bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cohesion and Identity: the Maghreb from Ibn Khaldun to Emile Durkheim
Authors: Gellner Ernest
Published: April 2007

IBN KHALDUN, LIKE EMILE DURKHEIM, IS PRIMARILY A THEORIST OF social cohesion. His central problem is - what is it that keeps men together in society? What is it that leads them to idendy with a sacid group, to accept and observe its norms, to subordinate their own individual interests to it, in some measure to accept the authority of its leaders, to think its thoughts and to internalize its aims? This is a question which sociologists, moralists and political osophers share. One of the interesting traits of Ibn Khaldun owever is the extent to which he is a sociologist rather than a moralist: modern sociologists may preach Wertfreiheit, he ractised it. Even when, as a kind of Maghrebin Machiavelli, he offers advice to princes, it is basically technical advice on points of detail, or on the wisdom of knowing things for what they are: but when it comes to the basic features of the social system, he indulges in no preaching. No advice is offered to the social cosmos as to how it should comport itself. Things are as they are. The thinker's job is to understand them, not to change them. Marx's contrary opinion would have astonished Ibn Khaldun. In this sense, Ibn Khaldun is more positivistic than Durkheim, whose thought is far more often at the service of values and of the concern with social renovation.
The Referendum and Political Change
Authors: Smith Gordon
Published: April 2007

AS A WAY OF REACHING IMPORTANT POLITICAL DECISIONS, THE referendum is usually regarded as a clumsy and unsatisfactory instrument and quite unimportant as a contribution to political democracy. Yet widespread demands for more participation ‘by the people’ have brought the referendum into new-found favour. Interest has been rekindled too by its application to the issue of membership of the European Community, with the clear possibility of directly comparing the referenda in the four countries involved. This new interest in the referendum comes at a time when many party systems, the traditional supports of a purely parliamentary democracy, appear to be in disarray, and there are signs of increasing volatility within electorates which can foreshadow basic realignments in party systems. Questions now are naturally being raised about the future ordering of democratic politics, and for this reason it seems justifiable to focus an examination of the referendum especially on the problem of political change.
Left‐wing Political Extremism and the Problem of Tolerance in Western Germany
Authors: Dyson K. H. F.
Published: April 2007

ONE CONTINUING CHARACTERISTIC OF GERMAN POLITICAL STYLE IS A ‘politics of fear’ which is propagated by both Left and Right. The Extra Parliamentary Opposition's anxieties about the neo-fascist potential in the political system are complemented by the campaign of the Springer press against totalitarian extremists of the Left. Fear is of course not necessarily unfounded in a regime which at its foundation was regarded as only ‘provisional’ and which has had every reason to fear its enemies after its experience of reactionary conservatism and Nazism and now of developments in the German Democratic Republic. The Federal Republic has been under considerable pressure since its inception to protect itself more successfully than its Weimar predecessor against its enemies. Unfortunately a ‘militant democracy’ can easily become an illiberal democracy, more concerned with its own stability than with political development.
Karamanlis’s Cautious Success: the Background
Authors: Clogg Richard
Published: April 2007

AN ANONYMOUS COMMENTATOR ON THE GREEK POLITICAL SCENE predicted in 1970 that it was unlikely that the Greeks, even if resentful of the Colonels' 'unta, would ‘respond widely to their presently exiled (self- or otherwise) erstwhile political leaders’ and concluded that 'the self-exiled Karamanlis, with his protracted silences, had lost much of his credit with his followers’. He was by no means alone in writing off the old politicians in general, and Constantine Karamanlis in particular, as a serious factor in the Greek political equation. But when the Greek military regime collapsed in July 1974 in the wake of President Makarios's overthrow in Cyprus and the subsequent Turkish invasion, President Phaidon Gizikis had no other choice than to summon the 67-year-old Constantine Karamanlis to clear up the mess created by seven years of military government. Karamanlis, far from being a spent force, returned to a welcome verging on delirium and looks set fair for another long term as Prime Minister and most likely, once the new constitution has been enacted, as President of Greece.
Europe as a Tenth Member of the Community
Authors: Pinder John
Published: April 2007

THE REFERENDUM PROVED THAT THE BRITISH PEOPLE DID NOT WANT to leave the Community. But neither the government's presentation of its case nor the people's response to the campaign indicated any demand for changes in the Community, other than a loosening of some of its rules and a strengthening of the intergovernmental aspect at the expense of the supranational. Yet M Ortoli called the referendum result a ‘point of departure’ for the Community; the French are interested in resuming progress towards monetary union; the Germans are talking of more political integration; and on the continent there are high hopes of ‘European progress’ following the Tindemans report on European Union. Are we, then, heading for another great clash between static British and dynamic continentals?
The Civil Liberties Lobby: a Comparative Analysis
Authors: Benewick Robert
Published: April 2007

A DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTIC OF BOTH THE AMERICAN CIVIL Liberties Union and the National Council for Civil Liberties (hereafter ACLU and NCCL) is their attempt to be comprehensive in coverage. Both organizations are concerned with spectrums of civil liberties questions and civil rights issues at different levels of discourse and practice. These may range from the promotion and protection of freedom of speech and assembly as fundamental rights to their particularist application in regard to demonstrators and demonstrations, from insuring due process of law to seeking equality before the law, from advocating citizens' rights for more information from government to protecting their rights to privacy. They may also be involved in issues that are not concerned with civil liberties, a priori, but have implications for civil liberties. On any given question, there may be other civil liberties spokesmen with whom they may cooperate, compete or confront. In carrying out their brief both the ACLU and the NCCL engage in public campaigns, litigation, lobbying, case work, direct representations, educational and research activities.
Corruption, Political Stability and Development: Comparative Evidence from Egypt and Morocco
Authors: Waterbury John
Published: April 2007

WHILE IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO MEASURE QUANTITATIVELY THE extent of corruption in any polity, it may well be that in an absolute sense it is more prevalent (although not necessarily more conspicuous) in ‘developing’ economies and polities, than in societies with relatively high standards of living. This, if it is so, results from a concatenation of politico-economic factors which fosters the spread of corrupt practices in virtually all dealings between the citizenry and the state. In what follows, we shall consider three forms of corruption – endemic, planned, and developmental – which, while analytically distinct, are not necessarily so legally or operationally. In everyday life they form a whole which will now be pulled apart. However, taken together these three forms may literally add up to ‘systemic’ corruption. This means simply that as a proportion of the total resources and talents available to an economy, those tied up in corruption are particularly high and alternatives in achieving individual or collective ends particularly few. These propositions must remain tentative, and instinct as much as hard measurement has informed them. Further, the trifold categorization of corruption used here is largely descriptive, and it is not my intention to undertake an exhaustive examination of causes nor to suggest remedies. However, a good deal will be said about effects.
Conserving Politics: Michael Oakeshott and Political Theory
Authors: Barber Benjamin R.
Published: April 2007

THE CONVERSATION (AS MICHAEL OAKESHOTT WOULD CALL IT) THAT is political theory finds itself these days starved for interlocutors. There are talkers aplenty, but they do little listening and pursue their several idioms not for the pleasure of language but in order to urge positions and promote interests. Philosophers like Rawls and Nozick join the conversation in order to demonstrate, thanks to the irrefutable logical foundations they presume to discover for justice, how most effectively to conclude it. Liberal sce tics like Karl Popper trust talk no more than philosophy, and opt for straightforward problem-solving. For Marxists, conversation can only obscure or reveal action – and action is where (as Marxism's American roponents might put it) the action is. In each of these modes of discourse, the goal is advocacy, certainty, justification – a resolution of, not a conversation about political issues. Moreover, as if the ranks of conversationalists were not already decimated, death has, in the last year or two, silenced the voices of three giants: John Plamenatz, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.
After Franco, Franquismo?: The Armed Forces, The Crown and Democracy
Authors: Maura Joaquin Romero
Published: April 2007

HAVING SPENT MORE THAN ONE THIRD OF A CENTURY IN THE TALL and narrow dungeon of Franco's authoritarian regime, Spain now stands on the threshold of an uncharted future. Not even those who say that the 35-odd million inhabitants mostly enjoyed the shade and the miasma can deny that the silhouette there for all to see is, unsurprisingly, that of a hesitant convalescent. Anxious questions concerning the future of Spain do not owe their acuity to the dread of what appears inevitable, but rather to the wide range of apparently equally probable alternatives.
The Prospects of Federalism: The Regional Problem after Franco
Authors: Medhurst K.
Published: April 2007

DESPITE YEARS OF POLITICAL STABILITY AND RECENT ECONOMIC growth General Franco's dictatorship has left many of Spain's perennial political dilemmas unresolved. The problems that preci itated the Civil War (1936–39) and destroyed the Second Republic will continue, albeit in modified form, to dog Franco's successors.

One particularly intractable problem is posed by Spain's Basque and Catalan minorities. Local nationalist movements contributed to the Republic's collapse and remain a long-term threat to Spain's political stability. This essay, therefore, tries to identify the root causes of these movements; to examine the regional problem's present state and to scrutinize possible solutions to the problem in the post-Franco era.
Underdevelopment and Political Rights: A Revisionist Challenge
Authors: Henderson Conway W.
Published: April 2007

WHEN THE NEW GOVERNMENTS OF UNDERDEVELOPED AREAS supplanted colonial rule, many were optimistic that these governments could operate within a democratic framework. But these nascent governments drifted into authoritarian forms of political life as they faced the exigencies of self-rule. Representative institutions on the Western pattern broke down and were replaced by single-party arrangements headed by charismatic leaders. This form of government, in turn, has tended to give way to bureaucratic and military regimes.
After Helsinki: The Politics of the Cultural Centres
Authors: Boisard Marcel
Published: April 2007

IT IS SIGNIFICANT THAT THE FINAL ACT OF THE EUROPEAN SECURITY Conference, which was designed to promote the expansion of cultural exchanges, did not ay any special attention to the very institutions which are best fitted to achieve that expansion. The centres, which are only one instrument among many, could be an important stage in the development of cultural relations because they are probably the best-known and the most permanent form of cultural exchanges. But such was the lack of consensus among the signatories that no mention was made of them in the final Act. The debates were in fact marked by a violent disagreement between the USSR and France. Both advanced arguments which corresponded more to the ‘national’ cultural tradition than to the ideological cleavage in Europe today. Those who took part in the negotiations were aware of the abstruseness of the texts. They were therefore able to search out in the final Act the compromise which had been agreed on but which had been so watered down that it is difficult to see to what it refers. For example: ‘The participating States express their intention … to envisage other appropriate measures which would permit where necessary by mutual agreement among interested parties the facilitation of access to their respective cultural achievements in particular in the field of books’.
Government Response to Man‐made Hazards
Authors: Williams Roger
Published: April 2007

THE BUSINESS OF LIVING IS INESCAPABLY HAZARDOUS, EVEN IN THE advanced industrial societies, for all that life within them has now become less nasty, brutish and short. In fact, the very process of technological innovation which has made possible the unprecedented affluence of these societies has also led to quite new dangers. In consequence, securing a reasonable balance between the advantages and disadvantages of innovation has now become an important government objective, and a vital one in the case of any technical development whose potentially dysfunctional effects would be catastrophic. It is with the political issues bearing upon the maintenance of this balance that this article is mainly concerned. Its scope is restricted for reasons of logic as well as of convenience to the specifically physical man-made hazards of industrial societies, and the unique psychological problems which these societies are often said to present are therefore not considered.
Point of Departure? The Blake Report on Electoral Reform
Authors: Roberts Geoffrey K.
Published: April 2007

THE OUTCOME OF THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTIONS OF 1974, WITH the multi-party Parliaments which resulted and the disproportionate relationship of seats to votes in the case of the Liberal Party, has revived interest in the question of electoral reform. The progress made since the Kilbrandon Report on the Constitution towards the creation of Scottish and Welsh Assemblies has emphasized the need to consider whether the existing method of electing parliamentary representatives should be used for these new legislatures, or, indeed, for the Westminster Parliament. Decisions to move towards direct elections for the European Parliament, eventually under some generally uniform system for all the member-states of the Community, have strengthened the case for a close examination of the suitability of retaining the British system of single-member seats won by the relative-majority system of ‘first past the post’.
The Politics of Employment Policy in Germany and Great Britain
Authors: Beyme Klaus , Ionescu Ghiţa
Published: April 2007

NATIONAL EMPLOYMENT POLICIES IN GENERAL HAVE BEEN ESPECIALLY intensively studied from a comparative point of view in the last decade during which unemployment has again become an object of universal concern. But, at least to our knowledge, these studies have been focused more on the economic and social asects of the problems of employment/unemployment, and less on the political aspects, or what we call the politics of employment policies, i.e. how are these policies made, by what kind of institutions and especially through what kind of political processes?
Devolution and Corporatism
Authors: Drucker H. M.
Published: April 2007

PARLIAMENTARY REPRESENTATWE DEMOCRACY IS ABOUT THE relationship of individuals to the state. It commonly invokes mechanistic metaphors about the relationship between these individuals and their governments. Corporatism is about the relationship of certain, apparently relationship indispensable, functional groups to each other in the society which, collectively , they comprise. It is commonly referred to in organic metaphors, specifically it holds that each function is organically related to each other function and that each is irreplaceable. None can be dispensed with and each can do its appointed task provided all others do theirs.
Absolutism, Tyranny and the Minimum Conditions of Constitutional Rule
Authors: Macfarlane L. J.
Published: April 2007

HISTORICALLY AND CONCEPTUALLY CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT IS presented as the antithesis of absolute sovereignty and the prophylactic to tyrannical oppression. The paradigm form for absolute sovereignty is rule by one man and, since everything turns on the character of that man, such rule is inherently liable to collapse through incapacity, or to degenerate into tyranny. Tyranny is an ill against which necessarily there can be no protection under conditions of absolute sovereignty. Constitutional government may, therefore, be conceived as an attempt to provide built-in safeguards to prevent, or at least reduce the chances of, absolute sovereignty assuming the corrupt and perverted form of tyranny. Such safeguards inevitably restrict the absolute nature of sovereign rule.
Ideology and Tactics of the French Socialist Party
Authors: Lieber Nancy I.
Published: April 2007

WESTERN EUROPEAN SOCIALISTS HAVE LONG BEEN PLAGUED BY THE existence of factions and cleavages within their party ranks. But it is quite consciously that Socialists defend internal party democracy as the best guardian against the abuses of arbitrary decision-making and bureaucratic fossilization. This aspect of party life continues to divide the Left movement into Socialist and Communist camps. The Socialists, however, believe that the means employed very much determine the nature of the end; that ‘if you have a revolution by a Bolshevik Party, you will end up with a Bolshevik society’. A Socialist Party therefore is not expected to bc homogeneous, but pluralistic - like the future Socialist society it seeks.
Spanish Political Parties: Before and After the Election
Authors: Story Jonathan
Published: April 2007

AS LONG AS FRANCO LIVED, ALL MILITARY, LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE powers centred on his person. Regional autonomies were suppressed, unions outlawed and political parties banned on the metaphorically medical grounds that ‘Spain’ was historically addictive to the ‘demoliberal system of inorganic democracy’. But Admiral Carrero Blanco, Franco’s éminence grise, was assassinated on 20 December 1973. His death marked the burial of Franco’s plans to perpetuate the regime beyond his grave. Juan Carlos, son of Don Juan - the heir to Alfonso XIII’s throne - pledged at his inauguration in November 1975 to create ‘a real consensus of national concord’. Spain was to become a full member of Europe, ‘with all that this implies’. Neither pledge was attainable without at least a major reform, or at most a dismantling of the regime’s characteristic institutions: the National Movement and the state syndicates. Both were eventually accomplished by a de facto alliance between the monarch and all political forces in the country opposed to a maintenance of the status quo.
The Changing Relations between Trade Unions and Working-Class Parties in France
Authors: Lavau Georges
Published: April 2007

The intellectual structures which can easily be applied to the political and social realities of Northern Europe are largely irrelevant to those of Southern Europe, and certainly, to those of France.

Three postulates are implicit in considering the problem of the changing relations between the trade unions and the working-class parties.

One is that in every European industrial country there are working-class parties. In addition there are parties which are not working class, but bourgeois middle class, conservateurs, popolare or volksparteien (and the logic of this postulate even implies that there is, in fact, only one working-class party of any real political significance).
Trade Unions and Political Parties in Britain, France, Italy and West Germany
Authors: Coombes David
Published: April 2007

The object in trying to compare the relationship between trade unions and working-class political parties in these four countries was to see how far the relationship had changed in response to certain trends supposed to be common to the countries concerned. The trends were: (i) the changing role of working-class parties themselves; (ii) the decline of political representation, especially by parliamentary means, in favour of direct action; (iii) the growth of government in the social and economic sphere and increasing direct participation by trade unions in governmental decision-making. It was considered important to look at these countries together in view of their growing economic and political interdependence, in spite of fundamental differences among them which affect the roles both of political parties and of trade unions.
White Power in South Africa: Cohesion without Consensus?
Authors: Austin Dennis
Published: April 2007

THAT SOUTH AFRICA HAS WITHIN ITS STATE AND SOCIETY THE POTENTIAL for revolution is rarely doubted. It is a very strange and wicked country — anachronistic and atavistic, as if left over from the past to trouble the present. Africans are not worse treated today in South Africa than black men and women were in the United States 150 years ago. They are not bought and sold as property. Their survival, too, is assured unlike, say, the American Indians or the Aborigines of Australia at the turn of the century. They are more free, or less 'unfree', than the serfs in Russia before emancipation. But the extraordinary feature of South Africa is that it is still bound to a rigidly divided society which, if it is not slavery, is certainly close to serfdom. To behave in the twentieth century in a modern industrial state as if it were still the nineteenth or eighteenth century is very unusual, so unusual in fact that many people simply refuse to believe that it can be done: the whites deny that the parallel is just, the non-white populations refuse to believe it can last. It is this conflict of belief as well as the opposition of interests which seem to presage tragedy, for, if revolution comes, it will certainly be tragic not only for those who fear its consequences but for many who now want to hasten its arrival. Very often in such terrible situations, it seems to me that there is also an element of fatalism. It comes to be believed that what must be, will be, although whether that point has yet been reached in South Africa I do not know. It is something we have to consider.
Anti-Elitism Revisited
Authors: Sartori Giovanni
Published: April 2007

ARE ELITES AND LEADING MINORITIES A NECESSARY EVIL, A LIABILITY, or are they a vital and beneficial asset? Ultimately, the question is: should we downgrade or uplift leadership?

The list of authors who speak in favour of the latter view is impressive, both in time and in eminence. For the ancients, it is the major Greek historian, Thucydides, who reminds us that the greatness of Athens reached its height with Pericles precisely because ‘by his rank, ability, and known integrity he was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude’. After we had begun again, Bryce reviewed the most advanced experience of his time in this concise sentence: ‘Perhaps no form of government needs great leaders so much as democracy does’. Fifty years later, in 1937, after the downfall of democracy in Italy, Germany and Spain, de Madariaga wrote : ‘Despite appearances, liberal democracies are dependent on leadership even more so perhaps than other, more authoritarian forms of government; for . . . their natural tendency to weaken the springs of political authority must be counterbalanced by a higher level of. . . authority on the part of their leaders’.
Party and Federation in the USSR: The Problem of the Nationalities and Power in the USSR
Authors: d’Encausse Hélène Carrère
Published: April 2007

THE SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION PROVIDES AN opportunity to draw up a balance-sheet. It is even more appropriate as the Soviet leaders have used the occasion to adopt a new constitution, and have thus implied that a new stage is about to begin for Soviet society and for the system of government which emanates from it and embodies it. This stage, called advanced socialism, has several characteristics: ‘the formation of a new historic community - the Soviet people, the development of the dictatorship of the proletariat into the state of the whole people, the transformation of the CPSU from a revolutionary party of the workers into the party of all the people, the strengthening of the homogeneity of Soviet society’. The phrases ‘homogeneity and cohesion of society’ are probably those which recur most frequently in the presentation of the new constitution, especially when its national implications are described. ‘The constitution of the USSR is at the same time a constitution of a state of the whole people — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — and of the fifteen sovereign republics which compose it and finally of the thirtyeight national-state formations with differing forms of autonomy. The new historic community — the Soviet people — numbers 250 million citizens, representing more than one hundred nations and nationalities of the USSR. But it is also a single social monolith, a single historical phenomenon with a single economy, a single culture, a single Soviet way of life, a single ideology’
The Centre Parties of Norway and Sweden
Authors: Elder Neil , Gooderham Rolf
Published: April 2007

THERE ARE THREE REASONS WHY THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN WRITTEN. FIRST, the Centre Parties, with their origins in rural interests, have provided a natural channel for the articulation of issues difficult to accomodate within the framework of a two-party system. These issues include decentralization, environmental protection and a questioning attitude to growth. Secondly, these parties provide an interesting study of attempts to adapt from a traditionalist base to the modern world. In the process they have come to play an important part in coalition formation in their respective countries. The Norwegian Centre Party, for example, provided the Prime Minister for a coalition from 1965 to 1971 in the person of Per Borten, while the Centre Party of Sweden achieved power in 1976 at the head of a three-party coalition under the premiership of Thorbjörn Fälldin. Finally, they have been little explored academically either in their own countries or in English-language source literature.
What next in Education? Reflections of an ex‐Minister
Authors: Lindsay Kenneth
Published: April 2007

EVERY YEAR IN EARLY JANUARY A GREAT GET-TOGETHER TAKES PLACE called the North of England Education Conference. It continues for three days and it brings together teachers, administrators, inspectors, professors, educational publishers - the lot. Usually it is addressed by the Minister of Education. Last year Mrs Shirley Williams gave the presidential speech, this year Lord James presided; he is better known to many of us as Eric James, formerly High Master of Manchester Grammar School. Looking back I notice that I had the privilege of presiding over two earlier conferences, at Scarborough as Minister in 1938 and at Morecambe as a university Member of Parliament in 1947: between these two dates a coalition government passed the famous 1944 Act.
The Politics of Limited Pluralism? The Case of West Germany
Authors: von Beyme Klaus
Published: April 2007

THERE IS NO OTHER WEST EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY AS HIGHLY SUSPECT throughout the world so far as the extent of its tolerance towards deviant marginal groups is concerned. This is one of the reasons why West Germany is a good case for testing certain propositions about the theory of pluralism in general. In political science terminology pluralism has mostly been used in the restricted way of a certain stage of public philosophy, i.e. in the sense of ‘interest group liberalism’ propagating and perpetuating the faith that a system built primarily upon group bargaining must be perfectly selfcorrective and must have confidence in the balancing impacts of ‘overlapping memberships’ and contervailing powers. The ‘bias of pluralism’ in political science2 included a restriction of the notion ‘pluralism’ to interest groups. It was the highly disputable attempt to sum up all the forms of emancipation movements and their counterforces in the concept of ‘group’, thus equalizing them, and to line up all the cleavage lines which developed at different times of modern history (movements for religious autonomy, nationalism, conflicts between cities and countryside, class struggles etc.) and which had some impact on the formation of party systems, to compete in one arena.
Belgrade and Human Rights
Authors: Edwards Geoffrey
Published: April 2007

IT WAS ONE OF THE MAJOR ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE WEST TO SECURE the inclusion of the issue of human rights within the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and its Final Act. Among the Principles contained in the latter which purport to guide relations between the participating states, Principle VII refers to respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief. Basket III of the Final Act contains an extensive number of detailed practical measures allowing for the freer movement of peoples, information and ideas. These results were achieved only after protracted negotiations in drawing up of a mutually acceptable package of measures covering the whole range of issues involved in detente: the military and the economic as well as the humanitarian. The practical manner in which the Final Act brought these aspects of detente together provides a solid basis from which to assess implementation by the participating states and therefore their commitment to continuing the process of detente.
The French National Assembly Elections of March 1978
Authors: Frears J. R.
Published: April 2007

WHEN A SLEEPER AWAKES FROM A BAD DREAM HE FINDS THE BEDCLOTHES a little rumpled but nothing else changed. The dream itself quickly fades. However the recurring dream is a phenomenon well-known to psychology. The French electorate of the Fifth Republic goes in for the insubstantial dream as an important form of experience. The most famous example was the ‘Events of May 1968’. Like a sleepwalker the whole country acted out the myth of revolution with all its romantic folklore. Comfortable, even wealthy, people manned the strike committees at their children's schools. However nobody turned the power or the water off and nobody did any shooting. People only began to get killed when petrol distribution was resumed for the Whitsun holiday weekend and there were 120 deaths in road accidents. Nonetheless the government tottered and the world trembled. No one noticed that in an affluent industrial democracy with a standard of living among the highest in the world the kind of discontent that leads to violent cataclysm did not exist.
Political Parties, Social Class, and Economic Policy Preferences
Authors: Tufte Edward R.
Published: April 2007

ALTHOUGH THE SYNCHRONIZATION OF ECONOMIC FLUCTUations with the electoral cycle often preoccupies political leaders, the real force of political influence on macroeconomic performance comes in the determination of economic priorities. Here the ideology and platform of the political party in power dominate. Just as the electoral calendar helps set the timing of policy, so the ideology of political leaders shapes the substance of economic policy.
Three Views on the Significance of the British General Election
Authors: Radice Giles , Raison Timothy , Marquand David
Published: April 2007

THE LABOUR PARTY WAS DECISIVELY DEFEATED AT THE 1979 general election. The Conservatives not only won 70 more seats than Labour but its lead of 6.9% was considerably bigger than that of Harold Macmdlan in 1959, while the swing away from Labour to Tory was the largest since 1945. What is even more depressing is that the Labour share of the poll was its lowest since 1931.
Political Cleavages in Spain and the 1979 General Election
Authors: Maravall J. M.
Published: April 2007

THE TRANSITION FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY IN Spain has been a fascinating experience ever since the Autumn of 1976, when the Ley de Reforma Politica (Law on Political Reform) was passed through the Francoist Cortes and later through a national Referendum. Setting aside the political virtuosity of the different players involved in this dramatic experiment, three aspects of the transition have been particularly important from the point of view of a sociological analysis of Spanish politics: first of all, the ideological moderation of the electorate, which would fulfil an essential prerequisite of democratic stability; secondly, the continuities with past political cleavages between Left and Right, in spite of a parenthesis of four decades of dictatorship; finally, the threat to the new democracy coming from the political violence of Basque separatists and from the activities of Francoist groups which are also active within the army. These three dimensions can be re-examined in the light of the results of the General Election of 1 March 1979, the first constitutional general election in Spain since 1936 and the second election since the death of Franco.
The Media World and Democratic Representation
Authors: Mansfield Harvey C.
Published: April 2007

THE MEDIA ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING - THAT IS FOR certain - but of what? They appear at frrst to be nothing in themselves, merely a facility of communication. They facilitate communication among a people, especially among a large people, and thus make that people more of a people, a whole that is conscious of itself and that, being so, can move together. We call a people of this sort a democratic people, or simply a democracy, implying that the communication among a people which makes possible a whole people is, or substitutes for, a form of government. As the media facilitate communication especially among a large people, they especially facilitate modern democracy, which, as opposed to ancient democracy, is the democracy of a large people.
Africa in the International System: the Great Powers in Search of a Perspective
Authors: Mayall James
Published: April 2007

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE AFRICAN CONTINENT HAS ALWAYS occupied an ambiguous and in the last analysis unhealthy place in the Western mind. To some its vast empty spaces have promised the riches of a new El Dorado together with the piratical thrills associated with their plunder, to others the challenge of a last frontier along which to stake out and defend their interests; while for many Africa was either the dark continent, a corrupt and corruptin place, or the last stronghold of barbarism waiting upon the enlightenment, or a refuge of worldly innocence where a breed of New Men might at last transcend their own past (and ours) and build a society based not on exploitation and conflict but on social justice.
Philosophy and Political Theory
Authors: Gunnell John G.
Published: April 2007

THIS ESSAY CONSISTS OF A COLLECTION OF ARGUMENTS WHICH have been more fully developed elsewhere but are presented here in rather summary form in order to point towards a fundamental problem concerning the present status of political theory in the discipline of political science. This problem is not easily defined; but the difficulty recalls Alfred Cobban's complaint twenty-five years ago that political theory had become disen aged Lom ‘political facts’ and ‘political practice’ and transformed into an ‘academic discipline’. My concern is with the ‘philosophization’ of political theory. By this I do not mean simply that political theory is not relevant to politics or has become detached from actual political issues – although this is probably quite true – but that it has tended to become a residue of arguments in academic philosophy. The bios theoretikos and the bios philosophikos have become indistinguishable.
The Post‐1964 Brazilian Regime: Outward Redemocratization and Inner Institutionalization
Authors: Mendes Candido
Published: April 2007

HAVING NOW BEEN IN POWER FOR FIFTEEN YEARS, THE PRESENT Brazilian political regime sees the coming year as the end of a successfully completed experiment. Its goal is the normalization of the ‘development state’ established in 1964 – a goal that encompassed a clear economic model and a willingness to accept the risks that the impact of the development state would have on other sub-systems of society.

Over a period of a decade and a half, the regime has sought to provide an increasingly coherent response to the impasses in social change that were characteristic of the period of so-called spontaneous development of the fifties. This response was based on the assumption of a natural convergence of increased productivity, social mobility and democracy.
Bergson's Philosophy and French Political Doctrines: Sorel, Maurras, Péguy and de Gaulle
Authors: Kennedy Ellen
Published: April 2007

BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR HENRI BERGSON HAD PUBlished three major works, but nothing exclusively or even primarily concerned with social and political issues. Nevertheless, Bergson's philosophy was thought to have a political meaning that could be deduced from its principles. Despite their different, even contradictory, conclusions about it, Bergson's philosophy influenced several leading figures in France – Georges Sorel, Charles Péguy, Charles Maurras and Charles de Gaulle – and through them the course of French history. Significantly, Bergson's philosophical arguments interested them more than his relatively minor, but concrete, statements about contemporary politics. Bergson's mature thought on moral and political life was shaped principally by the First world War: Les Deux sources de la moral et de la religion appeared after Sorel and Péguy were dead and when Maurras and the Action Franqaise no longer figured so prominently in French politics. Even de Gaulle, who came to prominence much later than the others and who really belongs more to the second half of the century than they do, appears to have taken no interest in Les Deux sources. Rather, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience and L'Évolution créatrice in which Bergson states his critique of ‘conceptual thinking’ and his theories of consciousness and biological evolution, comprise ‘Bergsonism’ in politics – not Bergson's own politics. These ironically find no consistent representation in the movements or political theories discussed below. The difference between what Bergson stood for and favoured in politics and what others thought his philosophy implied for politics is most striking and points to the difficulties inherent in taking practical advice from metaphysical arguments. There are, then, two problems surrounding Bergson's influence in France, one of which has already been alluded to and will be discussed at some length. The other is much more diffuse, but defines Bergson's political reputation today.
Business Interests and the British Conservative Party
Authors: Grant Wyn
Published: April 2007

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BUSINESS INTERESTS AND THE British Conservative Party is a matter of crucial importance which is relatively neglected in the existing literature. The basic theme of this article is that this relationship is more problematic and tenuous than is often assumed to be the case. Relations between business interests and the Conservative Government elected in 1979 are likely to be characterized by recurrent tensions on questions of economic and industrial policy.
On Political Compromise: Italy after the 1979 Elections
Authors: Graziano Luigi
Published: April 2007

SINCE 1976 ITALY HAS BEEN EXPERIENCING A POLITICAL STALEmate which should not be confused with the periodical difficulties of the system. What is at stake is the capacity of Italian democracy to ensure change in a peaceful manner – which I take to be one of the main functions of democracy. The political essence of the crisis lies in the Christian Democrats' (DC) growing incapacity to assure the governability of the country and in the problem of providing an alternative governmental leadership which would include the main opposition party, the Communist Party (PCI).

The resulting impasse is what explained both Moro's insistence on the need for a ‘great national solidarity’ and the PCI's strategy of the ‘historic compromise’. Convergence found political expression in the grand coalition governments which ruled Italy between 1976 and 1979, the first majority in thirty years which included the PCI.

On the analytical level, convergence in polarized systems like Italy's can be fruitfully analysed, as I have suggested elsewhere, from the viewpoint of the consociational model. I shall first briefly review the model before turning to a discussion of the prospects for cooperation after the 1979 general elections.
Experience and Concepts ‐ Between Democracy and Dictatorship
Authors: Bracher Karl Dietrich
Published: April 2007

IN THE FIELDS OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY AND POLITICAL science, the German discussion during the past thirty years has taken many unexpected turns. On the one hand, the expansion of political and social studies has led to often very exaggerated forms of specialization and theorization; the quantity of books and articles either on methodology or on fragmented details can hardly be mastered even by dedicated professionals. On the other hand, symptomatic of profound changes on the institutional and political level of German society is a marked polarization among social and political scientists, which has taken place mainly during the past ten to fifteen years; the historians are following the trend by confronting the ‘progressive’ methods of social and structural analysis with the ‘traditional’ history of persons, events and institutions. At the same time, an increasing demand for more personnel and more funds in the field of the social sciences, initially justified by the scarcity of public support, has now been followed by critical doubts about the expanding number of students and academic people pressing for positions.
Twenty‐Five Years of Socio‐Political Analysis: Notes and Reflections
Authors: Dahrendorf Ralf
Published: April 2007

SOCIO-POLITICAL ANALYSIS – SIT VENIA VERBO! – HAS TO DO with our experience of political development and its social foundations. Needless to say, our experience influences the way in which we see such development. It is not arrogant to add that this was never more true than in the changing circumstances of Europe in the last half-century.

A personal note may be regarded as generational, social, national as well. Before my eighteenth birthday I experienced both 20 July 1944 and the forced merger of Social Democrats and Communists in East Germany in the spring of 1946. In both cases, my father was in opposition, though in very different kinds of opposition. In the first instance, opposition from outside; being an insider, a member of the Reichstag, was a distant memory, though one to be revived at any moment, if the coup d'état succeeded. In the second instance, opposition from inside; a clear sense, as Deputy Chairman of the East German Social Democrats, that a new totalitarianism was just around the corner, after the brief euphoria of 1945. In both cases, moral victory and practical defeat, prison, exile. Such experiences need no interpretation.
On Looking Backwards
Authors: Gould Julius
Published: April 2007

THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS HAVE PASSED WITH SURPRISING speed. They have certainly fulfilled the imperatives of the curse: ‘may you live in interesting times!’. Too much has happened in too many places – on the moon as well as on earth. New movements, new ideas, new cults have emerged. Populations have multiplied and so have inventions. New centres of learning have been established and old ones have been subverted, not least by an overdose of political zeal. The sciences of man have developed – more painfully than was hoped and with fewer concrete results than was (and is) desired. I think we have learned that our efforts to understand complex social and political structures (including those constituted by governments and oppositions) may themselves founder (or flounder) in complexities. Some of those complexities are endemic to the subject of our study; others are the result of our own confusion of categories or of premature conceptualization; others result from overspecialization – and others from the hazards of cross-disciplinary study. Perhaps the cardinal error has been to seek too much – and expect too much – from a narrowly ‘scientific’ approach. We all know of cases on the heads of which one or other of these caps can fit.
A Tracery of Influences
Authors: Miller J. D. B.
Published: April 2007

LATE IN 1952 I ARRIVED IN LONDON FROM AUSTRALIA. I WAS to spend ten happy years in England, a period from which can be traced many of the influences which still matter to me. Nonetheless, the thirteen years before 1952 had provided a good deal of intellectual luggage which served me in various ways in England, and which still has relevance; so it is probably best to start with that earlier period in Australia, and explain how I got some of the ideas with which I came ashore at Tilbury.
Observations on Some Tribulations of Civility
Authors: Shils Edward
Published: April 2007

THE INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS REQUIRED FOR THE freedom of expression of beliefs and the representation of intertests and ideals – both of which can be divisive – can function effectively in society if those who use them for their own particularistic ends are at the same time restrained by an admixture of civility. Public liberties are conditions of the proposition, confrontation and persuasion of contending beliefs, of their cultivation in autonomous corporate bodies and of their presentation to public authorities. Representative institutions are the arrangements through which contending beliefs and interests are brought forward, considered and taken into account in the making of laws governing the territorially bounded society. The institutions in which beliefs and desires or interests are proposed and confronted in argument and the institutions in which beliefs and interests are taken into account and digested discriminatingly into law cannot work acceptably without some constituent civility and consensus of the contending parties. If the contending parties are vehemently irreconcilable and if effectively contending beliefs and interests are very widely disparate, one or another of the groups will resist physically or seek to impose its will by coercion and actual violence on the other. The representative institutions cannot moreover work effectively if they have too many tasks to master and if the different contending parties within them are irreconcilable to the point where they deny the legitimacy of the institutions themselves, of the procedures for arriving at decisions and the decisions themselves, should those decisions be uncongenial to their own beliefs and interests.
The State Versus Sociology: the Spanish Experience
Authors: Galván Enrique Tierno
Published: April 2007

WHEN I WAS INVITED BY GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION TO contribute a memoir on my intellectual autobiography to its fifteenth anniversary number, it struck me that the most appropriate subject for me to treat was the nature of the change affecting my own discipline – sociology – during the transition from dictatorship to democracy.