Robert Elgie's contribution to comparative politics is considerable. His work covers a range of subfields, including the study of political institutions, French politics, political leadership, presidentialism and semi-presidentialism. He became the leading scholar of semi-presidentialism and indeed defined much of the research agenda in this subfield.

The former rebel party Revolutionary United Front Party (RUFP) in Sierra Leone has struggled with a discredited wartime reputation and electoral defeats throughout the post-war period. In spite of this, the party has remained loyal to its wartime revolutionary ideas, symbols and political rhetoric. Why is this the case? In this article, I argue that the answer lies in the premises of party politics in war-torn states and new democracies on the African continent. In a political landscape where brokerage is power, retaining wartime identities can sometimes serve as a valuable source of (potential) patronage. With few other options for access to resources and opportunities, the core of the party membership has clung to its past as a means to both rally electoral support among the marginalized ex-combatant community and to get access to the long-awaited funds that were promised to them in the peace negotiations.

I base this enquiry on the simple proposition that the government of a university ought to be collegiate and that authority within an academic community should be diffuse.

Now it is clear – it became very clear at Manchester in 1981–82 – that the structure of control in most British universities is no longer capable of looking after its members in a rational, intelligent manner. Instead of dispersal there is centralization, and in place of collegiate government there is a persistent drift towards administrative control. Moreover, in relation to the title of this journal, universities are marvellously arranged to oppose but ill-equipped to govern. The words may sound harsh but they were amply illustrated in the crisis that descended on the unversity in July 1981.

LET US ASK FIRST OF ALL A SIMPLE QUESTION – ‘WHY DOES ANYBODY want integration?’ There are usually two reasons. The first is: in order not to be killed by somebody with whom we fail to integrate. This argument for integration has been stressed by popular writers, such as Emery Reeves and others. It is a variation of the old German proverb which goes, loosely translated, ‘If thou wilt not my brother be, I'll smash thy skull most certainly.’ This notion that groups that do not integrate must destroy each other is a widespread but false belief. Luckily it is not true. The Scandinavians did not form any United States of the North, and yet they have not killed each other for a long time even though their ancestors were formidable warriors.

THE CHANGE OF REGIME IN LISBON IN 1974 STIMULATED THE imagination of the far Left from Madrid to Santiago. For a brief period Lisbon was a political laboratory, attracting militants from every continent to test and analyse for future home consumption. What aroused this interest — unprecedented for a European upheaval since the Paris events of May 1968 — was a feeling that here was a rare example of history being made, not just by governments, but by the people themselves. How justified was this feeling, and how docs the Portuguese Revolution look now that it is, apparently, all over?

CONTRARY TO EXPECTATIONS, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SALAZAR FROM the political scene has not, in the short-run at least, led to a serious succession crisis in Portugal. A few weeks of hard but covert bargaining within the ruling circles culminated in the appointment by the President, Admiral Tomás of Dr Marcello Caetano as Prime Minister. Admiral Tomás was himself appointed by Salazar and chosen partly for his docility and innocuousness to replace the rebellious Craveiro Lopes in 1958; he has no power base of his own. Although in a fluid situation such as this his role has allowed him a greater latitude of choice than in normal circumstances, his decision probably reflected the balance of forces within the ruling circles. Caetano's background is typical of a whole generation of ‘counter-revolutionary’ monarchists, whose political formation matured within the matrix of the Portuguese Maurrassist movement, the integralismo Insitano. Somehow his monarchist allegiance, if not his authoritarian-corporatist convictions, waned as his career within the Estado Novo waxed. He was one of the young (in their twenties and thirties) integralista experts whose services were vital in Salazar's transformation of a mindless military dictatorship into a ‘respectable’ authoritarian regime.

EUROPEAN INTEGRATION — THE PHRASE WAS USED SO EASILY TO connote a process that might, over a period, incorporate most of the continent. But in the four decades when the cold war segmented Europe the notion of extensive integration seemed irrelevant; in practice integration has been consolidated as an essentially West European phenomenon. The policy scope, the economic application, the security implications and the institutional frameworks of integration became concentrated around the core countries of Western Europe. Similarly the underpinning understandings about solidarity and mutual commitment were formulated on the assumption that a hard boundary separated those Europeans capable of being engaged from those who were prevented from so doing. There were few among those who studied this West European process who kept the wider Europe in mind. Ghiţa Ionescu was unusual in always keeping an eye open to developments in both parts of the continent, a legacy that all of us who worked with him cherish. The burden that he leaves us is of trying to figure out whether integration can be given substance as a process for pan-Europe.

Resistance To The Poll Tax Has Been Described As ‘The greatest popular rejection of unjust law since Chartist time’. During the period 1990 – 91, for example, summonses for nonpayment in England and Wales were taken out agaha nearly a quarter of those registered for the charge, whilst in Scotland approximately 38 per cent of the registered population were pursued by legal means. Somewhat surprisingly in the light of the large numbers of people involved and the undoubted role which the unpopularity of the tax played in Mrs Thatcher's removal from the premiership, the campaign has reccived little attention from political scientists and none, as far as I know, from legal or political philosophers.

THE MOST SURPRISING BENEFICIARY OF A SERIES OF upsets in European elections which have shaken established political forces is probably the Lega Nord (Northern League) which wants to make the north of Italy effectively self-governing within a radically decentralized Italian state. In the Italian general election of 5 – 6 April 1992, its national vote rose from 0.5 to 8.7 per cent making it Italy's fourth largest party, while in the north it lies second behind the ruling Christian Democrats. The 3,394,917 votes which it has amassed represents a serious challenge to over a century of centralized rule in which before, during, and after the fascist period, consistent efforts were made to create a single nation, with uniform traditions and laws, out of diverse regions of the Italian peninsula. The League message is one which appeals to a range of social groups who feel that their interests are no longer served by a blocked political system unable to correct serious abuses in Italian public life. Despite warnings of chaos and instability if the Christian Dcmocrats and smaller governing parties were not given enough seats to form a new coalition, exasperated voters were prepared to reject existing arrangements.

HERE I WILL SHOW THE STRANGENESS OF ALEXIS DE Tocqueville's account of the doctrine of interest rightly understood. He affirms that doctrine, but not for the sake of interest. He wishes to preserve the greatness and the misery of the Americans’ very intense self-consciousness, and to keep open the possibility of spiritual responses to that experience.

SINCE 1989 THE NATURE OF OPPOSITION IN SEVERAL WESTERN democracies has been subject to change, and Italy is no exception. But the Italian case is distinct because the changes which occurred in Italy after 1989 amount to a revolution compared to the traditional political equilibrium. The Italian political scene was dominated, from the post-war years (1948) to the 199Os, by two political parties: the DC (Christian Democracy) and the PCI (Italian Communist Party), which respectively occupied the positions of ruling party and opposition party for over forty years.

AN IDENTITY CRISIS HAS FOLLOWED ON THE GRADUAL Succession of the generations in the second German state. The feeling that previous ideals have lost their meaning, and the abandonment of the hope of a unified German nation have led to discontent even amongst socialists. In addition to the numerous demands for more human rights and cultural freedom, which led in the mid-1970s to an emigration movement, harassed by the police, a movement which is still taking place, the end of the 1970s gave birth to the autonomous peace movement. This movement articulates the basic opposition of the younger generation in one theme, that of peace, and unites it with another, the search for the nation believed lost.

Electoral accountability is typically identified with retrospective economic voting even though it is widely recognized that explaining electors’ assignment of responsibility also implies considering issues other than the economy. Recently, scholars have also stressed the role of election quality in contributing to democratic legitimacy of elected authorities. In this perspective, electoral integrity as a valence issue would influence voters’ behaviour, structuring attitudes about accountability in substantial ways. This effect would also be moderated by individual- and country-level factors. I test these assumptions in 23 countries worldwide using a multilevel analysis of data from the sixth wave of the World Values Survey. Results indicate that the strength of the link between perceptions of electoral integrity and vote for the incumbent seems to be affected by individual characteristics such as partisanship, while it is also moderated by specific contextual characteristics such as government clarity of responsibility and pluralism of the media.

Recent scholarship on retrospective voting has shown that when they go to the polls, voters evaluate not only incumbent performance, but also the performance of parties in opposition. So far, however, these studies have not been able to identify how voters evaluate the performance of parties in opposition. The answers to a unique open-ended question included in a Belgian electoral survey in 2019 provide new insights into voters' minds. First, this study investigates what voters think about when they evaluate a party's performance in opposition. Second, it tests whether voters hold opposition parties responsible for the state of affairs in the country. The results show that voters are most concerned with opposition parties' competence in scrutinizing the government and providing constructive criticism, and dislike unconstructive and overly negative opposition. Furthermore, voters hold opposition parties accountable for the state of affairs in their country, albeit to a lesser extent than incumbent parties.

While the literature on directly elected mayors has largely neglected the relationship between mayors and their parties, studies of party transformation have generally ignored how changes in local democratic rules and practices affect parties. This article addresses these questions using a qualitative case study of the relationship between mayors and the three faces of their parties (in local public office, local central office and on the ground) in Genoa and Lausanne. Based on interviews with the mayors, elected representatives and party members, it finds in the two cases that, as long as these mayors can count on high levels of popularity and are not nearing the end of their term, they are ‘party detached’. When these factors do not apply and/or party institutionalization increases, the relationship with the party in local central office (although not with the party in local public office or on the ground) becomes more significant.

While the questions of how parties seek to address (or not) pressing issues are critically important, scholars have generally paid little attention to where issues are addressed within the political system, and the consequences for party competition of that choice. The fact that issues can be addressed within several institutional (i.e. functional) domains and levels – general elections, parliament, referenda, courts, local government, etc. – implies that political parties may address an issue, and thereby interact with one another, in consequentially different ways depending on the institutional arena or level of government wherein they seek resolution. This article describes how Ireland’s parties addressed the electorally volatile issue of abortion via referendum campaigns. The article draws upon multiple sources of evidence to support its findings, including original data based on results from the author’s two parliamentary surveys following the 2007 and 2011 election campaigns.

This article asks what international evidence suggests about the likelihood of major reform of the system used to elect the British House of Commons. It identifies four paths that have generated major electoral reform or come close to doing so in established democracies in recent decades and examines how likely each is to lead to reform in the UK. It argues that, on this evidence, reform in the UK is unlikely but not impossible.