The security discourses and practices that grew exponentially in Europe after 9/11 facilitated the elaboration of a counter-discourse on identity and security among many Muslim communities. In this context, the state's attempts to ‘discipline’ the Muslim communities produced an instrumental alliance between officials and those Islamic leaders deemed moderate enough to represent the ‘Muslim community’. Undermining this alliance of convenience are not primarily the global terror networks that triggered the securitization overdrive but rather those ‘amateur jihadists’ whose individualized approaches to religiosity increasingly undermine the political efforts to organize and institutionalize Islamic authority inside the framework of the nation-state.

SURELY IN THE MANUFACTURE OF VARIETIES OF PEACEABLE AND legitimate political opposition the American political system leads the world, and from a comparative perspective the United States is therefore extremely atypical. This essay will review briefly some of the more familiar ways in which political opposition in the United States is expressed and encouraged, will consider some of the consequences for a political system so rich in opportunities for opposition, and in conclusion will discuss changes in patterns of opposition over the last 30 years.

Despite their stated commitment to the 1951 Refugee Convention, liberal democratic states routinely interdict refugees, such as through the use of visa requirements, effectively blocking them from reaching their borders. How do liberal democratic states navigate this contradictory terrain? To answer this question, this article explores situations where normally routine and often invisible interdiction practices break down. Canada's approach to Roma arriving from the Czech Republic and Hungary between 1997 and 2001 is an illuminating example of such breakdown and repair, providing a rare glimpse into how one liberal democratic state manages its own interdiction contradictions.

The Success of The Movement For Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) is too recent an event to permit any firm assessment of changes taking place in the Zambian political system. These are, however, probably weighted in favour of a more democratic regime. A situation has arisen in which the powers of the President and those of a parliamentary opposition hang in the balance. In Africa presidents have tended to gain the upper hand but this may prove not to be the case in Zambia.

I SHOULD LIKE TO START WITH AN EXTREMELY SIMPLE STATEment about the French Revolution. This is that there are many historical arguments among historians on many subjects, but that none of these arguments is so intense and so heated as the one which takes place in every generation about the French Revolution. It is as though the historical interpretation of this particular subject and the arguments of specialists directly reflect the political struggles and the gamble for power. It is true that we are all aware today that there are no unbiased historical interpretations: the selection of facts which provide the raw material for the historian's work is already the result of a choice, even although that choice is not an explicit one. To some extent, history is always the result of a relationship between the present and the past and more specifically between the characteristics of an individual and the vast realm of his possible roots in the past. But, nevertheless, even within this relative framework, not all the themes of history are equally relevant to the present interests of the historian and to the passions of his public. The subject of Clovis, for example, and of the Frankish invasions was of burning interest in the eighteenth century, because historians of that era thought that the Frankish invasions were the source of the division between the nobility and the common people: the conquerors having evolved into the nobility and the conquered having become the commoners. Today, the Germanic invasions are no longer considered to contain or reveal any secret about French society: they have become once again a subject for historiography, left to scholars and to the arguments of specialists.

In 1989 The Reserve Bank Of New Zealand Act Gave The Rbnz the operational independence to vary monetary instruments, in particular to control the level of short-term money market rates, in such a way as to hold inf lation within a stated range over a stated period of time. That numerical range and period were to be agreed in a contractual arrangement between the Minister of Finance and the Governor, and the Governor was to be held personally responsible for achieving those agreed objectives.

With The Inauguration Of The Socialist President, Ricardo Lagos, in March 2000 it would appear that the Chilean party system had come full circle since the 1973 coup that unseated the last Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Despite the Chilean military's efforts to eradicate the left during its almost seventeen years in power, a Socialist assumed the presidency only a dozen years after the electoral defeat of the military regime in 1988. In one sense, this success is a testament to the perseverance of the party of Allende, and the party system in general. Nonetheless, the Socialist Party, and indeed the Chilean party system, are quite distinct from the ethos of the Allende years of the early 1970s. At the same time, it is undeniable that there are striking continuities in terms of the number of political parties and patterns of partisan competition. Thus, how should one interpret the extent of transformation and continuity in the Chilean party system?

In this article, we introduce a unique data set containing all written communication published by the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2017. Increasing numbers of scholars make use of protocols of parliamentary speeches, parliamentary questions or the texts of legislative drafts in various fields of comparative politics including representation, responsiveness, professionalization and political careers or parliamentary agenda studies. Since preparing parliamentary documents is rather resource intensive, these studies remain limited to single points in time, types of documents and/or policy areas. The long time horizon and various types of documents covered by our new comprehensive data set will enable scholars interested in parliaments, parties and representatives to answer various innovative research questions related to legislative studies.

Countermobilization has been a common strategy for autocrats to counteract the threat of opposition. Although the use of countermobilization has drawn scholarly attention, research on the mechanisms that enable countermobilization remains limited. This article underscores the role of political institutions in allowing autocrats to carry out countermobilization through incentivizing elites to serve as a bridge between the state and the masses. Focusing on the case of Hong Kong, where pro-government countermobilization is rising along with pro-democracy challenges against the hybrid regime, the article argues that countermobilization is enabled because societal elites are incentivized through political institutions to organize the masses and develop mobilization capacity through grassroots organizations. Using original elite biographical data and organizational data, the article shows that elites with more ties with grassroots organizations are more likely to remain in office in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. The findings offer an institutionalist explanation of how authoritarian rulers enact countermobilization by leveraging elite intermediaries and their grassroots networks. In this light, political institutions can serve as a conduit for the state to extend social control.

Do western publics make ‘demands’ for environmental policy that they have no desire to see enacted? The thesis that they do has been put forward recently by advocates of the ‘post-ecologist’ paradigm such as Ingolfur Blühdorn. Taking the example of climate change, this article assesses survey results that provide indicative evidence that such ‘simulative’ demands may exist. I suggest that such demands are, however, best explained through conceptual tools available from game-theoretic and rational-actor models of political behaviour, in particular rational ignorance and rational irrationality, rather than with the societal-level accounts preferred by Blühdorn and others.

Pushed by technological, cultural and related political drivers, a ‘new plebiscitary democracy’ is emerging which challenges established electoral democracy as well as variants of deliberative democracy. The new plebiscitary democracy reinvents and radicalizes longer-existing methods (initiative, referendum, recall, primary, petition, poll) with new tools and applications (mostly digital). It comes with a comparatively thin conceptualization of democracy, invoking the bare notion of a demos whose aggregated will is to steer actors and issues in public governance in a straight majoritarian way. In addition to unravelling the reinvented logic of plebiscitary democracy in conceptual terms, this article fleshes out an empirically informed matrix of emerging formats, distinguishing between votations that are ‘political-leader’ and ‘public-issue’ oriented on the one hand, and ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ initiated on the other hand. Relatedly, it proposes an agenda for systematic research into the various guises, drivers and implications of the new plebiscitary democracy. Finally, it reflects on possible objections to the argumentation.

IN THE SEVEN YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE COLONELS' dictatorship in Greece, a new Greek party has established firm political roots. With the accession of Greece to the European Community on 1 January 1981, the new parties have been brought into the Western European political orbit, a development which marks the rehabilitation of a political system ostracized by virtue of its period of dictatorship. Unlike Portugal and Spain, however, which also seek membership of the European Community, the Greek period of dictatorship – lasting seven years post-war – represents much more an historical aberration, for Greece not only has an ancient history which saw the birth of democratic government, it also has enjoyed far more democratic than dictatorial governments in its modern period.

WRITING A LETTER FROM IRELAND TOUCHES ON CERTAIN sensitivities because Ireland is a geographic unit in search of political expression. There has always been some doubt about political ownership. Between 1800 and 1921 it was, of course, part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Let us say for the present that Ireland now belongs to that small group of political entities - like Korea and Cyprus - which ‘enjoys’ the condition of partition. And that part of Ireland whence this letter is written, Northern Ireland, has been placed in some sort of historical context by a former leader of the Nationalist Party, Eddie McAteer, when he said of it: ‘and now we are sadly the last imperial aspidistra in the British window.’

Morocco has a number of islamic movements that demand the establishment of a truly Islamic society. Most of them sprouted up in the 1970s and caused considerable anxiety in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution. But these movements have proven to be less powerful than was once feared — or hoped. After describing the main tendencies represented by these groups, I shall suggest some possible reasons for their political inefficacy.

This article analyses the impact of government prospects and government participation on party policy preferences. Comparing the content of manifestos of governing and opposition parties in Belgium during three decades, I observed that the relationship of a party to the act of governing influences the content of its manifesto. In that sense, party preferences are not only driven by ideology and vote-seeking arguments but are part of a larger party strategy: parties adapt their electoral platform when they are in government or are willing to enter into it. The conclusion of the article also discusses the literature on government formation. Such literature hypothesizes that parties that are ideologically similar would form a coalition. However, results for the Belgian case demonstrate that parties strategically adapt their electoral platform when wanting to enter the government. Coalitions are made up of parties with similar policy preferences, not because they ‘are’ alike but because parties strategically ‘make’ them alike.

In coalition governments, political parties are concerned not only with how many but also with which departments they control. The foreign ministry is among the most highly considered prizes in coalition negotiations. This article develops hypotheses to explain under which conditions the foreign ministry is likely to be allocated to a ‘junior coalition partner’. The factors that are hypothesized to affect the allocation are: the relative size of coalition parties; the proximity of their foreign policy positions; the party family of the junior coalition party; the salience of foreign policy to the coalition parties; and past allocations of the foreign ministry to junior coalition partners. Employing a crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis, the article demonstrates that although the conjunction of the junior partner being relatively large and it having led the foreign ministry in the past is not sufficient by itself, those two factors are very influential in the junior partner being allocated the foreign ministry.

The 2010–11 Arab uprisings continue to prompt a great deal of discussion. By focusing specifically on Tunisia and Egypt, this article aims to present a more dynamic account of revolutionary moments in these countries. It does so in two ways. First, the changing nature of structures and mechanisms of authoritarian domination over time is explored. Second, the convergences of different social classes and political forces during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt are not treated as unique and static occurrences. By showing how the two revolutionary networks gradually emerged and enlarged, a truer picture is thus provided. By doing so, this article aims to contribute to a more nuanced interpretation of the two revolutionary outbursts and to the development of the fourth generation of revolutionary studies.

This article analyses the Erdoğan government's policy response to the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the abundant use of moral antagonisms in his discourse, Erdoğan did not attempt to politicize the pandemic, instead framing it as a global health crisis and presenting the government's public health policies as expert-driven and competent. However, this expert-driven approach was largely a performance. Without a system of democratic oversight or a free media to scrutinize government policies, the Erdoğan government could systematically undercount COVID-19 cases and disregard its own public health restrictions, all the while spreading its narrative of competence and success. Competitive policymaking by opposition-controlled municipalities and criticism from a strong doctors' association had relatively limited ability to discredit the government. The public opinion data we present reveal broad-based support for the government's COVID policies. Our article highlights how authoritarian institutions allow governments to sustain a gap between performance and actuality, granting their leaders greater possibilities to claim policy success.

THE POLITICAL GAINS EXPECTED FROM HOLDING DIRECT ELECtions to the European Parliament were bound to depend on the nature and extent of mass communication. Information flows released during the campaign in the various Community countries, and how they were received by electoral audiences, would determine, for example, whether: European awareness would spread beyond the confines of cosmopolitan élites into the ranks of mass publics; the legitimacy of the Euro ean Parliament would be strengthened by enhancing its visibility, intelligibility and relevance in the eyes of European citizens; and whether the seeds of a European-level body of public opinion would begin to sprout and flourish. As Emdio Colombo once put it, ‘The elections to the European Parliament by direct universal suffrage provide an opportunity of bringing the debate on Europe into the public forum and of enlisting the active support of the man in the street for the construction of Europe.’