TRIADS ARE IN FASHION. IN POLITICS AND MARKETS, Charles Lindblom distinguishes between three kinds of social relationships — the exchange relations characteristic of markets; the authority relations characteristic of states; and what he calls ‘preceptoral’ relations, the relations of teachers to pupils, of advertisers to consumers, of indoctrinators to the indoctrinated. In the epilogue to The Liberal Theory of Justice, Brian Barry proposes a different, but in some respects complementary, triad. There are, he suggests, three ‘models’ of social collaboration.

THE POLITICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL MAP OF EUROPE CHANGED dramatically during 1989 and 1990. Recent developments have totally demolished the old rules and beliefs that have guided relations between nations. Although some scholars have even argued about the final victory of liberalism, contemporary international relations are nevertheless far from unproblematic. The internal development of former European socialist societies is not yet complete and the North-South conflict seems to be intensifying. Relations between small and big nations still often threaten stability in the contemporary world.

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.

ANARCHISM AS A DOCTRINE HAS A PECULIAR FASCINATION FOR scholars. It both repels and attracts. It attracts because it embodies rage – the particular rage people have when they see man as an obstacle to his own humaneness. It is the ultimate statement of how outrageous the human condition can be. But it is precisely because man does not live by rage alone, but must master it by discovering proximate means to solving the ordinary problems of daily life, that anarchism repels. It seem a romantic luxury at best – a cry of pain for the future, just as nostalgia is for the past and, like nostalgia, this cannot fail to be attractive.

Perhaps because of this anarchism is not a mere reflection of anger but also a contributing source. It is thus more than a lightning rod for the anger that exists. Anarchism is associated with unreason and bombs, violence and irresponsibility.

WHEN THE NEW GOVERNMENTS OF UNDERDEVELOPED AREAS supplanted colonial rule, many were optimistic that these governments could operate within a democratic framework. But these nascent governments drifted into authoritarian forms of political life as they faced the exigencies of self-rule. Representative institutions on the Western pattern broke down and were replaced by single-party arrangements headed by charismatic leaders. This form of government, in turn, has tended to give way to bureaucratic and military regimes.

Spanish America Has Moved From The Status of Debt crisis region to that of emerging market in the past few years, and has done so without great political upheaval. So can economic liberalism and democratic institutions work together in the region? Neither phenomenon is really new in Spanish America. However they have often been regarded as potentially antagonistic or even mutual exclusive. Indeed there have been times when the two concepts seemed to be competitors rather than allies. If they are now (mostly) allies, this is not primarily because old-fashioned modernization theory has been proved right all along, but because of changes in both the internationalenvironment (political as well as economic) and in the character of democratic politics in much of Spanish America.

The elections which were held on 23 May 1965 will doubtless prove to be a watershed in Belgian politics, as were those of 14 October 1894, in which universal suffrage, tempered by the use of the plural vote, was first put into practice, and those of 16 November 1919 in which universal suffrage, with the exception of most women, was first fully introduced.

The new states of Asia and Africa present a variegated picture with respect to the status and mode of action of their opposition parties. In only about a third of the new states are opposition parties regarded as constitutionally legitimate. Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, India, Ceylon, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Nigeria, Malaysia, Philippines, Sudan, and a few others allow opposition to exist in a public and institutional form.

In any democratic system, the question of whether governments pay attention to citizens’ needs and requests represents a crucial component of democratic quality. But what conditions favour this fundamental democratic process? This article compares policy priorities identified by public opinion with the actual legislative production in Italy, Spain and the UK from 2003 to 2012. The article’s methodology is a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) in which causal conditions are represented by politico-institutional and contextual factors, while the outcome consists of the degree of overlap between public opinion priorities and legislation. Empirical analysis shows that there are four paths leading to a correspondence in priorities: first, it is linked to the combination of high government decision-making capacity and declining citizens’ trust in government; second, it is also linked to the combination of rising citizens’ trust and low government decision-making capacity. Third and fourth, priorities also correspond where there is a simultaneous absence of both trust and elections, and in the absence of both decision-making capacity and elections, respectively.

Leaders have an important role in initiating and shaping the democratization process. Formal and informal structures within the political system constrain possible options requiring leaders to exercise agency to manage expectations and facilitate change. This article examines the actions of F.W. de Klerk (South Africa) and Roh Tae Woo (South Korea) in initiating processes that eventually led to the consolidation of democratic political systems. The aims of the article are: (1) to identify the array of opportunities and threats faced by the two leaders; and (2) to determine the effect of regime form in shaping these structural factors. Drawing on previous work on the role of leadership in democratization, the analysis focuses on four factors: authority, institutions, opposition and continuity. To assess decisions made in the distinct political contexts the article examines how the respective structural configuration (one-party and military) was managed.

Sovereignism is at the crux of the current wave of radical right-wing populism (RRP). While sovereignism may concern different dimensions, claims by RRP parties and leaders about regaining sovereignty are increasingly associated with socioeconomic issues such as welfare, redistribution and international trade. Adopting a demand-side perspective, this article draws from an original cross-national survey to investigate the intersection between economic sovereignism, economic populism and globalization attitudes, and how such attitudes may shape RRP voting in Western Europe and the United States. Our results confirm that economic populism and sovereignism form coherent sets of attitudes together with perceptions of globalization, and that such attitudes have a significant effect on support for RRP actors. We find different patterns of association, however, across our European cases and the United States, which suggests that the relationship between populism, sovereignism and economic globalization is partly dependent upon national context and historical legacies.

What Does A Government New To Office Do When The Idealistic principles that guided its members in opposition face the hard realities of power? Recent German experience in the realm of foreign policy provides an instructive case study – not least because Germany's history in the first half of the twentieth century has created tremendous sensitivities in this sphere. Following a history of opposition to German military participation in actions beyond the NATO area, the parties of Germany's political left were immediately confronted with the need to make decisions on foreign and security policy when they were elected to govern in 1998. Pacifist principles or aspirations proved unsustainable in practice, and a policy consistent with that pursued by the outgoing conservative-liberal coalition was adopted. The new government developed a pragmatic foreign policy, incorporating the use of military means, notwithstanding the existence of a domestic political culture suspicious of the employment of military force.

There are good prima facie reasons to believe that directly electing a prime minister may provide the holder of that office with a tremendous power resource. Indeed some countries with weak prime ministers have debated this possible change, and one, Israel, carried it through. Using a theoretical argument based on the number of veto points in a political system, this article proposes that a directly elected prime minister will not increase the power of a prime minister. It studies what actually happened in Israel, and offers alternative explanations for the weakness of and lack of cohesion in its executive. Similarly, other factors are identified as causes of prime ministerial weakness in Italy and Japan.

Dominant party systems are defined by a lack of party alternation at the national level; however, dominant party systems do not inherently preclude electoral competition at the macro level, the micro level, or both. Nonetheless, little systematic work has documented the competitiveness of elections under a dominant party system. This article describes the nature of competition under one of sub-Saharan Africa's most enduring dominant party systems, Botswana. By examining electoral outcomes at the constituency level, this article demonstrates that elections in Botswana produce significant levels of competition, especially when compared to other sub-Saharan countries. Furthermore, electoral competitiveness appears unrelated to the party system at large: namely, competitiveness is no less or greater under dominant party systems than under multiparty systems.

Social Democratic Parties Across Europe Face adjustment problems. Given the electoral decline of almost every social democratic party, it is tempting for social scientists to pronounce such political parties as either in decay or even a thing of the past. There is little doubt that social democratic parties are searching for new concepts, ideas and policies. At the heart of the attempt to regain the political initiative is the debate over how to react not only to the challenges from the new social movements but also to the re-invigorated attack by liberals and conservatives on central social democratic policies: the welfare state and socioeconomicequality.

WRITERS ON CORPORATISM AGREE ABOUT LITTLE BUT ARE nevertheless strikingly united in one belief, that America has failed to develop strong corporatist institutions. The two most important collections published in recent years, for instance, both contain papers explaining this supposed American uniqueness. Yet the notion that corporatism is conspicious by its absence is odd. It is indeed true that the United States has failed to develop one particularly ambitious form of corporatism — the organization of capital and labour into central institutions designed to achieve agreed national aims. The essence of corporatism consists, however, of something less than this grand social scheme. It resides in what Offe calls ‘the attribution of public status to interest groups’. Endowing private bodies with public duties and public powers involves crossing a constitutional Rubicon. Behind fie the landscapes of liberal polities, with their open political struggle and comparatively clear separation of government from civil society. Beyond the Rubicon lie the features in Schmitter's famous description of corporatism — compulsion, hierarchy, monopoly. But these are contingent, not necessary, features. The quintessence of corporatism consists in the effort to endow private interests with sovereign authority. In so doing it challenges the great aim of a liberal polity — the separation of economic from political power — imposing in its place the ‘devolution of public policy making and enforcement on organised private interest’.

COSTA RICA SHAKES TWO HUNDRED MILES OF underpopulated border with Nicaragua. It has only the most limited capacity to regulate the flow of either weapons into, or refugees out of, the adjacent territory. The absence of a professional army is noteworthy (although it should not be overstated — there are some well armed, but unprofessionally led, defence forces, and the police are quite militarized). What requires emphasis is less the scarcity of soldiers than the abundance of lawyers, and the power of their profession. Last year, for example, tension built up between Managua and San José, because it was revealed that an airstrip in northern Costa Rica had been used to resupply the 'contras' in violation of Costa Rica's proclaimed policy of neutrality. The Sandinistas interpreted this as yet another proof of Costa Rican duplicity and of San José's subordination to the will of the paymasters in Washington. Nicaraguans (of all ideological persuasions) find it almost impossible to accept the Costa Rican version of this episode, which points out that the government has no power to interfere with the use of private property unless a prima facie case exists of illegal activity.