There Has Been Much Concern In The Past Few Years About the ‘decline of parliament’ in West European democracies. In the United Kingdom, criticism of the New Labour government has included its apparent neglect of Parliament demonstrated by the style and strategies of the government, ranging from reduction in the time allotted to prime minister's question-time and the utilization of the mass media rather than Parliament as the forum for important policy statements, to the government's refusal to accept reforms to the method of appointments to House of Commons select committees, as recommended by the House of Commons Liaison Committee. Strong party discipline, coupled with sanctions which can affect the political careers of MPs for failure to obey the edicts of the party leadership, have limited the autonomy of MPs in Britain, and, to a varying degree, in other West European countries also. Certainly the German Bundestag has been criticized for being too much under the control of the leaderships of the political parties, in terms of voting on legislation, the stage-management of debates and the choice of leaders of the parliamentary parties (the removal by Chancellor Schröder of Scharping as leader of the SPD parliamentary party in 1998 at the instigation of Lafontaine, the then party chairman, is a notorious instance).

ONE HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT ASPECT OF THE PROCESS OF INTEGRATION in the European Community is the transfer of social sectors from the national political systems to the Community system. One such sector is agriculture. This article will focus on a limited, but significant part of the activities performed by the Community institutions: the collective decision-making process with reference to the common agricultural policy.

THE DENIAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOCIALIST STATES CAN BE seen as the natural outcome of Marxist praxis: Marxist teaching about the nature of the class struggle and the conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat from bourgeois values is not only theoretically alien to the concept of universal human rights, but its implementation by Marxist revolutionaries in the circumstances expected to prevail is likely to require the denial of such rights to ever-widening sections of the society if political power is to be secured and retained.

TO THE AVERAGE EUROPEAN CONCERNED WITH, OR SIMPLY curious about, international politics and the Third World predicament, Latin America is a glaring compound of violent Machtpolitik, rampant demography and collective soul-searching. Uneasily torn between Western loyalties and the dismal realities of underdevelopment, the huge continent from Rio Bravo to Patagonia keeps featuring as the unhappy part of America – indeed, of the whole West (for Latin America, unlike Africa, is not just a lost possession of the West – rather, it is a Western projection, for all the obvious significance of its non-Western ethnic and cultural components).

IN A RECENT TALK GIVEN BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF Commerce in Paris Monsieur Michel Debré identified three forms of political oppositions : programmatic opposition typical of the ‘Anglo-Saxon countries’ opposition to the regime, prevalent in the Third and Fourth French Republics and revolutionary opposition, directed against the social and economic order. Unless the French Communist Party, he noted, accepts the republican regime based on peaceful alternations of the government and unless, he added for good measure, it ceases to be influenced by an outside power, it cannot become an ‘opposition’. The only opposition that is acceptable, he concluded – and nobody who knows Mr Debré's political career under the Fourth Republic can miss the irony – is the one that recognizes the legitimacy of the institutions and acts for the purpose of replacing the government.

THE DESTINY OF THE SO-CALLED SOCIALIST SOCIETIES OF EASTERN Europe is one of the great questions of our time. The communist counter-reformation may plunge Eastern Europe into the same kind of somnolent torpor which the original Counter-reformation imposed on Southern Europe, and from which it has not yet really recovered. The abortive Prague Spring will remain a good source of evidence for what countervailing forces are available, which could possibly save Eastern Europe from such a fate. It was a revolution of intellectuals, a fact which may perhaps have always augured ill for its final outcome, though it was a hopeful sign for the quality of its literary and scholarly accompaniment.

During Its First Two Years Or So In Office The Blair Government gave great prominence to its programme of constitutional reform. But more recently its priorities appeared to shift back to more familiar issues. As the election approached social and economic policies were brought to the top of the political agenda, and for the most part opposition parties too have been content to follow suit. All this ref lects the familiar belief that both politicians and most of the electorate in Britain are more interested in ‘bread-and-butter’ issues and the aspirations fuelling them than in constitutional arguments and abstractions. Nor is this view at all surprising. The British constitution is an elusive and ambiguous matter and its history has been one of continuous, often imperceptible, institutional adaptation rather than one marked by periodic formal amendment and revision. As a result the constitution as a whole has usually been taken for granted. It has been assumed to be sound in essentials, though no doubt capable of improvement here and there in response to serious political or social pressures.

IN TOLSTOY'S STORY OF THE THREE HERMITS, A BISHOP (TRAvelling by ship) passes by chance the island on which they live and asks to be set ashore. He discovers that they know only the simple prayer: ‘Three in One, One in Three, Praise be His Name’. ‘It is not sufficient,’ he says, and teaches them the catechism. After some difficulty, they memorize the words, whereupon he returns to his ship. Later, in the moonlight, he sees the three old men running towards him across the waves. ‘My lord, my lord, we have forgotten’. ‘Go back,’ says the bishop, ‘go back: faith that enables you to walk on the water does not need any catechism’. Mr P. W. Botha has his tricameral constitution, three in one, one in three, but can he truly walk upon the water?

Research during the past six decades has found that parties joining coalition governments receive payoffs, in the form of government posts, in proportion to their coalition share. These findings, however, do not indicate which coalition partners receive payoffs that will most enable them to influence their preferred policies. This article joins recent qualitative analyses of coalition allocation and examines payoffs in terms of the salience of positions relative to the policy goals of the parties receiving them. The single-country study of eight Israeli governments from 1992 to 2015 integrates quantitative and qualitative analyses of coalition payoffs. This article contributes to coalition allocation research by expanding the scope of coalition payoffs to include junior ministers and committee chairs, and by distinguishing payoff outcomes for different party families. The results show an edge for formateur parties in obtaining policy-salient ministerial payoffs and an advantage to non-formateurs for policy-salient deputy (junior) minister positions.

In this article we examine the phenomenon of the use of sovereignist claims, not only by nationalist or populist leaders but also by actors who would not normally fall into these categories. We zoom in on two different cases: France and Italy. Through an analysis of Twitter we examine the discourse of the political leadership in election campaigns. We document some interesting commonalities, as well as some differences, concerning the emphasis on sovereignist claims. We produce an account of the patterns of use of sovereignist issues, we identify which parties/leaders have been the main promoters of sovereignist claims and how their competitors have responded to this challenge. Finally, we analyse the main drivers of sovereignist party discourses. Through regression analysis we show how, both in France and in Italy, the sovereignist supply has been influenced by ideology and citizens' demands.

During their early political socialization young people start to recognize their agency as political actors and to develop their political identity. This article presents the findings of a comparative study across different types of youth activism in two cities, Athens and Cologne, which differ in their youth cultures of participation and the opportunities they provide to mobilize. Our data derive from in-depth qualitative interviewing, which is considered to be most fruitful for the exploration of the reasons behind activists' trajectories. We identified three groups of influences: micro-, meso- and macro-level influences, with micro-level influences being most visible in the path of social movement-related activism, meso-level influences being dominant in the path of partisan activism, and macro-level influences prevailing in grassroots activism. Finally, the implications of the differential impact of the studied socio-spatial contexts are critically discussed.

The article explores how macro-level political factors in conjunction with micro- and meso-level factors affect interest-group access to policymakers. The analysis is conducted based on two original data sets: a population ecology database of Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian national-level energy policy, healthcare and higher education organizations, and an online survey of these populations. Combining the two data sets allows us to investigate both polity-, population- and organizational-level factors. As the sampled countries have recently experienced democratic backsliding, we also test the effect of closing deliberative structures. The analysis reveals that the political process influences access: legislative fractionalization affects access positively, while the closure of deliberative structures has a negative effect. Nevertheless, the political contextual factors are mediated through variables at both the population (e.g. the size of latent constituency) and organizational (e.g. expertise provision) levels, as well as the meso-level of interorganizational cooperation.

This article assesses Bulpitt's treatment of the centre or central state. It begins by reviewing Bulpitt's argument that the UK centre elite developed a detached style of territorial management and recognized the limits to the state's power. The argument is that the elite at the centre sought to avoid the costs of intervention in the periphery so it could retain its autonomy over decisions affecting the economy and international affairs. The article then assesses Bulpitt's claims against extant evidence from the study of UK politics. It concludes that, in spite of Bulpitt's failure to appreciate the interest of the centre in the detail of local administration, the account holds up surprisingly well and could be adopted as a comparative framework for analysing how central elites seek to keep their grip on power by managing territorial politics successfully.

At various times the Roman Republic faced outbreaks of domestic political violence, including riots and intimidation, assassinations and conspiracies to overthrow the government. Violence was particularly noticeable in the Early Republic and the Late Republic. These activities were quite similar to the terrorism and violence used by mobs and groups during the French Revolution and the tactics of fascists and leftists in Europe in the 1920s or 1930s. More accurately, the actions of mobs and others during the French Revolution and leftists and fascists in Europe were very similar to the techniques used in the Roman political system in the last five centuries BCE.

Our aim in this article is to show the stance on solidarity present in a hybrid regime. Taking Hungary as an example, we give individual-level explanations for attitudes towards solidarity and inclusion/exclusion in times when populist parties are in power. By creating typical solidarity groups, we explain who belongs to different solidarity clusters and why, what political orientations can be linked to solidarity groups and whether people's attitudes reflect the values/solidarity conceptions propagated by the Orbán government. With this, we point to the social and political polarization of Hungarian society. We found that the appreciated, satisfied and politically trustful far-right exclusive groups – independent of their social status – make up not only the majority of society but also the crucial system-justifying basis of the Orbán regime. However, in an ethnically rather homogeneous society foreigners could be seen as cultural and economic threats to the decisive majority, including a significant part of the inclusive groups.

Political party think tanks (PPTTs) are important to the performance of parties' core functions. Despite their importance, they have largely escaped academic attention. To understand the role of PPTTs in contemporary politics, we develop a typology of their key functions (distinguishing between political party and think tank functions), and target audiences (distinguishing between internal and external target groups). Based on a comprehensive literature review and 22 in-depth interviews with leading representatives of PPTTs in the Netherlands and Flanders, we identify four types of PPTTs: Party Assistants, Party Supporters, Party Promoters and Party Intellectuals. The characteristics of the four types of PPTTs are illustrated through the analysis of four paradigmatic cases: the Study Centre Open Vld as an example of a Party Assistant, the Scientific Bureau GroenLinks as an example of a Party Supporter, the Renaissance Institute as an example of a Party Promoter, and the TeldersFoundation as an example of a Party Intellectual.

THE SHOCK INDUCED IN SWEDEN BY OLOF PALME'S assassination was not translated into any dramatic political consequences. In the absence of any identifiable culprit or motive Swedes could do little more than speculate inconclusively whether responsibility might lie in a vendetta against Palme pursued by some foreign agency or, less likely but more insidious, in some unsuspected pathology within their own society. The assassination served no obvious political purpose. It could only be registered, therefore, as signifying that Sweden, no less than countries with a tradition of political violence, was subject to the ‘sleep of reason’. In a mood of sad resignation the country sought to resume normal politics.

I ONCE PERSUADED MYSELF THAT I COULD DISTINGUISH AT least seven different meanings of the term ‘individualism’ but I shall mention here only two. The fust is individualism in contradistinction to spiritual and emotional identification with a group. The second is individualism in contradistinction to dependence on some individual other, or others, who are in some sense deemed superior. One of my themes today is the interaction between the two: between self-assertion vis-à-vis the group, and self-assertion vis-à-vis established authority, and what this tells us about the way industrial concerns can be or ought to be organized in modern societies.

THAT THERE IS ROOM FOR DOUBT TODAY ABOUT WHAT LIES ahead for the Communities nobody will deny. The Community has been in trouble for at least five years, and despite the succession of summits the trouble has not been fully disposed of. The enlargement negotiations are the demonstration - or one more demonstration - of the difficulty the Community is having in coming to terms with itself. And, worse, a further process of what I might call ‘institutional drift’ is making its operation yet more intergovernmental.

I should like first to review the position as it now stands and how it is likely to develop in the short term. I will then go on to try to establish what can be done to rectify, or even reverse, the present trends. For unless they do change in the months ahead the prospects for progress in the longer term will be in jeopardy.