The debate about electoral reform in Britain has taken a new turn with the latest upsurge in mid-term support for the Liberals, the launch of the SDP, and the immediate electoral success of the Alliance between the two parties. We do not deal here with the durability or consequences of these developments. We are concerned with the electoral system that they put under challenge. This concern is the more important because, as we shall show here, the working of that system altered fundamentally between 1955 and 1979. Before considering how fragile ‘the mould of British polities’ is or whether it should be broken, it is appropriate to reconsider and remeasure the precise shape and texture of that mould, and establish what are the chemical bonds which have determined those characteristics.

As the Reagan administration neared the end of its first full year in office, interpretations of the meaning of the 1980 presidential election were still as varied as the political positions of analysts and commentators. The politically dominant interpretation, promoted by the new administration and its supporters, was that the election provided a mandate to bring about several fundamental changes in the role of government in American social and economic life. In recommendations whose scope had not been matched since the first days of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the Reagan administration set about responding to what it understood to be popular demands for reduced government spending and taxes, expansion of the national defence establishment, limitation of environmental protection in favour of the development of energy resources, and a myriad of other tasks designed to encourage free enterprise by ‘getting government off the backs of the people’. With varying degrees of enthusiasm for the new administration's programmes, scores of Democratic politicians shared the interpretation of Reagan's victory as a new electoral mandate which rejected many of the fundamental policies of Democratic administrations from Roosevelt to Carter. This interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of the 1980 election was expressed by Democratic congressmen of many political colours who decried the bankruptcy of their own leadership and affirmed the victor's sense of mandate by supporting the President's various legislative programmes.

The existence of fairly strong correlations between newspaper readership and socio-political variables is well known. The interesting question about these correlations is not whether they exist but why they exist. In their analysis of British political behaviour in the sixties, Butler and Stokes put forward three possible explanations.

If one were asked to describe the process of policy change in the United States in one word, that word would surely be ‘incremental’. Students of the Congressional process can point to a number of factors which account for delay in changes of policy; it is only recently that they have begun to examine the occasional departures from Congressional intractability in matter of public policy. This paper seeks to further our understanding of how internal legislative conditions can produce or inhibit policy change. While the first scholars to call attention to this phenomenon noted that policy changes followed critical realignments, others have made a more general case for the ability of Congress to pass important legislation, arguing that Congressional potential for policy change depends largely upon the interactive effects of both majority and minority size and unity. Policy changes have been enacted by those Congresses with large and/or cohesive majorities and small and/or disorganized minorities. These conditions often follow realigning elections, but occur at other times as well.