Urban Planning and the City Dweller:

...American political scientists are going to have to rewrite their textbooks...

...The ideological and hence programmatic quality of British political parties was closely related to tensions created by the long drawnout transition from traditional to modern society...

...What has happened to the vaunted empiricism of Englishmen...

...They will be replaced by a party system which, again, more closely resembles the American—a system in which the parties are coalitions of interests, and rely upon personality and advertising agencies in order to create a favorable public image...

...On the whole, these men and women have left or are now leaving the party, and they are not being replaced in large enough numbers...

...They were, it is true, highly class-conscious men and women, driven by the desire to secure greater benefits for their class...

...We are faced with a paradox, a picture of a political party which seems determined to commit suicide...

...They are dying or becoming politically apathetic and their sons and daughters either share this apathy or are turning to the Conservatives...

...It now turns out, however, that it is not the American party system which has been "backward," but rather the British...

...The Labor party has always had its quota of this type...

...The current volume is the fifth on British general elections, and it is the best to date...

...Reviewed by Stanley Rothman Assistant Professor of Government, Smith College "PSEPHOLOGY," THE STUDY of elections and electoral statistics, is becoming increasingly papular among British political scientists...

...Such an analysis, however, is not so much inaccurate as it is incomplete, for the changes which have occurred in the past 15 years are qualitative rather than quantitative...

...Our fluid "interest" parties, it has been argued, are obsolete, and must and will be replaced by a programmatic disciplined party system...

...There can be little doubt but that the whole question of nuclear disarmament has played a key role in strengthening the left...

...The simple description of these trends is to say that the British have entered the age of affluence and that affluent workers are conservative...

...We are faced, then, with a second paradox...

...Either the Labor party will manage to handle this situation and "modernize" itself or we are witnessing the beginning of its end...

...Those who remain active tend to be "true believers...

...During the 1930s when the great mass of British intellectuals were turning to Marxism (if not to the Communist party), the Labor party remained moderate primarily because the great mass of its constituency party and trade union militants were fundamentally quite conservative...

...Nevertheless, an ever larger number of very excellent descriptive and analytic studies of elections in both England and other countries is now finally being published...

...In this sense the Labor party, with its continued emphasis on class loyalties and traditional socialist slogans (though these were played down during the election), is the more conservative of the two, and this, too, is clearly recognized by the electorate...

...Why do Labor party activists cling obstinately to old slogans when the supposedly more rigid and dogmatic Germans have dropped their socialist baggage with hardly a murmur...

...More fundamentally, however, the present power of orthodoxy would seem to be related to the same factors which have resulted in the gradual decline of the party's fortunes...

...For example, the Conservative party which won the election bears little resemblance to the Conservative party even of 1945...

...England today is witnessing an ever more rapid erosion of traditional life styles, and their replacement by a modern mass society which is more and more coming to resemble the American in its most important dimensions...

...It is less and less a party of the "best elements" in British society, i.e., the British governing class of the old-school tie, and more and more, in the public eye as well as in its own self-image, a party of equal opportunity and individual initiative whose appeal rests on giving the electorate what it wants rather than on governing it for its own good...

...Perhaps because of innate conservatism, they have not, thus far, been as productive as the French or Americans in this area...

...The present situation is qualitatively different, however, in that the relative numbers are greater than they have ever been since the party attained the status of a viable national movement...

...For years American political scientists have been urging the British party system on Americans...

...Whichever is the case, however, it is clear from Butler and Rose's study that the day of ideological parties is on the way out...

...As the transition is completed and the social basis of this party system disappears, the system itself is changing...

...Despite their rhetorical attachment to socialism, however, they always assumed the traditional values of British society, including attachment to tradition itself...

...British politics has come to reflect these changes...

...Interestingly enough, Labor party leader Hugh Gaitskell and others have been arguing in just these terms and have striven to create a new party image, thus far without notable success...

...In addition to excellent chapters on every aspect of the campaign, it contains a very sophisticated analysis of the longrange meaning of the election, an analysis which reveals both that the Conservatives won the election long before the dissolution and that the fundamental reasons for this victory lay in certain secular trends in British society...

...their activism stems not from "interest" but from conviction...

...In fact, since the election, the party, if anything, has moved back to its traditional moorings, or, rather, the left within the party has proven powerful enough to prevent the changes Gaitskell desires...