This article employs a semiotic approach to investigate the meaning of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ with a view to clarifying our understanding of this term. Contrary to conventional interpretations it demonstrates that ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is an empty signifier which is subject to definition on a contemporary basis by the CPSU itself. However, it also demonstrates that ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is the central element in a mechanism of control which bears all the hallmarks of a classic linguistic double bind. It therefore concludes that while ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is referentially open to re-definition it is connotatively attached to the practices of the CPSU. It is both fixed and not fixed in meaning.

The resulting analysis leads to a critique of terms which are conventionally taken for granted by Sovietologists and introduces a new methodological approach to the study of ‘Marxism-Leninism’.

The social cleavage theory of parly systems has provided a major framework for the study of Western party systems. It has been quite unimportant in studying other party systems, especially those of developing countries, where comparative development, and not mass electoral politics, has been the focus of study. This article reports the results of an attempt to bridge these traditions by analysing popular support for the Congress Party of India in terms of the expectations of the social cleavage theory of parties. This analysis illustrates the degree to which Indian partisanship conforms to the expectations of the theory. More importantly, this social cleavage theory analysis offers some new perspectives on (1) the inability of the Indian political system to develop national parties other than the Congress and (2) the ‘disaggregation’ of the Congress party.

The electoral domination of the Conservative party during the past decade has been interpreted by many as evidence of a long-term shift in the balance of public support from Labour to the Conservatives. This article argues that such a shift has not occurred. Rather, the stability apparent in recent election results disguises considerable underlying volatility. The balance of public support between the major parties continues to be highly unstable and subject to large and precipitous fluctuations in response to relatively small economic changes and ordinary political events. Recent Conservative victories appear to be the results more of good timing and luck than of any fundamental, long-term dynamic in British politics.

Dodd is generally credited with providing clear empirical support for the proposition that, in the period after the Second World War, minimal winning coalitions in European party governments will tend to last longer in office than non-minimal winning coalitions. There has been a considerable body of research on this and related questions. Dodd, as well as most other authors treating cabinet coalition formation, has attempted to model features of cabinet formation such as cabinet duration or cabinet type (e.g. minimal winning v. minority government v. oversized coalitions) largely or entirely using data pooled from all cabinets in each of a number of different countries over some considerable time period. One difficulty with this method is that system-level variables (such as number of parties, or the presence of large anti-system parties), which might be able to explain aggregate-level between-county variations in cabinet type or cabinet durability, are not likely to be the same variables that are useful in explaining within-country differences. A second difficulty is that certain system-level characteristics such as effective number of parties or number of cleavage dimensions are highly correlated with both cabinet type and cabinet duration and, as a consequence, these variables are highly correlated with one another when pooled cross-national data are used. Thus, if the analyst is not very careful, results of pooled cross-national data may lead to mistakes about causal structure and a confusion of within-country and between-country effects.