This article examines the prominence of Web sites of major and minor parties in the United States and the United Kingdom, comparing features such as search capabilities, membership forms, information on party organization and issues, characteristics of graphics, and currency of updates as well as their relative quality and sophistication.We also look at the prominence of major and minor parties in newspapers and magazines and in various search engines and sites for political junkies. We find that minor parties have a greater presence on the Web in the United Kingdom than in the United States, but even so, the sites of major parties in both countries are more prominent and sophisticated than those of minor parties, and major parties generally receive more media coverage than minor parties, both on-line and off-line.The data suggest that the established interests dominating most of the communications, transactions, elections, and political processes of advanced industrialized countries are extending their influence to these processes in cyberspace.

In order to defend participatory democracy in large-member voluntary organizations, Michels's challenge to traditional democratic theory must be answered. By arguing that the technical, sociological, and psychological processes of modern organizations invariably result in leaders dominating members, Michels questioned democratic theorists' assertions that participation is selfreinforcing and that participation produces popular control. Defending participatory democracy, then, involves showing how the problems of participation and popular control can be overcome in formally representative organizations. The answer proposed is that collective solidarity or community formed by those reacting to injustice and committed to egalitarian social relations provides the motivation for mass participation and the basis for popular control in modern union and party organizations.

State‐centred theory, a leading exemplar of the new institutionalism, assumes the separation of state from society and objectivity from subjectivity. This epistemological stance supports a structural analysis which holds that the state is an actor in its own right, that the state has distinctive interests, and that state capacity depends on strong institutions and weak societal opposition. Yet the case of the Thatcher governments’ideologically motivated privatization programme challenges the statists’hypotheses and epistemology. Rather, the making of British privatization policy supports the view that the way political actors form and use ideas is important in explaining state power and in defending the liberal democratic vision of mankind as the maker of history.

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