Once upon a time, during the early 1960s, all undergraduate International Relations courses in the United Kingdom were deemed incomplete if they did not contain a number of lectures on the question of the relationship between a country's foreign policy and the shape, size and other attributes of its national political community. The lectures often evolved into a discussion of the relative advantages of possessing a large population, and whether or not this was an element in a state's power (as in the case of the Soviet Union) or of a state's weakness, and hence of its inherent inability to attain a wider range of desirable foreign policy goals (as in the case of India). The debate was usually fairly inconclusive.

Masterson criticizes my argument concerning the incoherence of the principle of equality of opportunity on three grounds: (a) that I assume that ‘if a principle cannot be effected absolutely it must be discarded as a principle’ (p. 2), whereas he claims that so long as one can move in the direction of realizing the principle, then it can be a tenable working principle; (b) that I seem to believe that if a principle can be overruled by another principle in particular cases, it ceases to be a valid principle (p. 3); and (c) that I assume that a principle must apply to all cases, whereas he claims that a principle could be formulated so as not to apply to all cases (p. 5).

On one point my careless phrasing has led Charvet, and perhaps others, to misunderstand me. I want to remedy that and to comment on ‘state of nature’ theorizing and on formulating principles.

The concept of ‘rules of the game’ which regulate behaviour in a variety of political situations is one which has only been fully elaborated in recent years. As yet, ‘there has been little research systematically investigating the character and consequences of rules of the game’, particularly in relation to the operation of local political systems.

The critical importance of marginal constituencies and wards in determining national and local election results in England leads to the question ‘What makes a ward marginal? ’ The results of research on 384 electoral contests over ten years in Birmingham shows that the social class composition of a ward primarily determines its marginality or safety. The class composition associated with a high degree of marginality is as follows: for every non-manual worker there are likely to be twice as many foremen and skilled manual workers, and for every non-manual worker there are likely to be between one and a half and twice as many semi and unskilled manual workers. The further a ward departs from these ratios the more likely it is to be safe for the Labour or Conservative Party. The ratios are highly reliable in picking out marginal and safe wards in normal political periods involving only small swings of electoral opinion between the parties. During abnormal periods, such as the landslide against the Labour Party between 1965 and 1969, the ratios shift slightly but are nevertheless a good indicator of marginal propensity.

As Richard Rose has emphasized, the stabilizing factors in the British political system are many and strong. The political institutions and procedures have gradually adapted to changing circumstances; the society is homogeneous and integrated; and supportive attitudes have been successfully transmitted from generation to generation.

One of the reasons for paying attention to the results of American mid-term elections is the hope that they will tell us something about the standing of the President's party with the electorate. But the electoral verdict is notoriously hard to interpret. Since the President is not himself standing for re-election, the verdict has to be inferred from the results of House and Senate races in which the national mood of the electorate may be obscured by local and temporary factors. This will be especially true in Senate races, with only some 33 seats at risk; but even in House elections, with some 435 seats at risk, a grave problem arises when one comes to compare the results with those of the preceding Presidential election. In every mid-term election since that of 1934, the party of the President, whether it be Republican or Democratic, has lost some of the seats it had won at the previous Presidential election. The net loss has been as low as four seats in 1962 and as high as seventy-one seats in 1938, but it has always occurred. Some loss to the President's party is considered to be ‘normal’ at mid term, and it is only to the extent that the actual loss diverges from the normal loss that implications can be drawn to the President's standing with the electorate.

At the time of going to press (November 1970) the Journal has proved successful in attracting articles but much less so in getting notes. I am sorry about this because one of the most important functions which we hoped the Journal would serve was that of improving communications within the discipline, especially in Britain. It is for that reason that we should like to give a generous amount of space for notes. But unless an editor is gifted with ESP he can hardly know that someone has had an idea or hit upon some new information suitable for publication in a note.

The Royal Commission on Local Government in England argued that size and proximity to an urban centre were important factors in explaining the differing degrees of parish political activity. This paper examines in more detail the reasons for the differing degrees of activity drawing upon my study in the Oxford area for illustrative examples. It must be emphasized at the very outset that the main objective of this paper is to suggest reasons for the variations in activity and not to compare the degrees of political activity in the Oxford area. In particular, I argue that proximity to an urban centre (location within the immediate hinterland) is more important than size and that there are three distinguishing features associated with location within the immediate hinterland. The distinguishing features are the rapidly growing parishes (size); the high expectations of suburban residents with regard to the standard of service provision (expectations); and the under-representation of the immediate hinterland on the County Council and the Rural District Councils (under-representation).

In ‘Support for Nation and Government among English Children’ (this Journal, Volume 1, pp. 25–48) Dennis, Lindberg and McCrone present extensive new evidence on British political socialization, which they associate with a general decline in support for the British system. So powerful is their interpretation of the evidence in relation to British stability, that there is a temptation to take it as the only logical consequence of the data reviewed. This Comment is intended to suggest that another interpretation is possible, that Britain may remain stable in spite of somewhat more critical attitudes among the young and indeed that such critical attitudes may contribute positively to stability.

It has long been fashionable for political scientists to account for the stability of democratic regimes by the sorts of cleavages that occur in the society. One such theory runs that the more cleavages reinforce one another the more unstable the regime will be, whilst the more cleavages overlap the more stable it will be. Unfortunately, up till now

the discussion has been carried on largely in intuitive terms, without a rigorous way of measuring and quantifying the key variables. Rae and Taylor's recent book attempts to start remedying this defect.

Messrs Dennis, Lindberg and McCrone have written an interesting article 1 in which they draw the conclusion that those of us who have written textbooks about British politics should modify some of our generalizations about British attitudes and traditions. But before we all rush to revise our next editions, I should like to raise some critical questions about thearticle. I will enumerate these to meet the editor's request for brevity, (i) Why are we not told anything about the composition of the sample? It has been shown that political attitudes among British children are related both to the social class of their parents and to the type of school attended, 2 and without any indication of the class background or schools of the children interviewed it is rather difficult to assess the results. It would also be helpful to know exactly when the survey was conducted.