This article examines levels of interest and trust among the public in relation to Northern Ireland's newly established political institutions and actors, through an analysis of the results of the 2007 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (NILT). It is important to reveal the specific groups of people with the highest levels of political disenchantment, particularly in the context of the longer-term stability of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive, since the willingness of the electorate to have faith and trust in the workability of these political institutions and in the various political actors in whose custody they lie is considered vital.

The article examines the response of the French National Rally (Rassemblement National – RN) to COVID-19. It combines computer-based and qualitative content analysis of Facebook posts and press releases to uncover the salience and frames of the infection. I find that the RN used an ambivalent strategy to respond to the pandemic, linking an unexpected problem to its core ideological tenets, while also adapting its programmatic profile. Specifically, the RN interpreted COVID-19 in terms of immigration and defence. Diagnostic frames drew on nativist, authoritarian and populist tenets to identify the origin of the infection (migrants), and to attribute blame for its spread (lack of border controls). Moreover, prognostic frames used disagreement within the scientific community to criticize governments' policies and propose alternatives. While this strategy allowed the RN to address an issue outside its ‘comfort zone’, its support base remained stable. These results point at the radical right's strategic use of expert knowledge and populist logics to try to improve its credibility in mainstream public debates.

One of the most glaring differences between traditional and emerging middle powers relates to their projection of societal values abroad. Since most emerging powers are essentially fragmented multiclass states, class compromise often emerges to intermediate contradictory demands emanating from fragile political coalitions. Against the backdrop of vast income inequalities, and facing some domestic constituencies favouring liberalization on the one hand against pro-redistributive groups on the other, adopting a middle power role, in the cases of South Africa and Brazil, emerges in order to ameliorate these conflicting demands. Two dimensions are examined very briefly, namely recent mediation efforts in Iran and Libya and attempts to effect redistribution by reforming processes of global governance.

The American aggression in Iraq and the campaign in Afghanistan resulted from the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US. 9/11 has had a massive, catalysing effect on the American public, press, main political parties and official foreign policy makers. This article assesses the impact of 9/11 in changing US foreign policy and especially in creating a new foreign policy establishment by comparing it to the consequences of an historical military attack on the United States – Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941. It concludes that there is adequate evidence to suggest that a new bipartisan foreign policy consensus/establishment has emerged.

We examine the performance of four parliamentary democracies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK – as they confront the need for a substantial fiscal policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research covers the period 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2020. We score the four countries on nine components of democratic accountability using Mark Philp's distinction between formal and political accountability. We conclude, first, that to appreciate the nuanced character of accountability, it is important to have a set of operational measures that identify specific aspects of performance. Second, preparation is important for resilience: countries that demonstrated strong accountability before the pandemic maintained relatively high accountability standards during the crisis; weaker accountability mechanisms showed less resistance to the expanding power of the executive. Finally, it is easier to be accountable when outcomes are favourable, but favourable outcomes include adherence to the norms of democratic accountability.

THE POLITICAL CRISIS WHICH ERUPTED IN POLAND IN 1980 WAS widely attributed to the economic problems which beset the country then and subsequently. Economic conditions undoubtedly contributed to the crisis — but survey evidence suggests that gradual cultural changes were a less obvious but at least equally important factor. Historically, the Polish people have characteristically placed relatively great emphasis on self-determination and political freedoms. This traditional heritage has not grown weaker in recent years. Quite the contrary, it seems to have been reinforced by a gradual shift toward postmaterialist values among the Polish public.

An intergenerational shift from materialist toward postmaterialist priorities, already shown to be taking place in more than a score of Western countries, also seems to be occurring in Poland.

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES AUSTRALIAN REFERENDUM PRACTICE WITH the aim of contributing to the growing international debate over concepts of deliberative democracy, defined in terms of democratic regimes structured to maximize community deliberation in public decision-making. Theories of deliberative democracy go beyond earlier approaches to participatory democracy by specifying in greater detail the nature of the deliberative process in which citizens should be able to participate and of the importance of institutions of civil society to an effective deliberative process. The focus on ideals of public deliberation ref lects the ambition of deliberative democrats (the ‘deliberati’ if you will) to ground political decision-making in norms of shared public reason. Where earlier approaches to participatory democracy investigated rights to political participation, current approaches to deliberative democracy also investigate responsibilities of political participants – particularly responsibilities to comply with norms of rational political deliberation.

Besides seat maximization, what factors motivate an incumbent regime in the grey zone between democracy and dictatorship to alter a relatively institutionalized parliamentary electoral system? To answer this question, this article seeks to uncover the rationale guiding the 2005 changes to Russia's electoral system. It presents evidence to suggest that the same strategies that allowed Russia's current party of power to use the existing electoral system to its advantage in the 2003 Duma election, threatened to spoil the fruits of that advantage in the years to come. Yet it also points out that moving from a mixed electoral system to a purely proportional system could be good for Russian democracy in the future. As a result, the work contends that seemingly authoritarian incumbents will promote reforms that aid the future cause of democracy when these same reforms serve their more immediate interests.

This article makes a two-fold contribution to the European Parliament (EP) literature. First, it challenges the dominant assumption that post-Amsterdam the EP has experienced an increase in its powers. Through analysis of the Socrates case the article shows that the EP is now potentially weaker under the post-Amsterdam co-decision procedure (co-decision II), than it was under the earlier variant, co-decision I. Second, the article uncovers a hitherto overlooked aspect of internal divisions within the parliament, by revealing that there is scope for inter-committee conflict in the EP over budgetary allocations for multi-annual programmes. It is argued that such conflict can weaken the parliament in co-decision negotiations with the council, and that the negotiation of the EU's new multi-annual budgetary framework provides the perfect conditions for such internecine conflict to occur once more.

The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), victor in the civil war in 1991, has since transformed into an authoritarian party. While this transition is well covered in the literature, few studies have explored how the party’s ideology has adapted after its position was consolidated. This article addresses this gap, by analysing the EPRDF’s ideology of revolutionary democracy, and how the interpretation of it has changed over time. The Ethiopian case shows that wartime ideologies should not be considered as static remnants of the past. Instead, the ideology has served as a flexible political tool for controlling the state and for justifying or concealing major policy changes. More recent protests and ruptures in the ruling party, however, indicate that revolutionary democracy may have an expiry date. There seems thus to be a limit to how long a wartime ideology can provide power to uphold a rebel government’s hegemony and coherence.

Northern Ireland’s consociational institutions were reviewed by a committee of its Assembly in 2012–13. The arguments of both critics and exponents of the arrangements are of general interest to scholars of comparative politics, power-sharing and constitutional design. The authors of this article review the debates and evidence on the d’Hondt rule of executive formation, political designation, the likely impact of changing district magnitudes for assembly elections, and existing patterns of opposition and accountability. They evaluate the scholarly, political and legal literature before commending the merits of maintaining the existing system, including the rules under which the system might be modified in future.

In the last few decades, ethno-regionalist parties have become leading players in many regional political systems across Europe. This increased representation has opened up new strategic opportunities for these parties, and in particular it has offered them the chance to participate in regional government. Based on a newly compiled data set of 282 governmental formations in Italian and Spanish regions during the period 1945–2011, this study develops and tests several hypotheses regarding the governmental participation of ethno-regionalist parties at regional level. These have been partly drawn from similar studies of ‘outsider’ party families, such as the Green parties or the radical right. A specific focus is then placed on multilevel dynamics, based on the idea that there is a relationship between party strategies at regional and state levels, and in particular on the perception that parties are willing to adopt compatible alliance strategies at the two levels (vertical congruence), at least under certain conditions. Both types of hypothesis (single-level and multilevel) are shown to be plausible when empirically tested on the cases of Italy and Spain. Special attention is given to the conditions under which vertical congruence is used by ethno-regionalist parties as an effective way of minimizing the risks associated with inclusion in governmental coalitions at regional level.

IN THIS PRESENT-DAY WORLD, THE STATE - AND THIS IS TYPIcally the more or less sovereign national state - is both indispensable and inadequate. It is an indispensable instrument to get many things done, to provide many needed services and to deal with many real problems. But it is inadequate to cope with an increasing number of other problems of life and death for many of its inhabitants. No state today can protect the lives of its citizens in the case of thermonuclear war against it, nor against the poisonous fall-out from thermonuclear war outside its borders. No national state can protect the world's ecology, the oceans and the atmosphere, nor can any one state sove the problems of worldwide population growth or lack of raw materials, energy or food. In all these respects, the first and basic promise of government - to protect the lives of its citizens - has become illusory.

In the mid-1990s, Canadian scholarship introduced an important distinction between historically incorporated national minorities and ethnic groups emerging from recent immigration. While the former may be accommodated through federal or multinational arrangements, multiculturalism has come to describe a normative framework of immigrant integration. The distinction between these analytically different types of movements is crucial for Taylor's and Kymlicka's influential theories, but the relations between different types of national and ethnic struggles for rights and recognition have remained unexplored in much of the subsequent scholarly literature. This article starts from a theoretical position where different types of diversity are viewed as highly interdependent in practice. Tracing the trajectories of multiculturalism in three different countries, the article aims to identify common patterns of how changing relations between traditionally incorporated groups affect public perceptions of and state responses to more recent immigration-induced diversity. More specifically, it asks the following question: to what extent does the absence (in Germany), discontinuation (in the Netherlands) and exacerbation (in Canada) of claims on ethnocultural grounds by traditionally incorporated groups influence the willingness of the national majority/ies to grant multicultural rights to immigrants?

‘POLICY DETERMINES POLITICS’ IS A FAMILIAR APHORISM AND ITS durability has been tested time and again. Lowi's initial typology showed the normal trinitarian design (distinguishing regulative, distributive and redistributive policy). Later a fourth type was added constituent policy. Lowi's original three elements are, however, not on the same logical level. If we distinguish between the regulative and distributive levels of decision-making we end up with a six-fold typology (Matrix 1).

A distinction can be drawn within political philosophy between those theories which emphasize the procedural element of discussion in politics (exemplified in the work of J. Rawls and J. Habermas) and those that are concerned with the grounds people will bring up in support of their position. Within the latter type there are theories that work from wants/preferences (e.g. J. Bentham and some modern utilitarians), those that emphasize certain ideals (e.g. the Utopian Socialists), those that look to needs and their positive development (e.g. K. Marx), and those that use people's true interests (e.g. the Frankfurt School theorists and broad utilitarians like J. S. Mill and H. Sidgwick). This article has a twofold aim: to show how Sen's ‘capability approach’ incorporates a theory of true interests that goes beyond even more sophisticated existing theories of true interests; and to explain why Sen refrains from using the language of interests and needs. If his approach is reformulated in terms of needs and interests, certain political ramifications – structural and institutional changes – become unavoidable requirements for the realization of his goals. One possibility is that Sen does not discuss his innovative work in these terms because he is unwilling to condone some of these practical political ramifications.

As they become more successful, populist radical right parties face a tension between keeping their nativist credentials and moderating their appeal to gain new voters. We argue that differentiating party messages to core supporters and the wider electorate allows parties to pursue both goals. We outline and empirically illustrate the previously underexplored phenomenon of selective messaging based on the communication strategy of the Hungarian Jobbik party throughout its lifespan (2006–19) in partisan outlets, press releases and Facebook. Using a dictionary approach, we map the co-evolution of populist and nativist mobilization under conditions of supply- and demand-side changes. Our results show the decline and transformation of Jobbik's nativist appeal, and an increasing reliance on populism. The trend is not uniform; Jobbik relies on nativism as a function of targeting party identifiers or the general electorate in specific media outlets. Our findings show the importance of mapping parties’ programmatic appeal across platforms and over time.

Do the class backgrounds of legislators shape their views and actions relating to inequality and economic policy? Building on findings about ‘white-collar government’ in the US, this article examines the relationship between legislators’ class and their attitudes and self-reported behaviour in advanced democracies, drawing on survey data from 15 countries including 73 national and subnational parliaments in Europe and Israel. I find that legislators from business backgrounds are more likely to support income inequality and small government, as well as less likely to consult with labour groups, than those from working-class and other backgrounds. These results are buttressed by analysis of an additional cross-national survey of European legislative candidates’ attitudes, which replicates key findings. Given the skewed class makeup of legislatures in advanced democracies, these findings may be relevant to our understanding of widespread economic and political inequalities that are increasingly salient in many countries.

This article looks at the role of the Party of European Socialists (PES) in its attempts to shape social democratic parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) towards a West European norm. It discusses how existing views in the academic literature on the role of transnational parties are inadequate. We argue that the PES did not play a key role in encouraging the establishment and development of parties in the CEE states from the 2004 enlargement in the early stages of accession. We contend that the overall influence of party federations has been limited, and that these limitations were as much in evidence before enlargement took place as they were afterwards.