Fifteen years have elapsed since the British Parliament enacted legislation designed to curb air pollution. The 1956 Clean Air Act appeared seven years in advance of comparable American legislation and well before the quality of the environment became a matter of world-wide concern. In view of the fact that Queen Elizabeth I had complained about smoke pollution in London, or that nineteenth-century novelists had penned vivid portraits of London's smoke and fog, the 1956 Act should perhaps be viewed as being at least a century late in appearing. Nevertheless, the Act did mark a distinctive policy innovation, particularly with regard to those provisions relating to smoke pollution from domestic sources. An analysis of the impact of those provisions will be the subject of this paper.

In Volume 1 Part 4, the figures on page 474 have been incorrectly printed. This leaf is offered as a replacement.

This paper sets out to consider two related questions: the significance of elections in single-party systems in underdeveloped countries, and the kind of study which political scientists have made of such elections.1

In the past, the literature of community power studies has been bedevilled by two interrelated divisions amongst those who have conducted these studies. On the one hand, there has been a complex and bitter dispute about techniques, and on the other there has been a battle between the Sociologists who espoused a stratification theory and saw in all community structures a recurrent pattern of elites, and the Political Scientists who, with almost equal persistence, have found pluralistic structures. In this paper we wish if possible to break with this increasingly barren discussion and to use the study of the town of Ashford in Kent, with which we have been engaged in recent years, in order to illustrate what we hope to be a rather more fruitful approach to the analysis of community power structure. Our contention is that in this field of political science, which has claimed to be extremely scientific in its approach, there has been no real attempt to apply a thorough-going scientific methodology, and, as a result, the discussion has become bogged-down in a dispute about methods, in which the protagonists have become so embroiled that they have lost sight of the basic problem. Important as has been this debate about methods, it has taken attention away from the need to develop a theoretical framework for the study of community power which will enable us to transcend a level of the discussion which has largely been conducted by two ideologically opposed schools of thought, each determined to prove the other wrong.

In 1953 the King of the Baganda entered into a political confrontation with the British Governor of Uganda, Sir Andrew Cohen. The issues at stake ranged from whether Uganda should be forcibly tied to Kenya and Tanganyika to form an East African federation dominated by white settlers to the more immediate issue concerning the limits of the Governor's authority over the King of the Baganda. The British finally decided to send the Kabaka away into exile in England. There thus started one of the most fascinating wrangles between an African tribal community and the Colonial Office in London. The Kabaka's people were plunged into grief, but not into a spirit of resignation. Debates, petitions, and demonstrations in favour of the Kabaka's return became part of the strategy of his people to get him back to his throne.

There have been a number of attempts in recent years to define the subject-matter of political science and to provide a theoretical framework within which the discipline may be expected to develop. Among these, the work of David Easton occupies a leading place.1 This article discusses how successful Easton has been in adumbrating a general theory embracing the discipline. It then offers a rather looser and less ambitious framework within which the theories collectively called ‘political science’ may be placed and their interrelationships perceived.

Nobody, least of all anyone intending to allude to sociology and stay respectable, should nowadays dare employ a generalization from a single instance. Nonetheless (since this is an introductory paragraph, and therefore only rhetoric), 1 I shall permit myself to do so and excuse the lapse by calling it an illustration. A professor of my acquaintance recently observed that reading an essay on Montesquieu (by one of my better students) had almost persuaded him to go himself and read Esprit des lois. In this country, I suspect, Montesquieu is less read than merely acknowledged as ‘a precursor of sociology’ or even as one of the ‘great theorists’ of sociology in general and political sociology in particular. One of the contributions that I hope this article will make is to persuade others, not merely historians of ideas, that Montesquieu should actually be read, because his ideas and his difficulties are important, interesting and instructive.

Studies of medical politics usually emphasize one of the following types of inquiries: (a) analyzing the internal politics of medical organizations, as with Oliver Garceau's classic study of the American Medical Association; (b) describing and explaining the roles individual physicians play in the political life of the community as voters, officials, or citizen participants in civic life; or, (c) assessing the impact of medical groups and organizations on public policy, particularly health policy. Harry Eckstein's widely known study of the British Medical Association is primarily a study of the third type, a discussion of the channels of influence, the tactics, and the effectiveness of the BMA in shaping public policy to its ends.

Anxiety about the conditions that promote stable, democratic political relations in the developing countries has been a major preoccupation of both politicians and academics for over a generation now. One manifestation of this concern is the emergence of a new field of inquiry — the study of development — in the social sciences. The conditions most often put forward for political democracy fall into two general and by no means unrelated categories — cultural institutions, or values, and economic development. Political sociologists generally focus on one category or the other. Some, like Harry Eckstein and S. M. Lipset, concentrate mainly on cultural variables, the ‘patterns of integration’ supposedly conducive to the development and maintenance of democratic or authoritarian polities. Those who focus upon economic growth seem to fall into two groups. One school of thought, well represented by Daniel Lerner, emphasizes that democracy, as we understand it, is the end product of the modernization process; and the implicit assumption is that it is the inevitable end product of this process. The other trend in modernization thought, represented most notably by Professor Barrington Moore, argues that political democracy is the result of only a certain type of modernization — namely, the Anglo-American bourgeois variety.

Do novelists have something to say about politics? By raising the question in such a starkly rhetorical way it is tempting to respond, ‘Yes, of course, novelists (at least some of them) do have something to say on a wide variety of subjects which traditionally fall under the rubric of political thought’. One could quickly give examples: Tolstoy's devastating critique of military leadership in War and Peace, George Orwell's penetrating analysis of the reality of totalitarianism in 1984 and Jean Paul Sartre's portrait of a whole society in a state of imminent collapse in Le Sursis. With a little time for reflection it would surely not be difficult to expand this list to several hundred titles. But if the novelist is credited with having political thoughts or ideas it is rather odd to find so little systematic analysis and interpretation of those ideas by political scientists.² Why is this the case? For some political scientists perhaps the reason lies in their explicit acceptance of models of explanation which approximate those of the physical sciences. They wish to constrict their range of inquiry into politics in the interest of developing better models for explaining and predicting political phenomena. There is no need to quarrel with this perfectly sound approach, except where it leads its proponents into a dogmatic rejection of other modes of inquiry.

Tucked inside Thomas Kuhn's masterly little book is a statement to the effect that scholarly endeavours, that have yet to fix upon an accepted paradigm, display continual and often exacerbatic confrontations between rival wings each trying to press upon the other the virtues of their particular mode of scientific procedure. In Kuhn's own words: ‘Because it [the awareness of anomaly] demands large scale paradigm destruction and major shifts in the problems and techniques of normal science, the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity.’ It seems as if political scientists have taken this point to heart. Rarely does an issue of a journal appear without some restatement or reappraisal of the ‘State of the Discipline’ and related problems.² Apart from the obvious point that political scientists must be spending inordinate amounts of time in such debates, and so perhaps neglecting other fruitful activities — a point which my economist friends would characterize as opportunity costly — there is a concomitant danger that the political world may begin to appear only analyzable with the aid of abstruse, esoteric and above all novel paradigms. Theoretical reasoning may be sustained on the basis of novelty rather than perspicuity.

French politics have been undergoing a process of restructuring since the coming of the Fifth Republic in 1958. This process, like any process of political change, has been a complex one involving many factors and variables. The most obvious of these factors has been the one most commented upon by journalists and contemporary historians – the influence of General de Gaulle and his policies (the new constitution, foreign policy, etc.). What is only beginning to emerge from the academic debate is the relationship between Gaullist politics and the other variables.

One of the issues that has dominated American political science in the last twenty years has been the debate between those who assert that America is ruled by an elite, and those who believe that the pluralist model is a more accurate description. Robert Dahl, who is the most influential of the pluralists, has attacked ‘elitists’ on two fronts: negatively, he has argued that they misperceive the nature of power and are sloppy in their criteria for determining a ruling elite; positively, in Who Governs?,he has attempted to apply his own conceptualization of power to an American community and thus give empirical backing to the pluralist model.

In this paper we extend the probability model of voting which was first considered by Rae. We consider a voting body presented with issues on which decisions have to be made, and we seek the decision rule which maximizes in some sense the correspondence between individual preferences and the collective decisions of the voting body.

This article examines the results of the USSR Supreme Soviet elections held in June 1970, and presents an analysis of the patterns of drop-out and re-election among deputies to the previous Supreme Soviet, elected in June 1966.

Several attempts have been made recently to explain the formation of coalitions, especially government coalitions. Most of these theories assume that each of the actors involved (political parties in the case of government coalitions) uses only one criterion — such as the ‘size’ of the coalition or its ‘ideological diversity’ — in choosing between alternative coalitions. The criterion yields for each actor a preference ranking of all the possible coalitions. It is then assumed that the coalitions which are most likely to form are those which are ‘in equilibrium’ or ‘undominated’, a coalition T being undominated if there is no other coalition which is preferred by all its members to T.

Political science or political studies or government is a rather odd subject, something of a mixture, as indicated by its diverse origins and the various influences which have moulded it. In our universities it was affected by and grew out of the study of the classics, philosophy, law and jurisprudence, economics, history, geography, literature, and so on. The list of pre-existing and established academic subjects which acted as a sort of hydra-headed godfather is considerable. An important impulse in its development was provided, too, by ideology and practical purpose. I have in mind here the ethos represented, for instance, by the Webbs and the foundation of the LSE, by the teaching of people such as Cole, Laski, Hobhouse, Tawney and, more remotely, Green and Jowett. The idea was that the subject was one of considerable pragmatic value and offered practical advantages to be achieved, perhaps, by some sort of reforming doctrinal emphasis. But the general effect of this variety of influences and stress is that there is no obvious or uniform academic focus: the subject seems (in terms of the intellectual and other forces at work) essentially eclectic. Nevertheless something like a traditional form did emerge. Generally there was a distinction between ‘institutions’ and ‘theory’, though naturally, given the dissimilar sources and influences mentioned, what has been comprised by these titles has varied somewhat. ‘Institutions’, for example, could cover a concentration on the formal machinery of government simply or it might expand to embrace parties, groups, the formation of opinion and so on.

This paper presents a theory of the competition of forces and the resolution of conflict over what system of government a country is to adopt. In scope it extends from the prospect of a novel system within a single state to the distribution of this system among all states; in method it considers political events as elements in a single continuous process, the culmination of which provides the resolution of the conflict. The process described in the paper — the sweep of a revolutionary ideology through resisting countries — is the analogue of the epidemic spread of a disease among a human population, a model which has been thoroughly studied.