What difference does it make that Britain has a monarch? ‘Some political scientists,’ as Edward Shils and Michael Young remarked at the time of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, ‘tend to speak as if Britain is now an odd kind of republic which happens to have as its chief functionary a Queen instead of a President’.2 Shils and Young felt that the intensity of public interest in the coronation quite clearly belied such a commonsense and demystified interpretation of British politics. Two decades later, signs of lively interest in the monarch still abound, as do the many royal activities that sustain that interest: the investiture of the Prince of Wales, the BBC film of the Royal Family, the London walkabout of the Royal Family, the engagement and wedding of Princess Anne. Even controversies over such matters as the size of the Civil List appear to enhance interest in the monarchy. Yet in this era of empirical political studies there has been little systematic analysis of the impact of the monarchy on Britain. The evidence is especially weak about the impact of what Bagehot considered to be the monarchy's most important function — not the occasional and subtle royal initiatives at

Both the classical Romans and the classical Fascists of Mussolini referred to the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum, ‘our sea’. The rugged peninsula of Italy cuts the sea in half, making Italy, at least by geography, a Mediterranean country. At the same time, it is a European country, a central actor in the long history of both the Mediterranean and Europe. When the center of Europe gravitated toward that sea, the peninsula was near the center of the world and Italy was a major link between Europe and the Middle East, North Africa, and the Moslem world. As the focus of Europe moved north and west, Italy became more marginal; but as a Catholic country it remained oriented largely to Europe. The Christian and Moslem sides of the Mediterranean developed in different directions.

The introduction of more rigorous policy analysis into comparative politics reveals an important discontinuity in empirical democratic theory. The problem is not an entirely new one, but the dilemmas presented in looking more carefully at sub-national political systems, and in trying to compare sub-national systems cross-nationally, lend new urgency to this issue. On the one hand, policy studies of budgetary change and resource allocation over time in industrial democracies show that change occurs very slowly; indeed, the budgetary performance of most such governments can be predicted with very small errors given modest longitudinal information. On the other hand, the institutional infrastructure of the industrial democracies is geared to making major shifts in political control, presumably in response to popular preferences and with some notion of desired adjustments in governmental performance: yet the choices actually confronted by governments almost never take such simple politically determined forms; policy choices instead take the form of relative gains and benefits, trade-offs in expected impact of marginal resource changes, and gradual increases as new expenditures and investments can be absorbed in the public sector.

Appointments and removals or resignations of leading personnel in the Soviet Union constitute the raw data analysed in this article. These career movements are not examined in the ‘kremlinological’ manner, as individual transfers related to a particular policy change or factional struggle. The scope here is both more limited and more general — more limited in that the job transfers considered are confined to one union republic; and more general in that the raw data embrace all transfers of the republic's elite over a period of seventeen years. The aim is to discover both general career patterns and changes in these patterns over time, and to assess the significance of both.

'Life is all opposites, and a child born with a silver spoon may have to swallow many spoonfuls of bitterness.’ (The childhood nurse of Sir Henry Page Croft MP, quoted in My Life of Strife by Sir Henry Page Croft — later Lord Croft.)

Relationships between the public and the political elite in Britain are generally thought to be explicable in terms of a ‘strong leadership’ hypothesis, according to which the public responds to initiatives put forward by leading political actors. Reflecting the popular will is not thought to be a highly prized activity among British politicians, who supposedly share the general cultural expectation that the public defers to the wisdom of those more knowledgeable than themselves, the public being content with the opportunity to pronounce electorally on the fitness of the Government at least once every five years. Occasionally voices are heard demanding that more attention be paid to the wishes of the general public, as in recent years in regard to the Common Market and capital punishment, but these demands have so far gone unheeded.