IN HER SUBMISSION TO THE OPSAHL HEARINGS ON THE NORTHERN Ireland problem in 1993, the literary and cultural critic Edna Longley made a simple point about the ‘Anglo-Irish Agreement’. This term for what was a pact between the UK and Republic of Ireland governments is, she argued, a misnomer: ‘[It] obscures the contested area, and panders to the belief – in both London and Dublin – that the UK is coterminous with England.’ Longley later urged that the Northern Ireland problem should be viewed more widely, in its proper context as part of the ‘melting pot’ of cultures of the two islands, Britain and Ireland.

Prime ministers (PMs) significantly contribute to making parliamentary democracy work, but cabinet reshuffles can undermine the PM's ability to perform successfully. New ministers may have less policy expertise, intensify intra-cabinet struggles and hamper the control of government bureaucracy. This article explores the relationship between cabinet reshuffles and prime-ministerial performance in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Building on a data set covering 131 cabinets in 11 CEE countries between 1990 and 2018, we find that frequent cabinet reshuffles decrease prime-ministerial performance. In particular, the reshuffling of ministers belonging to other coalition parties than the PM's unfolds a strong negative effect on prime-ministerial performance, while reshuffles in core portfolios and turnover of ministers from the PM party have less negative consequences. These results have important implications for understanding executive politics and government stability in the dynamic environments of CEE democracies and beyond.

What is responsible for the decline of democratically dominant parties and the corresponding growth of competitive party systems? This article argues that, despite a ruling party's dominance, opposition forces can gain by winning important subnational offices and then creating a governance record that they can use to win new supporters. It focuses on South Africa as a paradigmatic dominant party system, tracing the increased competitiveness of elections in Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape province between 1999 and 2010. These events show how party strategies may evolve, reflecting how party elites can learn from forming coalitions.

This special collection is devoted to cabinet reshuffles, which are understood as personnel-related changes within the lifetime of a cabinet. Scholars agree that cabinet reshuffles matter in many respects. To begin, they may shape intra-governmental relations, by either intensifying or helping solve cabinet conflicts. Further, they are important instruments for party leaders to promote or demote party representatives, with far-reaching possible consequences for the party and beyond. Last but not least, reshuffles may be used to increase governmental efficiency and often trigger policy change. The ever-increasing personalization of politics has fuelled the public interest in any ministerial personnel-related issues, and turned cabinet reshuffles into events of undisputed political and scholarly relevance. Despite the apparent importance and ubiquity of reshuffles, the international literature displays at least two major flaws: first, a lack of systematic comparison across countries and regimes and second, a strong notional and empirical bias towards Westminster democracies. This collection seeks to overcome these weaknesses and their limiting effects on the knowledge and understanding of key aspects of executive politics and executive–legislative relations. With that aim, it gathers novel comparative research on the different types, causes and effects of cabinet reshuffles in a variety of democratic and authoritarian systems. The theoretical approaches and empirical findings of the six articles featured mark a major contribution to the scholarship on political executives and executive elites in the contemporary world. This introductory piece offers a succinct historical overview of cabinet reshuffles in different contexts, and the study thereof.

Globalization – Simply The Growing Intensity, Extent And deepening impact of worldwide interconnectedness – poses anew the classic questions of political life, namely: who rules, by what means, in whose interests and to what purpose? This is not to suggest, as some do, that the forces of globalization are eclipsing sovereign states but it is to acknowledge that the necessary conditions for sovereign and democratic self-government are undergoing a significant transformation. This is especially evident in Europe where, at the great intersection of regionalism and globalism, a novel continental political order is crystallizing: not quite federalism in its orthodox form but clearly something more than classic intergovermentalism. Caught between two worlds – a Europe of nation-states and a Europe of Citizens to use Joschka Fischer's construction – the future political trajectory of the continent, in part, will depend upon how effectively regionalism mediates the dynamics of globalism and localism.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MAJOR ‘KABYLE QUESTION’ IN Contemporary Algerian politics was made manifest in the spectacular events of the spring of 1980. In an earlier article I suggested that the reason why most observers did not anticipate this development was because of their failure, on the one hand, to appreciate the specificity of the Kabyle case – the extent to which it departs from the sociologists' stereotype of Berber societies – and, on the other hand, to recognize the leading role played by the Kabyles in the national revolution and, in consequence, the significance of their subsequent eviction from commanding positions in the Algerian political elite. The practical substance of the Kabyle question itself was referred to only in passing and remains to be dealt with. Why is Kabyle particularism, which in itself is nothing new, now taking the form of ‘Berberism’, that is, not only opposition to the Arabization policy of the Algerian government but also the demand for official recognition of the Berber language? Why, moreover, has ‘Berberism’ become a popular force in Kabylia, capable of mobilizing, on occasion, support throughout Kabylia and from all classes of the population, when it was previously confined to an unrepresentative coterie of intellectuals and remains so confined in respect of the other Berberophone populations of Algeria and Morocco? The answer to these questions lies in the singular economic history of the Kabyle population.

THE RESULT OF THE FEDERAL ELECTION OF NOVEMBER I972 APPEARED to many as a turning point in the post-war history of the German Social Democratic Party. For the first time in the history of the Federal Republic, the SPD. was the largest party winning 45.9 per cent of the list votes (230 seats in the Bundestag) to the CDU/CSU's 44.8 per cent (225 seats). In 1957 the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union had enjoyed a lead of 18.4 per cent over the SPD. This lead was steadily whittled away after the party adopted the moderate Bad Godesberg Programme in 1959. The SPD gained 4.4 per cent in 1961,3. 1 per cent in 1965, 3.4 per cent in 1969 and 3.2 per cent in 1972

This article examines the effects of electoral systems on issue ownership. This study argues that electoral rules significantly affect issue ownership because they prompt candidates to adopt different types of electoral campaigns. Compared to the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system, the mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system prods candidates to change the pattern of electoral campaigns from candidate-centred to issue-centred competition. In particular, partisan issue effects are more effective in gaining votes under the MMM. To support the argument, I find evidence from content analyses of party manifestos and multinomial logistic regression models of electoral surveys between the pre-reform and post-reform elections in Japan.

The article is divided into three parts. In the first part I review and compare the two leading sociological theories on intellectuals, those of Z. Bauman and A. Gramsci whose concepts are later critically examined to form the basis of my argument. The second part of the article draws on Gramsci's typology of organic and traditional intelligentsia and Bauman's distinction between interpreters and legislators in order to identify and assess the profile of the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav intelligentsia. Here I argue that Yugoslavia lacked the category of traditional intellectuals (be they legislators or interpreters) and that the dominant type of Yugoslav intellectual was an ‘organic’ legislator. As a result, the post-Yugoslav states are also characterized by the lack of a traditional intelligentsia and thus in the early post-communist period only the former organic legislators have become ‘organicistic’ interpreters. The final part of the paper summarizes the findings and looks at their implications relating to Bauman's and Gramsci's concepts.

It was one of the defining features of the soviet system that it allowed no legal challenge to party dominance. Elections took place at regular intervals; but from an early stage they were based upon a single slate of candidates, the ‘bloc of Communists and nonparty people’. Voting was not compulsory, but it was difficult to avoid – canvassers went from house to house, ballot boxes were set up in hospitals, long-distance trains and polar observatories, and constituency officials competed with each other for the highest turnout. In theory it was possible to vote against, but this meant using the screened-off booth in the polling station, since a vote in favour, with a single candidate system, could be cast without marking the ballot paper or even looking at it. Some called these ‘Elections Paradise-style: as God said to Adam, “Here is Eve, the woman of your choice”’. Bertolt Brecht, commenting on the leaf lets that had been distributed in East Berlin after the rising of 1953 which announced that the people had forfeited the government's confidence and could ‘only win it back by redoubled labour’, put it more directly. ‘Wouldn't it be simpler,’ he asked, ‘if the government dissolved the people and elected another?’

For South Africa 1994 was an Annus Mirabilis. Despite pre-election predictions of violent disruption, the country's first democratic general election took place in an atmosphere of reconciliation and hope for a future in which past injustice would be rectified and the ‘new South Africa’ welcomed back into the international community. For a brief moment — and, of course, it might not last as the inevitable constraints imposed by scarce resources, rising expectations and external pressures complicate decision making — South Africa appeared to have taken a major step towards Nelson Mandela's goal of a ‘nation united in diversity’. Certainly, one striking feature of the four-year transition was the willingness of the elites engaged in the negotiating process to accommodate each other as they sought to reach agreement on a new constitution in a spirit of ‘consensus and compromise’. And the same spirit is meant to inspire the day-to-day working of the Government of National Unity and Reconstruction (GNU) which, in effect, is a grand coalition of all the major talents.

THERE ARE TWO MAIN CONCEPTIONS OF ‘REPRESENTATION’ IN democratic theory, and they are not wholly compatible. All democratic electoral systems implicitly appeal to one or the other conception of representation. Therefore, the nature of an ideal electoral system is an essentially contested question. Furthermore, the mathematics of social choice sets severe limits on what an electoral system — any electoral system — can achieve. Though the implications of social choice are not so nihilistic as some would have us believe, they are relevant and serious.

THE SOVIET UNION'S ONCE DOCILE WORKING CLASS IS PASSIVE no longer. Strikes — once said to be an impossibility under socialism — are now commonplace. Unofficial workers' clubs, workers' fronts, and embryonic free trade unions are springing up all over the country. These show a marked polarization: some are oriented toward reform; others are openly conservative; many are ethnically biased. It will be argued in this article that this new worker activism could prove damaging to the progress of economic reform, but that further radical changes in the political framework could reduce this risk.

FOR A POLITICAL SCIENTIST THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS represented a unique historical period. There were opportunities for research in new fields requiring new techniques. Indeed, the sense of newness combined subject, technique and moral direction in a singular synthesis. Words like nationalism, growth, independence, freedom, not to speak of the staged figures who personified them, Ghandi and Nehru, Nkrumah and Zik, Touré and Keita, Sukarno and particularly Mao and Castro, gave a peopled tension to what constituted not only new frontiers of independence but also moral events as new nations and new political forms made their appearance.

This special issue presents scholarly research which, in distinctive ways, explores the intersection of political theory, comparative politics, international relations and the study of forced migration. The outcome of an international workshop hosted by the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford in May 2007, this volume features individual research trajectories focused on a range of important issues, including asylum and deportation, migration control and regional cooperation, internal displacement and sovereignty, in productive encounters with theory and method. Read together, the scholarly articles collected here also span the traditional divide between ‘North’ and ‘South’, including case studies from Australia, Canada, and Europe, as well as from South Africa, Guatemala, and Malaysia.

Some scholars warn about democratic disaffection of young people potentially leading to processes of ‘democratic deconsolidation’. Conversely, others interpret young people's preference for non-conventional forms of participation as a manifestation of democratic renewal. We surveyed respondents from nine European countries and analysed differences in attitudes of opposition to democracy across age groups and how these preferences shape political mobilization. Our findings show that the youngest adult group is no less supportive of liberal democracy than older age groups. Second, although attitudes of opposition towards democracy decrease political mobilization, this association is independent of age. Thus, young people's critical views of democracy rarely translate into apathy for democracy. Finally, our results provide insights into intra-generational democratic attitude differences by showing how young people's individual attributes are likely to crystallize into different value configurations and patterns of democratic engagement over time but within specific contexts.