The Terrorist Attacks In New York And Washington Dc On 11 September 2001, and the killing of thousands of people were not sufficient to dispel a mood of suspicion in European public opinion towards America. Of course, during the very first days after the attack, there was widespread grief and sorrow about the event among Europeans. But, as soon as discussion on the right strategy to pursu to combat terrorism began, the initial mood of identification with America started to change. And when America, although backed by a large international coalition and legitimated by two UN resolutions, moved towards an armed intervention in Afghanistan, European anti-Americanism emerged again. Thus, during the armed intervention in Afghanistan, especially when the bombing led to the death of innocent victims, a social mobilization against the American war grew day after day, with its critics apparently losing sight of the fact that a dramatic terrorist attack on America had recently taken place.

The interesting question is why does anti-Americanism re-emerge regularly in large sections of European public opinion? This intermittent Anti-Americanism appears more in southern and continental Europe, than in the northern British Isles and Scandinavia, where it is outdone by a more vociferous anti-Europeanism. In the latter countries, anti-Americanism takes the form of uneasiness with the United States. In fact, in spite of Britain's traditional special relationship with the United States, the fact cannot be denied that post-war British elites grudgingly accept their inferior status in that special relationship. But, of course, frustration with America is not the same as anger towards America. In any case, in (continental) Europe, anti- Americanism seems to be one of the few public philosophies that can unite large sections of the left, the right and the Catholic Church. It is a public philosophy which emerges especially in periods of war (and of international crisis in general).

Why, many Americans rightly ask, can material racial inequality and widespread segregation still persist 50 years after the enactment of key civil rights legislation and eight years after the election of an African American to the nation’s highest office? Many from outside the US pose similar questions about modern America. The explanation, I argue, lies with inconsistent and fluctuating levels of federal engagement to building material racial equality. National engagement fluctuates because it is energetically resisted and challenged by opponents of racial progress. This vulnerability to disruption is exposed by varying strategies of resistance, some fiscal, some violent, some judicial, some desultory and some combining violent protest against change with local electoral triumphs for anti-reformers. Public resistance to employing national resources to reduce inequality encouraged a de-racialization strategy amongst many African American candidates for elected office who opt to de-emphasize issues of racial inequality in campaigns and in office. Whatever the means, the effect is uniform: the slowing down or outright death of federal civil rights activism.

This article aims to bring the people to the heart of democracy measurement. Existing measurements have reinforced the idea that democracy is the domain of the state with its procedures, institutions and political elites. But where are the people in those measurements? So far, when we measure democracy we rely on experts who determine what democracy is, while people’s views have been ignored. This happens not only during the phase of conceptualization, but also during operationalization. The specific way we measure democracy feeds elitism and is emblematic of how our discipline has developed, namely an ivory tower in which political scientists define and measure democracy without taking people’s views seriously. The article proposes new people-centred measures of democracy and discusses their effect on the rankings of countries and their strengths and weaknesses. The future of the study of democracy lies in developing new measures that challenge our current understanding of democracy and assist us in developing new perspectives, thus reinvigorating democracy studies.

In this article, we focus on the candidate selection processes of Podemos in Spain and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S – Five Star Movement) in Italy, processes which are related to intra-party democracy. With a mixed-methods approach (including novel data from the expert survey PoPES, 31 semi-structured interviews with party representatives and militants, and analysis of party documents, statutes and leader speeches) and a comparative perspective, we explore candidate selection in the context of the broader organizational party structures over time. We find that: (1) Podemos functions like a typical centralized party, whereas M5S is a deviant case with strong and centralized control over party organization but decentralized mechanisms for candidate selection; (2) both these logics of centralization of power undermine the parties’ democratic credentials but have different consequences in terms of cohesion (expulsions/departures in M5S and splintering in Podemos); and (3) in both cases, the parties’ organizational culture and symbolic tools legitimate their top-down features.

Despite more than two decades of research on semi-presidential regimes, we still know very little about the actual coordination between the president and the prime minister. Through an in-depth analysis of Lithuanian semi-presidentialism, this article underscores the importance of institutional design on intra-executive balance of power. Drawing primarily on interviews with top-level civil servants and office-holders, it argues that in the absence of written rules or other strong norms guiding intra-executive coordination, presidents enjoy more discretion in designing their own modes of operation. Coordination depends on the initiative of the president, with ad hoc practices further weakening the position of the prime minister. While Lithuanian semi-presidentialism has functioned smoothly, the personality-centred politics commonly found in Central and East European countries create favourable conditions for presidential activism.

To one who believes in the essential worth of a democratic polity, how much opposition is desirable, and what kinds? What is the best balance between consensus and dissent ? Even among democrats there is not much agreement on the answers to these questions.

It is easy to see why. These questions seem to demand nothing less than a complicated assessment of democracy itself. Or to put the matter more precisely, one can judge the desirability of different patterns of political opposition only by employing a number of different criteria that would be used if one were appraising the extent to which a political system as a whole achieves what are usually considered democratic goals or values.

Compromise is routinely evoked in everyday language and in scholarly debates across the social sciences. Yet, it has been subjected to relatively little systematic study. The introduction to this inter-disciplinary volume addresses the research gap in three steps. First, we offer three reasons for the study of compromise: its empirical omnipresence in politics, its theoretical potential to bridge the rationalist-constructivist divide, and its normative promise to recognize the plurality of society. Second, we introduce different approaches to the coherence, legitimacy and limits of compromise found in the existing explanatory and normative literatures. We discuss why these literatures need to speak to one another, and identify possible applications in empirical research. Third, we conceptualize compromise as one possible solution to a conflict. Distinct from both dissensus and consensus, all compromises share three characteristics: concessions, non-coercion and continued controversy. However, different types of compromise can be distinguished by how mutual, costly and painful concessions are; by whether all forms of coercion are absent; and by the degree to which the relevant parties’ grounds for conflict are transformed. We conclude by discussing the challenge and appeal of ‘politics as compromise’ in plural and complex societies.

The post-Cold War era has seen the return of the ‘good war’ and a move away from legal pacifism – the control of war through international law – to ‘just war’ theorizing. This article is concerned with the re-legitimization of warfare witnessed within the post-Cold War security paradigm that is being justified via humanitarian claims. It aims to highlight the difficult relationship that has developed since the commencement of the Bush administration's ‘war on terror’ between the cosmopolitan beliefs of those who have long argued for legal and legitimate humanitarian intervention, and the cosmopolitanism being espoused by the neo-conservatives of the Bush administration and the Project for the New American Century.

The Conclusions Reached at the meeting of the European Council in Maastricht, on 9 — 10 December 1991, on economic and monetary union and also on political union, form an impressive and complex whole, in which undertakings of major importance coexist with other more timid ones. A detailed analysis would overstep the limits of an article. Moreover, there are still some problems to be cleared up before the final drafts are agreed, even if the principal political decisions have already been taken. The remarks which I would like to submit here will therefore deal more with general questions, and I will limit myself to the more significant provisions of the Maastricht agreements.

El Salvador’s FMLN is an oft-cited example of a rebel movement which successfully embraced electoral democracy. This article examines the ideological dimensions of this transformation. In the course of the Salvadoran peace process, the FMLN substantially overhauled its ideological orientation and associated modes of engagement with the state and the broader political system. Moderation unfolded in four subsequent stages: the resignification of revolution as a process of reform, the FMLN’s rebel-to-party adaptation, the electoral consolidation of the FMLN, and the FMLN as the party in government. Over the years, while electoral politics invited public moderation, Leninist dogma continued to dominate internal party politics. This article finds that the post-war FMLN has employed seemingly contradictory ideological repertoires in parallel. This ambivalence, strongly rooted in the war, has facilitated the FMLN’s electoral ascendency. It has also strained democratic consolidation in El Salvador.

Oppositional violence and repression are closely related. In fact, repression often produces an escalation of violence rather than controlling it. Bridging social movement studies and research on violence, the article uses a small-N, most-different research design to analyse the working of a specific mechanism at the onset of different types of political violence: escalating policing. In particular, it indicates specific causal mechanisms, related to interactions between social movements and the state, which create the conditions for some splinter groups to move underground. In order to compare left-wing, right-wing, ethno-national and religious violence, the article presents empirical references to the author's own empirical research on Italy and the Basque Country as well as a secondary analysis of the conflicts that preceded the rise of al-Qaeda.

This article explores the nature of the main opposition parties to the incumbent hegemonic regimes in Malaysia and Singapore. I argue that the differing characters of these opposition parties should be considered. In Singapore, where there is no ideological challenge to the ruling party, I contend that even if the opposition takes over it will be the end of a hegemonic party but not hegemony. In Malaysia, the opposite is true. This article contributes to the literature on transition theory in two ways: (1) it recognizes the diversity of authoritarian regimes and enhances analyses of various authoritarian regimes by focusing on one type – hegemonic parties; and (2) it brings ideology into the reckoning by focusing on the nature of the opposition parties most likely to take over.

BY 1997 THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY HAD BEEN IN POWER FOR EIGHTEEN years, the longest period of uninterrupted rule by a single party this century. To many it looked as if the alternation of two parties in government had stopped. And if that really had been the case, it would have meant that the British conception of opposition as the institutionalization within the workings of everyday politics of a standing alternative to the government of the day had broken down or been abandoned. But this is not what happened. The official opposition, the Labour Party, had re-established itself as a viable alternative government and was then able to gain not just an effective, but an overwhelming majority in Parliament in the general election of 1 May 1997. This outcome testified to more than the triumph of one party over another, marking the revival of the victor and the exhaustion of the loser: it also reasserted a crucial element in the constitutional practices of modern Britain.

TO AN ORDINARY DEMOCRATIC CITIZEN THE QUESTION ‘DO parties matter’ might seem a typical pseudoproblem of scholars. Everybody knows that parties matter, otherwise nobody would leave home on election day and cast his vote. Even the enlightened politicians have hardly any doubts that parties matter. When Margaret Thatcher was asked before her first electoral victory what her access to power would change in Britain, she answered in one word: ‘everything’. This means that she firmly believed that parties almost exclusively matter in a political system. How did scholars come to ask such a stupid question – so contrary to democratic common sense? New and unfamiliar questions normally rise when a change of paradigm in science takes place. The change of aradigm in this case was the shift of attention from the study of politics to policy analysis.

IN RECENT YEARS QUESTIONS ABOUT THE EXTENT AND nature of gender differences in political participation have proved controversial. Within the literature we can identify three main perspectives. The traditional view, common in the 1950s and 1960s, was that women tended to be less involved and interested in most conventional forms of political life, whether in terms of elected office, party membership, interest group activity, or campaign work, and, to a lesser extent, in voting. The paucity of women in parliamentary elites therefore seemed consistent with their general lack of interest in political life. Debates about the causes of the participation gap tended to revolve around the relative importance of gender differences in structural life-styles (domestic constraints, socio-economic resources, and organizational affiliations) and/or political attitudes (sex role socialization, political efficacy and confidence). The traditional perspective may have become less popular but it continues to receive support from some recent studies.

How do the visions of the state articulated by armed movements during conflict change when they become political parties after war? We show that ideas about the state are often central to the strategies and direction of these new parties, but there is variation in the extent to which these ideas have changed. The first part of this article shows why a focus on former rebel parties provides valuable insights into the role of ideas in post-war politics. The second part draws on the literatures on civil wars and political parties to highlight their relevance for former rebel parties. The third part provides a framework for understanding the variation in the role of ideology in former rebel parties, by focusing on ideological content and explanations of post-war ideological continuity and change. This part also introduces the other articles in the special issue and wider collection. Finally, we discuss the effects of these ideologies when they encounter other logics of post-war politics.

In recent literature on post-Soviet electoral revolutions in places where attempts at regime change through popular protest did not succeed, opposition groups are often simply regarded as ‘failed’. And yet, opposition actors exist and participate in the political life of their country. Building on the Belarusian and Azerbaijani cases, we argue that opposition actors are maintained in a ‘ghetto’, often virtual, tightly managed by the ruling authorities who exert monopolistic control over civic activities. Opposition actors adapt to the restricted conditions – accepting a certain level of dependency. They thus develop various tactics to engage with the outside, striving to reduce the ghetto walls. To this end this article proposes a typology of what we call oppositional ‘resistance models’: electoral, in the media, lobbying and through education. The models highlight what makes ‘opposition’ in authoritarian states and are a step towards a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon in this context.

The article explores the evolution of labour politics during the transition from authoritarian to electoral rule in South Korea and Taiwan during the last decade and a half. It argues that labour politics is a crucial aspect of democratic consolidation because it facilitates the reproduction of contingent mass consent to the new regime. To this end, organized labour must be re-positioned as a political and economic actor, something that requires institutional and structural reform away from the authoritarian experience. Based on analysis of the pattern of political insertion and the legal framework governing the interaction between organized labour, business and the state before and after the electoral transition, as well as data on strikes, union density and membership, the essay concludes that substantive change in the labour politics partial regime is minor in both countries and that in fact, democratic consolidation remains an unachieved goal in each.

After the fall of communism the ascendancy of neoliberalism seemed assured. Democratic government and free market capitalism had been universalized and any serious alternatives to them had disappeared. Rather than the end of ideology, neoliberalism is the latest version of the western ideology, proclaiming universal values and modernity, in the form of the liberal global order and globalization. Critics argue that neoliberalism is chiefly associated with the United States and Britain, and is best understood as a form of hegemony, concerned with the projection of Anglo-American values, policies and institutions around the world, including a particular model of capitalism and military interventions, and a particular conception of the West.