THE ABORTIVE COUP IN VENEZUELA, ON 4 FEBRUARY 1992, came at first sight in a very surprising place and at a very surprising time. Venezuela has enjoyed uninterrupted democratic rule since 1958; the last serious attempted coup was as long ago as 1962. Moreover, many Latin American countries whose experience of military rule was much more recent, have moved in the direction of democracy during the last few years. Textbooks which discussed and sought to explain Latin America's recent move toward democracy have only recently been published. Do Latin Americanists now need to start rehearsing their after-the-fact explanations for a new series of democratic breakdowns? The decision by President Fujimori in Peru to close his national Congress in April 1992 might suggest that the Venezuelan case is by no means isolated.

Established wisdom is sceptical of direct linkages between economic hardship and contentious mobilization. Occupy protests seem to constitute an anomaly in this regard by their very existence, but factors associated with these events have not been investigated yet. This study of 398 self-designated Occupy protests across 180 countries finds that the country’s level of inequality was associated with a higher rate of protest. Equally important were the severity of the downturn in GDP growth in 2007–11 and the level of democracy. The results offer some evidence for the ‘inverse J-curve’ hypothesis whereby an economic boom period followed by a downturn is conducive to protest. Few studies have previously investigated the influence of inequality and economic growth on political protest across a diverse set of countries going beyond OECD democracies. The applicability of these findings to protest events more generally needs to be corroborated and discussed in future work.

Masculine identity confers advantages over the feminine ‘other’, but works differently and in a twofold way. ‘Man’ as the generic representation of ‘the human’ is only apparently de-gendered or gender-neutral. It is in fact gendered masculine and defined within heteronormativity and homophobia. However, there are also overtly gendered roles for men, though these are characteristically represented in selective and flattering ways. Men therefore have little need for an ‘identity politics’ to work against an oppressive norm. Rather they are positioned against each other within competitive hierarchies, which are co-defined with the values and structures of militarism and capitalism.

Rather Than Signalling The End Of War, As Many Liberal Minds had hoped, the end of the cold war has seen ‘hot’ war moving firmly to centre-stage, while at the same time presaging a reclassification of its predominant forms and purposes. Since 1990 there has been a rash of what Kaldor calls ‘new wars’. Although often highly localized, they confound settled understandings of inter-state or civil war by virtue of the diverse range of protagonists involved, the issues over which they are fought, and their consistently brutal impact upon civilians. A virtual revolution in media technology has also made such wars publicly visible to an unprecedented degree. In spite of the fact that new wars are often fought without recourse to the most sophisticated or destructive of military technology, the horrific impact upon populations caught up in them has clearly assaulted public sensibilities worldwide and generated a chorus of demands that something should be done about them. Consequently, the political and ethical dimensions of going to war in response to such threats have also moved in from the periphery to the centre of public and intellectual debate. As Walzer has recently observed, the ‘chief dilemma of international politics is whether people in danger should be rescued by military forces from outside’. From the point of view of the key members of the international community at least, armed ‘humanitarian intervention’ is no longer just a form of war but has become virtually synonymous with permissible war itself.

The conditions under which losers are willing to challenge the results of elections remain an open question. Using data from the Electoral Integrity Project for 66 democratic and non-democratic countries in 2012 and 2013, we measure how parties or candidates react once votes have been cast and one of them is declared the winner. Do they accept or challenge the results? This measure allows us to examine the causal mechanisms that account for the self-enforcing nature of democracies. Our findings show that losers’ consent increases with free and fair elections and in more economically developed countries, while income inequality is not relevant. Additionally, the impact of free and fair elections is particularly important in more economically developed countries.

The electoral success of extreme right parties (ERPs) has attracted a disproportionate number of studies. By contrast, research into the mainstream parties’ reactions to ERPs has engendered little interest. With few exceptions, the effects of the centre-right parties’ strategic options in electoral competitions with ERPs remain unexplored. To overcome this shortcoming, this investigation examines the strategies employed by the French centre-right party – Union pour un Movement Populaire (UMP) against the Front National in the 2007 and the 2012 presidential elections by focusing on the topics of immigration and integration. This study suggests that the adoption of accommodating approaches in both elections was followed by distinct levels of success in 2007 and 2012. Drawing on a qualitative comparative analysis, this article explores three hypotheses in order to enhance understanding of the divergent effectiveness of the UMP’s accommodative approaches in the elections studied.

This article explores the gender dimension of ideology and representation by analysing the political parties that ran in the 2019 Polish parliamentary elections, using a novel analytical framework based on gender claims and gender-related policy pledges. This article demonstrates that a left and liberal ideology largely determines feminist and pro-LGBTQ+ promissory representation. However, the gender ideologies of right-wing political parties vary in their traditional types and can include a populist element. This article contributes to comparative gender and politics scholarship by examining gender ideologies in the Central and Eastern European context, where on the one hand, populism and anti-gender campaigns have taken hold, and, on the other, feminist and progressive movements have challenged traditionalism and illiberalism. This article also differentiates a scholarly meaning of gender ideology from its populist meaning.

THE ELECTIONS TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT IN JUNE 1989 will be only the third ever to be held simultaneously in independent nation states. The first two direct elections, however, were marked almost everywhere by disappointment; not only was turnout low −60.7 per cent in 1979 and 57.0 per cent in 1984, but the elections seemed to be more in the nature of plebiscites on the performance of national governments, rather than genuinely transnational, and politicians found it difficult to demonstrate their relevance to a wider public. It is true that small radical new parties, such as the Front National were able to exploit the elections to their own advantage. But this, of course, did not endear the European elections to liberal democrats.

Health Care Has Been Called ‘The World's Most successful industry’. That success is long-standing. In every nation for which we have reliable long-term evidence the proportion of Gross National Product devoted to health care is much higher than was the cast a generation ago. The state has been central to that expansion. In all advanced industrial nations it regulates health care industries; in many it pays most of the cost of care; and in some it directly employs those who do the caring. In the 1980s, however, most countries tried to slow down the growth of health care spending, or even to cut it absolutely. The ‘health care state’ is as a consequence being reshaped across the advanced capitalist world: its power structures are changing; the conditions under which it funds and delivers services are being altered; and its relations with the ‘consumers’ of care are being transformed.

WELFARE STATES ARE NATIONAL STATES, AND IN EVERY country welfare is a national concern, circumscribed by the nation's borders and reserved for its residents alone. In the course of centuries, these states have emerged from and against one another, in mutual competition, and in the past century this process of state formation in the West went in tandem with the collectivization of care. The welfare state is the national state in its latest phase. It may be succeeded by another stage which we may eventually see.

This article analyses the 2005 French referendum debate on the EU Constitutional Treaty as an instance of depoliticization. Particular emphasis is placed on the argumentative strategy of President Chirac as, despite the treaty's focus on institutional reform, he eventually chose to justify the document in terms of social policy: an ultimately unconvincing strategy because voters believed it was contradicted by current EU policy priorities. On this evidence, pace Glyn Morgan, prioritizing a justification of EU finality over that of institutions and policies does not seem appropriate. Rather, the priority for integration is to overcome elites' strategies of depoliticization during referendum campaigns.

REALITY IS UNTIDY AND WE SHOULD THANK OUR LUCKY stars for the fact. Liberty thrives on (and in) interstices. The reality of Hayek's world would be no less unbearable than that of Marx's. There is in fact no capitalist society, nor is there a socialist one. All variants of really existing capitalism — and socialism — are mixtures of both, and those which have come closest to the concepts were also the least attractive. The first question to address to any real society is therefore not whether it can be labelled this way or that, but what is the peculiar blend of ingredients which makes it tick.

The lack of effective political parties is one of the dominant characteristics of modern Arab polities. The role of opposition to the authoritarian regimes is therefore left to a number of civil society organizations. This study examines the interactions among such groups in the context of the traditional transition paradigm and it analyses specifically how religious and secular organizations operate and interact. The empirical evidence shows that such groups, far from attempting any serious coalition-building to make common demands for democracy on the regime, have a competitive relationship because of their ideological differences and conflicting policy preferences. This strengthens authoritarian rule even in the absence of popular legitimacy. The article focuses its attention on Algeria and Jordan.

The European Union is caught between technocracy and the politics of the exception, eroding in the process the very political sphere that makes democracy work. Partly a cause of this erosion and partly an effect, the EU retreats into the ‘rule of rules’ when faced with what are, in fact, profoundly political problems. Whether it be in response to the eurozone crisis, EU–Russia–Ukraine relations or the influx of refugees, the EU's policies led to conflicts over geopolitics, sovereignty and redistribution. Its apolitical responses were as ubiquitous as they were inadequate. They reflect Germany's preference for consensual politics, which is paradoxically enforced by Angela Merkel's dictum about there being ‘no alternative’. In order to think of alternatives to the Europe that exists, we need to revive ‘the political’, theorized by the likes of Carl Schmitt, Max Weber and Hannah Arendt at times when democracy was under duress.

OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS, ECOLOGY HAS MADE ITS ENTRANCE INTO politics. At first the main concern was with pollution; but soon it broadened, and today the watchword is energy. In both cases the underlying phenomenon is that of economic growth. Not that all growth is incompatible with ecological balance; but over the last few decades normally there was a conflict, and industrial and urban growth in particular have led to a significant deterioration of the environment. Hence the importance of the controversy surrounding industrialization and economic growth, which has taken on an increasing importance in the politics of several Western European countries.

EPOCHS OF MAJOR SOCIAL CHANGE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A SPURT to intense intellectual effort. The emergence of the new nations and their economic and political modernization constitutes one such epoch in history. The phenomenon has demanded from the student of society new modes of understanding and analysis, has provided him with both a challenge and an opportunity, and has called for new insights and a continuous re-fashioning of conceptual schemes. What is more, the nature of the change in these societies differs in significant respects from the experience of earlier epochs. It is neither the cumulative result of an outburst of creativity that marked the scientific and industrial revolutions in the West, nor a sharp break with the past brought about by a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’ revolution, although undoubtedly both of these strands are involved in varying proportions. A deliberate attempt at condensing several centuries into a short span, the occurrence of ‘simultaneous change’ in so many spheres of life, the phenomenon of cultural dualism in so many societies, and the complex interactions caused by the constant closing in of national and international horizons, have led to a situation of continuous flux and readjustment that seems to have neither a beginning, nor possibly an end.

ONE CONTINUING CHARACTERISTIC OF GERMAN POLITICAL STYLE IS A ‘politics of fear’ which is propagated by both Left and Right. The Extra Parliamentary Opposition's anxieties about the neo-fascist potential in the political system are complemented by the campaign of the Springer press against totalitarian extremists of the Left. Fear is of course not necessarily unfounded in a regime which at its foundation was regarded as only ‘provisional’ and which has had every reason to fear its enemies after its experience of reactionary conservatism and Nazism and now of developments in the German Democratic Republic. The Federal Republic has been under considerable pressure since its inception to protect itself more successfully than its Weimar predecessor against its enemies. Unfortunately a ‘militant democracy’ can easily become an illiberal democracy, more concerned with its own stability than with political development.

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE PATTERN OF SIMILARITIES AND differences in Britain and France with regard to public service charterism: that strand of recent public service reform designed to reconstruct relations between the state and the citizen on the basis of new or revitalized principles of public service, epitomized by the Citizen's Charter (1991) in Britain and the Charte des Services Publics (1992) in France. Despite the appearance of increasing convergence in the rhetoric of public management reform in the two countries during the 1990s, especially during the incumbency of centre-left governments in the latter part of the decade, there is evidence of continuing divergence in the philosophy and practice of public service charterism. This article argues that variation is a function of the existence of country-specific public service regimes, embodying different ideals of citizenship, which have shaped the emergence and implementation of charter policy in Britain and France.

FOR SOME YEARS NOW, WESTERN ACADEMICS AND POLICY-MAKERS HAVE embraced the cause of democratic reform in Central and Eastern Europe. To take but one well-known example, President Clinton in the 1994 State of the Union Address cited the absence of war among democracies as a reason for promotion of democracy around the world. Assistance to former Warsaw Pact and newly independent states has been made conditional to varying degrees on the acceptance of democratic change. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Union, the United States Agency for International Development and associated non-governmental organizations have unleashed armies of promoters of democracy throughout the region to: observe elections; monitor human rights; draft new constitutions and laws defending civil and political rights; train judges and police personnel; and organize and assist political parties, media and non-governmental pressure groups. In short, they have sought to transplant the fabric of civil society and democratic institutions. These armies have landed on terrain often quite foreign to them and have often displayed little sensitivity to the social, economic and political context in which they are operating. This may have contributed to results other than those intended.