bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Pattern of Electoral Rules in the United States: a Deviant Case among the Industralized Democracies
Authors: Lijphart Arend
Published: April 2007

THE UNITED STATES IS THE WORLD'S SECOND LARGEST DEMOcracy (after India) and the largest of the older well-established democracies, with a very long and uninterrupted history of free elections. For this reason, it can be argued that the American democratic example has been and, should be an important model for other countries to follow. This article will focus on one important aspect of the American democratic system - the pattern of electoral rules - and it will emphasize the striking differences between the American electoral process and that of most other democracies. This contrast obviously affects the applicability of the American model to other countries that may be in the process of revising their electoral rules: because the United States is a deviant case in almost all respects, it presents clear alternatives to the more common attern but also dternatives that are so radical that they may ge difficult to transplant. The democracies with which the American pattern of electoral systems will be compared and contrasted are the 20 countries which, Me the United States, have been democratic without interruption for a relatively long time, that is, since approximately the end of the Second world War: the four large West European countries (Great Britain, France, West Germany, and Italy), the five Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland), the Benelux countries (the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg), Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, and five countries outside Europe (Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand).
Karl Marx and Party Theory
Authors: von Beyme Klaus
Published: April 2007

PARTIES ARE THE LINK BETWEEN EXISTING POLITICAL STRUCtures and the rocesses which lead to new political institutions. No wonder, therefore, that parties play an important role at the centre of many revolutionary theories. Nevertheless the theory of parties is not as decisive to Marx's social and political theory as one might imagine. Some introductions to Marx's thought do not even mention the catchwords ‘party’ or ‘parties’ though they concentrate on the sphere of his political ideas. In most books hints at a theory of parties are hidden away in remarks of marginal importance under the topics ‘praxis’ or ‘revolution’. Only those comprehensive studies which emphasize the continuity between Marxism and Leninism, because they defend the Marxist position, deal explicitly with the theory of parties. The same is true for those authors who overemphasize the continuity of Marxist thought, to a degree which almost identifies the theoretical positions of Marx, Engels and Lenin, for the purposes of anti-Marxist polemi.
Craxi’s Italy
Authors: Guizzi Vincenzo
Published: April 2007

IT IS NOT EASY TO EXPLAIN THE REASONS THAT LED TO THE appointment of Bettino Craxi as Prime Minister. First of all, there was certainly the political fatigue of the Christian Democratic Party which had held the premiership for 35 years. AIdo Moro, a great man and leader, had tried to mediate between the various currents within the party, as well as between the party and other allied parties (the Republicans, the Social Democrats, the Socialists). But what Moro really dreamt of was a possible alliance with the Communist Party to solve at least the most serious issues, such as terrorism and economic decline. He thought of repeating with the Communists the experience the DC had had in the early 1960s with the Socialists: widening the democratic area with the view of transforming the PCI into a social democratic trend. In order to obtain this he even considered letting the PCI take part in the majority at least if not in the government itself. His disappearance had serious repercussions, especially in the Christian Democratic Party where internal friction grew even stronger than in the past. This resulted in a great drop in the party's power and ability to manage the country politically even if, at least in part, it regained in the 1979 and 1983 elections the votes lost in the 1976 elections.
Carl Friedrich and Political Science
Authors: Vile M. J. C.
Published: April 2007

IT IS PERHAPS A SIGN OF THE GREATER MATURITY OF THE discipline of political science today that the ‘great debate’ of the immediate postwar period on the essential nature of the subject has now died down. The vast quantities of ink that were spilled (and not a little blood) did not result in a victory for either of the two great camps - the traditonalists or the behaviourists - but in a recognition, however reluctant, that the subject of the study of politics was too great, and too complex, to be approached only from this angle or that, but required the application of many different methods, and of many different kinds of minds, if progress was to be made towards the better understanding of the ways in which man provided for his own overnance. However, if the students of political thought, of constitutions and institutions, now work alongside the practitioners of ‘empirical’, and indeed of quantititive, techniques for the study of politics, it is in large part due to the efforts of Carl Friedrich, who saw the need to maintain the intellectual unity of a subject which, since the time of Aristotle, had progressed, as indeed all subjects can only progress, by the continual interaction between those who contemplate its theoretical underpinnings and those who are knowledgeable about the data by which, in the end, the theories must be tested. The normative dimension of the study of man and his political activities, is an additional complication, but it does not absolve the theorist from the need to relate his theory to perceived reality, nor the empiricist from the necessity of placing his observations within a context which alone will give them significance.
‘Distributing Decline’: Swedish Social Democrats and the Crisis of the Welfare State
Authors: Walters Peter
Published: April 2007

IN SWEDEN, AS ELSEWHERE, ECONOMIC TRAUMA HAS BROUGHT the future of the welfare state onto the political agenda. The conjuncture at the end of the 1970s of a faltering economic performance together with an acute fiscal crisis has called into question the viability of welfare commitments. A widespread body of opinion sees the welfare state as a volume of expenditure which needs to be trimmed to accord with more limited economic means. Some argue more fundamentally that the welfare state, both as a fiscal burden and a set of values, contributed to the malaise of the economy and is an obstacle to its recovery. A feature of Swedish politics in the early 1980s has been the growth of electoral support for the Conservative Party which has introduced into public debate the ideas and idiom of neo-liberal political economy. The Conservatives have exploited a vein of unease extending across the political spectrum which has become concerned not only about the economic inefficiency of the welfare state, and the tax burden needed to maintain it, but also about the possibility that its institutions have limited rather than enhanced individual choices and freedoms.
Planning Approaches to the Welfare State Crisis
Authors: Cazes Bernard
Published: April 2007

MY INTENTION IN THIS ARTICLE IS TO PRESENT A BIRD'S-EYE view of various planning approaches to the welfare state crisis that are currently being initiated or at least discussed in a number of Western democracies. They fall into three broad categories which, I believe, bear some relation to the kind of diagnosis made about the 'crisis' to be dealt with.
First of all, those who believe that the welfare state's main weakness comes from the disappearance of sustained, fast growth of the GNP, put their hopes in economic recovery in Beyond this strictly quantitative solution there are interpretations of the welfare state's predicament in terms of dee - order to return as soon as possible to ‘welfare state as usual’. seated, ‘structural’ imbalances which allegedly require fairly radical transformation in order to provide this ailing system with the more effective command and control mechanisms needed to make it viable again, Finally some people argue that the welfare state has exhausted its growth potential alto ether, so that its crisis can only be overcome through a quaftative change toward a different system (hence the phrase ‘metasystemic’ solution).
Exit and Voice in the Future of the Welfare State
Authors: Crouch Colin
Published: April 2007

THE ANTITHESIS BETWEEN INDIVIDUALISM AND COLLECTIVISM which dominates political discussion of the welfare state and many other political issues confuses more than it illuminates. First, the individual of market liberal theory is a curious entity, existin solely as a disembodied unit in market transactions. Secondly, the ‘choice’ which is the means by which units in the liberal system express their freedom is highly constrained: they choose solely between items offered in the market. Such a choice confers power on the choosing individual, but it also limits that power: choices may be made only within the framework that the market provides. Liberal theory is explicit about this; it is this limitation on the behaviour of individuals that protects mankind from tyranny. But by no means all the constraints it imposes are of this kind. If consumers are ill-equiped to choose they are made dependent on the providers ofthe service, who may, if competition is imperfect, acquire something of a dictatorial position themselves.
Reflections on the Community in the Aftermath of the Meeting of the European Council in Milan
Authors: Noël Émile
Published: April 2007

THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY HAS BEEN IN A STATE OF ALMOST perpetual crisis since 1979: a financial crisis, institutional drift, the lack of long-term objectives. Nevertheless the patient efforts to bring back order into its affairs which were undertaken after the European Council at Stuttgart (1983) and tenaciously pursued by the European Commission under Mr Thorn's presidency, as well as by the successive presidents of the Council of Ministers, are at last coming to fruition. For the first time in many years, the heads of state or of government have been able to devote themselves in Milan to genuinely political reflections – to concentrate their thoughts on the future Europe and the means of building it. Even if the dialogue was only too often replaced by confrontation, nevertheless, the debate has begun and is bound to continue.
Negotiations and Coalition Formation in the European Community
Authors: Wallace Helen
Published: April 2007

INSTITUTIONAL REFORM IS ON THE AGENDA OF THE EUROPEAN Communities again, perhaps more seriously than for a decade. The European Parliament's Draft Treaty on European Union and the Dooge Report provided a focus for assessing possible changes to the institutional ground rules and constitutional framework of EC negotiations. A central strand in the debate has been the concern of many practitioners to make the negotiating process more productive and effective, particularly given the prospect that enlargement to twelve wil make the EC more heterogeneous and less manageable. Aside from the constitutionalists, whose arguments for reform are essentially political, the pragmatists can be divided between proponents of better practice and the advocates of some Treaty amendments as necessary means to their end. This article seeks to shed some light on the character of the EC negotiating process in the hope of aiding judgments about the relevance of institutional rules to negotiating outputs.
The 1985 Greek Election and its Background
Authors: Clive Nigel
Published: April 2007

IN EARLY 1985, MOST POLITICAL OBSERVERS WOULD HAVE forecast the probability of Constantinos Karamanlis's reelection to his second term as president, which seemed the likely prelude to the election due before the end of October 1985. This, it was assumed, would have given Andreas Papandreou's Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) a good chance to repeat the advantage which his party undoubtedly enjoyed in its convincing victory at the election in October 1981, when a significant portion of the electorate, notably from the centre of the political spectrum, felt that it could well afford the risks of voting for all that was implied in PASOK's electoral slogan ‘Change’, so long as Karamanlis remained at the helm with the special powers reserved for the president under the 1975 constitution. The outlook was consequently for an election in or before the autumn of 1985. In fact, PASOK's victory on 2 June was achieved at a different time, for quite different reasons and in quite different circumstances.
‘Fire, fire’, be it in Noah’s Flood
Authors: Marquand David
Published: April 2007

IT IS A COMMONPLACE THAT BRITISH POLITICS ARE AT PRESENT less consensual, and more polarized ideologically, than they have been for a generation. It is also a commonplace that the ideological polarization of the 1980s has its roots in the economic and political failures of the 1960s and 1970s.
Neutralism in Germany
Authors: von Donat Marcell
Published: April 2007

IN 1986, THE FRENCH PRESIDENT FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND reminded us that neutralism in Germany was not just a simple reaction to political facts but a very complex constant in recent German history. Is the idea of a neutral Germany or of two neutral German states of any political importance today? Are there still supporters for neutrality in Central Europe? Would it not be normal for some people to think in those terms?

In today's relatively tension-free period of East-West relations, the fact may be overlooked that the German situation remains exceptional and that the Germans have a burden to carry which other nations do not have. The Federal Republic of Germany does not have full freedom of choice like for instance, Norway, which is a member of NATO without being a member of the EC, or Ireland which is an EC-member without belonging to NATO. What is considered as a normal option for any other nation might not be permitted for the Germans. Thus the frontline state at the frontier of the two world ideologies cannot claim normal freedom of action.
Political Science and Modern British Society
Authors: Smith Trevor
Published: April 2007

FOUR YEARS AGO THIS JOURNAL INITIATED AN OCCASIONAL series on the development of political science in different countries. To date four articles have appeared covering West Germany, Japan, France and the United States of America. Reading them together one is struck as much by the similarities as by the differences between the four countries. The main distinction of a comparative kind to be made, of course, is the fact of the sheer size and corresponding influence of American political science in relation to that of any other country or indeed all other countries taken together. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that commentaries on the contemporary character of American political science are almost exclusively concerned with its own methodological and professional considerations, while analogous exercises on the recent development of the discipline in other countries invariably dwell at length on how each has responded to the paradigmatic changes that have been pioneered from time to time in the USA; and as often as not they will admit of a hint of apology either for not embracing the new American modes fully enough, or, if positively disinclined so to do, for not developing a sufficiently considered critique of their shortcomings, or, again, for not themselves innovating alternative approaches and techniques of similar import and magnitude.
Budgetary Policy‐Making under Institutional Restrictions: The Experience of Britain, France, West Germany and the United States
Authors: Sturm Roland
Published: April 2007

POLITICIANS LIKE TO BE REGARDED AS EFFECTIVE IN THE WORK THEY do. They insist that the promises they make and the programmes they decide on are more than mere declarations of goodwill. To practise what they preach is of special importance to governments which stress that their policies are substantially different from the policies of their predecessors. Thus, a departure from conventional politics on the model of the social-democratic consensus was asserted by the previously more pragmatic, now more ideologically minded, Conservative governments in Britain (1979), the United States (1980) and to some degree also by the electoral successes of Conservative parties in West Germany (1983) and France (1986). The conservative ground-swell in current government policies in Western democracies is, however, not restricted to the countries mentioned here, although Britain and the United States have played a special role as pathfinders for the political reorientation process.
How Fabius Lost: the French Elections of 1986
Authors: Levy David A.L. , Machin Howard
Published: April 2007

THE 1986 ELECTIONS PRODUCED ONE OF THE MOST DRAMATIC results in recent French history, after one of the most unexciting campaigns. It is clear that the marked a break with the previous experience of the Fifth Repu Is lic.

What was the nature of this break? First, the campaign began in a context where defeat seemed inevitable for the President's majority in parliament. Secondly, there was a new electoral system which affected the campaign, the competition and the results. Thirdly, the results showed considerable changes in French voting behaviour. Fourthly, there were some important changes in the influence and nature of the parties themselves. Fifthly, and perhaps most importantly, despite the collapse of the two-block part system, a majority hostile to the President was elected to par l 'ament. The President responded by staying in office, and appointing the leader of the largest party in the new majority as prime minister. The other original feature of these elections was that they were held less than two years before a presidential election. Much of the changed behaviour of voters, parties and leaders reflected not only the circumstances of the elections of 1986 but also those foreseen in 1988.
The Politics of Management: the Corporate Governance Issue
Authors: Knight Arthur
Published: April 2007

THE TERM CORPORATE GOVERNANCE HAS COME INTO USE TO describe both the purposes and the methods which determine the structure and the control of companies. A wide range of legal, regulatory and less formalized arrangements is thus embraced. In the UK in recent years discussion has related to a number of interrelated issues: the structure and functioning of boards of directors, reporting to shareholders and the ways in which shareholders use their power. These issues have a bearing upon business performance, though the debate about ways to improve the quality of management embraces also the cultural factors, the educational system and training arrangements; and performance depends too upon factors wholly or largely beyond the influence of managers, such as the tensions from class-division, over-powerful unions and the uncertainties which flow from discontinuities in public policy which are especially evident in the British political system. But in the general debate the corporate governance issues have perhaps had less attention than they deserve; the discussion has been confined to a limited circle. It is proposed here to concentrate on non-executive directors.
A Surrealistic Referendum: Spain and NATO
Authors: Gooch Anthony
Published: April 2007

THE POSITIONS OF THE TWO MAIN SPANISH POLITICAL PARTIES vis-8-vis the NATO referendum held on 12 March 1986 have caused commentators to recall that Spain, although much less so of late, always was ‘different’ and ‘dramatic’; Lord Carrington, on a boost-the-Atlantic-Alliance visit to Madrid, was reported to have gone one better and said that a country in which those in favour appeared not to be going to vote at all, while those who had been totally against were now set to vote in favour, was nothing short of ‘surrealistic’, while the French magazine L'Express described the referendum itself with the colourful word ‘loufoque’. Miguel de Unamuno, that master of contradiction, and Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, the man who saw Spain as an esperpento or grotesque distortion of what a European country should be, would have smiled. And, indeed, although there are hoardings in the Peninsula proclaiming the message ‘Spain is not different - your credit-card is valid here, too’, the fact remains that it is the only country to restore monarchy in the late twentieth century and to hold a NATO referendum.
The Dutch Political Parties and the May 1986 Elections
Authors: Gladdish Ken
Published: April 2007

IN THE MID 1960S, HANS DAALDER CONTRIBUTED A CLASSIC survey of the dynamics of the Dutch party system to Dahl's major anthology on opposition. His study was entitled ‘Opposition in a Segmented Society’. The focus upon opposition however was dictated less by the nature of Dutch politics than by the requirements of a comparative study. Thus the emphasis of the account was upon the essentially non-oppositional character of organized national politics in the Netherlands, for reasons which he showed to be both historical and practical.
Loquocentric Society and its Critics: the Case of Habermas
Authors: Minogue Kenneth
Published: April 2007

What is politics the outcomeof? The common answers to this question would invoke such ideas as power and interests. I want to argue that political events, particularly in the modern world, are the outcome of nothing else but politics itself. They emerge rhetorically, from public talk, and nothing more fundamental can be found. A society which can be validly characterized in this way may suitably be called ‘loquocentric’, or talk-centred. The odd thing is that much of the most acute exploration of this idea has taken place in a distorted form - in acamera obscuru, as it were - in ideological writing, which is dedicated to such fundamental determinants of the course of events as race, nation, gender and class. The work of Jurgen Habermas is particularly striking. Before I consider it, however, let me sketch out the thesis that modern politics is essentially loquocentric.
CivisandCitoyen
Authors: Nicolet Claude
Published: April 2007

GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITY IS SO EVIDENTLY PRESENT IN French revolutionary and imperial imagery that we are inclined to assign to it the role of a conscious model for a great number of ideas and even of institutions. The Frenchmen of the Republic and of the ‘Grande Nation’ would be, in short, resurrected Greeks and Romans, who would awaken the ‘dead world’ as Saint-Just called Rome. Indeed this received view is not wholly false or arbitrary. Perusal of the political literature – speeches, pamphlets, theoretical works – reveals that the allusions or references to Antiquity were something more than a fashion: from the ideological or cultural point of view, whether it is to identify with or get away from it, we think insistently and continuously of Sparta, Athens and Rome.
The Politics of Belgium and Denmark: A Comparative Perspective
Authors: Fitzmaurice John
Published: April 2007

COMPARATIVE EXERCISES BETWEEN THE POLITICAL SYSTEMS of countries with little obvious common ground may not lead to convergences being discovered, but may be useful in bringing out, by the decorator's well known principle of contrast, the strongest and most salient features of each. It is in this spirit that the present essay has been undertaken, for the author would not seek to claim any evident link or close comparative yield from examination of these two countries.

They do, however, have more basic characteristics in common than might be imagined, at first sight. First, they both fall into the category of ‘small democracies’. Certainly Belgium with a population of 9.9 million is considerably larger than Denmark with its 5.1 million, but Belgium remains nevertheless in both world and even European Community terms a ‘small state’.
The Changing West German Party System: Consequences of the 1987 Election
Authors: Smith Gordon
Published: April 2007

Dramatic Change is Hardly a Feature of West German politics. The signals are usually visible well in advance — but gradual change also means that the wider significance of particular developments may be overlooked. A cursory examination of the political scene in the wake of the election held in January 1987 may fail to reveal much that is new since the success of the Christian Democrats in 1983. Thus, despite the sharp fall in the CDU vote, the coalition with the Free Democrats was comfortably confirmed in office. At the same time, the haemorrhage of SPD support — although partially staunched — still continued, with the inability to .make a recovery in the intervening years the haunting question for the party.’ Chiefly at the expense of the SPD, the Greens have now anchored themselves in the party system. Their presence on the federal stage since 1983, and earlier in the Länder, has gingered up political debate and forced issues on to the agenda that otherwise would have been neglected. There are signs of change, but how are they to be interpreted?
Anti‐Political Politics: the Barre Phenomenon
Authors: Rizzuto Franco
Published: April 2007

ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE DEVELOPMENTS ON THE French political scene since the Left's historic victories in the presidential and parliamentary elections of 1981 has been the spectacular emergence of former Prime Minister Raymond Barre as both a powerful contender for the ‘leadership’ of the Right and for the French presidency. His emergence raises a number of interrelated issues which are likely to have a profound impact in France over the next few years.

First, it has brought to the fore questions about the nature and perhaps even the very future of the Fifth Republic. The insistent refusal by Barre and his supporters to countenancecohabitationhas elevated to the top of the political agenda the perennial issue of constitutional interpretation. What happens when the President of the Republic and the majority in the National Assembly are of opposed political persuasions? This has ceased to be a question of interest only to constitutional scholars but has become a reality after the March 1986 legislative elections resulted in a narrow victory for the RPR-UDF alliance. How Barre and his supporters behave in such a delicate situation is of crucial importance.
The Scientific Ethos of Reagan's America
Authors: Williams Roger
Published: April 2007

WHILE STATES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IN COMPETITION, modern states are in competition in an historically unique way. Only since the Second world War has it become generally appreciated that the mastery of technical change is vital to economic success, to such military security as is available, and, in short, to political achievement in a world in which expectations are unprecedentedly high. Since the political system of a state is inescapably a major factor in that state's overall performance, it follows that the efficiency and effectiveness of the world's various political systems are now, in an important sense, under long-term test. Whether over time most systems will tend to an asymptotic common performance, or whether some will reveal themselves as objectively ‘better’ than others is thus, really for the first time, a meaningful issue, and one which each succeeding generation can be expected to do a little more to resolve. In this context particular interest attaches in the immediate future to the relative performances of the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Western Europe, the latter considered both as separate states and collectively. This article is concerned only with the United States, but a reference frame of permanent international competition, in accommodating to and capitalizing upon technical change, needs to be borne in mind throughout.
Pride versus Interest in American Conservatism Today
Authors: Mansfield Harvey C.
Published: April 2007

THE FOLLOWING IS NOT INTENDED AS A VALUE-FREE SURVEY of American conservatism today. Less clear, perhaps, will be my general approval of this revolt, although that will emerge soon enough. It remains to announce that I want to offer some friendly advice to American conservatism regarding pride and interest and to recommend to its attention the American Constitution, which so beautifully combines them. American conservatives, perhaps because of the manipulations of American liberals, have lost some of their attachment to the Constitution, and much of their understanding of it.

Recently I overheard someone say that Harvard University was wrong to have invited Ronald Reagan to its 350th anniversary in 1986, because of Reagan's ‘anti-intellectualism’. What could this have meant? Reagan has reduced student loan programmes and university research programmes, and wants to cut them further. He invites many actors and very few professors to his White House dinners. He himself should have been, and probably was, a C student in college, like the Democratic president he frequently praises — the one who began the practice of using ghost-writers for his speeches — Franklin D. Roosevelt. In sum, Reagan doesn't sufficiently respect the intellect.
An Outpost of Corporatism: the Franchise State on Wall Street
Authors: Moran Michael
Published: April 2007

WRITERS ON CORPORATISM AGREE ABOUT LITTLE BUT ARE nevertheless strikingly united in one belief, that America has failed to develop strong corporatist institutions. The two most important collections published in recent years, for instance, both contain papers explaining this supposed American uniqueness. Yet the notion that corporatism is conspicious by its absence is odd. It is indeed true that the United States has failed to develop one particularly ambitious form of corporatism — the organization of capital and labour into central institutions designed to achieve agreed national aims. The essence of corporatism consists, however, of something less than this grand social scheme. It resides in what Offe calls ‘the attribution of public status to interest groups’. Endowing private bodies with public duties and public powers involves crossing a constitutional Rubicon. Behind fie the landscapes of liberal polities, with their open political struggle and comparatively clear separation of government from civil society. Beyond the Rubicon lie the features in Schmitter's famous description of corporatism — compulsion, hierarchy, monopoly. But these are contingent, not necessary, features. The quintessence of corporatism consists in the effort to endow private interests with sovereign authority. In so doing it challenges the great aim of a liberal polity — the separation of economic from political power — imposing in its place the ‘devolution of public policy making and enforcement on organised private interest’.
Britain: 11 June 1987—Some Reflections
Authors: Jones G. W.
Published: April 2007

AS SOON AS ONE ELECTION IS OVER PREPARATIONS BEGIN FOR the next. Governments shape their programmes with an eye to what will retain and enhance their popularity, while their opponents seek to discredit them and parade their own more superior wares. Although' at times parties become enmeshed in internal wrangles that damage their standing, and even proclaim their attachment to policies which alienate potential support, as the day of the election draws near they concentrate their attention on winning. Internal disputes are set aside, unpopular policies dropped and attractive ones highlighted.

An election was not needed until June 1988, five years after the first meeting of the current Parliament, but during 1986 the signs were that the government was clearing the way for an election in 1987 if the auspices were favourable. The Queen's Speech of 1986 was light in its legislative proposals, and controversial and complicated measures that would have bogged down parliamentary proceedings, such as the privatization of water or compelling local authorities to put a range of their functions out to competitive tender, were postponed. During the spring of 1987 the government increased the production of decisions to court the voters.
Portugal: 19 July 1987
Authors: de Sousa Marcelo Rebelo
Published: April 2007

THE PORTUGUESE PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS OF 19 JULY 1987 initiated a profound change in the Portuguese party system and in the system of government. From 1974 onwards, Portugal had moved peacefully towards a democratic political system, enshrined in the 1976 Constitution. This evolution lasted about eight years and culminated in the revision of the Constitution in 1982. From 1982 onwards the present political regime has been a democratic one, coexisting with a capitalist economic regime attenuated by state monopoly in key sectors and by public companies which were nationalized between 1974 and 1976. It is also since 1982 that the system of government has been semi-presidential. There is pure representativeness as referendums do not exist at national level and have never been regulated at local level. But the government is semi-presidential in the sense that, owing to French influence, it attempts to balance Parliament with the election of the President of the Republic by direct and universal suffrage.
A Time for Peace
Authors: Sanchez Oscar Arias
Published: April 2007

A FEW YEARS AGO, THE PRESENCE OF A CENTRAL AMERICAN Head of State here was an unknown event. It was also uncommon to make any reference to the countries of Central America in the area of international politics.

The Central American countries have been characterized during their century and a half of independence by their relative isolation, and by a slow process of development which forced upon us the stereotyped label of 'banana republics'. In the meantime nations emerged in our region, sometimes with problems, some with more vigour than others, but all with their traditions, their demands, their contradictions and their truths.
The Costa Rican Initiative in Central America
Authors: Whitehead Laurence
Published: April 2007

COSTA RICA SHAKES TWO HUNDRED MILES OF underpopulated border with Nicaragua. It has only the most limited capacity to regulate the flow of either weapons into, or refugees out of, the adjacent territory. The absence of a professional army is noteworthy (although it should not be overstated — there are some well armed, but unprofessionally led, defence forces, and the police are quite militarized). What requires emphasis is less the scarcity of soldiers than the abundance of lawyers, and the power of their profession. Last year, for example, tension built up between Managua and San José, because it was revealed that an airstrip in northern Costa Rica had been used to resupply the 'contras' in violation of Costa Rica's proclaimed policy of neutrality. The Sandinistas interpreted this as yet another proof of Costa Rican duplicity and of San José's subordination to the will of the paymasters in Washington. Nicaraguans (of all ideological persuasions) find it almost impossible to accept the Costa Rican version of this episode, which points out that the government has no power to interfere with the use of private property unless a prima facie case exists of illegal activity.
Two Views of the Mitterrand Presidency (1981–88): I
Authors: Manent Pierre
Published: April 2007

The French presidential election will be held after the publication of this issue. Our summer issue will contain an analysis in depth of the results and the foreseeable consequences. But our readers will find here two contrasting interpretations of the significance of the Mitterrand presidency of 1981–88, the first in the history of the French Fifth Republic which produced an exercise in ‘cohabitation’.
Two Views of the Mitterrand Presidency (1981–88): II
Authors: Machin Howard
Published: April 2007

THE AIM OF THIS ARTICLE ON MITTERRAND IS NEITHER TO ‘bury’ him nor to praise him, but rather to assess the impact of his presidency on French politics and French socialism. Any such assessment is inevitably a partial and interim report. The full impact of several socialist reforms (notably those concerning decentralization and workers' rights) might only become apparent after several years of implementation. But in January 1988 Mitterrand is still in the Elyste Palace. Despite his loss of a parliamentary majority in the 1986 elections and his subsequent ‘cohabitation’ with Chirac's RPR-UDF government, Mitterrand has won back, since 1986, considerable popularity and respect.
The 1988 French Presidential Election
Authors: Frears John
Published: April 2007

THE 1986 ELECTION WAS THE BEGINNING OF ‘COHABITATION’ and 1988 was the end of it — at least of the Fifth Republic's first experience of it. Cohabitation between the President and a Prime Minister who was his chief political adversary was to be the last great test of the stability and adaptability of the Fifth Republic's political institutions. It had been the dominant theme in 1986 just as the fearsome prospect of cohabitation between left-wing parliamentary majorities and previous presidents had been to the forefront in the parliamentary elections of 1978 and even 1973. It was as the President of cohabitation that FranGois Mitterrand won his extraordinary 1988 victory. The survival of presidential legitimacy against the onslaught of prime ministerial power is what the 1988 presidential election will be remembered for. This is the principal theme of this article.
The Rediscovery of English Democratic Socialism
Authors: Crick Bernard
Published: April 2007

‘SEEK, AND YE SHALL FIND’. YET IT IS NOT IMMEDIATELY obvious that the last decade has seen a remarkable revival of a specifically English tradition of democratic socialist thought. Most political writing in England, of course, has a bad press. I use ‘political writing’ in an obvious but also a special sense. By ‘political writing’ I mean serious writing about politics which is neither academic nor purely polemical. Sometimes it may be by academics, but then not academics writing for academics in a manner only comprehensible to academics; rather those books or articles which are written for a general public who take a serious interest in politics, whether directly or indirectly involved — say ‘literate citizens’.
Letter from France — July 1988
Authors: Manent Pierre
Published: April 2007

France is perhaps today the one European country about which it is most difficult to speak with any degree of accuracy. A phrase used by General de Gaulle during the events of May 1968 applies perfectly to France today, different as it is from France as it was then: ‘La situation est insaisissable’. (‘The situation is beyond our grasp.’) Let us recall the principal facts.
The Single European Act
Authors: Noël Émile
Published: April 2007

THIS ARTICLE' PUTS FORWARD SOME GENERAL reflections on the Single European Act, on the conditions in which it was negotiated and on its first consequences. But a detailed description of the modalities of the Single Act, of the entire range of changes which it will introduce and of its potential would be beyond its scope. The Single Act has been extremely controversial, during its negotiation, after its conclusion, and for different reasons, during the ratification process. Some decried it as inadequate, even derisory, but others saw in it a threat to national sovereignty. Two referendums (in Denmark and in Ireland) were needed before it could be ratified. Today, on the contrary, the Single Act and its best-known feature — the achievement of the internal market in the Community by the end of 1992 — are presented in the media as the basis of a new Europe, the foundation of all European policy. The Single European Act does not deserve so much honour, any more than it deserved the past indignity, but it contains important innovations, which might lead to significant changes in the behaviour of the institutions and in the way in which the Community itself will develop. This is what I shall try to put forward by recalling briefly first the background of the Single Act, describing the details of the negotiations and, lastly, by singling out some of the original features of the new Treaty.
Video‐Power
Authors: Sartori Giovanni
Published: April 2007

MUCH OF OUR RHETORIC IS, TODAY, GLOBALISTIC. THE STATE unit, we say, is obsolete, and we are moving toward a global market with fewer and fewer frontiers. Concurrently our minds are opening themselves to a broader world, indeed to the ‘other worlds’ that surround our own. And the catalyst of this globalization is the enormous expansion of all kinds of communication, thereby eminently including our being able to see the world, all the world, in images in our homes in real time.
Corporatism is Dead! Long Live Corporatism!
Authors: Schmitter Philippe C.
Published: April 2007

ANDREW SHONFIELD DID NOT DISCOVER THE HIDDEN AFFINITY between modern corporatism and modern capitalism. John Maynard Keynes should probably be credited with that insight, even if it is contained in just a paragraph cited in part by Shonfield) in his essay: The End of Laissez-Faire. Mihail Manoilesco, an economist of lesser renown and much less reputable politics, was probably the first to offer a systematic argument to this effect, but he located its site on the periphery of European capitalism and (mistakenly) believed that it could only be brought into existence through imposition from above, either by the state bureaucracy or by ‘un parti unique.’ For a while, Mussolini's corporativismo seemed to prove him right. With its ignominious collapse, the concept disappeared from respectable political discourse -except as an insult to throw at one's opponents.
Letter from Greece—mid‐December 1988
Authors: Clive Nigel
Published: April 2007

THE SERIOUS ILLNESS DURING THE LATE SUMMER OF THE PRIME Minister, Andreas Papandreou, who is rising seventy, brought Greece to the start of an unusually long pre-electoral period which, if the government holds to its word, will end on 18 June 1989. Meanwhile, the affairs of state were being overshadowed by affairs of the heart, as detailed press coverage of his progress at Harefield showed him walking hand-in-hand with Dimitra Liani, a buxom former Olympic Airways hostess half his age, who had flown with him to London and with whom he has had a far from discreet liaison for the past year.
The People Fail to Decide: The Israeli General Election of 1988
Authors: Capitanchik David
Published: April 2007

BEFORE THE ISRAELI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1988, IT HAD BEEN confidently forecast that the major determinant of the outcome would be the year-long Palestinian uprising in the Administered Territories — the so-called intifada — and the future of the peace process. It was widely believed that the traumatic events in the West Bank and Gaza would displace from the attention of the electorate the more pressing issues, both domestic and foreign, which had been virtually frozen owing to the inability of the critically-divided ‘national unity government’ to agree on any positive course of action.
The EC's Technology Policy as an Engine for Integration
Authors: Williams Roger
Published: April 2007

‘EUROPESSIMISM’, SAID THE ECONOMIST IN 1984, ‘IS A FASHION that comes and goes’. The newspaper added that ‘The idea of a technology gap, with an uncompetitive Europe on the wrong side of it, deserves a very cold eye’. But it still covered its bets with the view that, despite reservations, ‘few doubt that Europe is in real trouble’. Europe experienced a previous peak of alarm about a ‘technology gap’ in the late 1960s. Concern then focused only on the United States was epitomized by Jean-Jacques Salomon's Le Défi Américain of 1967, and spawned a large literature. This petered out in the early 1970s as the United States experienced its own crises over Vietnam and Watergate, and by the end of the decade and the Carter presidency some Americans were becoming seriously worried about their own technological standing. One now had books with such titles as America's Technology Slip and The European Revenge: How the American Challenge was Rebuffed. However, by 1984 in a chapter entitled ‘“Europeanizing” the US Economy: The Enduring Appeal of the Corporatist State’ Melvyn Krauss was able to be far more sceptical: in his words ‘. . . the call for a new industrial policy in the US amounts to a call to catch up with the losers’. The Chairman of the European Committee for Research and Development had warned even in 1979 that while certain favourable factors guaranteed Europe's ‘survival, and perhaps even relatively comfortable existence’, this would be only ‘for a period that is difficult to predict but is probably no more than a few decades’.
The June 1989 European Elections and the Institutions of the Community
Authors: Bogdanor Vernon
Published: April 2007

THE ELECTIONS TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT IN JUNE 1989 will be only the third ever to be held simultaneously in independent nation states. The first two direct elections, however, were marked almost everywhere by disappointment; not only was turnout low −60.7 per cent in 1979 and 57.0 per cent in 1984, but the elections seemed to be more in the nature of plebiscites on the performance of national governments, rather than genuinely transnational, and politicians found it difficult to demonstrate their relevance to a wider public. It is true that small radical new parties, such as the Front National were able to exploit the elections to their own advantage. But this, of course, did not endear the European elections to liberal democrats.
Elite Power, Manipulation and Corruption: A Demo‐Elite Perspective
Authors: Etzioni‐Halevy Eva
Published: April 2007

THE MAIN PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO CONTRIBUTE TO the continuing debate on the manner in which power is exercised in Western-style democracies from a democratic–elite — or what I prefer to term a demo–elite — perspective. This is to be done through a theoretical exposition placing this perspective in the spectrum of the main theories on the same topic, with special reference to the classical democratic–elite theories of Max Weber, Gaetano Mosca, Joseph Schumpeter, and Raymond Aron, and the contemporary pluralistelitist theories of Robert Dahl and Giovanni Sartori.
The Concept of ‘Ideological Struggle’: Some Soviet Interpretations
Authors: Pork Andrus
Published: April 2007

IT IS NOW OFTEN SAID THAT THE MODERN WORLD IS interdependent, that there is an intensive interaction of military, political, economic and other factors in the world. There is no doubt that one of the most important aspects of this interaction process is the international flow of information, and that political ideas have a special place in that exchange of information.

What follows is an attempt to look at some phases in the development of the Soviet perception of Western non-socialist political ideas over the past few years. As is generally known, Soviet ideologists have often emphasized the need for ideological struggle against these non-Marxist, bourgeois political ideas, and they continue to do this even in the present period of perestroika. At the same time it is obvious that major changes are taking place in Soviet political thought.
Letter from Paris—April 1989
Authors: Manent Pierre
Published: April 2007

IN A BRILLIANT ARTICLE, FERDINAND MOUNT RECENTLY drew up a balance sheet of the ‘Thatcher decade’ in which he attempted to discern the laws governing political longevity. Now, when he looks at various politicians who are or were remarkable in their capacity for survival, it is striking that he does not so much as mention the head of a neighbouring country, an almost exact contemporary of Mrs Thatcher, since Franpis Mitterrand has been President of the French Republic since 1981 and should, in principle, remain president until 1995. This no doubt is because, in the eyes of F. Mount, Mitterrand's longevity is of a different nature from that of Mrs Thatcher and is far less politically instructive.
Economic Integration versus National Sovereignty: Differences between Eastern and Western Europe
Authors: Pinder John
Published: April 2007

THROUGHOUT THE WORLD, NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE bringing greater specialization and scale of production, and hence more need for interdependence among the economies of nation states. Nowhere is this need more keenly felt than in Europe, both East and West.