Two typical features of new modes of governance (NMG) are of particular concern: (1) the delegation of regulatory activities to independent regulatory authorities at the national and the European level; and (2) regulatory networks outside the legislative arenas, with both private and public actors. These features tend to make the NMG less democratically accountable. Yet some hold that NMG can confer legitimacy on the European Union, especially because they secure ‘output’ more effectively than democratic arrangements, even though they lack any ‘input’ from voters. This article challenges these normative claims: the alleged benefits of NMG may be less than often claimed, while democratic accountability measures are less of a challenge to effectiveness and credibility, properly conceived.

The Purpose of This Article is To Analyse The Document ‘A Framework for Accountable Government in Northern Ireland’, published by the British government in early 1995, and to assess its significance in terms of the theory of powersharing (consociational democracy). The Framework Document, as it is usually called, received a hostile reception from many Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland. The ideas that it contains, however, resonate with many previous blueprints for the future of Northern Ireland. In some form they are very likely to re-emerge in the proposed solutions that will follow the ‘all-party’ talks set for June 1996. I shall show that the Framework plan for democratic government in Northern Ireland is completely and thoroughly consociational in its orientation. It confirms the proposition that power-sharing is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for viable democracy in deeply divided societies.

Political opposition has long been one of the most dramatically understudied elements of real-world politics in contemporary democratic and authoritarian regimes. The past decade or so has, however, witnessed an upsurge of new opposition research that begs for a major state-of-the-field review. Interestingly, recent scholarship has focused more on manifestations of opposition in authoritarian and hybrid than in democratic systems, which indicates a latent reconceptualization of political opposition (setting aside older distinctions between regime-loyal opposition and regime-challenging forms of resistance, dissidence and contestation). With a focus on party-based forms of opposition, which have been widely considered to mark the most effective form of opposition, this review article takes stock and highlights key issues for future research as well as some inherent obstacles to the emergence of a more integrated field of cross-regime opposition studies.

A compromise is an agreement that involves mutual concessions. Each party gets less than it feels entitled to, but agrees to it because the situation it anticipates under the deal is better than the one it expects in the absence of a deal: conflict, exit or arbitration by a third party. Some compromises, however, are bad, and others are good. This article discusses three conjectures about what it is that makes a compromise good. Is a good compromise an honourable compromise, one that enables each party to save face? Is it rather a fair compromise, one that contributes to the progress of justice independently defined? Or is it a Pareto-improving compromise, one that changes things in such a way that it ends up making everyone better off than under the status quo? A compromise is never as good as a consensus, but it is generally better than nothing, and often achievable when a consensus is not. And when it is, trying to make it as good as possible in each of the three ways described is always worthwhile.

Populist radical right (PRR) parties have increasingly occupied positions of power in recent years, inspiring much scholarly interest in the mainstreaming consequences of government responsibility. This article analyses the extent and manner of mainstreaming of the Rassemblement National (RN) while in power at the local level of government in France. A municipal-level focus enables the novel inclusion of the party into the debate about the consequences of government participation for the PRR. We conduct a paired case study analysis of RN-led Hénin-Beaumont, the political base of Marine Le Pen and her ‘de-demonization’ strategy, alongside nearby Lens, which is led by a mainstream party. We analyse the policy and discourse of the administration through a qualitative content analysis of mayoral statements and data from semi-structured interviews with local politicians. The results show a partial mainstreaming due to the strategic exercise of local government power to present a more moderate and capable image, as well as the use of populist discourse to frame mainstream opposition forces and the local press as working against the interests of ‘the people’.

In an age of rampant distrust and disaffection, pledge fulfilment is important for the quality of delegation between voters and elected officials. In this article, we make an empirical appraisal of pledge fulfilment in Portugal. Do Portuguese minority governments fulfil their pledges? How do they fulfil those pledges? What is the role of opposition parties? Using an original data set with over 3,000 electoral pledges for three Socialist governments, as well as interviews with former ministers and party leaders, our evidence suggests that: (1) minority governments fulfil at least as many pledges as their majority counterparts; (2) the main opposition party manages to extract the most policy benefits; and (3) economic conditions and cohabitation situations matter for pledge fulfilment.

ARE ELITES AND LEADING MINORITIES A NECESSARY EVIL, A LIABILITY, or are they a vital and beneficial asset? Ultimately, the question is: should we downgrade or uplift leadership?

The list of authors who speak in favour of the latter view is impressive, both in time and in eminence. For the ancients, it is the major Greek historian, Thucydides, who reminds us that the greatness of Athens reached its height with Pericles precisely because ‘by his rank, ability, and known integrity he was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude’. After we had begun again, Bryce reviewed the most advanced experience of his time in this concise sentence: ‘Perhaps no form of government needs great leaders so much as democracy does’. Fifty years later, in 1937, after the downfall of democracy in Italy, Germany and Spain, de Madariaga wrote : ‘Despite appearances, liberal democracies are dependent on leadership even more so perhaps than other, more authoritarian forms of government; for . . . their natural tendency to weaken the springs of political authority must be counterbalanced by a higher level of. . . authority on the part of their leaders’.

Set in the context of the larger literature on regionalist parties and specifically on the Italian Northern League, this paper examines and explains why the party moved from Euro-positivism to Euroscepticism. Drawing on concepts raised in the larger comparative politics literature, five explanations of this U-turn towards Europe are evaluated. It is argued that, despite the strength of explanations that focus on the desires of party supporters, the role of public opinion, the potential influence of economic investors or the role of EU-level institutions in shaping party preferences, a more cogent explanation focuses on domestic-level developments. The conclusions will underscore the general implications of this research for the study of parties, particularly regionalist ones in the EU, highlighting that a party's changing stance towards supranational integrationist polices can be best understood as a consequence of its experience in a political system's electoral system.

CONTINUITY RATHER THAN CHANGE WAS CHARACTERISTIC OF THE Turkish party system during its formative years in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Now, however, party competition in Turkey appears to be approaching a new phase of development. While some political analysts have described the emerging trends in the 1970s with reference to a ‘critical realignment’ in mass electoral behaviour, others have characterized the party system as going through a period of ‘flux and transition’. Indeed, the recent course of electoral politics in Turkey displays some significant changes. First, with the termination of the Justice Party's UP) dominant position in party competition, there has been a transition from a predominant party system to one of moderate pluralism in which the likelihood of coalition government has significantly increased. Secondly, the trend toward greater fragmentation in the party system which partially accounted for the JP's loss of dominance in 1973, appears to have been reversed in the 1977 parliamentary election as the two major parties made substantial gains at the expense of the minor parties. Thirdly, these changes have been accompanied by the increase of ideological polarization in the party system and the intensification of ideological cleavages among the party elites.

This article explores the factors affecting post-rebel party electoral performance. We present new research tracking the participation of these groups in national legislative elections from 1990 to 2016. Our full data set covers 77 parties and 286 elections in 37 countries. It includes parties formed after conflicts of varying length and intensity, with different incompatibilities, in every region of the world, and in countries with disparate political histories. Our analysis suggests that post-rebel parties’ early electoral performance strongly affects future performance, and that competition – crowd-out by older rival parties – and pre-war organizational experience in politics have a significant positive effect, particularly for those parties that are consistently winning more than about 10 per cent of seats. But especially for parties that consistently win very low seat shares, organizational characteristics yield increasingly to environmental factors, most importantly the presence of rival parties and the barriers to representation presented by electoral rules.

To Grasp Fully The Nature And Significance Of The Economic policies at the heart of dominant political projects, those policies have to be studied in the round. They have to be grasped as complex totalities which touch all aspects of the political agenda; and they have to be seen as constructed and contested wholes, whose contradictions, internal inconsistencies and conceptual limits are as vital to their trajectory as are their axioms, theories and content. Academically and professionally, the study of policy in this rounded way is often a more difficult task to complete than might be expected, in part because of the powerful divisions within and between the intellectual disciplines which comprise the social sciences.

The Return to Democracy of Spain, Portugal, and Greece in the 1970s is an encouraging and inspiring example to democrats everywhere — but especially to Latin American demccrats because of their region's close historical and cultural ties with two of the Southern European countries. However, apart from the general feeling of optimism that the Southern European experience legitimately engenders, are there any specific lessons and lessons specifically relevant to Latin America that can be learned from it? In this article, I shall suggest six such lessons. Some of these are positive lessons — examples to be followed, such as choosing a form of democracy that is suitable to a country's size and to its political and social divisions; others are negative ' examples to be avoided, such as Portugal's and Greece's experimentation with a presidential form of government. Some lessons are based on common characteristics of the new Southern European democracies; others concern traits on which they differ.

ALL POLITICAL CULTURES ARE MIXED AND CHANGING. WHAT IS interesting in the English case, however, is the way in which a veritable army of scholars has seized on the deferential component. Other features in the overall cultural pattern have been neglected. This paper is devoted to an examination of the concept of deference as it is applied to English politics. In particular it will focus on the different meanings that the concept has assumed in the literature describing and analysing the popular political attitudes, and those aspects of the political system, including stability, which it has been used to explain. My concluding argument is that deference, as the concept is frequently applied to English political culture, has attained the status of a stereotype and that it is applied to such variegated and sometimes conflicting data that it has outlived its usefulness as a term in academic currency.

MOST OF WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE ROLE OF POLITICAL pacts and pact-making in developing democracy is based on transitions from exclusionary authoritarian regimes in Europe and Latin American. This is not surprising; most political pacts have been concluded in Europe and Latin America, as political and economic elites have attempted to extricate themselves from the ruins of war or the reigns of tyrants. Increasingly, however, pacts have been used elsewhere as devices to mark political transitions of other kinds. In the Arab world, for example, the ultimately unhappy fate of Lebanon's 1943 National Pact, which provided the framework of a transition to independence, did not deter pact-makers in Tunisia in 1988 from using the device in what they hoped would be a transition from a single-party regime to a more pluralist democracy.

In this article I discuss terrorism as a problem in the study of strategy rather than strategy as a problem in the study of terrorism. There is a developing literature now asserting that terrorist activity should be evaluated as strategy, so that dealing with the phenomenon requires not only denouncing it for its warped morality and inhumanity but also understanding motives and methods, treating it as purposive and instrumental and not just wicked. In this article I take it for granted that terrorism is strategic activity; my question is, what does this type of activity tell us about strategy? The case is interesting because terrorism is strategically generally demanding and prone to failure. Certainly when used on its own it is a poor support for political objectives, and may be counter-productive even when used with other methods. By looking at strategy at the fringes it is possible to illuminate aspects of strategic activity that have a wider application.

MUCH OF OUR RHETORIC IS, TODAY, GLOBALISTIC. THE STATE unit, we say, is obsolete, and we are moving toward a global market with fewer and fewer frontiers. Concurrently our minds are opening themselves to a broader world, indeed to the ‘other worlds’ that surround our own. And the catalyst of this globalization is the enormous expansion of all kinds of communication, thereby eminently including our being able to see the world, all the world, in images in our homes in real time.

A BASIC QUESTION IS HOW POLITICS ARE TAMED AND CEASE BEING A deadly, warlike affair. The most dramatic way is through sudden, deliberate and lasting compromises of core disputes among political elites – what we think of as ‘elite settlements’. Prior to settlements elites disagree about government institutions, engage in unchecked fights for dominance, and view politics as winner-take-all. After settlements, elite persons and groups continue to be affiliated with conflicting parties, movements, and beliefs, but they share a consensus about government institutions and the codes and rules of political competition. Settlements tame politics by generating tacitly accommodative and overtly restrained practices among competing political elites.

Post-Cold War autocracies appear novel in their use of multiparty elections, attracting the attention of scholars and policymakers alike. A longer historical view, however, reveals that what is unique is not electoral authoritarianism after 1989, but rather the electoral inactivity of autocracies during the Cold War period. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, authoritarian regimes have held multiparty elections. The prevalence of these elections begs the question of whether they have any effects on political liberalization and democratization. But the study of authoritarian elections in processes of political change faces a number of theoretical and empirical challenges that can only partly be surmounted with existing approaches.