‘The first and perhaps most compelling attribute of the modern social structure which we inhabit’, according to James Coleman, ‘is the asymmetry of a large portion of its relations’. What is striking about modern society, however, is not the asymmetry of relations as such. Western societies have often been, and to some extent still are, highly asymmetric; think, for example, of the relations between feudal lords and their serfs, between factory owners and workers, between men and women. What is striking about the modern asymmetry is that the parties involved are completely different classes of entities, natural persons and complex organizations. Our (great) grandparents had to rely for their income, housing and the supply of goods and services mostly on independent employers, landlords, shopkeepers and artisans. We, on the other hand, are dealing with corporations, welfare institutions, public services, housing associations, building societies, banks and department stores. These organizations are not just rational, person-like servants, waiting quietly in the corners of society to be called upon. They also, and predominantly, act on their own account. Complex organizations are a new and powerful breed of social actors; they are corporate actors alongside the traditional, human actors.

For a Soviet General Secretary presumably committed to the collectivist principles of Marxism-Leninism, Mikhail Gorbachev has been peculiarly insistent upon the decisive importance of individual leadership. In speech after speech it was not only the socioeconomic order that Gorbachev held to be the source of the Soviet Union's problems: the quality and style of its political leadership were also crucial factors.

Success and even survival in politics frequently depends on the ability of politicians and public officials to extricate themselves from various types of predicaments. Indeed, politicians are particularly adept at extricating themselves, with a wide range of explanations at their disposal to avoid blame for unpopular actions and decisions. However, there has been little systematic research on the effectiveness of various political blame-avoidance strategies. This Note has two purposes. First, a typology of blame-avoidance strategies, or accounts, is developed. Second, the results of an experiment examine the effectiveness of these various accounts in enhancing evaluations of a hypothetical public official are reported.

Political parties are not unitary actors; rather, each contains within its ranks a variety of different ideological beliefs and strategic orientations. Nor are individual political parties wholly isolated; rather, each has friends and allies among the other parties, and, of course, some implacable opponents.

Nurmi has analysed a number of voting procedures with respect to various criteria. It has been pointed out that acceptability voting not only fares as well as approval voting under Nurmi's type of analysis but also may be more intuitively appealing to voters.