THE BRITISH-IRISH COUNCIL SPRINGS FROM AND IS PROVIDED FOR IN the Belfast Agreement signed on Good Friday 1998. Its coming into force depends upon the implementation of the Agreement. The Council is established, however, not by the 1998 Northern Ireland Act, which gives legislative expression to the bulk of this Agreement, but by an international treaty, the British–Irish Agreement, attached to the Belfast Agreement.

The Belfast Agreement together with the legislation providing for devolution to Scotland and Wales establishes a new constitutional settlement, both among the nations which form the United Kingdom, and also between those nations and the other nation in these islands, the Irish nation. The United Kingdom itself is, as a result of the Scotland Act and the Government of Wales Act, in the process of becoming a new union of nations, each with its own identity and institutions – a multi-national state, rather than, as many of the English have traditionally seen it, a homogeneous British nation containing a variety of different people.

AS ELECTION DAY APPROACHED IT SEEMED CERTAIN THAT LABOUR would come out on top and the Scottish National Party (SNP) would come second. Thanks to the new German-style electoral system it also seemed certain that Labour could not win an overall majority in the new Scottish Parliament and that the Conservatives would get some parliamentary representation however low their vote. But each of the parties had hopes and ambitions as well as expectations. Labour hoped to get over 60 seats in the new parliament of 129, enough at least to have the option of forming a minority government. The SNP hoped to get well over 40 seats, enough to let it assume the undisputed role of the opposition, and to mark a further step along the road to independence. The Liberal Democrats hoped to be more than a small but useful coalition partner in the new parliament. Out in the country they hoped the new electoral system would end the traditional handicap of a Liberal Democrat vote being dismissed as a ‘wasted vote’ and so let their votes rise to equal their underlying level of popular support. ‘Other’ parties and candidates hoped that the new electoral system and the new inclusive politics would somehow include them.

THE WELSH LABOUR PARTY COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED THE FIRST elections to the National Assembly with a fair degree of equanimity, if not optimism. In the 1997 General Election, the party had won 55 percent of the vote and delivered on its promise of a devolution referendum which it won, albeit by a narrow majority. The architect of Labour's devolution policy, Ron Davies, the Welsh Secretary of State, who was widely respected within and beyond the Labour Party, had spoken of a new Welsh politics, with policy-making open to and inclusive of other Welsh parties. All this, however, was called into question by what Ron Davies subsequently described as his ‘moment of madness’ on Clapham Common in October 1998. Although the circumstances remain unclear, they resulted in his resignation from the post of Secretary of State and leader of the Welsh Labour Party. Alun Michael, a Cardiff MP and a minister at the Home Office, was appointed Welsh Secretary and subsequently endured a bitter and bruising leadership contest with Rhodri Morgan, during which claims were made that he was Blair's man, and not really an enthusiastic devolutionist but part of the Millbank control system. Large sections of the party were disillusioned by the process and serious questions were raised as to what extent disillusioned party activists would be involved in the Assembly election campaign.

PSEPHOLOGY – THE ART OF STUDYING ELECTIONS – HAS COME TEN thousand leagues since R.B.McCallum applied the term in the 1940s to his pioneering analyses of British elections and political opinion in the first of the now classic Nuffield studies. Putting the electors under a magnifying glass has ranged from examining them by means of formal logic and sophisticated mathematical procedures, to anecdotal accounts of the process through which democracies choose their governments. In this article, I seek to situate a particular contest – the 1998 Quebec provincial election – into the general political landscape.

The result of the balloting was that the reigning sovereigntist Parti Québécois (PQ) was returned to power under a first-past-thepost system with a resounding majority of seats but with fewer votes than the opposition federalist Parti Liberal du Québec (PLQ). As if that paradox were not enough, polls demonstrated without a smidgen of doubt that although the voters returned a government committed to holding a referendum on the sovereignty of Quebec, a significant majority did not wish a referendum to be held within the foreseeable future. Majorities of both francophone and anglophone electors opposed a direct consultation on Quebec's status in the federation.

ON 1 JULY 1997, THE END OF COLONIAL RULE USHERED IN A NEW government for the 6½ million people of Hong Kong. Ironically, in stark contrast to other new regimes which took over from colonial rulers, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government was greeted with only a moderate amount of enthusiasm by the governed. Nevertheless, public support for the new regime mounted in the first four months of its existence. Since October 1997, however, it has declined continuously and has now reached a low level. Evidently, the governing strategy crafted by the HKSAR government had achieved a certain degree of success in the early months of its existence. Since then, though the HKSAR government obstinately follows this governing strategy, changes in the conditions in Hong Kong have in any case rendered this strategy obsolete. Low public support is bound to undermine effective governance in postcolonial Hong Kong.

THE DECADE FROM THE LATE 1970s TO THE LATE 1980S, WHICH BEGAN with the birth of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations and concluded with the fall of communist regimes throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, and the concurrent rise of the Asian NIES states, was the renaissance era of laissez-faire economic liberalism or neoliberalism. ‘Privatization’, ‘deregulation’, and ‘small government’ became popular slogans globally, borrowed heavily from the policy proposals of neoliberal economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. It was best manifested in the world-wide trend towards privatization, involving more than one hundred countries.

MEXICO'S NATIONAL, MID-TERM ELECTlONS OF JULY 1997 PRODUCED important changes in the country's political landscape. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has dominated virtually all realms of Mexican politics since the late 1920s, suffered an unprecedented setback, losing its majority in the lower house of the Mexican Congress.

Though the era of single-party political domination appears to have come to an end, policy-making since the July 1997 elections has exhibited considerable continuity. Notwithstanding the opposition's new legislative majority, the will of the President, Ernest0 Zedillo, of the PRI, has prevailed on important issues of public policy. What can the continued legislative strength of the President, in the wake of significant opposition gains, tell us about the nature of democratization in Mexico?