Abstract
The last quarter century has witnessed a radical shift in the reputation of the British polity. For a long time the United Kingdom had a reputation as a bulwark of political stability. British institutions were considered to possess a rare capacity to reconcile the demand for change with the maintenance of political order. A major five-country study of democratic political attitudes concluded that Britain was a ‘civic culture’, combining the requisite amounts of political participation and obedience to authority.1 The British party system of unified, disciplined legislative voting on proposals from the Executive was highly touted as a superior means of combining debate and governing.2 These views were not the domain of foreigners only. The British population as a whole manifested a high degree of contentment with its institutions,3 and members of the British élite were only too eager to share their institutions with the newly-emerging states of the former Empire.
Governments are praised when their nations are great. How much of the success of a nation is caused by the structure of its government and how much by other conditions is difficult to determine. Kenneth Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics
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Notes
Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963 ).
Leon Epstein, ‘What Happened to the British Party Model?’, American Political Science Review Lxxiv (Mar. 1980) 9–22.
See James B. Christoph. ‘Consensus and Cleavage in British Political Ideology’, American Political Science Review LIx (Sept. 1965) 629–39;
William B. Gwyn, ‘Jeremiahs and Pragmatists: Perceptions of British Decline’, in Britain: Progress and Decline, ed. William B. Gwyn and Richard Rose ( New Orleans: Tulane University Press, 1980 ) 1–25.
Andrew Gamble, Britain in Decline ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1982 ).
R. Emmett Tyrrell, ed., The Future That Doesn’t Work ( Garden City; N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977 ).
Samuel H. Beer, Britain Against Itself ( New York: Norton, 1982 ).
Geoffrey Smith and Nelson Polsby, British Government and Its Discontents ( New York: Basic Books, 1981 ).
Daniel Bell, ‘A Report on England: I. The Future That Never Was’, Public Interest LI (Spring 1978) 35–73.
Louis Heren, Alas, Alas for England ( London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981 ).
Stephen Haseler, The Death of British Democracy ( Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1976 ).
Isaac Kramnick, ed., Is Britain Dying? (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979 ).
Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Why Has Britain ‘Failed’?’ (Washington, D.C.: American Friends of the London School of Economics, n.d.).
Richard Caves and Lawrence Krause, ed., Britain’s Economic Performance ( Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1980 ).
The Hudson Report, The United Kingdom in 1980 ( London: Associated Business Programmers, 1974 ).
Bernard Nossiter, Britain: A Future That Works (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978 ).
Dennis Kavanagh, ‘New Bottles for New Wines: Changing Assumptions About British Politics’, Parliamentary Affairs xxxt (Winter 1978) 7.
Dennis Kavanagh, ‘An American Science of British Politics’, Political Studiesxxii (Sept. 1974) 251–70.
Richard Rose, Do Parties Make a Difference ( Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1980 ) 111.
Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, ‘Introduction’, in Ethnicity ed. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) 1–26.
Bernard Crick, The Reform of Parliament ( Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1965 );
Brian Chapman, British Government Observed ( London: Allen & Unwin, 1963 );
W. J. Stankiewicz, ed., Crisis in British Government ( London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967 );
Trevor Smith, Anti-Politics ( London: Charles Knight & Co., 1972 );
Frank Stacey, British Government, 1966 to 1975 ( London: Oxford University Press, 1975 );
Samuel Brittan, Left or Right: The Bogus Dilemma ( London: Secker & Warburg, 1968 ).
Lord Hailsham, The Dilemma of Democracy (London: Collins, 1978); Johnson, op. cit.
Samuel E. Finer, Adversary Politics and Electoral Reform ( London: Wigram, 1975 );
Lord Hailsham, op. cit.; ‘Blowing Up a Tyranny’, The Economist (5 Nov. 1977) 11–16;
Samuel E. Finer, The Changing British Party System, 1945–1979 (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1980); Johnson, op. cit.;
Vernon Bogdanor, The People and the Party System ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ).
Vernon Bogdanor, Devolution ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1979 ).
Douglas E. Ashford, British Dogmatism and French Pragmatism ( London: Allen & Unwin, 1981 ).
Anthony King, Britain Says Yes ( Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1977 ).
David Butler and David Marquand, European Elections and British Politics ( London: Longman, 1981 ).
See Richard Rose, ‘Models of Governing’, Comparative Politics, v (July 1973) 465–96.
David Braybrooke and Charles E. Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision ( New York: Free Press, 1963 ).
Samuel H. Beer, The British Political System (New York: Random House, 1974 );
Richard Rose, ‘England: a Traditionally Modern Political Culture’, in Political Culture and Political Development ed. Lucien W. Pye and Sidney Verba (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965) 83–129;
Richard Rose, Politics in England ( 3rd edn, Boston: Little, Brown, 1980 ) 374–5.
Kenneth N. Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967);
Max Nicholson, The System ( London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967 );
Keith Thomas, ‘The United Kingdom’, in Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States ed. Raymond Grew (Princeton University Press, 1978) 41–97; Ashford, op. cit.; Smith, op. cit.
Anthony King, ‘Overload: Problems of Governing in the 1970’s’, Political Studies, xxtit (Sept. 1975) 284–96;
Richard Rose and B.G. Peters, Can Government Go Bankrupt? ( New York: Basic Books, 1978 ).
Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973);
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press, 1971); Inglehart, op. cit.
Samuel Huntington, ‘Post-Industrial Politics: How Benign Will It Be?’, Comparative Politics vi (Jan. 1974) 163–91.
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© 1984 Donley T. Studlar and Jerold L. Waltman
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Studlar, D.T. (1984). Introduction: Dilemmas of Change in British Politics. In: Studlar, D.T., Waltman, J.L. (eds) Dilemmas of Change in British Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17575-8_1
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