The academic literature on interest groups has tended to concentrate on the assessment of the relative influence of these groups in different political systems, and on the implications of the activities of interest groups for democratic ideology. In recent years, however, the work of Mancur Olson has stimulated an increasing interest in the formation of interest groups, and in the reasons why individuals (or corporate bodies) join them. The aim of this article is to examine Olson's analysis in the light of a study of one major British economic interest group, the Confederation of British Industry. In the course of this examination I hope to illustrate some of the weaknesses of Olson's analysis and to suggest how it might be refined and developed.

Inherent in many models of voting, as well as in defences of representative democracy, is the assumption that the voting public has knowledge of and opinions about public policy issues. In recent years in the United States a stream of scholarly articles has been devoted to assessing not just the extent to which issue knowledge and opinions exist but also the extent to which they influence electoral decisions. This new literature suggests that issue-related perceptions and attitudes are rather more important in the electoral process than earlier studies had suggested. This increased focus on issues appears to reflect both methodological changes in the analysis of them and also real changes in the importance of policy issues in American electoral politics. By contrast, students of British electoral behaviour have made few systematic attempts to assess the fit between popular attitudes and knowledge of party policy positions on issues. Instead, the conventional wisdom is repeated which holds that ‘a majority of people are either ignorant of, or disagree with, the specific policies of the party they support’. The implication of this seems to be that electors' familiarity with issues is so low, and the holding of policy attitudes by them so uncommon, that rigorous analysis of issues in the context of electoral politics is unnecessary.

The military regime has now become a common phenomenon throughout the world. Research on the military in low-income systems used to focus on the military coup rather than on the military regime, but in recent years this imbalance has lessened. Moreover, many of the old ‘standard findings’ about military regimes have come to be rejected. It is fitting that they should have been since they tended to be the products more of stereotyping and inadequate theorizing than of systematic research.

Theories of policy formation derived from the experience of one country are not always easy to apply in another. This is particularly true of policy making in British cities, where scholars have often found that the relevance of theories developed in the United States is strictly limited. This paper seeks to explore two approaches that have been influential in orienting theory-building in American local politics – the ‘elite’ approach and the ‘pluralist’ – and to examine their relevance to policy analysis in urban Britain. Our contention is that both of these approaches, if reformulated so as to apply to policy-making processes in different arenas of decision, afford valuable insights. Data collected in three Greater London boroughs, which were attempting a vast reorganization of secondary education, suggest that distinctly British patterns of pluralist and elite-oriented policy-making behavior are related to particular types of governmental outputs.

One observation about the budgets of governments has passed into the conventional wisdom: budget-making, we are told, is a process of ‘incremental decision making’. The approach of the incrementalists is directed primarily to the question of how the creation of the new budget in a particular year (‘the budgetary process’) is to be explained. The approach seeks to characterize how budgeters respond to the problem of allocating resources and to develop explanatory models of budgetary outputs. But, despite the volume of research that now exists on budgetary incrementalism, the operationalization of the concept remains an issue, and many of the empirical studies have the limited perspective of a single budget-making system – that is, of one set of resource allocators, who employ the same standard operating procedures, rules of search, and so on. This paper has two objectives: (1) to explicate some simple operational models of budgetary incrementalism; and (2) to examine the adequacy of these models by means of an empirical test in four comparable budget-making systems – British county boroughs.

The elitist-pluralist controversy is a long and complex one and most participants in the debate will readily acknowledge that there are several distinct though related questions ‘at issue’. It is equally apparent that a great variety of concepts has been used by those who have written on the subject and that the definition and usage of these concepts is in no way standardized.

Over a number of years, and with concerns as far apart as democratic theory and organizational behaviour, many commentators have studied the patterns of recruitment in local government and the contents of the job that elected officials take upon themselves. Most of these analyses have convincingly shown a tendency for political actors to possess a higher average socioeconomic status than the population from which they are drawn. One student is explicit in saying that ‘politics is a middle-class job and the training appropriate for middle-class jobs is also a training for politics’. What has not, however, been subject to such extended consideration is the question of differences among groups of legislators themselves. This Note attempts to restore the balance by reporting briefly on a limited and exploratory investigation of patterns of leadership/influence in one Scottish local council.

The strong relationship between social class and partisan choice is one of the most extensively documented facts of British political life; but that relationship declined markedly during the 1960s, as Butler and Stokes have shown. Their lucid documentation of the declining class–party nexus is among the major findings of the second edition of their book, and, as class-based partisanship is particularly low among the young, many might conclude that the relationship between class and party will continue to decline in future. It would, however, be premature to reach this conclusion.

Definitions of the political party in the context of Western competitive electoral politics have usually centred on the notion that the critical function of the political party is power-seeking or power-wielding. In practice, of course, Western parties of the unpaid voluntary kind cannot be solely concerned with power-seeking in the sense of vote-getting; they must also take the opinions and wishes of their own activists into account, at least to some extent. Thus, Epstein's emphasis on the nomination and electoral functions of political parties, although fundamentally correct, should not be allowed to obscure other central preoccupations of party leaders, in particular the problems they often face in attempting to keep an organization in being between elections without recourse to extensive material payoffs in the shape of patronage or regular salaries for large numbers of activists.

The proper role of the values of the doer in the doing of political theory is a continuing and vexed problem. Is the holding of values an encumbrance or an integral part of the process? Recently Lukes has made a determined effort to argue, in the case of one particular concept, ‘power’, that theoretical and value disputes cannot in principle be disentangled: ‘I shall argue for a view of power (that is, a way of identifying it) which is radical in both the theoretical and political senses (and I take these senses in this context to be intimately related). The view I shall defend is… ineradicably evaluative and “essentially contested”.’ The notion of ‘essentially contested’ is defined by reference to Gallie, and although the above quotation may be ambiguous, Lukes' later usage makes clear that he is claiming that it is the concept of power (and not his metatheoretic statement about it) that is ‘essentially contested’. This claim is technically mistaken and the mistake, I would argue, is substantively pernicious.