Pasok's Eight Year-Old Socialist Administration, The first in Greek history, which followed its successive victories in 1981 and 1985, was due to undergo its third electoral test in mid-1989. In fact, the electoral campaign had started in the late summer of 1988 and was well under way at the beginning of the new year. Andreas Papandreou's charismatic leadership of PASOK, which in the past had been the principal explanation of his firm control of events, was already starting to fade, as he struggled to put a brave face on the resignations of respected ministers and party members in the wake of revelations of several scandals at the top of the pyramid. Foremost among these was the celebrated case of George Koskotas, the young owner of the Bank of Crete, who was in gaol in America after his escape from Greece, to avoid charges of embezzling more than £130 million in bank deposits. In mid-March, Time magazine's cover story showing Koskotas behind bars was entitled: ‘The Looting of Greece: a fallen tycoon charges Papandreou with stealing millions’. This caused the resignation of Agamemnon Koutsoyorgas, Papandreou's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice, when Koskotas claimed he had credited him with $2 million in a Swiss bank account. He also stated that Papandreou had authorized this payment and had himself been on the payroll.

THE TERM ‘INDUSTRIAL ADAPTATION’ HAS RECENTLY EMERGED as a rallying call in the vocabulary of economic policy-makers in national governments and international organizations. At the same time the political consequences of the adaptation process, such as the reorientation of whole areas of government activity towards industrial priorities, or the escalation of unemployment, have redefined the agenda of economic policy for students of politics. This article, based on a comparison of the systems of industrial adaptation that have operated successfully in West Germany over the post-war period and, far less successfully, in Britain, focuses on the subsidy issue in the two countries and points to the hypocrisy of official economic doctrines and programmes. Insofar as governments must concern themselves with economic activity, issues such as subsidy must be evaluated not in pejorative, polemical fashion but in terms of their goals and of policy frameworks within which they can be controlled.

WHILE GORBACHEV'S REFORMS HAVE HAD A BROAD IMPACT ON Soviet society, one key element in the communist system of rule has been particularly affected: the nomenklatura. The word refers to lists of positions for which party committees traditionally held responsibility in recruitment, and lists of persons deemed suitable to fill them. In general, appointments to such posts could not be made without the sanction of the relevant party committee. In some cases, it directly selected the appointee; in others it simply endorsed nominations made elsewhere. The crucial point, however, is that appointments could not be made without the party committee's permission, and that committee's Department of Organizational and Party Work supervised this procedure for staffing the various bureaucratic apparatuses. It has been the essential element in the staffing procedures, and the term covered party involvement in staffing non-party positions, both elective and appointive, the staffing by the party apparatus of positions at lower levels in its own apparatus, and the filling by non-party institutions (such as ministries) of lower-level appointments in their own structures.

THE TEST OF A THEORY IS IN ITS APPLICATION. THE DIFFICULTY IS that in political theory, application is rarely a sufficient test. This is especially true of the kind of theory in which I am interested. It is abstract, highly generalized, and for this reason, tends to be illustrated by means of applications which neither prove nor disprove. A lack of clear guides for disproof is one of the more serious deficiencies of highly general theory. If that is so, what is the point of doing it? One answer is that if such theory can lead in an a priori way to logically inferred predicaments which repeat themselves in many forms in the real world, this should allow us to anticipate events. This, in turn, allows us to compare these common predicaments in diverse settings to discover the necessary and separate it from the contingent. This can represent a big step forward if it results in new types of data and different forms of linkages between variables. The ‘tests’ then are more insightful generalizations rather than ‘validations’. If such generalizations can be made subject to quantitative proof, so much the better. In any case, the route to validation is bound to be indirect. Propositions locked into a logical structure of thought will remain for long cumbersome and wearisome. Despite this, as long as not too many people waste their time with it, a general theory approach seems worth the effort.

LESS THAN TWO YEARS AGO, THE READERS OF Government and Opposition had reasons to be moderately optimistic concerning the future of our country. If their judgment was based on George Feaver's ‘Letter from Canada’, it appeared prudent to conclude that it was no small achievement for Canada to have persisted as a state in the face of tremendous adversity. These readers may have also trusted some distinguished experts on Canadian history and politics. Donald Smiley recently wrote that he had ’very much over-estimated the strength of Québec nationalism and provincialist influences elsewhere in the country and very much under-estimated the capacity of the system to respond effectively to such divisive pressures’. Smiley's judgment was supported by Kenneth McRoberts: ‘Canada's most serious political crisis, which originated in the political modernization of the Quiet Revolution and saw the election of a Québec government formally committed to Québec sovereignty, appears to have run its course.’

POLITICAL VIOLENCE CREATES ITS OWN MOMENTUM NOT ONLY in the wider security community but also in that refuge for the voyeur, academic research. Before 1968 a mere handful of books looked at the Ulster problem. Since then more than two hundred books and several thousand articles have appreared. But to what avail? In a survey of this vast literature Professor John Whyte concludes that there has been a disproportion between the enormous effort expended and the exiguous results achieved. The purist might maintain that it is not the task of scholars to indulge in political engineering: to those of us who live in the benighted province any port in a storm will do. The merit of these five books is that, wittingly or not, they create some optimism simply because they shift our gaze from the depressing reality of Belfast and examine the problem in a wider context. Of course, that might not be their purpose. Bad Chubb set out with the modest task of explaining the political process of the Irish Republic for the benefit of his own students who had lacked an up-todate general work. Bew and Patterson took as their starting point ‘the irrepressible reality of the class conflict generated by the capitalist structure of the Irish economy’ (p. 187).

PSEPHOLOGY – THE ART OF STUDYING ELECTIONS – HAS COME TEN thousand leagues since R.B.McCallum applied the term in the 1940s to his pioneering analyses of British elections and political opinion in the first of the now classic Nuffield studies. Putting the electors under a magnifying glass has ranged from examining them by means of formal logic and sophisticated mathematical procedures, to anecdotal accounts of the process through which democracies choose their governments. In this article, I seek to situate a particular contest – the 1998 Quebec provincial election – into the general political landscape.

The result of the balloting was that the reigning sovereigntist Parti Québécois (PQ) was returned to power under a first-past-thepost system with a resounding majority of seats but with fewer votes than the opposition federalist Parti Liberal du Québec (PLQ). As if that paradox were not enough, polls demonstrated without a smidgen of doubt that although the voters returned a government committed to holding a referendum on the sovereignty of Quebec, a significant majority did not wish a referendum to be held within the foreseeable future. Majorities of both francophone and anglophone electors opposed a direct consultation on Quebec's status in the federation.

THE OPUS DEI WAS FOUNDED AS A RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION IN 1928 by Father Escrivá de Balaguer in Spain. Its existence is public but its membership has always been secret. During the period of the Civil War it went briefly underground, to re-emerge in Nationalist Spain. In 1947 it was recognized as the first Secular Institute by the Pope and the centre of the organization moved to Rome. It has been most successful in Spain where it profited from the extremely favourable conditions created by Franco's government for Catholic groups. Its aim was the re-conversion of all social classes and especially intellectual and bourgeois groups to a universal Catholic spirituality. It worked towards this aim through the positioning of its members in places of power within society: preferably in university chairs, banking, business or bureaucratic positions. Each member had the duty to lead an upright Catholic life and at the same time to convert the maximum possible number of his fellows to active Catholicism (or to membership of the Opus Dei), through the example of his life. This implied not only proficiency and diligence at work, but also the traditional spiritual values such as humility, chastity, obedience, etc. Escrivá de Balaguer argued that the further Opus members could rise up the social ladder the more influence they would have on society in general and on their fellows.

THE NEWS FROM AMERICA IS (WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE?) BILL Clinton – America's first first-name-only-please President, informality and accessibility being hallmarks of democratic populism in the 1990s. It might seem as if this is the roller-coaster presidency: if you do not like Clinton's bad (good) reputation today, just wait a month and you can be sure that things will have turned upside down. When I started this piece in the spring, he was way, way down; today just a few months later, following a successful Japanese trip (his weak rivals in the G-7 group made him look good), his two successful judicial appointments (Ruth Bader Ginsberg to the Supreme Court and Louis J. Freeh to the FBI), his paper-thin but indispensable budget victory in the Congress, and his shepherding of the historic Israeli-Palestinian peace protocol, he's looking good. By the time you read this, however, he's likely to be down again, or perhaps down but once again up. His political career has been on a rollercoaster from the start and the media seem determined to keep him and the country rocking — and rolling.

POLITICIANS LIKE TO BE REGARDED AS EFFECTIVE IN THE WORK THEY do. They insist that the promises they make and the programmes they decide on are more than mere declarations of goodwill. To practise what they preach is of special importance to governments which stress that their policies are substantially different from the policies of their predecessors. Thus, a departure from conventional politics on the model of the social-democratic consensus was asserted by the previously more pragmatic, now more ideologically minded, Conservative governments in Britain (1979), the United States (1980) and to some degree also by the electoral successes of Conservative parties in West Germany (1983) and France (1986). The conservative ground-swell in current government policies in Western democracies is, however, not restricted to the countries mentioned here, although Britain and the United States have played a special role as pathfinders for the political reorientation process.

IT IS NOW OFTEN SAID THAT THE MODERN WORLD IS interdependent, that there is an intensive interaction of military, political, economic and other factors in the world. There is no doubt that one of the most important aspects of this interaction process is the international flow of information, and that political ideas have a special place in that exchange of information.

What follows is an attempt to look at some phases in the development of the Soviet perception of Western non-socialist political ideas over the past few years. As is generally known, Soviet ideologists have often emphasized the need for ideological struggle against these non-Marxist, bourgeois political ideas, and they continue to do this even in the present period of perestroika. At the same time it is obvious that major changes are taking place in Soviet political thought.