In This Article I Do Two Things. I Begin With A Brief Discussion of the nature of political community in general, and argue that a political community is defined and constituted by the common public commitments of its citizens. Its identity is political not ethnic or cultural in nature, an important distinction that is obscured by the term ‘national identity’ and often ignored in much of the discussion of it. Its identity has an inescapable moral content. Although the latter is often shared with other communities, what distinguishes a political community is the way in which it interprets and institutionally articulates these moral principles. I then apply this general analysis to Britain and suggest how we might best define its identity.

THERE ARE COMPLAINTS ABOUT CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION: it is inefficient and expensive, its outdated curricula and methods of teaching do not adequately prepare the brighter students for life in a post-industrial economy, while the less gifted or privileged ones often leave school without having acquired basic skills of reading, writing and calculating. Educational reform, of both institutions and curricula, is on the agenda.

AMBIGUITIES OF MEANING ARISE IN ALMOST ANY DISCUSSION OF comparative politics. In talk about the political responsibility of public officials it seems even harder than usual to be sure that one is not slipping from one meaning of responsibility to another oneself, harder yet to be sure that others are talkin about the same thing. Responsibility is a term used in politics, philosophy and law, and though there may be links between, for example, the debate about free will and individual responsibility and certain legal concepts, the philosophers' and the lawyers' discourse is quite different. The study of politics, for its part, involves many disciplines. Here, among other things, we may find ourselves concerned with the broad ideological and constitutional principles upon which the political system rests, with an institutional examination of the machinery of government, with the laws that regulate administrative practice, with the beliefs and behaviour patterns of administrators, and with broader philosophical questions about the nature of ‘good’ government. Given these different approaches, the word responsibility is bound to be used in a variety of senses and, within each, because our vocabulary is not legislated for us, there are bound to be shades of meaning that vary with the user.

DRAMATIC CHANGE IS HARDLY A FEATURE OF WEST GERMAN politics. The signals are usually visible well in advance — but gradual change also means that the wider significance of particular developments may be overlooked. A cursory examination of the political scene in the wake of the election held in January 1987 may fail to reveal much that is new since the success of the Christian Democrats in 1983. Thus, despite the sharp fall in the CDU vote, the coalition with the Free Democrats was comfortably confirmed in office. At the same time, the haemorrhage of SPD support—although partially staunched — still continued, with the inability to make a recovery in the intervening years the haunting question for the party. Chiefly at the expense of the SPD, the Greens have now anchored themselves in the party system. Their presence on the federal stage since 1983, and earlier in the Länder, has gingered up political debate and forced issues on to the agenda that otherwise would have been neglected. There are signs of change, but how are they to be interpreted?

The issuance of parliamentary questions (PQ) in presidential democracies reflects an effort to connect with the electoral constituency to advance the legislator's career. We postulate six hypotheses on the association between party affiliation, career advancement and district-level incentives and the issuance of PQs in Chile's presidential multiparty democracy. We test them using a novel dataset containing 68,424 inquiries (oficios legislativos) issued by Chamber of Deputies legislators in three legislative terms (2006–2018). Though district-level variables play a role in the issuance of PQs, incentives of political ambition do not. As opposition coalition legislators make more use of PQs than ruling coalition legislators, there is preliminary evidence to associate PQs with a possible oversight role.

Although the research surrounding PRR parties has increased over the years, health policies, an important part of the welfare system, have generally been neglected. Using an in-depth case-study approach, this article analyses the health policy consequences of PRR parties in Austrian and Italian subnational governments over time, thereby expanding the units of analysis while also looking at an understudied level of government. The findings indicate a propensity towards neoliberalism, combined with accents of welfare chauvinism in Austria and a strategy of shutting down the Freedom Party of Austria. In the case of Italy, both regional cases mark a desire for welfare chauvinism but an inability to restrict healthcare access directly. In all four cases (except Burgenland), the PRR parties are consistently chauvinistic (despite seeming to prefer welfare to liberal chauvinism, they typically implement the latter for health policies) and any factor of generosity comes from a social democratic coalition partner or not at all.

LIKE THE HISTORICAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT THE NEW LEFT TODAY is an international phenomenon, and it is recognized as such both by the revolutionaries themselves and by the authorities, just as the revolutionary movement was a century ago. In June 1871, a few weeks after the suppression of the Paris commune, Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister in the provisional government, said ‘Europe is faced by a work of destruction which is directed against all nations and directed against the principles upon which civilization rests.’ And on 14 November 1968, a few months after the attempts at revolution in Paris in the spring, M. Raymond Marcellin, Minister of the Interior in the French government, said ‘a study of the movement launched in the German Federal Republic in November 1967, in Britain from 1968, and the attempts observed in Holland at the same time disclosed the disturbing simultaneousness, a complete identity of methods of action and of intervention between communist and activist groups. We observe in the convergence of the phenomenon between Europe and the United States in the last few years the action of determined and militant minorities cultivating close contacts with each other across frontiers and living in a state of permanent conspiracy against society.’

What is politics the outcome of? The common answers to this question would invoke such ideas as power and interests. I want to argue that political events, particularly in the modern world, are the outcome of nothing else but politics itself. They emerge rhetorically, from public talk, and nothing more fundamental can be found. A society which can be validly characterized in this way may suitably be called ‘loquocentric’, or talk-centred. The odd thing is that much of the most acute exploration of this idea has taken place in a distorted form - in a camera obscuru, as it were - in ideological writing, which is dedicated to such fundamental determinants of the course of events as race, nation, gender and class. The work of Jurgen Habermas is particularly striking. Before I consider it, however, let me sketch out the thesis that modern politics is essentially loquocentric.

Between The European Elections of June 1989 and those of June 1994, the voters had to digest an extraordinary diet of change. The cold war ended, leading to the unification of Germany and replacing one monolithic security problem by a diversity of problems, including, most agonizingly, Bosnia. The Soviet Union disintegrated. Recession brought unemployment above 10 per cent for the European Union as a whole. Many were bemused by the complexity of the Maastricht Treaty and the political conflicts engendered by some of its major elements. Foremost among these was the project for the single currency, promoted by France in order to anchor Germany yet more firmly in the Union. The idea of a ‘common defence’ as a backbone for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) also had this motivation.

MODERN ALGERIA BEARS VARIOUS STIGMATA OF RADICALISM. ITS struggle for national liberation was one of exceptional severity, involving untold and incalculable suffering and sacrifices. Only Vietnam can surpass it; no other ex-colonial country can equal it. After independence, the commanding heights of the economy, and even a very significant part of the rural sector, passed into one form or another of socialist ownership, including the important experiments in auto-gestion (workers' self-administration), in both industrial and agricultural enterprises. In foreign policy, the hostility of its government to what it holds to be remaining forms of colonialism has been serious and sustained. Internally, the regime is relatively egalitarian and rather puritanical and earnest, by any standards. The Algerians look to their own efforts for the betterment of their condition. All these traits - a heroic struggle for liberation, followed by a good deal of socialism and a general earnest radicalism, ought to have made Algeria a place of pilgrimage for the international Left. It is well known that the promised land must be somewhere. Algeria had as good a claim as Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam, to be at least considered for such a role. In fact, Algeria found in Frantz Fanon the thinker or poet of this vision. Though not a native of Algeria, he identified with the Algerian national cause and died whilst serving it, and became its internationally renowned theoretician.

On 14 May, 1989, Argentinians Elected The Peronist Carlos Menem as president, causing the first constitutional transfer of power to the opposition since 1916. The situation is so unfamiliar that quite a few Peronists are behaving in their newly acquired positions, particularly in some cultural and mass communication spheres, as though the change had been the result of a violent takeover. After all, the first Peronism was heralded by the nationalist military coup of 1943, and its second coming, in 1973, was the result of a combined strategy of electioneering and guerrilla tactics. Those were the days when many Peronists repeated Mao Tse-tung's dictum that ‘power comes from the barrel of a gun’, and such intellectual habits die hard. Culturally the authoritarian components are still strong in Peronism, partly because most of the progressive, liberal or left-of-centre intelligentsia have flocked to the Radicales or to small leftist parties, renouncing their sympathies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when they thought Peronism was the harbinger of revolution, owing to its working-class composition. This, of course, creates a cultural vacuum in Peronism, which has to be filled by whoever comes or remains from the old days. However, many things have changed in the Argentine political climate, and despite the many stragglers the country is becoming accustomed to a pluralist institutional structure.

IN MODERN ITALIAN, ‘POLITICAL CLASS’ IS A CONCEPT quite distinct from that of a ruling class. The notion of political class applies to a million people who are in full-time politics. The cream of these professional politicians is part of the ruling class: a term which applies to the people who effectively run the country working in business, finance, administration, politics, and so on.

In Italy the history of the changing importance of the political class has always been connected with the weakness of the ruling class, which was evident from the beginning of unification. Italy became a nation-state in 1861, largely thanks to the action of a tiny group of patriots consisting of ambitious aristocrats and romantic intellectuals. While in the same period the Prussian monarchy gave strong leadership to the process of unification in Germany, the Piedmont monarchy led the Italian process of national unification under the discreet partnership, open protection, or direct involvement of other major European states. From 1861 to the present time in Italian history many observers have pointed to the weakness of the ruling class and the interference of foreign powers.

WHEN RAWLS FORMULATED HIS VIEWS ON SOCIAL JUSTICE IN the 1950s and 1960s, leading to the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, he based his theory on a simple but unconditional assumption, namely, that justice is the first virtue of social institutions. This assumption Rawls considers to be beyond doubt, so much so that in the very first page of his treatise he claims that ‘laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust’.

Largely as a result of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, over the last 25 years questions of social justice have dominated most debates on political theory. And while vast quantities of ink were expended over philosophical discussions on significant but detailed aspects of Rawls's theory, principally on the plausibility of his meta h sical assumptions on individuals and human psychology, it is unfortunate that not enough attention has been paid to Rawls's initial recommendation of adopting normative criteria as a tool for evaluating political institutions.

This paper critically assesses the description ‘empire’ as applied to the United States in the twentieth century, proposing that US policy makers lack the territorial and occupation motives pre-requisite to being an imperial power. It is proposed that the USA is better described as an empire by accident than by design. Americans’ domestic experience of nation-building within the USA, since the early twentieth century, helps account for their unwillingness to permit the USA to be an imperial nation.

Since the third wave of democracy, term limits have become a popular fixture of most constitutions intended to constrain the executive. Yet, recent constitutional reforms around the world show that presidents seeking re-election sometimes overturn the entire constitutional order to extend their power. What is the impact of these constitutional manipulations on the longevity of the executive in office? Using survival analysis of all political leaders and national constitutions from 1875 to 2015, this article demonstrates, for the first time, that when ‘authoritarian-aspiring’ presidents remove constitutional term limits, they increase their stay in office by more than 40%. Our findings contrast with a widely held position in the comparative authoritarian literature suggesting that dictators survive longer under institutional constraints. On the contrary, we argue that by removing constitutional barriers, rulers consolidate more power at the expense of their most ambitious allies and can stay in power longer.

Parties usually argue in favour or against a government coalition based on party considerations in terms of projected policy implementation, power in office and vote maximization – that is, the ‘policy, office, votes’ triad. So far, however, it remains unclear which claims mainstream parties invoke to motivate their choice to rule or not rule with populist parties. Adopting the ‘policy, voter, office’ triad, this article examines mainstream parties' Twitter claims on ruling with populist parties in Austria, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands (2006–2021, N = 1,919). Mainstream parties mainly reject ruling with (mostly radical right) populist parties. To justify unwillingness, policy-based motives referring to the populist parties' extremist nature trump motives on office-seeking and vote maximization. To justify willingness, predominantly office-seeking motivations are invoked. Party characteristics (ideology, incumbency status, size) and context, however, shape these claims. This study sheds light on mainstream parties' patterns of political communication on coalition formation with populist parties.