Despite the dramatic final breakthrough in summer 1987, the democratization of South Korea (hereinafter Korea) displayed the hallmarks of a gradual or continuous transition from authoritarianism. These included: liberalization emanating from within the regime; continuity of personnel from the authoritarian ruling elite; continuity in economic and foreign policy; and the exclusion from power of the representatives of the economically disadvantaged groups. Such features of democratic deficit have been observed for Korea and for Brazil, two countries whose experiences of authoritarian developmentalism are commonly compared.

Events in recent years suggest the possibility of more fundamental reform of Korea's economic and political institutions. The financial crisis of late-1997 led to the most serious economic recession for 40 years. Held in the middle of the financial meltdown, the presidential election of December 1997 resulted in a victory for Kim Dae-Jung (or DJ as he is commonly known), a veteran dissident associated with the excluded constituencies (not only his own underdeveloped home region but also labour and progressivelyminded intellectuals and activists).

HISTORIANS OF I8TH-CENTURY ENGLAND ARE COMING TO RECOGnize that the Rockingham Whigs played a significant role in the establishment of ‘party’ and ‘opposition’ as political instruments in the life of the nation but they remain divided over the precise contribution which the Rockinghams made to the evolution of the party system. On dose analysis the party appears to be profoundly divided over some of the most fundamental political issues of the time. Its attitude towards the American colonies was at best ambiguous and unsatisfactorily thought out. It was deeply divided on reform. All too frequently its parliamentary performance was inept, its members absent and its public credit low. In office, the Rockinghams were unable to effect lasting political changes and were never able to survive for more than a few months. Because most historians have concentrated their studies on these aspects of Rockinghamite history they have tended to neglect, indeed almost to dismiss, the party ideology which emerged during the 1770s and have remained indifferent to the institutional changes which occurred a little later. Only when the theoretical and institutional developments have been analysed and their significance assessed can a balanced view of the Rockinghams emerge – and thus a more valid picture of party development in the later I8th century.

DURING AUTUMN 1995 JUDICIAL REVIEW BECAME NEWS IN THE United Kingdom. Tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, radio, television and Parliament provided fora for ministers, Conservative backbench MPs and journalists to debate the apparent growing willingness of the judiciary to intervene in politically contentious government decisions. The tone of the debate was often hostile; sometimes vitriolic. We were told that there was a crisis. According to an editorial in The Times, ‘it is tempting to observe a pattern emerging, a potentially alarming hostility between an overmighty executive and an ambitious judiciary’. Radio and television journalists described a situation of ‘mutual resentment and suspicion’ and ‘unprecedented conflict between a Conservative government and the judiciary’. The Daily Express denounced ‘the sickness sweeping through the senior judiciary – galloping arrogance’ and the Daily Mail accused judges of giving ‘the impression – perhaps a false impression, but nevertheless a real one – of acting on a political agenda of their own’.

THERE ARE THREE REASONS WHY THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN WRITTEN. FIRST, the Centre Parties, with their origins in rural interests, have provided a natural channel for the articulation of issues difficult to accomodate within the framework of a two-party system. These issues include decentralization, environmental protection and a questioning attitude to growth. Secondly, these parties provide an interesting study of attempts to adapt from a traditionalist base to the modern world. In the process they have come to play an important part in coalition formation in their respective countries. The Norwegian Centre Party, for example, provided the Prime Minister for a coalition from 1965 to 1971 in the person of Per Borten, while the Centre Party of Sweden achieved power in 1976 at the head of a three-party coalition under the premiership of Thorbjörn Fälldin. Finally, they have been little explored academically either in their own countries or in English-language source literature.

The problem of ‘tutelage’ of trade unions by political parties in italy must be seen against a background of: the structural conditions of the labour market (where trade unions are active) and those of the ‘political market’ (where parties are active) as masses for manoeuvre used to attain certain aims; the characteristics of the leadership of the trade unions and those of the political parties; the ‘styles of leadership’ (including the conduct of conflict) by trade union and party leaders.

MEXICO'S NATIONAL, MID-TERM ELECTlONS OF JULY 1997 PRODUCED important changes in the country's political landscape. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has dominated virtually all realms of Mexican politics since the late 1920s, suffered an unprecedented setback, losing its majority in the lower house of the Mexican Congress.

Though the era of single-party political domination appears to have come to an end, policy-making since the July 1997 elections has exhibited considerable continuity. Notwithstanding the opposition's new legislative majority, the will of the President, Ernest0 Zedillo, of the PRI, has prevailed on important issues of public policy. What can the continued legislative strength of the President, in the wake of significant opposition gains, tell us about the nature of democratization in Mexico?

The American Elections This Year Overturned conventional expectations. In March 1991 President Bush — leader of the free world during the fall of the Berlin wall and winner of the Gulf war — seemed invincible. With the troops home in victory parades, Bush's approval rating stood at 88 per cent in Gallup polls. Few thought he could lose against Governor Clinton, dogged by questions about the draft and marital fidelity, perceived as a second-rank Democratic contender from a small southern state. Yet President Bush won 37.7 per cent, the lowest share of the popular vote of any incumbent president since William Taft in 1912. Against most predictions, 19 per cent of the vote went to Ross Perot, the best result for a third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Governor Clinton enjoyed a comfortable victory, with 43.2 per cent of the popular vote and 370 electoral college votes in 32 states. The result for Clinton was not a landslide, indeed his share of the popular vote was similar to Mondale's in 1984 and Carter's in 1980, and less than Dukakis's in 1988. But questions about a popular mandate are academic: Democrats now control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and almost two-thirds of governorships and state legislative chambers.

THE VIOLENCE WHICH MARKED THE OVERTHROW OF Nicolae Ceaugescu's regime at Christmas 1989, and the recurrent disorders, especially in Bucharest, which have punctuated developments over the last nine months, have made Romania's experience of anti-Communist revolution strikingly different from that of its neighbours to the north and to the west. Whatever the political and social tensions emerging in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland (and whatever may be the GDR's legacy to a reunified Germany), it is unlikely that the charge of neo-communism will be central to their political debate. It is precisely that charge levelled against the government party (National Salvation Front/FSN) and against the person of Ion Ilescu by various opposition groups, and former prominent dissidents under Ceaugescu, which remains the most emotive issue in Romanian politics. The question of whether the revolution which overthrew Nicolae Ceauyescu and led to the dissolution of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) was the result of a popular uprising or a coup d'état planned by Party members has haunted Romanian politics through the first nine months of the post-Ceauqescu period.

THE ‘NEW INSTITUTIONALISM’ HAS BEEN THE MOST VISIBLE movement in American political science during the last decade. It is a recoil from reductionism that is said to have dominated the political science of the previous decades. During the American Political Science Association presidency of Charles E. Lindblom in 1981, with Theodore Lowi and Sidney Tarrow as co-chairs of the Program Committee, it was decided that all titles of panels and round tables at the annual meeting were to have ‘and the state’ tacked on. The implication was that the behavioural revolution had resulted in the neglect of the power and autonomy of the state. But this adding on ‘and the state’ had very little effect on the content of the papers, and seemed primarily to have ‘buzzword’ significance. A second manifestation of this discomfort was an article in the American Political Science Review of 1984 by James March and Johan Olsen, entitled ‘The New Institutionalism; The Organizational Factor in Political Life’, followed by a book by the same two authors called Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics.

EL SALVADOR AND NICARAGUA, TWO SOCIETIES WHICH HAVE recently experienced revolutionary conflict, have also embarked upon electoral processes. The US government cdls El Salvador's regime ‘democratic’ and aids its fight against leftist revolutionaries, while calling Nicaragua's regime ‘totalitarian’ and its elections a sham. What would democracy in these countries require and what are democracy's prospects?

One criterion of democracy, opposition or competitiveness, is insufficient because it says nothing about the social bases of competing elites. In order to provide some guarantee that a regime will be responsive to politicized social needs, we must stress the criterion of participation or inclusiveness as a necessary condition for democracy. In a context of intense conflict a democratic regime must allow all sectors – or rather their representatives chosen in competitive elections – to participate in decisions which will affect them. Such a regime's prospects for success are further enhanced by pacts of mutual guarantees of security among the contending actors, as in the consociational democracies.

THE WELFARE STATE IS WIDELY THOUGHT TO HAVE SOME connection with the ideal of equality. But what is the nature of that connection and what is the relevant sense of equality? The purpose of this paper is to identify two conflicting ideals of equality and to discuss their im lications for the political label these ideals ‘equality of welfare’ and ‘equality of resources’, though I shall define them somewhat differently from Dworkin. The conclusion I shall seek to establish is that both ideals have a place in our thinking about the welfare state, and that this is no accident. Both ideals may be traced back to competing conceptions of the person, each of which has a firm place in what may be broadly termed liberal thought.

The modern state would be a crisis if consent to long-established sites of authoritative rule were breaking down, previously capable states were unable to command coercive power, and if the demands of international and supra-national institutions had enforceable claims against historically sovereign states. There is no general crisis of the modern state. The states of most developed countries are secure as sites of authoritative rule, and the military power commanded by the American state is unprecedented. However, the external sovereignty of many poor and small states is diminishing. The cause is not ‘globalization’ but the policies of the world's dominant state.

IT WOULD SEEM CURIOUS TO AN OUTSIDE OBSERVER THAT THE DISSOLUTION of the Nihon-Anakisuto-Renmei (Japanese Anarchist Federation) should be formally announced in January 1969, at a time when militant students were determined to defend their ‘fortress’, the Yasuda auditorium of Tokyo University, which they had occupied for several months, against an attack by the riot police. The anarchists themselves called the dissolution ‘a deployment in the face of the enemy’. Yet they had to admit at the same time that they had reached a deadlock in their attempts within the Federation to formulate new theories of anarchism and to hit upon new forms of organization for the new era of direct action which they believed had begun. Indeed, they remained very weak numerically, and they had only a limited direct influence among the student movements which appeared in their eyes to have ushered in this era.

EUROPE AT FIRST SIGHT SEEMS A WORD WITH A CLEAR MEANing; but a further look shows it to be most ambiguous.

The most obvious meaning is geographical: Europe is the north-west peninsula of the Asian land mass. But even this is not correct: there are three western peninsulas: Finland, Scandinavia and the main European. Usually the three are lumped together; but even at its narrowest point the sea which divides these is much wider than that which separates the Balkans from Anatolia - which is always reckoned to be Asia, and indeed one portion of which constituted the whole of Asia when that word was first used. I know this because I once swam across the Bosphorus, but would certainly never have tried the sound between Elsinore and Helsingborg.

There are conflicting theoretical expectations regarding students' protest behaviour in contemporary autocracies. On the one hand, in line with a resource model of political participation, university students are more likely to protest than their peers without higher education. On the other hand, university students in autocracies might refrain from high-risk activism in exchange for their own financial well-being and career advancement. To address this debate, the article leverages data on anti-corruption protests organized by the opposition politician Alexei Navalny in March 2017. Results show that anti-corruption protests were larger in Russian cities with a larger university student population. Next, employing individual-level data from the fifth wave of the European Values Survey, multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrates that university students participated in demonstrations at a higher rate than non-students of the same age. More broadly, these findings yield insights into subnational variation in mass mobilization in a repressive political regime.

Many countries have constitutional rules, granted to prime ministers, presidents or cabinets, that govern early parliamentary dissolution. Although there are sharply divergent theoretical expectations about the consequences of such powers for both democratic representation and accountability, there have been no empirical examinations of these arguments. Using data from the European Social Survey (2002–16) in 26 European countries, we test whether such provisions for early election calling affect citizens' satisfaction with democracy, and if so, which rules and how. While it appears that no form of constitutional rules for early election is directly related to citizen satisfaction with democracy, when early elections are called by prime ministers or presidents, democratic satisfaction drops significantly, and this effect is more pronounced the later in the term the early election is called. These findings have important implications for academic and policy debates about the desirability of constitutional change designed to limit early election calling for opportunistic purposes.

Dictatorships that use plebiscites – that is, referendums initiated by the executive – have a longer expected lifespan. A successful plebiscite sends a signal that makes coordination for collective action more difficult and induces the falsification of preferences. It also enhances the status of the dictator within the regime and against potential rivals through the use of agenda power. As a result, plebiscites are followed by decreased mobilization and a reduced risk of palace coups. This, in turn, adds years to the dictator's tenure. We have found evidence to support these propositions by utilizing data from various databases of autocratic regimes that span from 1946 to 2008.