As Recent Demilitarization And Democratic Trends World-Wide have shown, the exit of a dictator of the calibre of Abacha (1993–98) in Nigeria may foster a strong desire among successors for transition to a more democratic order. As in Chile after General Augusto Pinochet, and in Spain after Franco, General Abdulsalam Abubakar, who succeeded General Sani Abacha, presided in Nigeria over a programme of transition to civilian rule. This culminated in the election of General Olusegun Obasanjo (retired) in February 1999, and his subsequent official take-over of government in May 1999. However, since new democracies often revert to dictatorships, the new government faces daunting challenges in Nigeria's search for democracy and political stability.

This article considers the utility of emigration figures for signalling political dysfunction in Europe. If given a choice, most people would prefer not to leave friends, family and homes in order to find work. By assuming that international migration is more of a burden than a freedom, international migration patterns can help us distinguish between politically successful and politically dysfunctional states. This approach is first applied to international refugees and migrants to the EU, then used to study internal EU migrant flows. In doing this, it creates two sets of rankings (in overall and per capita terms) for Europe’s most and least successful states. Included among the most dysfunctional states in Europe are Romania, Lithuania, Ireland, Croatia and Latvia. It would seem as though policymakers in these states are unable to satisfy their constituents’ needs.

This article examines the determinants of the annual overall spending levels of political parties from a comparative perspective. On the basis of a dataset with 1,317 observations from 99 parties in nine European parliamentary democracies, we illustrate that the spending levels of parties – calculated on the basis of Nassmacher’s index of political spending – have not systematically increased over the past decade. A multilevel analysis shows that, at the country level, spending levels are higher in countries with a longer tradition of public funding, a higher effective number of parties and a shorter democratic tradition. They are also higher in election years, but this effect is moderated when campaign spending limits apply. At the party level, spending levels increase with party strength and party age. Party ideology and government participation, on the other hand, do not have an effect.

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.

European mainstream right parties are increasingly choosing to include radical right parties in coalition governments or other types of stable and committed cooperation. How does this cooperation affect voters’ perceptions of party positions? This article examines whether coalition signals have a significant impact on voters’ perceptions of the specific policy issues that were at stake in the bargaining process. More specifically, does the issue ownership of the radical right cause voters to perceive mainstream parties as radicalizing on immigration issues pertaining to asylum and multiculturalism? I compare the perceptions of Dutch parties before and after two coalition formations that (formally and informally) involved a radical right party: the coalition with the List Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and the support agreement with the Freedom Party in 2010. Furthermore, I examine the long-term effects of the Danish mainstream right government's reliance on the support of the radical right Danish People's Party in 2001–11.

Right-wing populists often mobilize popular support by employing a people-versus-elite dichotomy in which they cast ‘the people’ as the underdog, or by ‘performing’ crisis to discredit the elite. Such ‘underdogism’, and the reliance on crisis more broadly, remains an effective strategy for as long as populists are in opposition. But what happens when populists gain power? One would expect that they would not be able to exploit their position as effectively and their appeal would weaken drastically. In certain cases, however, they still manage to sustain the underdog illusion. This article argues that memory politics are an important locus for populists to maintain their underdog rhetoric, and within that field the performance of victimhood is key. Building on theories about the performance of crisis and recent trends in research on memory politics in Central Europe, we propose a framework for understanding how governing right-wing populists justify vindictive policies and thus try to cement their power.

IT IS REPORTED THAT WHEN ALVARO CUNHAL CAME OUT OF PRISON IN the late 1950s, he initiated a purge of the leadership of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). Their crime was apparently españolismo – or a sympathy with the broad reformist policy of ‘national reconciliation’ adopted by the Spanish Communists in 1956. The Spanish leaders were aware of this implied slur on their revolutionary seriousness, but as both parties battled for survival against repressive dictatorships, it was not an issue over which to break openly the fundamental solidarity between them. Yet a decade and a half later, with Cunhal seemingly leading his Party down the highroad to socialism and his Spanish comrades probably within sight of their immediate goal of the collapse of Francoism, the theoretical discrepancies have re-emerged. Santiago Carrillo, Secretary-General of the PCE, has been sufficiently critical of Cunhal's attempt to create an Eastern European-style socialism in Portugal to earn Soviet accusations of lack of solidarity. Carrillo has described Cunhal's policy during the last year as ‘a good example of how not to make a revolution’. In doing so, the Spanish leader has not only incurred the displeasure of Moscow, something which he has learned to live with since his stand against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, but also risked serious internal division inside his own party.

On the morning of 12 February 1951 Kwame Nkrumah was freed from James Fort Prison in Accra. On the 14th he was invited by the Governor of the Gold Coast to form a government. He and his party, the Convention People's Party (CPP), remained in office through the transition to political independence on 6 March 1957, when the Gold Coast changed its name to Ghana, until the military revolution of 24 February 1966. This event formed the fifth of a series of army coups in Negro Africa which had begun on 25 November 1965 in the Congo, and it is probably the most important. Not only had Nkrumah held power for fifteen years, he was, for all the small size of his country, almost certainly the most influential politician south of the Sahara, and for what it was worth the only serious non-Muslim ideologist of the whole continent. Ghana had led the movement to African independence. So far as there was a common political creed its items and aspirations were Nkrumah's and the aspirations, however ineffective, to African unity, were based on his Pan-Africanism and not on the potentially alternative concept of négritude which had spread from the West Indies into French Africa's attitudes and politics.

THERE ARE FEW COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD IN WHICH THERE IS NO constitutional machinery for changing the head of the government. Certainly there are a number of heads of government in Latin America who are effectively irremoveable by constitutional means (and Mr Burnham would seem recently to have joined their ranks); constitutionally, however, they are bound to go through the motions of an election.

The emergence of a student opposition movement in the United States in the past few years has received world-wide attention. During the last year, American students have made headlines for their organized opposition to the Vietnam war, and for the now celebrated Berkeley Student Revolt. For perhaps the fist time in American history, the politics of university students has become a major topic of national political discussion. Many articles have been written in newspapers and magazines discussing the nature and sigmlicance of this movement.

Any analysis of the American student movement must attempt to answer the question why student politics in the mid-1960s should be so much more noteworthy than any preceding set of such activities. Before turning to a discussion of this issue, I would like to summarize briefly some of the earlier radical activities of American university students.

JAPAN'S INCREASING AFFLUENCE AND ITS INFLUENCE IN world affairs have led many to inquire about the functioning of Japanese politics and how one should deal with the Japanese in government or business negotiations. With the steady rise of such interest in Japan, the study of Japanese politics has started to flourish at home and abroad. It was impossible to predict one or two decades ago that one would find so many students, many of whom have a good command of the Japanese language, enrolled in a graduate course on Japanese politics in major US universities. Writings on Japanese politics have started to attract many more general readers, not just a small group of specialists in Japanese politics whose number would not reach, by any method of calculation, one thousand in the whole world. In this article I shall summarize and discuss some major debates on the nature and functioning of Japanese politics with some recent illustrations. The following three subjects have been chosen: decision-making and policy implementation, power structure and the nature of democracy.

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, THE THEME OF POLITICAL PARTICIpation and the set of issues connected with it are as old as politics itself, because they touch on some of the most central and perennial questions of political life – who decides, where are the boundaries of community and citizenship to be drawn, who benefits, how will decisions be made? However, beyond this, participation has from time to time become a particularly central and salient issue in British politics. In the seventeenth century the issues revolved around the ‘claims of the gentry and merchant classes to play a larger part in the making of government policy’. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the issue moved on to representation of the nonropertied classes – the town worker, the rural worker and Etterly universal suffrage.

More Than Four Years Have Passed Since The Uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989. If the revolt of the Romanians, after years in which Ceausescu encountered practically no opposition to his personal harsh dictatorship, surprised the entire world, the subsequent evolution of Romanian society seemed to return to the sad pattern of old: a country with little democratic tradition and maybe the most damaged by communism of all Eastern European countries would be expected to meet great difficulties and take more time to become a freemarket, liberal-based democracy. What is left of this prognosis more than four years after Ceausescu's fall?

Communism is dead, but the communist spirit continues to hover over Eastern Europe. In most of the states there is a peculiar resilience of the class structures imposed by the previous regime. This is not a new situation, which could explain in part the relative popularity of that system even in the countries where it was imported from abroad by Soviet military occupation. To speak nowadays about the popularity of communism, however relative, may sound like an affront to the numerous people who either perished in gaols and camps or barely survived after almost fifty years of political homogenization and isolation.

Legislatures are key institutions that stabilize authoritarian rule. However, less is said about the individuals who populate these institutions or the pathways that take them to power. This is an oversight, since how autocrats recruit reflects upon their institutional capacities and adaptation to changing circumstances. Specifically, recruitment is challenging when regimes lack robust ruling parties to cultivate partisan loyalists and during periods of multiparty elections when candidates must provide a higher degree of self-financing. This article examines these dynamics across the lifespan of Cameroon's authoritarian regime and introduces an original biographical data set of over 900 legislators between 1973 and 2019. The data show there is an increased proportion of businesspeople in the legislature, but also a possible emerging preference for former civil servants. The article argues that civil service recruitment pipelines substitute for the monitoring functions a party might serve, while simultaneously preparing candidates for the unique financing needs of elections.

While the growing body of research on non-violent political movements centres on the idea that choosing non-violence tends to produce more favourable outcomes for dissidents, the question of why some non-violent campaigns still fail has not been sufficiently empirically investigated. Building on the extant research on the effects of group dynamics and certain external actors, we examine the role of the natural resource wealth of target states on the outcomes of non-violent campaigns. We hypothesize that the probability that a non-violent movement will fail increases as the target state's natural resource wealth increases. This natural resource wealth could serve to neutralize the potential for support from both domestic and external actors, thereby increasing the risk of failure. The results of our statistical analyses support our hypothesis and suggest that non-violent campaigns are more likely to fail in states with higher natural resource wealth, particularly that which stems from oil.

THIS ARTICLE ADDRESSES THE PROBLEM OF NORWEGIAN membership in the EC. Why is it so difficult for Norway to follow in the tracks of Sweden and Finland, and for that matter the rest of Western Europe?

The changes on the European continent since the collapse of the East-West divide have also altered the political agenda in the Scandinavian countries. The ambitions of the EC-internal market as well as the Single European Act speeded up a discussion of how Finland, Norway and Sweden should position themselves in order not to lose out economically and become marginalized politically. In Norway, the traumatic EC debate in 1972 had split the country, and the parties, into two camps, resulting in the rejection of EC membership by 53 per cent of the electorate. Since then, the issue has been absent from political debate. In Finland and Sweden the official rationale for not discussing the issue disappeared simultaneously with the regimes in Eastern Europe, suddenly pushing the topic onto the political agenda, causing an abrupt change in Swedish EC policy.

MOST STUDENTS OF SAINT-SIMON HAVE BEEN ESPECIALLY CONCERNED with his relations with the different 19th-century ideological movements; hence few have approached his work from the point of view of the incompatibility between his attitudes and those of the Jacobins. Yet such an approach re-situates his intellectual biography in its proper context – and indeed protects his work from the anachronistic interpretations which have plagued it in the history of ideas. Moreover it illuminates even more rewardingly his present relevance. His clash with Jacobinism might be taken as the startingpoint of the opposition between Jacobinism and industrialism, between the modern industrial societies and the ‘politics of power’ of the old centralized nation states. From this then derives his theory of the difference between the politics of power and the politics of abilities. The importance of this theory, especially for political science, has not been sufficiently stressed in the classic studies on Saint-Simon's work. Mostly sociological, these studies are divided amongst themselves on whether his work must be seen as socialism, Utopian or otherwise, or as elitism, technocratic or otherwise. And yet it is this theory which provides the logical link between these two seemingly contradictory interpretations.

The future historian of European integration is likely to suffer from a surplus of documentation and a shortage of facts. If a certain kind of ignorance, as Lytton Strachey once remarked, is essential to the writing of intelligible history, it has little hope of survival amid the vast accumulation of newspaper cuttings, official statistics, policy speeches, annual reports and statesmen's memoirs with which the present-day scholar must contend. One expert has calculated that ‘the volume of official documents produced by the United Kingdom Government and its agencies during the six war years 1939–45 equalled, in cubic content, the volume of all previous archives of the United Kingdom and of its constituent kingdoms England and Scotland that had survived down to the date of the outbreak of war.’

The Common Market as an issue in domestic British politics under the Macmillan government – and distinct from the negotiations, as such, with the European Economic Community – can be considered under three broad heads. First, there is the question how the decision to seek entry for Britain was taken. How far was it a political decision; how far was it motivated by the views of civil servants; how far was it prompted by interest groups in industry and finance ? Secondly, how did the Conservative Party become converted to the idea of British membership of the European Economic Community and how significant was the opposition to the idea that developed in the party ? The third question is what effect, if any, did domestic political opposition to the Common Market have on the French President's eventual veto of the project ?

Except by implication, the third question is excluded from consideration here. Only a close student of French domestic politics is competent to evaluate how far, if at all, the hostility to the European idea in a section of the Conservative Party and the official objections of the Labour Party to British membership of EEC on any terms that then seemed negotiable, made it easier for the French President to impose his final veto. Conceivably, the possibility that a successor labour government might disown any treaty that the conservatives had signed may have played a marginal part in assisting the President's attitude in the final stages.