The new editorial team at the University of Mannheim and London School of Economics and Political Science would like to take this opportunity, in our first “Notes from the Editors,” to express our great thanks to the APSA Presidents Jennifer Hochschild and David Lake, President-elect Kathleen Thelen, the APSA staff, the Council, and the Publications Committee, as well as to Cambridge University Press, for their support and guidance during this transition process. The decision to transfer the editorship of the Review to Europe has caused some astonishment on both sides of the Atlantic. And indeed, the collaboration of a British-German editorial team that will process manuscripts from scholars around the world seems to contrast the recent political events that herald scattered regionalism instead of global competition. Admittedly, we had to overcome organizational, legal, and political hurdles to realize this transfer. But with the help of APSA Executive Director Steven Rathgeb Smith, APSA Director of Publications Barbara Walthall, and Mark Zadrozny from Cambridge University Press, we were able to master all challenges. We would also like to thank John Ishiyama for his support during this process, which officially ended on September 1. Finally, we would like to thank the members of the APSR editorial board for their willingness to support our work over the upcoming years, and those reviewers who spent valuable time and resources to serve our profession.

It is interesting that this work by Professor Keith, who is acknowledged everywhere to be the most authoritative of the commentators on the constitutional system of the British Empire, should have appeared at the very moment when the Conference on Dominion Legislation and Merchant Shipping Laws began its sittings in London in October, 1929. If it was intended to guide their deliberations, the publication of the Report of the Conference in February, 1930, shows how widely a conservative statement of the existing law and practice will differ from the new structure of Dominion autonomy, once the Report is accepted by the Imperial Conference, by the Parliament in Great Britain, and by the legislatures of the Dominions. For where Professor Keith saw in the “equal status” of the now classic Balfour Report of 1926 only “exaggerated language,” “careless phraseology,” and “rhetoric,” the Conference took this “root-principle” seriously and applied it throughout. As the Conference contained all the most important legal advisers and civil servants of the governments concerned, besides four Dominion ministers, its report will almost certainly be accepted by the Imperial Conference.

The experts recognized only one general principle from Professor Keith's work: that any changes which are to be made in the legal status quo in relation to certain subjects would have to be accomplished by acts of the British Parliament. These subjects are: (1) disallowance and reservation, (2) the extraterritorial operation of Dominion legislation, (3) the over-riding powers of British legislation laid down by the Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865, (4) the right of Great Britain alone to legislate on royal titles and the succession to the throne, and (5) the making of basic changes in Merchant Shipping and Colonial Courts of Admiralty Acts.

In the August 2015 issue of American Political Science Review, Eisenstadt et al. (2015) did not cite the last three authors in the reference for Mansbridge et al. (2012). The reference appears in the reference section below.

Parliament has today perhaps less supervision over foreign policy than over any other field of governmental activity. Such has been the case for over a generation, and such is still the case in spite of the Labor party's efforts to democratize the control of foreign affairs. That such a situation should exist is particularly strange, since the generally accepted theory of the English constitution assumes that foreign affairs are under the strict control of Parliament. Indeed, the governmental practice of the last forty years has largely violated theories formulated somewhat earlier. How this situation originated, and what its significance is, can best be understood after some examination of the theory and practice of foreign policy control.

What may be called the classical theories of the English constitution are largely the product of the writings of Bagehot and J. S. Mill working on the imagination of the generation which Gladstone dominated, and given emphasis by the Liberals of the seventies. Somewhat unthinkingly, perhaps, these theories won acceptance by Liberals and Conservatives alike. Authoritative statements of the constitutional theory of the control of foreign policy will be found, for instance, in Anson's Law and Custom of the Constitution and Halsbury’s Laws of England. Both of these works express a Liberal conception of foreign policy control; yet both ate the works of Tories.

In the development of democracy in the modern world, increasing attention has been paid to the idea of representation. With the growth of large electorates which resulted from the extension of the franchise, it has been a necessary and logical process for thinkers and constitution-makers to devise methods by which the will of the electors can be formulated and translated into public policy. Since the voters are too numerous to gather in the market place, some means must be found to represent their opinions in the control and administration of the state. In the words of John Stuart Mill, “the meaning of representative government is, that the whole people, or some numerous portion of them, exercise through deputies periodically elected by themselves the ultimate controlling power, which, in every constitution, must reside somewhere.”

But specifically whom should the deputy represent—individuals, areas, groups, parties, or himself? Must he be popularly elected and, if so, how, and by whom? These and other vital questions have occupied the attention of scholars and statesmen for more than a hundred years. How to organize a system of good democratic representation is today a very live question in several countries, and a really critical question in one or two of them.

The overriding theme of this very insightful work from distinguished presidential scholar Fred I. Greenstein is stated in the opening pages: “The United States is said to have a government of laws and institutions rather than individuals, but as these examples remind us, it is one in which the matter of who occupies the nation's highest office can have profound repercussions” (p. 2). Greenstein's analysis of presidential leadership styles from FDR to Clinton corroborates his theme by demonstrating the extent to which the aggrandizement of the presidency since the New Deal has left the American polity at the mercy of the skills and personalities of the holders of the office. As Greenstein himself points out (p. 3) parliamentary systems, with their more collective leadership, place more partisan and institutional constraints on the head of government. In contrast, the centrality of the presidency to the American system of government since the New Deal and the extent to which the institution is driven by the individual style of respective officeholders provide a recurrent and pervasive element of instability in American national government. Yet this very instability is also perhaps the office's most useful attribute. In a system characterized largely by gridlock it provides intermittent and necessary innovation and dynamism. The presidency's' greatest shortcoming, its highly protean nature, is also, ironically, its greatest value as a political institution.