The article starts from a critique of the widespread assumption that intergovernmentalism is not only the more practical but also the more democratic way of handling the current European crises – and particularly the euro crisis – to argue for the need to rethink the working and the definition of democracy in the current heightened interconnectedness of political organization. It suggests that perceiving European citizens as being separated into distinct state communities stands in the way of a full appreciation of the externalities, hence of the reciprocal responsibilities, that they owe each other and turns apparently democratic decisions into potential acts of domination, as theorized by both Pettit (1997) and Bohman (2006). It suggests that we should embrace a more encompassing and dialogical notion of democracy which translates Pallasmaa’s (2012) notion of hapticity from the field of physical architecture to that of institutional architecture. It concludes by suggesting that there are already institutional architectures in the EU which lend themselves to a haptic declension, for example the European Semester.

The personalization of politics, the decline of political parties and the weakening of political institutions in large democracies are considered to produce instability and to undermine democratic governance. Yet despite having extremely informal and personalized systems with non-ideological parties, small states around the world maintain significantly higher levels of democracy and regime stability than large ones. This article addresses this paradox by offering a systematic literature review of 167 case study publications on personalization and informal politics in 46 small states. The analysis reveals that personalized relations between political elites translate into either fragmentation or power concentration, while pervasive patron–client linkages structure the interaction between citizens and politicians. Despite the obvious downsides of these dynamics for democratic governance, the small state system is functional in the sense that it fulfils the needs of both citizens and politicians, which explains why small states have succeeded in maintaining their political stability.

THE ELECTION OF 582 COUNCILLORS TO NORTHERN IRELAND'S 26 local authorities on 21 May 1997 was eclipsed, to a large extent, by the media focus on the General Election earlier that month (1 May). That little attention is paid to the only elected forum with executive powers in Northern Ireland is neither new nor surprising. Councils in the province have relatively few functional responsibilities, confined principally to the delivery of regulatory services (street cleaning, refuse collection, leisure and tourism and a limited role in economic development); representation on area boards which deliver major services such as education; and a consultative role in relation to planning, roads, water and housing which are delivered through ‘Next Steps’ agencies or similar arm's-length organizations. This minor role is reflected in the level of council budgets. In 1997/98, the estimated net expenditure for local government in Northern Ireland amounts to £230 million, approximately three per cent of identifiable public expenditure.

This article examines the nature of political opposition in the Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR) to give us an understanding of its role in and approach to political reform in the territory. It explores the emergence of the pro-democracy opposition in Macao since the end of the colonial era and the self-perception of pro-democratic opposition groups in the MSAR regime, and argues that the majority of opposition groups perceive themselves as ‘loyal’ opponents to the current regime. The groups aim at checking the authorities in the scope of the constitution as loyal constituents. Their assumption of this role is the result of several environmental factors, including a relatively weak civil society, a lack of resources and a pro-government media.

ALTHOUGH THE SYNCHRONIZATION OF ECONOMIC FLUCTUations with the electoral cycle often preoccupies political leaders, the real force of political influence on macroeconomic performance comes in the determination of economic priorities. Here the ideology and platform of the political party in power dominate. Just as the electoral calendar helps set the timing of policy, so the ideology of political leaders shapes the substance of economic policy.

IN SPITE OF ALL THAT HAS HAPPENED, WITHIN BRITAIN AND WITHOUT, since Bagehot's death in 1877, the British political world still speaks, writes and teaches in Bagehot's terms, Some reassessments of his ideas did of course take place, the most searching of which probably arose as a result of the advent of socialism. Its impact on the politics of Britain, and of the world, needed to be considered. Nevertheless, though we might have grasped what changes had taken place, and though we might have seen how Bagehot's vision needed to be adjurtedg to these new realities, yet, on the whole it seemed that these changes did not affect the essential aspects of that vision. We were still bounded by the classic British parliamentary system for which Bagehot is the best interpreter.

During the eurozone crisis, technocratic governments were appointed in several eurozone countries, becoming in the eyes of many the embodiment of the EU's democratic deficit. In spite of the central place that these technocratic governments occupy in the scholarly debate, however, we have remarkably little evidence on Europeans’ attitudes towards technocracy, and technocratic governments are under-studied from an empirical standpoint. We contribute to the very limited empirical literature on this topic by using a novel natural experiment design, in the context of the 2011 Italian crisis that led to the appointment of the Monti technocratic cabinet. We hypothesize that the effect of technocratic appointments on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is a priori uncertain, and it depends on the balance of a trade-off between reduced input participation and increased output effectiveness. Overall, the results point to citizens’ attitudes towards technocracy being more complex than often assumed in the debate.

Why have some German Land constitutions been changed more frequently than others? This is the basic research question addressed in this article. In addition and maybe even more importantly, for the first time the article will apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to the study of comparative constitutional policy, and thus will investigate what conditions explain the changeableness of subnational constitutions. Overall, I will argue that subnational constitutional policy is not just a manifestation of Germany’s consensus democracy. On the contrary, it seems that a crucial element of majoritarian democracy – that is, a low number of effective parties – appears to be a core condition for the changeableness of constitutions. In addition, the findings suggest that any theory striving to explain the frequency and scope of constitutional amendments in a comparative perspective should include both institutional and party factors.

The objective of this paper is to reconstruct both the Kursk incident and especially the reaction to it by Russian military and political authorities with the aim of gauging the extent of continuity and change of Soviet-era practices in three key areas of contemporary Russia's public institutional life: (1) the organizational behaviour and institutional culture of the Russian military; (2) the behaviour of Russia's executive political leadership, i.e. President Vladimir Putin; and (3) the media of mass communication. Reaction to such crises, the author argues, can shed much light on the actual behavioural patterns and operating assumptions of relevant institutions and leaders. The method employed is essentially a detailed forensic reconstruction of the incident and its aftermath from three angles: the reactions of the military authorities; the reactions of Putin; and the reactions of the mass media (and of the authorities to the mass media).

The individual is nonsense, the individual is zero.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1921

Human life still costs nothing here.

Leonid Radzikhovskii, 2000

European mainstream right parties are increasingly choosing to include radical right parties in coalition governments or other types of stable and committed cooperation. How does this cooperation affect voters’ perceptions of party positions? This article examines whether coalition signals have a significant impact on voters’ perceptions of the specific policy issues that were at stake in the bargaining process. More specifically, does the issue ownership of the radical right cause voters to perceive mainstream parties as radicalizing on immigration issues pertaining to asylum and multiculturalism? I compare the perceptions of Dutch parties before and after two coalition formations that (formally and informally) involved a radical right party: the coalition with the List Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and the support agreement with the Freedom Party in 2010. Furthermore, I examine the long-term effects of the Danish mainstream right government's reliance on the support of the radical right Danish People's Party in 2001–11.

This article examines the evolution of long-term trends in the prioritization of environmental protection in Britain over a period of four decades. It does so by compiling comparable questions tapping into the same underlying environmental dimension from a range of sources, including historical polling data that has only recently been made available to the research community. At the aggregate level, prioritization largely tracks changing economic conditions as well as key environmental events, with the winter of 2019 showing the highest recorded levels. Furthermore, trends in individuals' willingness to prioritize the environment may not always go in tandem with trends in environmental salience. At the individual level, educational attainment is the only consistently significant demographic correlate over time. However, there is evidence of increasing politicization of the environment, with left–right orientations only becoming an important correlate of environmental prioritization in recent years, in line with rising divergence on the issue at the elite level.

In recent years much debate has been generated over the reshaping of the European airline industry and the restructuring of many of the heavily indebted national flag-carriers across the European Union. The European Commission has sought to orchestrate this reform process by the gradual break up of monopolies in air travel and its associated services and a much tighter policing of state aid practices. The EU's liberalizing agenda in air transport, however, has met with strong domestic opposition in the member states. Nowhere else has the resistance to reform been stronger than in Greece, where for a decade successive attempts to restructure or privatize Olympic Airways have yielded very limited success. By focusing, in particular, on the initiative of the Greek government in 2003 to create a new ‘Olympic Airlines’, the article examines how domestic pressures prompted the Greek government to shift away from cooperation with the Commission and invite conflict. The Greek government lost an ECJ case and both Athens and the Commission were left with a sub-optimal outcome. By linking the narrative to the conceptual literature on Europeanization and compliance, the article addresses a number of themes including: the contestation of European competition rules and the ability of national governments to manipulate them, policy entrepreneurship and complex problem-solving, as well as the Commission's role as a stimulus, but potentially also an obstacle to domestic reform.

Two attempts at grand compromise have underpinned global order since the end of the Second World War. The first, a compromise between laissez-faire liberalism and domestic interventionism, famously described by John Ruggie as ‘embedded liberalism’, legitimated and stabilized a multilateral order for 50 years. A second attempt, this time between North and South at the end of the Cold War around a discourse of ‘sustainable development’, remains uneasy, conflict prone and much less institutionalized. They are compared and contrasted by asking whether they are truly compromises or reflect domination and hegemony, what conditions led to them, and what drivers of change have limited and challenged them. Ultimately, differences in their bases of legitimacy offer lessons for the prospects of building a new grand compromise in the wake of contemporary strains on global governance.

Recent discussions of accountability in contexts of expert knowledge raise questions about the limits of transparency. Against this background, we discuss the nexus between expert knowledge and meaningful accountability – that is, context-sensitive accountability based on a genuine understanding of a situation. We argue that the concentration of expertise in certain institutions makes it difficult to hold those institutions accountable. In particular, three components challenge meaningful accountability: specialization, inaccessibility and potential biases or conflict of interest. We emphasize the role of ‘epistemic communities’ and their impact on the tension between expert knowledge and independence. Drawing on the deliberative systems literature, we discuss how expert knowledge might be communicated to outsiders to enable meaningful accountability. To illustrate our argument, we draw on the European Central Bank, a case study in which states have chosen a delegation design characterized by a high degree of independence and trust in expert knowledge, to the detriment of accountability. We sketch possible avenues for creating the conditions for meaningful accountability even in the case of institutions with highly concentrated expertise.

DURING THE 1990S, THE INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS (IFIS) have gone beyond supporting free-market economics via the socalled Washington consensus which advocated primarily marketoriented reform, to adopt a broader notion of ‘good governance’ which includes political as well as economic factors. The World Bank's Development Report 1997; The State in a Changing World is a key document in explaining this new thinking. It lays out the desirability of democracy, the rule of law and effective democratic regulation alongside the market-oriented economic policies and fiscal orthodoxy which IFIs have long advocated. There is no doubt that governance matters to development and to that extent the Report is welcome. The Report also makes a number of worthwhile points about administrative good practice and reform. However some scepticism is in order too. This is because the Bank's notion of ‘good governance’ is too idealistic, insufficiently historically specific and over-confident in respect of what we do know and can know about the politics of development.

AS THE GREAT HISTORIAN LOUIS HARTZ TAUGHT US IN HIS remarkable study The Liberal Tradition in America, anyone wishing to focus on the special character of a regime would do well to begin by taking the measure of what is absent rather than what is present. Like America, Switzerland has long been regarded as an exception to many of the conventional rules of historical and democratic development — Sonderfall Schweiz is how the Swiss portray and perhaps boast a little about their national exceptionalism. Switzerland possesses a unique form of democratic government the hallmarks of which are participatory democracy, neutrality and radical federalism (decentrahsm or localism, what the Swiss sometimes call Kantönligeist). These hallmarks give to it a character which stands in stark contrast to traditional Anglo-American democracy. The student of comparative politics will observe at once that a great many of Switzerland's leading political features seem to have no analogue in either the English common law or the American Constitution. Swiss democracy is English democracy minus most of English democracy's salient features: which is to say, it is scarcely English democracy at all.

The powerful idea of natural rights as the armour of the individual against illegitimate authority (originally against the illegitimacy of absolute monarchy, later against the hyper-legitimacy of majoritarian tyranny) is largely missing, for example. Missing too is the tradition of an independent judiciary devoted to the protection of wholly private rights against an alien, power-mongering state. When Alexis de Tocqueville, whose liberal premises suited America so well, went looking in the Alps for something like the English liberties, he went astray. Not finding English liberties, he quite misunderstood Switzerland's regime.

Power is potentiality: for those subjected to it, it offers the potential for good and for ill and therefore each and everyone is directly concerned with the way in which power is used. On this account we give the subject the name of citizen; for to do so implies a right to influence the use of power, which is his at least theoretically. But it is a hollow right, without substance, if he cannot use it. It is a hollow right if its only manifestation is that the citizen from time to time be invited to vote for the person or persons who will then wield absolute power. In such cases, the choice of the citizen is limited and furthermore he who before his accession may seem most desirable may after it reveal himself to be very bad: one has only to remember that no emperor was more fervently greeted than Caligula.

ON 1 JULY 1997, THE END OF COLONIAL RULE USHERED IN A NEW government for the 6½ million people of Hong Kong. Ironically, in stark contrast to other new regimes which took over from colonial rulers, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government was greeted with only a moderate amount of enthusiasm by the governed. Nevertheless, public support for the new regime mounted in the first four months of its existence. Since October 1997, however, it has declined continuously and has now reached a low level. Evidently, the governing strategy crafted by the HKSAR government had achieved a certain degree of success in the early months of its existence. Since then, though the HKSAR government obstinately follows this governing strategy, changes in the conditions in Hong Kong have in any case rendered this strategy obsolete. Low public support is bound to undermine effective governance in postcolonial Hong Kong.

CAN PARLIAMENTARY INSTITUTIONS THRIVE IN COUNTRIES WITH little or no tradition in the habits of self-government? Is multiparty competition viable in states where compromise is not accepted as a political virtue? The questions are familiar and are asked whenever the advisability of exporting the Westminster model (or the Capitol Hill or Palais Bourbon model) is raised.

The proposition to be examined is that a parliamentary and party system was transplanted into an initially unfavourable environment and eventually acclimatized itself. The ecological difficulties are familiar; indeed, they form the substance of the debate about the export of systems. In the Third World, at the point of decolonization it involves the former colonial power bequeathing liberal-democratic institutions as a device for legitimizing the new native regime.