Two main themes have been emphasized in recent description and interpretation of English political behaviour. One theme traces the stability of our political system to a widespread attachment to the civic values of submission to authority and an intermittent popular participation. The other theme explains support (at least among the manual working class) for the Conservative party in terms of deference to a traditional elite and/or a pragmatic appraisal of that party's economic and welfare capabilities. Little attention has been paid to the validity of either interpretation or to the relations between them. Accordingly, this paper first reviews the evidence for both themes and attempts to relate them, and then introduces some new survey data to throwfurther light on this problematic subject.

Political socialization refers to the developmental process through which political orientations and patterns of behavior are acquired by members of a society. Some persons acquire only limited political dispositions as they mature while others continuously elaborate and revise personal systems of political belief, value, motivation and activity as they pass through childhood arid adult life. In some part socialization of political orientations is conscious self-adaptation to an otherwise confusing social environment. More often, perhaps, it is the result of taking unconscious cues and examples from such convenient sources as family, school, peers and mass media of communication.

In this article it is proposed to take another look at what have elsewhere been called ‘sources of diversity’ in British local government. The purpose is to show that across a sample of English and Welsh county boroughs, significant associations can be found between levels of expenditure in certain public service areas and both socio-economic and political variables. In particular, it will be shown that the presence of greater Labour representation on councils is associated in such areas as housing, education, and local health with higher levels and in the case of the police service with lower levels of expenditure.

It is only in connection with electoral law that the terms ‘majority principle’ and ‘proportionality’ are widely used. It seems to us meaningful to apply the two concepts also to the political decision-making process as a whole. In this broadened sense ‘majority principle’ and ‘proportionality’ denote certain models of conflict regulation. The majority model then denotes the regulation of conflict through majority decisions. The proportional model is much more difficult to describe: its basic characteristic is that all groups influence a decision in proportion to their numerical strength. Proportional conflict regulation is easiest to apply when a decision is concerned with several units, all of which are perceived as equivalent to one another. The classical case of this is the parliamentary election, for the parliamentary seats are perceived as equivalent to one another, so that by means of an appropriate electoral law they can relatively easily be distributed on a proportional basis among the different political groups. In Switzerland the election of the government by the parliament gives rise to an analogous situation, in that the seven seats in the Bundesrat (Federal Council) are perceived as equivalent to one another, so that they can likewise be relatively easily distributed on a proportional basis. In most other political systems the application of the rules of proportionality at the level of the government would entail greater difficulties, since the individual governmental posts are perceived as being of different value. The greatest difficulty presents itself when only a single office is to be filled, for example that of President. Here the application of proportional rules is only possible if rotation of office (i.e. proportionality in the temporal dimension) is brought into the reckoning, or if the disadvantage imposed on one group can be compensated by preference given to it in another decision.

Contemporary political science is rightly concerned with the complex relationship between the political process and the public policies in which it results. In understanding this relationship, it may be useful to distinguish two complementary aspects of the political process: (1) those which are relevant because they account for the policy preferences of elite-members and, (2) those elements, like voting and bargaining, which are of interest because they determine policy outcomes from given configurations of elite preferences. This paper offers a theoretical model for an important component of this second aspect: it is explicitly addressed to legislative voting processes and the underlying strategies of legislators as these contribute to the determination of policy outcomes. And, for the present, we take preference-formation as given.

As Richard Rose has emphasized, the stabilizing factors in the British political system are many and strong. The political institutions and procedures have gradually adapted to changing circumstances; the society is homogeneous and integrated; and supportive attitudes have been successfully transmitted from generation to generation.

The Royal Commission on Local Government in England argued that size and proximity to an urban centre were important factors in explaining the differing degrees of parish political activity. This paper examines in more detail the reasons for the differing degrees of activity drawing upon my study in the Oxford area for illustrative examples. It must be emphasized at the very outset that the main objective of this paper is to suggest reasons for the variations in activity and not to compare the degrees of political activity in the Oxford area. In particular, I argue that proximity to an urban centre (location within the immediate hinterland) is more important than size and that there are three distinguishing features associated with location within the immediate hinterland. The distinguishing features are the rapidly growing parishes (size); the high expectations of suburban residents with regard to the standard of service provision (expectations); and the under-representation of the immediate hinterland on the County Council and the Rural District Councils (under-representation).