ALL POLITICAL CULTURES ARE MIXED AND CHANGING. WHAT IS interesting in the English case, however, is the way in which a veritable army of scholars has seized on the deferential component. Other features in the overall cultural pattern have been neglected. This paper is devoted to an examination of the concept of deference as it is applied to English politics. In particular it will focus on the different meanings that the concept has assumed in the literature describing and analysing the popular political attitudes, and those aspects of the political system, including stability, which it has been used to explain. My concluding argument is that deference, as the concept is frequently applied to English political culture, has attained the status of a stereotype and that it is applied to such variegated and sometimes conflicting data that it has outlived its usefulness as a term in academic currency.

The Purpose of This Article is To Analyse The Document ‘A Framework for Accountable Government in Northern Ireland’, published by the British government in early 1995, and to assess its significance in terms of the theory of powersharing (consociational democracy). The Framework Document, as it is usually called, received a hostile reception from many Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland. The ideas that it contains, however, resonate with many previous blueprints for the future of Northern Ireland. In some form they are very likely to re-emerge in the proposed solutions that will follow the ‘all-party’ talks set for June 1996. I shall show that the Framework plan for democratic government in Northern Ireland is completely and thoroughly consociational in its orientation. It confirms the proposition that power-sharing is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for viable democracy in deeply divided societies.

A compromise is an agreement that involves mutual concessions. Each party gets less than it feels entitled to, but agrees to it because the situation it anticipates under the deal is better than the one it expects in the absence of a deal: conflict, exit or arbitration by a third party. Some compromises, however, are bad, and others are good. This article discusses three conjectures about what it is that makes a compromise good. Is a good compromise an honourable compromise, one that enables each party to save face? Is it rather a fair compromise, one that contributes to the progress of justice independently defined? Or is it a Pareto-improving compromise, one that changes things in such a way that it ends up making everyone better off than under the status quo? A compromise is never as good as a consensus, but it is generally better than nothing, and often achievable when a consensus is not. And when it is, trying to make it as good as possible in each of the three ways described is always worthwhile.

MOST OF WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE ROLE OF POLITICAL pacts and pact-making in developing democracy is based on transitions from exclusionary authoritarian regimes in Europe and Latin American. This is not surprising; most political pacts have been concluded in Europe and Latin America, as political and economic elites have attempted to extricate themselves from the ruins of war or the reigns of tyrants. Increasingly, however, pacts have been used elsewhere as devices to mark political transitions of other kinds. In the Arab world, for example, the ultimately unhappy fate of Lebanon's 1943 National Pact, which provided the framework of a transition to independence, did not deter pact-makers in Tunisia in 1988 from using the device in what they hoped would be a transition from a single-party regime to a more pluralist democracy.

In this article I discuss terrorism as a problem in the study of strategy rather than strategy as a problem in the study of terrorism. There is a developing literature now asserting that terrorist activity should be evaluated as strategy, so that dealing with the phenomenon requires not only denouncing it for its warped morality and inhumanity but also understanding motives and methods, treating it as purposive and instrumental and not just wicked. In this article I take it for granted that terrorism is strategic activity; my question is, what does this type of activity tell us about strategy? The case is interesting because terrorism is strategically generally demanding and prone to failure. Certainly when used on its own it is a poor support for political objectives, and may be counter-productive even when used with other methods. By looking at strategy at the fringes it is possible to illuminate aspects of strategic activity that have a wider application.

About two decades after the introduction of party quotas, in the mid-2000s both Portugal and Spain enacted legislative gender quotas. The simultaneous implementation of party and legislative quotas raises questions about the potential interactions between two types of candidate quotas sharing the same goal – granting gender equality in political representation. Following a feminist institutionalist approach, this article aims at disentangling under what circumstances compliance with legislative quotas is greater. By looking at the different party institutional contexts in which candidates are selected, a double comparative framework is set. Firstly, we examine within country how legislative quotas affect political parties with dissimilar strategies to pursue equal gender representation. Secondly, we analyse across countries how they impact on political parties with differently institutionalized voluntary quotas. The article shows that legislative quotas are nested in political parties’ candidate selection process and that existing gendered practices and norms limit the effective compliance with such measures.

OWING TO THE GROWTH OF THE GREEN MOVEMENT IN THE 1980S MANY feel that Britain has experienced a cultural revolution on environmental issues. According to conventional wisdom, public opinion has come to reflect a deep-rooted and widespread sense of environmental awareness, with long-term consequences for British politics. Yearley suggests that there has been a significant ‘greening’ of British public opinion in recent years.’ In a series of articles reviewing attitudes towards environmental values, Young concludes that evidence for a culture shift ‘is almost beyond dispute’. Environmentalists commonly make three distinct claims, namely: there has been a growth of public concern about environmental issues; as a result public support for green policies and ideas has increased; in turn this has led to greater environmental activism, including support for the Green Party, involvement in environmental groups and green consumerism.

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.

Pedro P. Kuczynski (Peru 2018) and Evo Morales (Bolivia 2019) are the most recent cases in a long list of Latin American presidents who have been forced out of office. We seek to contribute to understanding why some presidents fail to fulfil their terms by analysing the role of an actor overlooked by the extant literature on presidential failures: political parties. We hypothesize a non-linear relation between party institutionalization and the risk of presidential failure. That is, when parties are weakly or highly institutionalized, the hazard of presidential failure is lower than when parties are moderately institutionalized. We test this and other hypotheses with a survival analysis of 157 Latin American administrations (1979–2018). We also qualitatively explore how the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of certain events affects the risk of failure in three countries with different levels of party institutionalization. We find that party institutionalization – as well as legislative support, anti-government demonstrations, presidential scandals and economic growth – significantly affects the risk of presidential failure.

This article explores the factors affecting post-rebel party electoral performance. We present new research tracking the participation of these groups in national legislative elections from 1990 to 2016. Our full data set covers 77 parties and 286 elections in 37 countries. It includes parties formed after conflicts of varying length and intensity, with different incompatibilities, in every region of the world, and in countries with disparate political histories. Our analysis suggests that post-rebel parties’ early electoral performance strongly affects future performance, and that competition – crowd-out by older rival parties – and pre-war organizational experience in politics have a significant positive effect, particularly for those parties that are consistently winning more than about 10 per cent of seats. But especially for parties that consistently win very low seat shares, organizational characteristics yield increasingly to environmental factors, most importantly the presence of rival parties and the barriers to representation presented by electoral rules.

This article aims to bring the people to the heart of democracy measurement. Existing measurements have reinforced the idea that democracy is the domain of the state with its procedures, institutions and political elites. But where are the people in those measurements? So far, when we measure democracy we rely on experts who determine what democracy is, while people’s views have been ignored. This happens not only during the phase of conceptualization, but also during operationalization. The specific way we measure democracy feeds elitism and is emblematic of how our discipline has developed, namely an ivory tower in which political scientists define and measure democracy without taking people’s views seriously. The article proposes new people-centred measures of democracy and discusses their effect on the rankings of countries and their strengths and weaknesses. The future of the study of democracy lies in developing new measures that challenge our current understanding of democracy and assist us in developing new perspectives, thus reinvigorating democracy studies.

To one who believes in the essential worth of a democratic polity, how much opposition is desirable, and what kinds? What is the best balance between consensus and dissent ? Even among democrats there is not much agreement on the answers to these questions.

It is easy to see why. These questions seem to demand nothing less than a complicated assessment of democracy itself. Or to put the matter more precisely, one can judge the desirability of different patterns of political opposition only by employing a number of different criteria that would be used if one were appraising the extent to which a political system as a whole achieves what are usually considered democratic goals or values.

Populist radical right (PRR) parties have increasingly occupied positions of power in recent years, inspiring much scholarly interest in the mainstreaming consequences of government responsibility. This article analyses the extent and manner of mainstreaming of the Rassemblement National (RN) while in power at the local level of government in France. A municipal-level focus enables the novel inclusion of the party into the debate about the consequences of government participation for the PRR. We conduct a paired case study analysis of RN-led Hénin-Beaumont, the political base of Marine Le Pen and her ‘de-demonization’ strategy, alongside nearby Lens, which is led by a mainstream party. We analyse the policy and discourse of the administration through a qualitative content analysis of mayoral statements and data from semi-structured interviews with local politicians. The results show a partial mainstreaming due to the strategic exercise of local government power to present a more moderate and capable image, as well as the use of populist discourse to frame mainstream opposition forces and the local press as working against the interests of ‘the people’.

Oppositional violence and repression are closely related. In fact, repression often produces an escalation of violence rather than controlling it. Bridging social movement studies and research on violence, the article uses a small-N, most-different research design to analyse the working of a specific mechanism at the onset of different types of political violence: escalating policing. In particular, it indicates specific causal mechanisms, related to interactions between social movements and the state, which create the conditions for some splinter groups to move underground. In order to compare left-wing, right-wing, ethno-national and religious violence, the article presents empirical references to the author's own empirical research on Italy and the Basque Country as well as a secondary analysis of the conflicts that preceded the rise of al-Qaeda.

CONTINUITY RATHER THAN CHANGE WAS CHARACTERISTIC OF THE Turkish party system during its formative years in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Now, however, party competition in Turkey appears to be approaching a new phase of development. While some political analysts have described the emerging trends in the 1970s with reference to a ‘critical realignment’ in mass electoral behaviour, others have characterized the party system as going through a period of ‘flux and transition’. Indeed, the recent course of electoral politics in Turkey displays some significant changes. First, with the termination of the Justice Party's UP) dominant position in party competition, there has been a transition from a predominant party system to one of moderate pluralism in which the likelihood of coalition government has significantly increased. Secondly, the trend toward greater fragmentation in the party system which partially accounted for the JP's loss of dominance in 1973, appears to have been reversed in the 1977 parliamentary election as the two major parties made substantial gains at the expense of the minor parties. Thirdly, these changes have been accompanied by the increase of ideological polarization in the party system and the intensification of ideological cleavages among the party elites.

TO AN ORDINARY DEMOCRATIC CITIZEN THE QUESTION ‘DO parties matter’ might seem a typical pseudoproblem of scholars. Everybody knows that parties matter, otherwise nobody would leave home on election day and cast his vote. Even the enlightened politicians have hardly any doubts that parties matter. When Margaret Thatcher was asked before her first electoral victory what her access to power would change in Britain, she answered in one word: ‘everything’. This means that she firmly believed that parties almost exclusively matter in a political system. How did scholars come to ask such a stupid question – so contrary to democratic common sense? New and unfamiliar questions normally rise when a change of paradigm in science takes place. The change of aradigm in this case was the shift of attention from the study of politics to policy analysis.

BY 1997 THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY HAD BEEN IN POWER FOR EIGHTEEN years, the longest period of uninterrupted rule by a single party this century. To many it looked as if the alternation of two parties in government had stopped. And if that really had been the case, it would have meant that the British conception of opposition as the institutionalization within the workings of everyday politics of a standing alternative to the government of the day had broken down or been abandoned. But this is not what happened. The official opposition, the Labour Party, had re-established itself as a viable alternative government and was then able to gain not just an effective, but an overwhelming majority in Parliament in the general election of 1 May 1997. This outcome testified to more than the triumph of one party over another, marking the revival of the victor and the exhaustion of the loser: it also reasserted a crucial element in the constitutional practices of modern Britain.