The choice of issues for debate is of central importance in any political system. By deciding what they will decide about, legislators also establish the terms and the most prominent participants in debate and, ultimately, the distribution of power and influence in the society. As Schattschneider has pointed out:

Political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power; the antagonists can rarely agree on what the issues are because power is involved in the definition. He who determines what politics is about runs the country, because the definition of alternatives is the choice of conflicts, and the choice of conflicts allocates power.

What is the political role of the peasantry? Is it a source of revolution or reaction? For the Third World nations, where this is an issue of special importance, the answer is by no means clear. In the advanced capitalist countries, however, the political impact of peasants has become less ambiguous. Although Lipset once argued that radical consciousness in the United States had shown itself primarily through agrarian struggles, farmers have now evolved into perhaps the most conservative occupational group in America. Harrington Moore, considering the historical place of peasants in the modernization of France, England and Germany, details their revolutionary contribution. But, concerning more recent times, Huggett indicates that, in general, the peasants of Western Europe have expressed themselves politically through the parties of the Right. The contemporary evidence presented here demonstrates that these strong right-wing sentiments on the part of the peasantry persist.

The analysis described below forms an extension to the Netherlands and the United States of research on British political recruitment that has already been reported in this Journal. The object of the research is to make quantitative estimates of the influence of personal characteristics in pushing the socially better endowed into active politics, and particularly to measure the extent to which advantages on some characteristics make up for disadvantages on others. These processes are of interest because they determine to a large extent what type of persons will emerge as elective politicians, with possible consequences for agenda-setting and policy-making.

The first twenty years of the Federal Republic of Germany afford a particularly interesting context for the study of popular evaluation of executive figures. The importance of popular perceptions of executive political authorities has been dramatically demonstrated in contemporary German political history. The role of attitudes toward the leading executive figure in the current democratic regime has been the subject of much speculation. A well-established view suggests that the étatist and authoritarian attitudes that supported previous regimes have been very important in establishing the new one. Most important in this regard is the part played by Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic, in shaping party and electoral politics in the new regime's early years.

This article is an examination of the English judicial process as a subject of research. My perspective is that of a political scientist whose major field of interest has been American judicial politics. If my subject were the House of Commons or party politics in Britain, it would be appropriate to focus my examination upon an evaluation of the relevant political science literature. But political scientists thus far have virtually ignored the English courts as an object of study; the limited scholarship done on this set of institutions has been contributed chiefly by social scientists in other fields and by legal scholars. For this reason, my primary goal is not to assess the existing literature on the judicial process. Rather, I wish to communicate this literature to political scientists and to suggest directions that they might take in studying the judicial branch.

This research is addressed to the problem of constructing scales of political attitudes within the British House of Commons. Our aim, broadly, is to produce measures that will enable us to distinguish between backbenchers of the same party – for example, a Right-Left scale applied to the Labour party – and to relate these data to biographical variables and other measures of political behaviour. Moreover, by observing the relationship between Members' positions on different scales, and changes over time, we hope to learn more about the belief-systems of Members of Parliament.

This paper is based upon data collected in a survey of public attitudes toward the energy crisis, and toward U.S. energy policies, in several California communities in mid-1975. The authors believe that some of the information obtained in this survey makes possible a significant, though by no means conclusive and exhaustive, comparison of two models of civic ‘affect’. Following the usage of Almond and Verba, we take ‘affect’ to be ‘feelings about the political system, its roles, personnel, and performance’.