THE SERIOUS ILLNESS DURING THE LATE SUMMER OF THE PRIME Minister, Andreas Papandreou, who is rising seventy, brought Greece to the start of an unusually long pre-electoral period which, if the government holds to its word, will end on 18 June 1989. Meanwhile, the affairs of state were being overshadowed by affairs of the heart, as detailed press coverage of his progress at Harefield showed him walking hand-in-hand with Dimitra Liani, a buxom former Olympic Airways hostess half his age, who had flown with him to London and with whom he has had a far from discreet liaison for the past year.

SARTORI'S COMMENT THAT UNDERCOMPREHENSION APPLIES to the engineering of history provides a starting point for these reflections since those words suggest three familiar ideas — purpose, thought and action — as do also other expressions he uses: ‘our cognitive control of ourselves’, ‘the shaping of societies and polities’, and a ‘policy enactment which amounted to little else than allowing markets to blossom’. Purpose, thought and action can be seen as aspects of management, at least in the context of this discussion and provided it is clear that decisions not to act can often be a form of management; so can we justify equating undercomprehension with unmanageability.

Purposes with varying degrees of compatibility are pursued and both cooperation and conflict characterize the pursuit; instruments are required for planning, for conflict resolution and for damage limitation.

‘WHEN THE SWEDES BEAT A RETREAT FROM KEYNES THAT surely signals a climacteric.’ Thus Andrew Shonfield clinched his argument that the unwillingness of the industrialized countries to offset the deflationary consequences of the 1979 oil shock reflected a general crisis of confidence in the principles of the mixed economy. The loss of Keynesian innocence in the 1970s came to different countries in different ways. In Sweden it came comparatively late and abruptly when, in 1980, after six years in which public expenditure had grown from 46 per cent to 64 per cent of GDP, the coalition non-socialist government acknowledged that the budget deficit, amounting to 10 per cent of GDP, had reached crisis proportions. From 1980 the problem of curbing the recalcitrant deficit became a corner-stone of the non-socialists’ economic policy. Eschewing any increase in the tax-burden, which it was committed to reduce, the government launched a comprehensive attack on public spending. Its persistence on this course in the face of protests that it was eroding the welfare state and tolerating rising unemployment was a major factor in its defeat in the general election of September 1982.

The Analysis of Opposition in Asian Political Systems raises acute problems of definition. At one end of a continuum lie those polities in which an ‘opposition’ is either inconceivable (North Korea is perhaps the best example) or inevitably in a state of war or confrontation with the regime (as is the case in Burma/Myanmar). In cases at this end of the continuum opposition cannot be democratic in the systemic sense, unless the opposition realizes its programme and becomes a democratic government. At the other end of the continuum, however, the character, standing and potential of ‘opposition’ is very much a matter of debate. In these systems a multiplicity of non-governing political parties exist, and these parties contest elections and send members to legislatures, though they often operate under rules (informal as well as formal) and conditions which tend to prevent them from gaining power. The focus of this article will be upon these systems, which are here labelled – whether parliamentary or presidential – ‘constitutional’. ‘Constitutional’ is understood as entailing the existence of an embedded and more or less regularly operating set of electoral mechanisms which plays an essential part in the selection of the government.

BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR HENRI BERGSON HAD PUBlished three major works, but nothing exclusively or even primarily concerned with social and political issues. Nevertheless, Bergson's philosophy was thought to have a political meaning that could be deduced from its principles. Despite their different, even contradictory, conclusions about it, Bergson's philosophy influenced several leading figures in France – Georges Sorel, Charles Péguy, Charles Maurras and Charles de Gaulle – and through them the course of French history. Significantly, Bergson's philosophical arguments interested them more than his relatively minor, but concrete, statements about contemporary politics. Bergson's mature thought on moral and political life was shaped principally by the First world War: Les Deux sources de la moral et de la religion appeared after Sorel and Péguy were dead and when Maurras and the Action Franqaise no longer figured so prominently in French politics. Even de Gaulle, who came to prominence much later than the others and who really belongs more to the second half of the century than they do, appears to have taken no interest in Les Deux sources. Rather, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience and L'Évolution créatrice in which Bergson states his critique of ‘conceptual thinking’ and his theories of consciousness and biological evolution, comprise ‘Bergsonism’ in politics – not Bergson's own politics. These ironically find no consistent representation in the movements or political theories discussed below. The difference between what Bergson stood for and favoured in politics and what others thought his philosophy implied for politics is most striking and points to the difficulties inherent in taking practical advice from metaphysical arguments. There are, then, two problems surrounding Bergson's influence in France, one of which has already been alluded to and will be discussed at some length. The other is much more diffuse, but defines Bergson's political reputation today.

IT IS A GREAT HONOUR TO PROVOKE NOT ONE BUT TWO sustained reactions from Raymond Aron, and I can only hope that his prediction of the initiation of a vaste débat concerning this issue will indeed be fulfilled. For my own part, I have few if any serious disagreements with what he says in his article, notwithstanding the fact that it has the form of a critical examination of my own position. The differences are matters of stress, interpretation and perhaps temperament, rather than genuine disagreements of fact or argument.

THE POLITICAL SYSTEM OF WEST GERMANY MAY BE CHARACTERIZED as a ‘penetrated system’, a notion which has been developed by James Rosenau. After the restoration of German sovereignty in 1955 , Rosenau's definition seemed less applicable to Germany, since it was defined by the fact that ‘non-members of a national society’ . . . ‘participate directly and authoritatively, through actions taken jointly with the society's members, either in the allocation of its values or in the mobilization of support on behalf of its goals’. Wolfram Hanrieder tried to improve the applicability of the notion of ‘penetrated system’ to Germany by broadening the scope of the concept; he no longer restricted it to ‘direct and authoritative participation of non-members’. This concept fitted the German situation better than G. Modelski's model of ‘internal war’ which has been applied to Germany by some younger scholars since the process of the division of Germany was more or less a result of the action of the great powers and only rather late was it consciously endorsed by decision makers in both parts of Germany.

The main argument to be developed in this article posits that fundamental changes and variations in the financial market structure of East Asian economies have been predicated on the emergence and configuration of the dominant coalitions. The coalitions have been forged by private market agents, economic policymakers and political elites who have developed particular interests in financial market changes as a response to economic and political imperatives both at home and abroad. In East Asia, the dominant coalitions that have borne crucially on regulatory rules and market practices have differed in the policy preferences of key actors in the coalitions and the power structures of these coalitions. It is these differences that have exerted divergent shaping influences on financial market development.

FOR US IT IS ENTIRELY NATURAL TO ASSUME THAT THE paramount political question of our time is whether to move in the direction of a socialist or capitalist organization of the economy, or to decide what manner of welfarist compromise between them ought to be struck. But merely to make this assumption is already to be committed to a particular view about what defines politics, the political priorities of our society, the nature of the relationship between state and society, and so on.

This article approaches the puzzle of how parties can strategically anticipate coalition formation and make themselves more attractive coalition partners in their electoral strategies. It argues that parties can strategically adjust the salience of issues that are secondary to them in pursuit of increased ‘coalitionability’. It tests the argument through analysis of the salience of secondary policy dimensions of up to 232 European parties between 1970 and 2019, finding evidence that parties adjust the levels of salience of their secondary dimension in response to the probability of their being included in a coalition government and their distance from the coalition in which they are most likely to be included.