This article examines citizens' attitudes towards the two major parties in the United States since 1952 and in West Germany since 1969 employing open-ended data from each country's National Election Study time series. Despite similar declining trends in party identification in the two countries, it is found that the patterns of change in party images are markedly different. In the United States it is shown that voters have become increasingly neutral towards the two parties as the focus has turned more and more towards the candidates. In contrast, in West Germany voters have come to have a more balanced view of the parties, seeing both positive and negative features of both. Thus in both cases there has been a decline in polarized strong partisanship (‘my party right or wrong’), but for different reasons. In the United States this decline can be seen as a sign of the decay of an ageing and outdated party system; in West Germany it can be seen as the development of realistic and balanced views of a party system which is just reaching full maturity. The implications for analysing party system development in Eastern Europe are discussed.

Do party manifestos matter to government policy? Does a genuine party mandate operate within the British political process? These questions are generally neglected in analyses of British politics, but they are crucial in assessing how far political parties transmit electoral preferences into government action. We try to answer them through a novel use of available data, using content analysis to code and classify policy emphases within the post-war election programmes of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties. Statistical analysis reveals that government party programmes are remarkably well reflected in post-election policy priorities, measured as percentages of central government spending in major policy areas. This gives strong support to traditional mandate theory within the context of the ‘Westminster model’ of party government. Anomalies, such as a strong relationship between Liberal emphases and expenditures in three key areas, and the more consistent relationship of expenditures with Conservative rather than Labour priorities, are also considered.

Surveys sponsored by the Commission of the European Communities are employed to study value change in West Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Italy between 1970–71 and 1990 and in Denmark and Ireland between 1973 and 1990. During these years generational replacement had a major impact on value trends in all eight societies. In Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark generational replacement contributed to the growth of Postmaterialism, and in France, Italy and Ireland replacement was the major force creating the trend towards Postmaterialism. Even in Belgium, where there was only a slight move towards Postmaterialism, replacement may have prevented a movement towards Materialism. For the European public as a whole, replacement contributed to the growth of Postmaterialism. However, the impact of replacement is likely to be smaller in the coming two decades because relatively low birth rates during the late 1970s and the 1980s will contribute to lower rates of generational replacement.

In Britain in recent years the study of tactical voting has become something of a growth industry. Unresolved, however, is a key question: the number of tactical voters. Despite an election-night estimate of 17 per cent, a variety of later analysts have estimated that little more than one in twenty voters behaved tactically in 1987, a surprisingly low figure in the light of the efforts of various groups to encourage tactical voting in order to avoid fragmentation of the anti-Thatcher vote. Most recently, Heath, Curtice and Jowell, in their analysis of the British Election Study survey, report that ‘just 6.5% of major party voters indicated in their replies a tactical motivation for their vote’.

Movements of the heavenly bodies are not affected in any discernible way by the fact that there are people on earth recording the apparent movement. Similarly it is almost inconceivable that the planets would alter their orbits because of Kepler's discovery and publication of the laws of planetary motion. The social and behavioural sciences are different in that the objects under investigation may behave differently as a result of the research process. This is particularly true when the method involves naturalistic observation, surveys or experiments. When people behave differently because of being research subjects, this is called a Hawthorne effect.

One of the most striking features of British general election results is the large variation in turnout across constituencies. In 1983, for instance, the mean turnout was 72.6 per cent of the registered electorate but it ranged from 82.1 per cent in Carmarthen to 51.8 per cent in the City of London and Westminster. Moreover, these variations tend to be reproduced in successive elections – the bivariate correlation between constituency turnout in the 1983 and 1987 elections for all 633 mainland Britain constituencies is +0.94.