The purpose of this article is to create a method for determining regions which is suitable for political science. The criteria proposed to define a “political region” are based on the concepts of political cleavages and party systems. Applying this framework of analysis to Belgium and Switzerland makes it possible to establish two very different kinds of regions. In the case of Switzerland, the proposed political regions do not correspond to linguistic areas but are instead combinations of religious and industrial factors. On the other hand, in the case of Belgium the suggested political regions reflect the tensions among the Flemings, Walloons, residents of Brussels, and German-speaking Belgians.

A popular theme in the literature on British government and politics describes British culture as suffused with deference to political authority. However, recently observers have begun to question whether political deference is characteristic of the British public. They argue the need to reexamine the extent of deference in the light of changes in the political culture. Accordingly, this note critically examines the hypothesis concerning political deference with respect to England specifically, and presents some evidence relating to deference among the younger generation there. We can thereby assess the persistence of political deference and explore some hypotheses concerning the sources of political deference in England.

This paper reports the making and testing of an attitude scale to be used in measuring toryism-conservatism in both English Canada and the United States (and any other English-speaking country). The fact that the scale is to be used on both sides of the border affects the kinds of items included in the scale, but more of that later.

The inspiration for creating the toryism-conservatism scale came from Gad Horowitz's contention that the political cultures of both the United States and English-speaking Canada are Lockean liberal in content, but the English-Canadian political culture is different from the American because it has a “tory streak” which came in with the United Empire Loyalists, the expelled American “tories,” and was reinforced by later immigrations from the United Kingdom.

The bureaucratization of the political process that characterizes twentieth century politics in many countries has not bypassed Canada—as evidenced by skyrocketing rates of government employment and expenditure and, even more dramatically, by the ever-expanding policy-making power of Canadian bureaucracy. One observer sees the civil service as occupying an increasingly strategic role in Canadian politics, a condition that

reflects in part the expanding role of modern government into highly technical areas, which tends to augment the discretion of permanent officials because legislators are obliged to delegate to them the administration of complex affairs, including the responsibility for drafting and adjudicating great amounts of sub-legislation required to “fill in the details” of the necessarily broad, organic statutes passed by Parliament. Some indication of the scale of such discretion is found in the fact that, during the period 1963–8, an annual average of 4,130 Orders-in-Council were passed in Ottawa, a substantial proportion of which provided for delegating authority to prescribe rules and regulations to ministers and their permanent advisers. By contrast, the number of laws passed annually by Canadian federal parliaments is rarely over one hundred.