Advocates of the welfare state often appeal to social justice as the moral basis of their claim that distribution of scarce resources ought to be made in proportion to the needs of potential recipients, at least to a certain minimum level of satisfaction. More generally, it is commonly assumed that need is certainly one and perhaps the main factor which ought to determine any just distribution of benefits and burdens. Thus, when the Labour Government abolished medical prescription charges under the National Health Service in 1964 the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, defended this step in the House of Commons by saying that it was ‘unjust’ to put such ‘burdens on the old and sick’ and he went on to cite the principle ‘from each according to his means, to each according to his needs’.

One of the most striking features of British general election results is the large variation in turnout from one constituency to another. In the 1970 election, for instance, turnout in Britain ranged from 44–9 per cent in Stepney to 85–3 per cent in Cornwall North. Moreover, the variation in turnout has become greater in recent years. While the mean turnout in general elections has tended to fall, the standard deviation of turnout has increased steadily from 5–3 in the 1955 election to 6–9 in the 1970 election. With the exception of the Nuffield studies, however, there have been few attempts to investigate this variation. Political scientists have concentrated instead on describing and attempting to explain differences in turnout between different social and demographic groups.

My title is plagiarized from an article written by Trotsky's friend Adolf Ioffe for the second anniversary of the October Revolution.The ‘first proletarian government’ was not the Council of People's Commissars, approved by the Second Congress of Soviets at the time of the seizure of power ‘for the administration of the country up to the convening of the Constituent Assembly’, and described in the enabling decree as ‘the Temporary Worker and Peasant Government’. Before long the Council of People's Commissars (CPC), under Lenin's chairmanship, was indeed to become the key executive body in the Soviet regime, but some weeks were needed to acquire the necessary staff and procedures and even longer to establish effective control over the inherited machinery of administration and to convert it to the CPC's own purposes.

The results of this analysis may be reduced to four inter-related findings. First, evident throughout the paper is the similarity of activists at all three schools. Cross-national similarities consistently predominate over differences. The same patterns of relationships are found everywhere. This fact, among other things, enhances the credibility of our findings.

My primary purpose in this review is to provide a detailed critique of the internal logic of Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Before doing this, however, I should like to consider briefly the phenomenon of which it is an exemplar: the ‘in’ book. For this raises some general questions of interest.

In the literature on new nations, much attention has been given to the threat to nationhood posed by cultural and linguistic variations, rather less to the political repercussions of the regional inequality with which such variations are often associated. Regional disparities in resources and services inherited at independence tend to be compounded by policies which stress growth rather than equity. Given that such imbalances are not easily or speedily corrected by means of compensatory economic policies – even if the will exists – the political vulnerability of governments to regional disaffection is bound up with the question of whether it is possible for a common national outlook to be superimposed upon regional variation. The purpose of this brief Note is to test two hypotheses which relate to this question against Kenyan data and experience.

The ‘paradox’ of swing resides in the expectation that ‘if national influences were completely paramount,. swings would not involve identical fractions of the total vote or electorate in each constituency, but a fraction proportional to the prior strength of the party that was losing ground’. The mass of the evidence is however that swings are virtually equal across constituencies. The intention here is to demonstrate that the ‘prior proportional’ expectation is a mistaken one since it leads to a logical contradiction, and therefore that the phenomenon of equal swing is not paradoxical.

Professor Greenstein has asked me to point out that his article, which I criticized in this Journal ('American Democracy Reconsidered, Part II and Conclusion’, III (1973), 129–67, p. 152), was a slightly condensed version of the original taken from P. Coulter, ed., The Politics of Metropolitan Areas. The original article appeared in The Annals of th American Academy of Political and Social Science, 353 (1964), and included the following