and ‘sophisticated’ theories of class politics and account for their shortcomings in terms of the alternative theoretical framework.

This article analyses the influence of economic conditions upon the behaviour of voters in elections to Australian, Canadian and New Zealand legislatures between the First and Second World Wars. It shows that this influence need be neither uniform nor unconditional: rather, it is contingent upon both political and economic phenomena. The existence of the relationship as well as its form and strength differ systematically in different settings. It varies according to the stratum of the electorate, the point in time and the type of party analysed.

In a familiar observation, members of the British House of Commons are demographically unrepresentative of the British population in terms of gender, race, education and class. This article takes a fresh look at the reasons why this is the case, based on data from the British Candidate Study, 1992. This study analyses the background, experience and attitudes of MPs, candidates, applicants, party members and voters. By comparing strata we can see whether the outcome of the selection process reflects the supply of those willing to stand for Parliament or the demands of local party activists when adopting candidates for local constituencies.