THAT POLITICAL PARTIES DID NOT HOLD A RESPECTABLE PLACE IN 18th-century American political theory was a reflection of the low place they were believed to hold in practice. Wherever the Americans looked, whether to the politics of Georgian England, their own provincial capitals or the republics of the historical past, they thought they saw in parties only a distracting and divisive force representing the claims of unbridled, seKsh, special interests. I do not intend here to try to penetrate the thickets of 18th-century politics either in England or in the American provinces. We long ago learned not to identify the Whigs and Tories of the 18th century with the highly developed British political parties of modern times, and not to imagine that England had a well-developed two-party system at the close of the 18th century or even during the first two decades of the 19th. Modern parties have grown up in response to (and in turn have helped to stimulate) the development of large electorates, and their institutional structures are in good measure an outgrowth of the efforts necessary to connect the parliamentary party and the mass party. The modern party is, in this respect, the disciplined product of regular party competition in the forum of public opinion. It also deals with legislative issues, over which the established parties differ.

HISTORIANS AND POLITICAL SCIENTISTS HAVE CLEARLY ESTABLISHED that party as an institution developed slowly, and thus the term took in a wide variety of social forms. We also know that the acceptance of party competition and constitutional opposition was an equally gradual process, aided, but certainly not secured, by the writings of Bolingbroke or Burke. Throughout the 18th century, most references to party as such were unfavourable, although some echoed Bolingbroke's judgement that the efforts of a virtuous opposition were vita until, and only until, it triumphed. But before Burke, even before Bolingbroke, there was a theory of party nonetheless incisive because of its discontinuity with most writings of the time.

The general disrepute of party needs no elaboration. There has also been some valuable research into the much rarer genre of literature that showed a limited appreciation of the virtues of party conflict. A number of these sources were limited to the fleeting expression of an attitude rather than a coherent theory.

I SHOULD LIKE TO START WITH AN EXTREMELY SIMPLE STATEment about the French Revolution. This is that there are many historical arguments among historians on many subjects, but that none of these arguments is so intense and so heated as the one which takes place in every generation about the French Revolution. It is as though the historical interpretation of this particular subject and the arguments of specialists directly reflect the political struggles and the gamble for power. It is true that we are all aware today that there are no unbiased historical interpretations: the selection of facts which provide the raw material for the historian's work is already the result of a choice, even although that choice is not an explicit one. To some extent, history is always the result of a relationship between the present and the past and more specifically between the characteristics of an individual and the vast realm of his possible roots in the past. But, nevertheless, even within this relative framework, not all the themes of history are equally relevant to the present interests of the historian and to the passions of his public.

As scholars explore opportunities for democratic renewal, the potential of ballot structures to improve the quality of representation has been largely neglected. We argue that expressive ballots can improve the congruence of political preferences between voters and their vote choice and, subsequently, decrease parliamentary polarization. Recognizing that voters’ political preferences are more complex than a dichotomous party-vote allows, we propose the ‘assembly ballot’, which allows voters to choose their ‘ideal parliament’ by distributing 150 parliamentary seats across all participating parties. To assess the consequences of the assembly ballot for ideological congruence and parliamentary composition, we conducted a survey experiment with over 16,000 respondents around the 2017 Dutch parliamentary elections in which respondents cast a vote in a mock-election using the assembly ballot or a closed-list PR ballot. Results show that ideological congruence is, on average, significantly higher for voters voting with the assembly ballot for both the left–right dimension and the cultural dimension, while also producing a more centripetal, less polarized parliament.

How do political parties react organizationally when the competitive context changes? Are all parties equally accustomed to adapting? In recent decades, the emergence of an electorally volatile and publicity-oriented style of politics has pushed Western parties to replace member-centred mass organizations with centralized ‘media agencies’. However, as has long been speculated, parties’ ‘genetic’ heritage may condition their adaptive capacity and threaten their competitiveness. This study presents the first comprehensive quantitative test of the impact of party ‘genetics’ on the ease of parties’ organizational professionalization in the cartel party era (1983–2018). It utilizes uniquely fine-grained time-series data on the financial and staff resources of central party offices to compare the adaptive processes of two ‘genetically’ distinct major Finnish parties – a social democratic mass party and a conservative cadre party. The study finds that although both parties have professionalized under strong external pressure, the ‘genetically’ election-driven cadre party case adapted much faster, and the member-oriented mass party case continues to invest much more in its membership organization.

It can be challenging for a democratic government to effectively make policies that address crucial national problems. While a bulk of literature reports that many democracies have overcome this challenge through centralization of legislative organization, few studies have explained why legislative decentralization that allegedly impairs policymaking performance would take place. Drawing on Taiwan's experience and over 13,000 legislative bills proposed in Taiwan's parliament between 1993 and 2012, this article demonstrates that the legislative decentralization during the onset of Taiwan's democratization slightly revived the policymaking performance of a near-paralysed parliament. Like drinking poison to quench the thirst, myopic politicians may opt for legislative decentralization as an instant remedy to ease severe legislative obstruction, despite the unfavourable consequences that the resulting decentralized legislative organization may eventually bring about. These findings shed new light on the evolution of legislative organization and account for the difficulties in policymaking facing developing democracies.

What do modern election campaigns look like? According to the most recent accounts, they are data-driven operations in which extensive data are collected and targeted messages are deployed in efforts to maximize support. Whilst highlighting important new developments, in this article we argue that a focus on novel practices offers a distorted picture of modern campaigns. Presenting a unique analysis of over 22,720 separate items of expenditure made by political parties at the 2019 UK general election, we demonstrate that whilst there is some evidence of a ‘fourth’ era of campaigning, these novel practices do not define campaigns. Taking a more holistic approach that examines how campaign activities are blended and entwined, we offer unprecedented insight into the nature of modern campaigns, revealing variation in parties' campaign strategies. We also introduce a new dataset for those interested in party campaigns and call for others to pursue a more holistic analysis.

Mainstream parties have taken increasingly restrictive immigration policy positions across Western Europe. Yet the political consequences of this behaviour for citizens' democratic norms and practices are still not well understood. This article focuses on public political trust. Bridging the literatures on immigration-related trust and spatial theory, the spotlight is put on the consequences of mainstream party position-taking on immigration for the interconnectedness of citizens' immigration policy preferences, political distrust and far-right voting. An analysis of data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and European Social Survey across 14 Western European democracies (2006–2018) suggests that tougher immigration positions of centre-right parties in government weaken the link between immigration scepticism and political distrust and, in turn, the relevance of political distrust as a precursor of far-right voting. This has important implications for our understanding of immigration politics and advances the existing literatures on party competition, political trust and far-right voting in several ways.

‘There is cause for grave concern that South Africa has thus far been unable to develop any significant party, aggressively committed to a liberal solution of the racial problems.’ These words, written in 1956, by a distinguished South African historian, imply an important truth about South African politics, namely the extent to which the crucial issues of race relations have become, over five decades, interlocked with disputes between the two white language groups and partly submerged in the process.

These disputes have been ventilated in the context of a parliamentary system which since its inception in 1910 has remained the exclusive preserve of a white minority, determined to resist any challenge by the non-white majority for representation in the process of decision-making.

As The Results of The General Elections In Spain of 3 March were being announced, the leaders of the two main parties came out of their respective headquarters to greet the crowds of well-wishers. To judge by the expression on their faces, one could be forgiven for thinking that the victors had lost and the losers had won. A jubilant Felipe González, the outgoing Premier, uttered the phrase which serves as the main title of this article. The paradoxical outcome of the election was that in order to form a government, the victors were forced to seek the kind of parliamentary support which they had bitterly decried in the outgoing government and a pact with parties that they had mercilessly attacked during the previous legislature.

THE PORTUGUESE PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS OF 19 JULY 1987 initiated a profound change in the Portuguese party system and in the system of government. From 1974 onwards, Portugal had moved peacefully towards a democratic political system, enshrined in the 1976 Constitution. This evolution lasted about eight years and culminated in the revision of the Constitution in 1982. From 1982 onwards the present political regime has been a democratic one, coexisting with a capitalist economic regime attenuated by state monopoly in key sectors and by public companies which were nationalized between 1974 and 1976. It is also since 1982 that the system of government has been semi-presidential. There is pure representativeness as referendums do not exist at national level and have never been regulated at local level. But the government is semi-presidential in the sense that, owing to French influence, it attempts to balance Parliament with the election of the President of the Republic by direct and universal suffrage.

IN 1965 IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR THE AUTHOR OF AN ARTICLE ON THE anarchists in Britain to begin by observing that anarchists no longer figured in the popular consciousness and that the existence of anarchists could occasion as much polite surprise as the continued existence of the Independent Labour Party. This present article and its inclusion in a special issue on Anarchism is perhaps in part a proof that this situation is no longer true, and that anarchism has recently attracted sufficient attention to justify a new and closer look at anarchists in Britain today. It would hardly be rash to argue that whatever else may be true of the Left in Britain in 1970, the anarchists’ presence deserves to provoke much less polite surprise than it may have done five years ago.

This article is not, however, a description of the shape and variety of anarchists and anarchist groups to be found in Britain today. It is rather an attempt to describe one particular facet of anarchist thought which has characterized anarchism in the 1960s and to relate this to the ‘anarchhation’ of the New Left described by James Joll in his concluding article. It is to that extent an extrapolation and abstraction from a very wide range of alternatives and undoubtedly presents a picture which many anarchists would not recognize or would repudiate.

TODAY, GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS OFTEN SEEM TO BE IN THE position of the legendary caliph Harun al Raschid, who went about in disguise among his people in order to find out what they really thought, since he could not trust his servants to tell him the truth. This story puts in a nutshell some systematic questions:

What kind of political information is circulating in society?

What are the information ‘needs’ of government and how can they be satisified?

How is information transformed or shaped in the political process, in society, in parliament, in government?

To what degree is political information dependant on the respective structure and distribution of legitimate power Herrschuftsorganisation?

What informal and organizational networks exist?

What is the impact of the mass media? How far, if at all, do our present theories on information processes explain reality?

How far is political information dependent on individual perception?

What processes of feedback exist and what influence do these feedback processes exercise on the content of information and decision-making?