IT IS A TRUISM TO STATE THAT ALL AGES ARE AGES OF TRANsition, and that the clash of tradition and experiment never ceases. Nevertheless, there are periods when history seems to collapse in on itself, and the time-span of change so contracts that revolution, not only political, becomes almost a norm. Since the Industrial Revolution many writers have dealt with the ideological reaction to the predicaments of rapid social change. J. S. Mill described the English public of his day as caught between two warring camps of the ‘Men of the Past’ and the ‘Men of the Present’, those who wish to return to the certainties of an earlier age, and those who wish to hasten change in the hope of a better future. Such a division is clearly simplistic, but it expresses the sense of bifurcation in society. ‘Past’ and ‘Present’ serve in this context as omnibus terms for multi-dimensional complexities which allow ample scope for individual selection, organization and evaluation.

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?

The Very Nature Of Democracy Makes Its Defence Difficult. In a democracy, the majority has the right to be wrong and the opportunity to make public its private passions while acting on its personal interests. What is more, democratic tolerance of pluralism and legitimation of social conf lict ensure that democracy will be characterized above all by self-criticism. As a result, when it is threatened, its enemies will find at least some domestic support from those who despair of democracy, or at least of this democracy, and who convince themselves that a better, more substantial or less superficial, democracy can be brought into being. Such critics of the really existing democracy are convinced that they are acting in the name of real democracy. So it was, for example, that the American Communist Party could claim to incarnate ‘twentieth-century Americanism’ following the same logic used by Marx a century earlier to criticize the ‘merely formal’ nature of bourgeois democracy. But so it was too when the CIA took it upon itself to finance not only political opposition to Soviet inf luence but also to support and encourage what Francis Stonor Saunders's recent study of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters revealed. The shared logic of the CIA and the communists turns out, as the saying goes, to be no accident.

ELECTIONS FOR A CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY ARE SCHEDULED TO TAKE place in Peru in 1978. In view of this event and of the changes which it might bring about, it would be useful to examine the tenyear record of the military revolutionary government in that country.

If the road to hell truly is paved with good intentions, it is of little solace to those who must walk it. So it is that after nearly a decade of revolution in Peru we can no longer concern ourselves with ferreting out the motives of the military officers who have led it, but must turn instead to an assessment of the damage that has been done. Peru's Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces has attracted considerable attention and even admiration within and without Latin America since its inception through a bloodless coup on 3 October 1968. In subsequent years the military junta, in which the Army dominates over the Air Force and Navy, has passed through three perceptible stages. The first corresponded to the presidency of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, architect of the coup and leader of the revolution until he was ousted in August 1975. His tenure, now referred to officially as the ‘First Phase’ of the revolution, was responsible for dramatic and far-reaching reforms which eventually over-taxed the financial and political resources of his government and forced him from office. The so-called ‘Second Phase’ of the revolution began with Velasco's replacement by his more conservative Prime Minister, General Francisco Morales Bermddez. Attention turned to consolidating the gains of the revolution during this period but the inability of the government to shore up the economy and rationalize the programmes of the Velasco era resulted in the imposition ofa severe austerity programme in July 1976. Violent political upheavals within the popular classes in July, and the backlash of the conservative factions within the military, caused a purge of most of the remaining liberal officers in the government. It is fair to speak of a ‘Third Phase’ of the revolution since the latter part of 1976 in which President Morales has been pressured into systematically dismantling many of the popular reforms of the Velasco era. Official announcements in 1977 clarified the military's intention to withdraw from direct management of the state over the next two to three years. Thus, it is appropriate now to begin assessment of the Institutional Revolution of the Armed Forces and its legacy for Peru.

IT IS THE BURDEN OF CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE AND technology to produce change at a rate, and of a scale and character, which is genuinely without precedent. Science and technology have between them made the world a smaller and inescapably interdependent place, and as catalysts and instruments of change they are far from finished yet. In fact, the introduction into industrial societies of systematic research, development and innovation, as contrasted with the more or less serendipitous activity of invention, bids fair to being one of the few major benchmarks of history. It is also a benchmark to which political systems, and above all the international system (if one may so dignify what is still in many respects a rag-bag) have still fully to accommodate themselves.

‘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.

Multilevel polities do not typically facilitate secession, so why did the European Union adopt Article 50? Revisiting formative debates from the 2003 Convention on the Future of Europe, we combine archival research with an original dataset of delegate debates over two levels: the existence and procedural operation of an exit article. This reveals essential new detail on the genealogy of Article 50. We locate this institutional innovation within a Rokkanian–Hirschmanian theoretical framework which treats exit closure as necessary for loyalty and resilience. Further refining this ‘polity’ perspective, we find many participants showed awareness of the potentially disruptive implications of an exit article. Yet, given extant tensions around ‘ever closer union’, a Eurocentric procedural design prevailed as a safety valve, granting EU authorities default control over any exit process. This European logic of ‘controlled opening' offers a potential blueprint for other integrating compound polities and international organizations facing backlashes from member states.

We explore whether including cultural reforms in an intra-state peace accord facilitates its success. We distinguish between accommodationist and integrationist cultural provisions and employ a mixed research method combining negative binomial regression on a data set of all intra-state political agreements concluded between 1989 and 2017, and an in-depth analysis of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland. We recognize the important reassuring effect of accommodationist cultural reforms in separatist conflicts. However, we also find that they have an important and hitherto overlooked reputational effect across all conflict types. By enhancing the reputation of negotiating leaders, accommodationist cultural provisions contribute to ending violence by preventing leadership challenges, rebel fragmentation and remobilization across all civil conflicts. By the same logic, and despite the overwhelming emphasis of peace agreements on integrationist cultural initiatives, integrationist cultural reforms problematize leaders' ability to commit to pacts and to ensure compliance among their rank and file.

Although there has been extensive research on electoral system choice at the national level, we know relatively little about the dynamics of deciding the rules of the game for sub-state institutions. This article examines the factors that influenced the choice of a proportional electoral system for the new Scottish Parliament in 1999. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with key participants, we challenge the conventional rational choice explanation for the adoption of the mixed-member proportional (MMP) system. Although rational considerations on the part of the Labour Party were involved in the choice of MMP, our findings suggest that, as at the national level, theories of electoral system choice need to consider normative values as well.

The aim of this article is to determine the EU's effect on British–Irish and Greek–Turkish cooperation. It examines the EU's actual and potential role in fostering British–Irish and Greek–Turkish cooperation as well as its policies to Northern Ireland and Cyprus themselves. Domestic bureaucratic capacity and institutional design are put forward as explanations for the success of the British–Irish relationship rather than EU membership per se. In the case of Cyprus, the article suggests that increased bilateral cooperation with respect to disputed territory is unlikely to occur in the absence of faster bureaucratic change in both Greece and Turkey. EU membership is not a causal factor in the evolution of cooperation and conflict resolution.

‘L'Irlande est une petite contreé sur laquelle se débattent les plus grandes questions de la politique, de la morale, et de l'humanité.’

Gustave de Beaumont, 1839

IT IS MUCH EASIER TO EXPLAIN THE COURSE OF A FULLY LEGITIMATE, a fully repudiated or a fully coercive regime than to explain what goes on in a regime that is persistently divided. Northern Ireland is an excellent case study of a regime that lacks the stability or quasistability of these three familiar types of political authority. The regime there has always been divided, i.e., the constitution is supported by only a portion of the population, and a substantial fraction of its nominal subjects are inclined to disobey basic political 1aws. It is particularly striking that this should happen in a land where the institutions of government are explicitly modelled after the Parliament of the United Kingdom to which it is bound, and the culture permits the easy assimilation of its emigrants to life in Britain and America. To understand why industrialization and urbanization together have not produced a fully legitimate regime, one must look back into the history of Ireland, and examine the strategy of political leaders who commenced governing in less than ideal circumstances. Then one can begin to understand the multiple and extreme challenges to the regime today.