While China has been the most important constraint on Hong Kong's democratization, another neglected constraint has been the limited mobilization power of the pro-democracy opposition in both civil and political society for most of the period from 1984 to 2002. The mobilization power of the pro-democracy opposition, mediated by their degree of internal unity and ability to capitalize on external political opportunities, affected its overall bargaining power vis-à-vis the Chinese and British government over democratization in different phases. The self-censorship among Hong Kong's media, plus economic recession since the Handover, further sapped the mobilization and bargaining power of pro-democratic forces.

‘PEACE PROCESS’ IS A NEW AND FASHIONABLE CONCEPT. THERE are of course great local differences between the Middle Eastern, the South African and the Irish-British peace processes. But there are some remarkable characteristic similarities between them which form a pattern and especially when, as at present, they are seen in their phases of transition. What I present here are a few remarks on the differences and similarities in the phase of transition of the ongoing peace processes in South Africa and in Northern Ireland — differences which geopolitically, demographically, culturally and economically might seem at first sight in some respects rather difficult to compare.

This article examines variation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) expansion in four ‘latecomer’ reformers: Germany, England, South Korea and Japan. Taking a comparative approach through an analysis of policy documents, it focuses on the role of ideas as coalition magnets in explaining the more extensive and sustained policy shifts in Germany and Korea, in contrast to the more limited and fragmented reforms in England and Japan. As the comparative literature struggles to explain variation in ECEC expansion, this focus on ideas provides a significant contribution, highlighting why ECEC reform became supported by a broad cross-class coalition in Germany and Korea but not in England or Japan. The theoretical contribution argues that coalition magnets are formed when the polysemic potential of a policy is drawn out by key actors strategically linking it to several problem definitions, which can appeal to diverse political actors and forge lasting consensus for reform.

A large body of scholarship shows that autocrats can use corruption strategically to strengthen their political hold, such as by distributing rents to their supporters. However, this scholarship often overlooks how corruption may also politically damage autocrats. I argue that corruption often brings substantial political costs alongside its advantages, resulting in a ‘corruption dilemma’ for autocrats. I show that in recent years, public anger over corruption has led to numerous anti-government protests and has been a major cause of autocrats being ousted from power. How politically costly corruption is depends on factors such as the public's tolerance for corruption, whether the autocrat is accountable to quasi-democratic institutions and whether the autocrat can credibly claim to be fighting corruption. The case of Malaysia illustrates how relying on corrupt practices to stay in power can backfire even in a long-standing authoritarian regime. My analysis advances our understanding of corruption's mixed role in authoritarian durability and authoritarian strategies of rule.

Declining voter turnout has been highlighted as problematic for a number of western democracies. However, in this article we argue that whether an election is seen as ‘legitimate’ or not depends crucially upon interpretations of the levels of turnout by elite actors. Through comparing two recent democratic ballots in the UK we demonstrate how elections with lower turnouts can come to be seen as holding more legitimacy than those with higher turnouts. The cases demonstrate, we argue, a distinction between actual legitimacy, defined as a binary concept, and the process of legitimization – a process through which the authority of an institution is discursively constructed and conferred. This suggests a new research agenda which extends beyond the current literature to focus upon how the legitimacy of a ballot is socially constructed in a broader context of unequal socioeconomic power relations.

While India's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has become recognized as a populist radical right (PRR) party under the leadership of Narendra Modi, we do not know whether this PRR supply is matched yet by PRR attitudes among its supporters. Using an original survey, we therefore investigate: Do BJP supporters display PRR attitudes? We find that those who feel close to the BJP have stronger populist and nativist attitudes than other Indian citizens. However, authoritarianism is not a distinguishing feature of BJP supporters. We argue that the similarities between the drivers of support for European PRR parties and for the BJP reinforce the idea that radical right populism is a coherent global phenomenon both in terms of supply and demand. Finally, we discuss how our study shows that party support in India is more ideologically rooted than has previously been thought.

RECENT EVENTS IN EASTERN EUROPE HAVE GENERATED A large degree of uncritical triumphalism amongst certain Western commentators. The collapse of the communist regimes in these countries as the result of their failure to manage their economies and the consequent demand on the part of their citizens for more accountable government, has led many to link the struggle for democracy with a desire for capitalism. Some writers have gone so far as to portray the demise of ‘actually existing socialism’ as the culmination of ‘a universal human evolution in the direction of free societies’ grounded in ‘the empirically undeniable correlation between advancing industrialisation and liberal democracy’.

Armed insurgents seeking to seize the state often aim to transform the nature of state power. Yet for insurgents who become ruling authorities, how do radical visions of state power influence governance after the urgency of war? This article examines state-building in the liberation movement for Western Sahara, a partially recognized state which has ruled an exiled civilian Sahrawi population in Algeria from wartime through to a prolonged ceasefire. Drawing on in-depth qualitative fieldwork, and engaging with theories of radicalism, post-war sociopolitical reconstruction and anomalous forms of state power, the article traces how post-ceasefire international and domestic contexts created conflicting pressures and opportunities for both the moderation, and the continuation, of Sahrawi refugees’ wartime radical governance. This case of insurgents-turned-rulers suggests how radicalism and moderation are overlapping processes, how moderation is not necessarily an ‘undoing’ of radicalism, and how radical ideas matter for leadership and grassroots militants in different ways.

In general discussions about opposition in democratic political systems, such as the thoughtful reflections of Robert A. Dahl, the role which federalism may play in providing an opposition with opportunities to oppose is often forgotten. This is curious, but perhaps in part at least the result of the fact that the institutionalization of opposition has gone farthest in Great Britain – a non-federal state. Yet in a sense to be further developed below, federalism may be looked upon as an alternative method for institutionalizing opposition – alternative that is to the British parliamentary system.

PARTY POLITICS UNDER THE FIFZH REPUBLIC HAVE BEEN COMPLEX AND confused. New parties such as the Independent Republicans and the Centre Démocrate have appeared, and old ones such as the MRP and the CNIP-two of the great pivotal parties of the Fourth Republic - have disappeared as national forces. The Gaullists have grown, the communists have stagnated, the radicals have declined, and the socialists have experienced dramatically changing fortunes. The observer will be bewildered by the appearance and disappearance of party coalitions, by the political dissensions within the parties, by the bitter squabbles between parties which are in nominal alliance, and by the Quixotic waverings of certain party leaders - veritable weathercocks susceptible to the slightest political draught.

The outcome of one of the closest elections in the German Federal Republic's history partly resulted from the serious flooding which occurred a few weeks before polling day, allowing the government to display its concern in eastern Germany. There the SPD won votes, at the expense of the PDS, which returned to the Bundestag with only two representatives. The Christian Democrats did well in Bavaria. The small increase in votes for the liberal FDP and the large increase in support for the Greens meant that the incumbent coalition could continue, with a reduced majority. Significant economic problems will challenge the new government.

In December 1995 General Elections Took Place in Russia for the lower house of parliament, the Duma. In constitutional terms the Duma is a relatively weak body, comparable with the French National Assembly. It initiates and enacts legislation, but must find a two-thirds majority if it is to override a presidential veto. The December elections were, however, of a disproportionate significance. The fact that they were taking place was important in itself. The Duma elected in December 1995 was only the second Duma to be elected in post-Soviet Russia, and the first to be elected in relatively normal circumstances. (The preceding Duma had been elected in 1993 only after President Boris Yeltsin had used tanks against the old Supreme Soviet, created a new parliament almost literally out of its ashes, and legitimized his actions by means of a new constitution approved by a national referendum.)

The Israeli General Election of 1996 Has Been Described as a ‘referendum’ on the Middle East peace process, the central issue in the campaign. However, important as it was, the outcome of the election was determined not so much by the issue of peace, as by a change in the electoral law providing for the direct election of the prime minister. On 29 May, for the first time, Israelis went to the polls to elect a prime minister as well as a new Knesset and the result was yet another upheaval in Israeli political life.

Parallel with the efforts which have been made during the last fifteen or twenty years to build, in Churchill's words (1946) ‘a kind of United States of Europe’, much research has been undertaken to try to find out whether public opinion had followed the movement, or perhaps even anticipated it.

I do not intend to recapitulate here in detail all these works, but merely to underline some of the problems which they raise, for the researchers as well as for the men of action and above all for those who, perhaps over-ambitiously, try to reconcile the concerns of the former with those of the latter.

ONE HAS TO BE CAREFUL ON THESE OCCASIONS. THERE IS SO much accident about it. Personally, as a latedeveloper at school, I did not have matriculation Latin but if I had I would have read History at Oxford. Instead I began in Economics at London University, at University College, by the way, not LSE – I had not heard of either, but LSE looked like the office blocks of Croydon in which my father worked in insurance and UCL looked like a university, as I had seen them in the cinema. But I moved out of Economics when my tutor at the beginning of the third year gave me a very high mark on an essay on ‘Value Theory’, but said: ‘Get out. I advise you to get out. You plainly don't believe in the subject. You will be a brilliant critic of it if you go on. But you don't believe that economic theory is an thing else but an analytical card-castle. If you go on, youdend up by hating your subject, hating yourself, and feeling like I do that you've wasted your life.’ I said that as I was taking Finals that summer, it was a little late to switch. ‘Nonsense’, Alfred Stonier replied, ‘not if you really want to get out of Economics. You are going dong to LSE for Laski's lectures for subsidiary. Government's easy, just reading books. Switch to that till you're clear what to do.’

THE EARLY GENERAL ELECTIONS IN SLOVAKIA HELD ON 30 September–1 October 1994 and resulting in the victory of populists and nationalists caught many observers by surprise, both in and outside Slovakia. Unlike in Poland and Hungary, the leftist party in Slovakia suffered decisive setbacks, receiving 10.4 per cent of the poll instead of around 20 per cent as indicated in the pre-election surveys. The Democratic Party, the latest successors to the intellectuals who took power from the communists after November 1989, did not even receive the 5 per cent necessary to enter the National Council (see Table 1). The reaction to the overall results has been one of resignation, and pessimism about the fate of democracy in this post-communist country, which, with the Czech Republic constituted Czechoslovakia until 1993.

THE RECENT POLITICAL HISTORY OF NORTHERN IRELAND HAS been punctuated by arrivals and departures as successive secretaries of state have attempted to impose their personalities on an intractable problem through a series of (failed) initiatives. The latest exercise has been under way since the beginning of 1990 and is closely identified with the diplomatic skills exerted by the present Secretary of State, Mr Peter Brooke. In what has been described as ‘potentially the most significant political discussions in all of Ireland since the treaty of 1921’, Mr Brooke has embarked on a voyage which could transcend in importance the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985. The purpose of this article is to put that voyage into some sort of context by suggesting that rather than concentrate solely on the ‘high’ politics of political negotiation, attention needs to be paid to the mechanisms which allow negotiations to proceed. For that reason we will look at the relative merits — and the complementarity — of ‘Track One’ and ‘Track Two’ diplomacy.

If There is any teaching of MARX from which the leadership of Vietnam might bitterly demur, it would be his claim that society raises only such problems as it is ready to solve. Although this magisterial myth provided solace to generations of revolutionaries (who could conclude from it, 'We are, therefore we will prevail'), the Communist Party of Vietnam has been buffeted since its victorious national reunification of 1975 – 76 by challenges from within and without for which it was not prepared. As a result, the politics of Vietnam for the past fifteen years has been more a response to crisis rather than the execution of a political vision. Reform and international openness have become essential parts of these efforts at coping with crisis, but they have been strongly tethered to the need to preserve order and to prevent larger crises.

In Early December 2000 The Political Leaders Of The European Union (EU) met in Nice in order to decide on the treaty adaptations needed before the enlargement envisaged for the next decade. The overall goal was to render the EU more efficient and its decision making more transparent. The outcome of this important event was widely considered as disappointing. Some observers even came to the conclusion that there were no leaders of the EU as such, but only rather narrow-minded, egotistical national leaders who did not – with minor exceptions – care about the ‘common good’ at all. Never had it become so evident, in the opinion of some, that the European perspective had been fading away for many years, and that it was being replaced by national considerations which are often short-sighted and limited to the horizon of the next national elections. One of the classical theories on European integration, neo-functionalism, measures the progress of integration in terms of the Europeanization of its political elites. From this perspective, the top decision-makers seem to be on a downward trend. Is it then a case for the opposite theory, that of intergovernmentalism, which claims that national interests continue to be in the centre of EU decision-making and that tough bargaining is of its very nature?

Is legislative power flowing to the executive branch over time? Beginning in the 1990s, comparativists began to investigate delegation to the executive under different executive formats. Hypothesized causes include collective action problems due to legislative fractionalization, the presence of a dominant pro-executive faction, preference congruence vis-à-vis the head of government, and challenges posed by economic crises. We test these four hypotheses on a data set containing 2,020 country-year observations of democracies and semi-democracies between 1976 and 2014. Using V-Dem data, we derive annualized measures of shifts in executive–legislative relationships. Contrary to stereotypes of executive dominance, relative gains by legislatures are no less frequent than gains by executives, and economic crises do not advantage political executives in consistent ways. Surprisingly, some of the factors expected to benefit executives seem to enhance assembly authority as well. Robust democracy maintains interbranch power relations in equilibrium, while lower levels of polyarchy are associated with greater ‘noise’ in the relationship.