Legislative responses to social changes signify how representative democracy works. Yet research is still needed to find out whether and how representatives in new democratic countries address the constituents’ interests and demands. We revisit the 18th National Assembly in Korea (2008–12) to examine legislative activities surrounding the issue of economic inequality. To understand how lawmakers in the new democracy like Korea respond to the demands of redistributive policies, we turn to representatives’ co-sponsorship behaviour. We find that Korean lawmakers do respond to constituents’ preferences. More specifically, Korean lawmakers representing conservative districts tend to care less about economic inequality than other representatives while controlling their partisanship. This study fleshes out the link between the represented and the representatives in a new democracy where party discipline at the expense of constituency connection has long dominated legislative politics.

Recently, scholars have shown a growing interest in radical left parties (RLPs). In terms of electoral success, the rise of the KPÖ Graz, the Communist Party in Austria’s second biggest city, represents perhaps the most counterintuitive case in Western Europe. Adding to previous studies, the rise of the KPÖ Graz contradicts many of the claims made and patterns found about the conditions for the electoral success of RLPs. While the national KPÖ was voted out of parliament in 1959, the Graz branch has been a member of local government since 1998. Since then, the party has managed to gain 20 per cent of the vote in three out of four elections. In 2017, the KPÖ defended its place as the second largest party in local legislature and stayed ahead of the radical right FPÖ, on the rise at the national level. In stark contrast to the Communists’ current strength, however, they did not gain even 2 per cent of the vote in 1983. This analysis shows how the party has managed to ‘own’ the issue of housing and to exploit local political opportunities in order to be electorally successful. The findings point to the importance of agency and the subnational level for RLPs, and highlight more general questions in the study of this party family.

Studies have suggested that people voting for Brexit were motivated by anti-globalization, anti-multiculturalism and anti-elite sentiments. However, little is known about how these factors are related and whether citizens in other member states share similar reasons for wanting to exit the EU. Methodologically, this question is addressed by utilizing path models on data from the European Social Survey, with respondents in 17 countries. Empirically, this article reveals considerable cross-country variation, which implies that motivations for voting Leave should be assessed on a country-by-country basis. Yet, two main pathways are identified. First, lower education is related to more negative attitudes towards multiculturalism, which increases the probability of voting Leave. Second, lower income decreases the level of trust in the political establishment, which again increases the probability of voting Leave. Theoretically, this implies that the anti-globalization model is subsumed by the anti-multiculturalism and anti-elite models, giving rise to two new mechanisms.

Recent work has noted an increase in the number of parties at the national level in both proportional and majoritarian electoral systems. While the conventional wisdom maintains that the incentives provided by the electoral system will prevent the number of parties at the district level from exceeding two in majoritarian systems, the evidence presented here demonstrates otherwise. I argue that this has occurred because the number of cleavages articulated by parties has increased as several third parties have begun articulating cleavages that are not well represented by the two larger parties.

Two attempts at grand compromise have underpinned global order since the end of the Second World War. The first, a compromise between laissez-faire liberalism and domestic interventionism, famously described by John Ruggie as ‘embedded liberalism’, legitimated and stabilized a multilateral order for 50 years. A second attempt, this time between North and South at the end of the Cold War around a discourse of ‘sustainable development’, remains uneasy, conflict prone and much less institutionalized. They are compared and contrasted by asking whether they are truly compromises or reflect domination and hegemony, what conditions led to them, and what drivers of change have limited and challenged them. Ultimately, differences in their bases of legitimacy offer lessons for the prospects of building a new grand compromise in the wake of contemporary strains on global governance.

‘POWER’ AND ‘CONFLICT’ ARE BOTH TERMS WE DO NOT SEEM TO BE able to do without, however much we may be worried by what methodological purists say. We tend to feel that if we could understand the distribution of power and the lines and amounts of conflict we would have the key to the explanation of political events in the world as a whole, a particular society, or some group - some association or organization - within a society.

This feeling is in my view quite justified, but only in this sense: that if we had an analysis of the state of a society (etc.) that was sufficient to enable us to talk confidently about the distribution of power and the lines and amounts of conflict, we would already be in a position to be able to explain political events. In other words, as a means to being able to describe the situation in terms of power and conflict, we would have to build up information and ways of analysing that information, so good, that we would indeed be able to explain political events. But the logical relationship among the elements would be, not that because we could talk about power and conflict we could explain political events but rather that because we could explain political events, we could talk about power and conflict.

ONE OF THE MOST NOTICED FEATURES OF OUR TIME IS that global problems are increasing at a faster rate than the evolution of the political capacities to manage them. This is not a new observation, or even a new condition. It has long been part of a pessimistic assessment of the prospects for modern industrial technological civilization that can be traced back to its origins, but has been particularly strong throughout the twentieth century. H. G. Wells's famous comment that ‘human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe’ is even more apposite to the contemporary mood than it was when first written. The spectre of communism no longer haunts Europe, but other spectres now haunt the global civilization which developed out of Europe. Some of the key trends of this global civilization threaten at best an era of mounting disorder and chaos in the world system, at worst the survival of the human species itself. The problems are increasing far faster than the ability to find solutions for them.

BOTH GERMAN STATES HAVE IN THE PAST BEEN ECONOMIC systems in search of political legitimation. The legitimation of the West German state was gradually established by the acceptance of democratic principles by the huge majority of the population and by a welfare system which was deliberately devised to protect it against contamination from the socialist camp. East Germany lost its legitimation at the moment when it abandoned its economic system. Consequently the battle-cry turned from ‘we are the people’ to ‘we are one people’.

THERE ARE SOME DATES AND EVENTS WHICH REMAIN engraved in the collective memory of a people. In Algeria these are: 1 November 1954, which sparked the eight-year long War of Liberation; 5 July 1962, which witnessed the end of French rule over the country after 130 years of colonial settlement; and 12 June 1990, which signalled the withering away of the monopoly of power exercised by the ruling party - the National Liberation Front (FLN) - following the holding of the first ever free and competitive local elections in the history of independent Algeria. No doubt, on 12 June 1990 the Constitution of 23 February 1989, which fundamentally transformed the political and social system of Algeria, achieved its most spectacular application. These elections aimed at the renewal of seats in the Councils of both APC: Assemblées Populaires Communales (constituencies), and APW: Assemblées Populaires de Wilayat (provinces). For the first time, Algerians were offered the freedom to choose their representatives from among lists of candidates sponsored by several newly-legalized parties alongside the FLN, and for the first time, the FLN tasted defeat.

During the Early 1990s the Term Social Market economy has been used rather loosely; this is not surprising since the theory is derived from a specifically German tradition of political economy with little or no resonance outside the Germanspeaking area. The leading thinkers in the genre are hardly known in English-speaking circles and most of their works remain untranslated.

The fundamental purpose of this article is to present this rich and diverse strand of thought to a non-German audience barely aware of its existence, to point out possibilities for developing the international aspects of such a theory, and to highlight policy issues concerning the post-cold war European and international orders which can be addressed from social market perspectives.

THERE ARE 518 MEMBERS OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT(MEPs). Each of the twelve member states of the EuropeanCommunity (EC) has a specific number of MEPs, based onpopulation. As one of the larger member states, the UnitedKingdom, along with France, Germany, and Italy, has 81repre sent at ives.

European Parliament (EP) elections are held every five yearsfor a fixed term. The Parliament is organized into blocs ofrepresentatives, which, in the traditional manner of multi-partyparliaments, span the ideological spectrum from left to right.There are continual adjustments in these coalitions, but generallythe 5 18 MEPs are divided into approximately ten groupings. The EP holds its plenary sessions in Strasbourg, and itsSecretariat is in Luxembourg. However, most of its substantivedeliberations are done by committees, which hold their sessions inBrussels. This, together with the ease of commuting andinherently greater appeal of Brussels, has made the Belgiancapital the usual reference point for the European Parliament,although the EP continues to have something akin to ageographical split personality.

IN ROBERT DAHL'S ACCOUNT OF THE SUBJECT ‘OPPOSITION’ IS SEEN AS a political actor, opposing the government in parliament, having goals and strategies, being cohesive or not, well identifiable or not, aggressive or less aggressive in its action, and so on. As it is a ‘theory of action’, applying it would necessarily require (as Jean Blondel also shows in his essay) determining the ‘goals’ of the opposition. One would then be able to predict what a certain opposition would probably be doing, and explain why one type of opposition must be classified as different from another. I maintain, however, that the concept of ‘the goals of a political actor’ is a very elusive, and at the very least, an oversimplified concept. Indeed, it is impossible to match it with the facts and operationalize it. The analysis of the Italian case during the First Republic shows this clearly.

POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN ITALIAN CITY STATES WAS NOT FOR MEN who valued themselves more than they valued politics. The stakes were too high. Exile or loss of life and property were too often the penalties. The difficult legal circumstances which attended organized political opposition went back to the early commune, to the fervour of the civil struggles that began late in the 12th century. These were to affect the character of the opposition down to the 16th century. If the contenders in political strife sometimes expressed a readiness to compromise, they revealed, just as often, an inability to do so. And in critical times the desire for the physical elimination of political opponents easily emerged.

Major rivalries of the 11th and 12th centuries inadvertently favoured the rise of local government. The communes – rendered bolder in many cases by their quickening economies – profited from the conflicts between papacy and empire, between the emperor and the German princes, and between the episcopal and comital powers in Italy. As imperial authority waned, local groups all over north and central Italy pressed forward to take over the administration of their own affairs.

This article examines the evolution of long-term trends in the prioritization of environmental protection in Britain over a period of four decades. It does so by compiling comparable questions tapping into the same underlying environmental dimension from a range of sources, including historical polling data that has only recently been made available to the research community. At the aggregate level, prioritization largely tracks changing economic conditions as well as key environmental events, with the winter of 2019 showing the highest recorded levels. Furthermore, trends in individuals' willingness to prioritize the environment may not always go in tandem with trends in environmental salience. At the individual level, educational attainment is the only consistently significant demographic correlate over time. However, there is evidence of increasing politicization of the environment, with left–right orientations only becoming an important correlate of environmental prioritization in recent years, in line with rising divergence on the issue at the elite level.

During the eurozone crisis, technocratic governments were appointed in several eurozone countries, becoming in the eyes of many the embodiment of the EU's democratic deficit. In spite of the central place that these technocratic governments occupy in the scholarly debate, however, we have remarkably little evidence on Europeans’ attitudes towards technocracy, and technocratic governments are under-studied from an empirical standpoint. We contribute to the very limited empirical literature on this topic by using a novel natural experiment design, in the context of the 2011 Italian crisis that led to the appointment of the Monti technocratic cabinet. We hypothesize that the effect of technocratic appointments on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is a priori uncertain, and it depends on the balance of a trade-off between reduced input participation and increased output effectiveness. Overall, the results point to citizens’ attitudes towards technocracy being more complex than often assumed in the debate.

Recent discussions of accountability in contexts of expert knowledge raise questions about the limits of transparency. Against this background, we discuss the nexus between expert knowledge and meaningful accountability – that is, context-sensitive accountability based on a genuine understanding of a situation. We argue that the concentration of expertise in certain institutions makes it difficult to hold those institutions accountable. In particular, three components challenge meaningful accountability: specialization, inaccessibility and potential biases or conflict of interest. We emphasize the role of ‘epistemic communities’ and their impact on the tension between expert knowledge and independence. Drawing on the deliberative systems literature, we discuss how expert knowledge might be communicated to outsiders to enable meaningful accountability. To illustrate our argument, we draw on the European Central Bank, a case study in which states have chosen a delegation design characterized by a high degree of independence and trust in expert knowledge, to the detriment of accountability. We sketch possible avenues for creating the conditions for meaningful accountability even in the case of institutions with highly concentrated expertise.

The question of how involvement in institutional politics and governance affects rebel groups’ behaviour is pertinent when studying violent non-state actors, both during and in the aftermath of conflict. This is especially the case when participation in the political system becomes sustained over time. The interactions between the political and governance practices of a rebel group and its overall ideological orientation and state-building aspirations are not sufficiently analysed in the literature, especially in the context of hybrid armed-political organizations operating in latent, frozen or protracted conflicts. This article aims to begin to fill this gap by examining how involvement in institutional politics has shaped both Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s branding, interpretation and reliance on their own constitutive ideological manifestos, with an emphasis on both organizations’ dynamic processes aimed at reconciling political participation with their previous ideological rejection of the legitimacy of the political system and their constitutive calls to dramatically restructure the political order. Based on these detailed accounts, this article reflects on how the complex relationship between politics, electoral competition, governance and ideological principles can shape an armed group’s political identity.

TWO QUESTIONS ARISE WHEN CONSIDERING THE CHANGES that might be brought about by direct elections and by developments in the new European Parliament. One concerns institutionalized cooperation between political parties. To what extent can the three existing European party federations – Socialist, Christian Democrat, Liberal – be considered as a step towards the formation of genuine European political parties? Are they anything more than alignments of traditional parties coordinating their action at European level? The other question is related to parties or groups which have not until now created close-knit ad hoc structures. A special case is that of the Communist parties, which have not organized specific links at Communit level. Another problem is raised by non-traditional parties and groups that have in most cases little or no parlia mentary representation at either national or European level. Will some of them take advantage of the European sphere of action to make more impression than they have been able to do at domestic level, in cooperation with similarly oriented partners in other member countries?

The international controversy concerning the Hungarian ‘status law’ of 2001 attests to the vital importance of ethnic minority rights in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as within an enlarged European Union. The paper examines the unique challenges raised by the law from its initial adoption in June 2001 to its subsequent amendment in June 2003. It looks at the interaction between four principal kinds of actors: Hungary (a kin state legislating support for ethnic co- nationals in neighbouring countries), Romania and Slovakia (home states to sizeable Hungarian ethnic groups), the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia, and the European institutions that became involved in the dispute as mediators.