This is a sequel to an article written by the same author, which was published in the Journal in 1986. The current pace of economic and political reform in the Soviet Union represents a ‘paradigm’ change, which Western specialists have found difficult and challenging to assimilate; concepts have lagged behind events. The key to understanding these changes and the reason why they have been so long delayed lies in the fusion of economic and political institutions formed during the Stalin period. The interdependence of economic and political factors is explored as a basis for understanding why political reform has been a necessary accompaniment to economic reform. One can discern in the pattern of political reform an attempt to increase the level of democratization without fundamentally destabilizing the political and social order. Since this strategy requires that a new political culture will take root faster than the growth of popular discontent at deteriorating economic performance and frustrated national aspirations, the author is pessimistic as to the outcome.

The case for secrecy in voting depends on the assumption that voters reliably vote for the political outcomes they want to prevail. No such assumption is valid. Accordingly, voting procedures should be designed to provide maximal incentive for voters to vote responsibly. Secret voting fails this test because citizens are protected from public scrutiny. Under open voting, citizens are publicly answerable for their electoral choices and will be encouraged thereby to vote in a discursively defensible manner. The possibility of bribery, intimidation or blackmail moderates this argument but such dangers will be avoidable in many contemporary societies without recourse to secrecy.

Japan uses simple plurality elections with multi-member districts to elect its lower house. This system tends to produce competition among n + 1 candidates per district. This ‘law of simple plurality elections’ is a structural generalization akin to Duverger's Law. Evidence from Japan also indicates that the causal mechanism behind this ‘law’ is not strategic voting, although strategic voting occurs, but elite coalition building. It is further argued that the connection between structure and behaviour is learning and not rationality. Equilibria are reached slowly through trial and error processes. Once reached, the equilibrium is unstable because parties and candidates try to change it. Even without rational actors and stable equilibria, however, this structural generalization accurately describes the dynamics of electoral competition at the district level in Japan.

Comparable survey data from Norway, Sweden and the United States are used to examine trends in political trust for the period 1964–86. During the early part of that period trust declined in all three countries; later it recovered for Norway but continued to plummet in Sweden and the United States. Three major features of the party system are hypothesized to explain the difference in these trends for the three countries. These features are: the structural aspects of the party system; the public's cognitive judgements of the parties as representatives of the policy interests; and the possibility that a negative rejection of political parties as undesirable institutions may spill over to citizen evaluations of government more generally.