This article examines how party competition has led to electoral reforms in Taiwan. Dissatisfied with the existing system, political parties in Taiwan promoted electoral reforms. The Democratic Progressive Party led the reform process and the Kuomintang collaborated with it to change the electoral system from a single non-transferable vote and multi-member district system to a first-past-the-post mixed system. Despite opposition to the changes, these two parties successfully formed a coalition and passed reform bills with the support of the public. Using a theoretical framework of actors’ rational choices, this article argues that the parties’ goals of maximizing the number of seats and strategic interaction led to electoral reforms, and that during the reforms, the provision that the first-past-the-post system would provide more seats in the Legislative Yuan was crucial for the two parties. The article supports this argument with evidence from interviews, biographies and documents.

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.

Extant research in comparative politics has examined the role of institutional frameworks such as constitutional design, the nature of the electoral systems, parliamentarism and federalism on the quality of governance. Understanding variations on effective democratic governance has assumed a state-centric approach that has largely neglected how strong legislatures can drastically affect political outcomes. This study finds empirical evidence that the strength of national legislatures (in terms of its influence over the executive, institutional autonomy, its specified powers and institutional capacity) is correlated to effective democratic governance as measured by voice and accountability, governmental effectiveness, regulatory quality, control of corruption and rule of law entrenchment based on a cross-national analysis of 150 countries with available data from the period 1996–2016. The results hold even when the sample is restricted to developing countries, where party systems are more likely to be under-institutionalized. A sensitivity analysis also confirms that the relationship between strong legislatures and effective democratic governance is not attenuated or conditioned by its interactive effect with other institutional arrangements. Implications suggest that the substantive strength of national legislatures promotes higher levels of democratic accountability, and that the international community must focus on frameworks that strengthen global legislatures to avert political instability and creeping authoritarianism.

Radical right parties are commonly associated with nativism and opposition to ethnic diversity, but there have been few systematic attempts to investigate this connection further. Noting that radical right parties in Europe do not express hostility towards all minorities or all immigrants, I investigate possible explanations for the difference in targeted hostility. I introduce the concept of targeted nativism, distinguishing between ethnic minorities that are excluded using the nativist cleavage, and those that are implicitly included in ‘the nation’. I propose three explanations for the targeted nativism, identifying minority outgroups based on: (1) ethnocultural differences, (2) minority political empowerment, or (3) ethnocultural minority accommodation. I examine these explanations using the examples of radical right parties in Sweden and Bulgaria, and further test these hypotheses with a new dataset that identifies targeted minorities. My findings indicate that more distinctive minorities are significantly more likely to be targeted by the radical right.

THE IDEA OF THE WELFARE STATE IS CURRENTLY TREATED with more scepticism across the political spectrum than at any time during its development. Insofar as the institutions of the welfare state were consolidated during the period of Butskellite consensus which lasted until the late 1960s, in the more polarized political climate of today it is now seen on both the Right and the Left to embody many of the failures implicit in that consensus. It was assumed, so it was argued, that the fiscal dividends of growth could be used to increase welfare in a relatively painless way by maintaining the absolute position of the better off and using the dividends of growth via public expenditure on health, education and welfare to improve the relative standing of the worst-off members of society. In this way it was thought that the social and economic rights of citizenship could be extended within a market economy without putting excessive strain on that economy.

NINE YEARS AGO GEORGE WOOD SURVEYED THE ‘GHOST OF THE historical anarchist movement’ and concluded that there was ‘no reasonable likelihood of a renaissance’. History showed that ‘the movements which fail to take the chances it offers them are never born again’. Seven years later, when identifiably anarchist tendencies re-emerged in the youth movements in England and Holland, Woodcock wondered ‘whether I had been rash in so officiously burying the historic anarchist movement’. He decided. that he had not been rash because of the differences between the new anarchists and the old. The new anarchists represented no ‘knock in the coffin’ but ‘a new manifestation of the [anarchist] idea’.

Woodcock described the new anarchists as ‘militant pacifists’ who had ‘forgotten Spain and had no use for the old romanticism of the dinamitero and the petroleuse’. He pointed to the difference between the old days when one ‘joined’ an anarchist party and the current situation in which the young ‘became’ anarchists. Finally, Woodcock discerned no obvious signs of an anarchist revival in the United States.

IT IS NOT EASY TO EXPLAIN THE REASONS THAT LED TO THE appointment of Bettino Craxi as Prime Minister. First of all, there was certainly the political fatigue of the Christian Democratic Party which had held the premiership for 35 years. AIdo Moro, a great man and leader, had tried to mediate between the various currents within the party, as well as between the party and other allied parties (the Republicans, the Social Democrats, the Socialists). But what Moro really dreamt of was a possible alliance with the Communist Party to solve at least the most serious issues, such as terrorism and economic decline. He thought of repeating with the Communists the experience the DC had had in the early 1960s with the Socialists: widening the democratic area with the view of transforming the PCI into a social democratic trend. In order to obtain this he even considered letting the PCI take part in the majority at least if not in the government itself. His disappearance had serious repercussions, especially in the Christian Democratic Party where internal friction grew even stronger than in the past. This resulted in a great drop in the party's power and ability to manage the country politically even if, at least in part, it regained in the 1979 and 1983 elections the votes lost in the 1976 elections.

EDMUND BURKE, REVIEWING IN 1790 THE EVENTS OF 102-101 years previously, saw no objection to penning and printing the following remarkable words: ‘The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. Justa bella quibus necessaria’. He cannot have meant that the revolution was ‘obtained’, in the sense of ‘secured’, by the wars in Europe which followed from 1688 to 1697, for he speaks of ‘civil war’; nor is it likely that he intended his words to refer to the war in Ireland which ended with the Treaty of Limerick. Burke's Irish perspectives might indeed lead to his viewing this as a civil war rather than a war of conquest, but the context which surrounds the words quoted makes it clear that he is thinking of the ‘Revolution of 1688’ as an English political process and an English civil war. The ‘cashiering’ or dethroning of a king, he is instructing readers of Richard Price's sermon to the Revolution Society, is not a legal or a constitutional process, which can form one of the normal procedures of an established civil society.

A FEW YEARS AGO, GALL1 AND PRANDI WROTE THAT THE UNIFICATION of the socialists represented a phase of rationalization of the Italian political system. Not only did the re-unification of the PSI (Socialist Party of Italy) and the PSDI (Social Democratic Party of Italy) lead to a simplification of the party subsystem (by reducing its excessive numbers), thus rendering the choice between alternatives easier for the electorate. But at last a single voice seemed to emerge which could undertake the task of opposing the twenty years of Christian Democrat predominance, which had been responsible for so many aspects of political ‘immobilism’. Moreover it was possible to discern a strategic design in the socialist plans — an optimistic design perhaps, but entailing possible innovations. The formation of a strong Socialist Party might have led to the overcoming of one of the principal - if not the greatest - defects of the Italian party system: the absence of a mechanism of rewards and punishments.

THE 1986 ELECTIONS PRODUCED ONE OF THE MOST DRAMATIC results in recent French history, after one of the most unexciting campaigns. It is clear that the marked a break with the previous experience of the Fifth Repu Is lic.

What was the nature of this break? First, the campaign began in a context where defeat seemed inevitable for the President's majority in parliament. Secondly, there was a new electoral system which affected the campaign, the competition and the results. Thirdly, the results showed considerable changes in French voting behaviour. Fourthly, there were some important changes in the influence and nature of the parties themselves. Fifthly, and perhaps most importantly, despite the collapse of the two-block part system, a majority hostile to the President was elected to par l 'ament. The President responded by staying in office, and appointing the leader of the largest party in the new majority as prime minister. The other original feature of these elections was that they were held less than two years before a presidential election. Much of the changed behaviour of voters, parties and leaders reflected not only the circumstances of the elections of 1986 but also those foreseen in 1988.

IN THE PAST TWO CENTURIES WESTERN STATES HAVE ACQUIRED many functions that before were carried out by small social entities, such as families, neighbourhoods, parishes, guilds or local communes. As these activities became the business of state agencies, they changed beyond recognition. Apprenticeship and tutoring made way for formal education in a universal and compulsory school system. Charity and mutual aid wellnigh disappeared as social security and public welfare emerged. Folk medicine, magic and home healing waned, while treatment of the sick became the monopoly of the medical profession, protected, regulated and, for the greater part, paid by public agencies.

MANY INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, FOUNDED DURING OR JUST AFTER the Second World War, are passing their fiftieth anniversaries, which have become the occasions for reviewing their past performance and looking into the future. This has already happened for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, launched at Bretton Woods in 1944; and for the United Nations (UN), inaugurated in 1945. The fiftieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan, the origin (at one remove) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), falls in the summer of 1997. The anniversary of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is not till 1998. But the end of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have already prompted some backward looks.

The transition to democracy in bangladesh after the overthrow of the authoritarian regime in 1990 began with the formation of a non-political caretaker administration (NCA) to prepare the ground for the transfer of power to a popularly mandated government. Its other important purpose was to manage the affairs of the state during the interlude that separated the dissolution of the authoritarian regime (December 1990) and the complete installation of the democratically-elected government (September 1991) to rule the country in its own right.

The need for this NCA was imperative in the wake of the dismantling of authoritarian rule. The attempts of the ousted regime to conduct a third election, while still in power, were not acceptable to its political adversaries, given the former's proven tendency to unduly inf luence the electoral process in the past.

LATE IN 1952 I ARRIVED IN LONDON FROM AUSTRALIA. I WAS to spend ten happy years in England, a period from which can be traced many of the influences which still matter to me. Nonetheless, the thirteen years before 1952 had provided a good deal of intellectual luggage which served me in various ways in England, and which still has relevance; so it is probably best to start with that earlier period in Australia, and explain how I got some of the ideas with which I came ashore at Tilbury.

THE WARY WRITER COVERS HIMSELF IN ADVANCE AS BEST HE CAN against the most obvious lines of criticism. Let me say, therefore, that this article is not intended to break, or even blunt, a lance in the methodology debate of comparative politics, nor is it put forward as a contribution in its own right to the science of comparative politics. The intention is much simpler. I want to argue that there are practical forms of comparison which the political scientist can use when in a less than scientific mood and that useful ends can be served by such practical activity. What is offered here, then, is a series of personal reflections and no more. To prevent the appearance of scholarly intent, scholarly reference to the literature has been avoided. A plausible argument to forestall the critic, but probably sensible, is that the case for an unsophisticated approach to comparative politics should be presented in an unsophisticated way. Put another way, it may be that to be practical one should sometimes be naive.

A PREDOMINANT THEME OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICAL liberal thought is the claim that piecemeal acts of intervention by government in a free economy and society will, if continued over an unspecified period of time, bring about the transformation of that society into a totalitarian regime in which all but the most trivial decisions affecting an individual are taken by the state. The crucial feature of the liberal's argument is that this process generates an outcome which was not intended by the originators of the acts of intervention: it is the method or mechanism of intervention itself which produces a state of affairs undesired by both non-statists and (at least moderate) collectivists alike. Thus, in addition to general economic and moral arguments that a classical liberal might raise against, say, a nationalized health service, he also maintains that an abridgement of the right to provide health care privately, which the collectivist does not value, must set in motion a process which culminates in the direction of medical personnel, and the prevention of the emigration of doctors by the state, to which, presumably, the moderate collectivist would himself object.

The Concept of ‘Critical Elections’ is Justifiably Used in Two eventualities: when there is a significant turning-point arising from a particular election, such as dramatic changes in party strengths which are subsequently consolidated and affect the structure of the party system (e.g. the replacement of one party by another as major opposition or government party); and, when in new democracies an election has a decisive effect in confirming or diverting from the democratization path. It may of course be that the latter incorporates the former.

Conditions In The Market For Votes Have Changed throughout Europe in recent years. Markets which for much of the post-war period were characterized chiefly by voter loyalty to governing parties and plausible challengers to them, have latterly been subject to significant elements of uncertainty and fragmentation. Not only have votes been switched with increasing rapidity, they have also been cast increasingly for parties which lie outside hitherto established frameworks of electoral politics. Perceived governing incompetence has dearly been a major factor in this transformation, but broader social change has also played a part. The consequence is that European electoral markets present increasingly open terrain for party political competition. Not for many years have possibilities for market entrance been as good.

The object of these notes is to assess how relevant are the main terms of reference of the discussion outlined in Professor Sartori's introductory paper to the group of one-party states known as People's Democracies or Socialist Republics, and in particular to Yugoslavia, Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and to a lesser degree, Albania. But many of the findings on these states, and I would say those most worthy of our attention, in order to be valid at all, must be valid for all one-party states. Valid for all one-party states is for instance the conclusion that the non-institutional and non-constitutional opposition which is being carried on naturally, inevitably and incessantly against any government in any polity, and by any sui generis means, should be described by other names. I believe that the terms control and contestation can be particularly useful to describe the political process of the People's Democracies, and can be equally applicable to the entire category of one-party states if they are understood in accordance with the definitions I suggest below.