The appeal to globalization as a non-negotiable external economic constraint plays an increasingly significant role in the linked politics of expectation suppression and welfare reform in contemporary Europe. Yet, although it threatens to become something of a self- fulfilling prophecy, the thesis that globalization entails welfare retrenchment and convergence is empirically suspect. In this paper it is argued that there is little evidence of convergence amongst European social models and that, although common trajectories can be identified, these have tended to be implemented more or less enthusiastically and at different paces to produce, to date, divergent outcomes. Second, I suggest that it is difficult to see globalization as the principal agent determining the path on which European social models are embarked since the empirical evidence points if anything to de-globalization rather than globalization. The implications of this for the future of the welfare state in Europe and for the USA as a model welfare state regime are explored.

The paper considers Mackie's defence of ‘populist’ democracy against the critique offered by Riker and the Rochester School. Riker has two arguments against populism: first that Arrow's theorem shows there is no such thing as the general will, second, that once we have chosen a social decision mechanism the results may not represent the true wishes of the population since people may vote strategically. Mackie argues Arrow's theorem is misleading since the independence condition is not itself substantively rational, and that manipulation never actually occurs. The paper shows that independence is needed for interpretation and prediction, and whilst Arrow's strong condition may not be ‘substantively rational’, examples show that no single decision mechanism, even Mackie's favoured Borda count is obviously superior. It then argues that every election can, in Arrow's terms, be considered as manipulated – though there is nothing substantively wrong in that. The paper ends by pointing out that in the absence of complete information market outcomes are also similarly manipulated.

There are good prima facie reasons to believe that directly electing a prime minister may provide the holder of that office with a tremendous power resource. Indeed some countries with weak prime ministers have debated this possible change, and one, Israel, carried it through. Using a theoretical argument based on the number of veto points in a political system, this article proposes that a directly elected prime minister will not increase the power of a prime minister. It studies what actually happened in Israel, and offers alternative explanations for the weakness of and lack of cohesion in its executive. Similarly, other factors are identified as causes of prime ministerial weakness in Italy and Japan.

This article explores Christian Democratic electoral decline in the 1990s through an examination of the key problems faced by the CDU, the ÖVP and the CDA. Although the problems of Christian Democracy in this period are identified as arising from exogenous changes, the article goes beyond a mechanistic approach by also scrutinizing the response of the various parties. It is argued that the contraction of core support bases, intensified party competition and the rise of problematic issues created a series of dilemmas for the parties but also that the unconvincing reaction of the parties contributed to their electoral predicament.

At various times the Roman Republic faced outbreaks of domestic political violence, including riots and intimidation, assassinations and conspiracies to overthrow the government. Violence was particularly noticeable in the Early Republic and the Late Republic. These activities were quite similar to the terrorism and violence used by mobs and groups during the French Revolution and the tactics of fascists and leftists in Europe in the 1920s or 1930s. More accurately, the actions of mobs and others during the French Revolution and leftists and fascists in Europe were very similar to the techniques used in the Roman political system in the last five centuries BCE.

This paper critically assesses the description ‘empire’ as applied to the United States in the twentieth century, proposing that US policy makers lack the territorial and occupation motives pre-requisite to being an imperial power. It is proposed that the USA is better described as an empire by accident than by design. Americans’ domestic experience of nation-building within the USA, since the early twentieth century, helps account for their unwillingness to permit the USA to be an imperial nation.

The modern state would be a crisis if consent to long-established sites of authoritative rule were breaking down, previously capable states were unable to command coercive power, and if the demands of international and supra-national institutions had enforceable claims against historically sovereign states. There is no general crisis of the modern state. The states of most developed countries are secure as sites of authoritative rule, and the military power commanded by the American state is unprecedented. However, the external sovereignty of many poor and small states is diminishing. The cause is not ‘globalization’ but the policies of the world's dominant state.

This article provides a preliminary evaluation of the de-Baathification policy that has been adopted by the occupying forces in Iraq. In order to do this evaluation, the article examines the logic behind major lustration laws approved in East European countries between 1990 and 2003 and assesses their political effects. It introduces the concept of ‘lustration systems’ and provides their classification into either ‘exclusive’, ‘inclusive’, ‘reconciliatory’ or ‘mixed’ systems. It recommends a ‘reconciliatory’ system for the new Iraqi administration as an alternative to the ‘mixed’ system previously pursued by the Coalition authorities in Iraq.

This article observes a transformation in the largely essentializing, decontextualized form of identity politics that long defined political cosmology in Turkey, now in the process of negotiating accession to the European Union (EU). Accordingly, identity politics – not only the bread and butter of both Kurdish nationalism and Islamism, but also a justification for exhortations towards a limited, authoritarian democracy by Kemalists, the major power holders – is receding in favour of a civic, non-divisive political culture enabled by the EU anchorage. In danger of losing the longstanding centre–periphery configuration in an enhanced, participatory democracy and, concomitant with it, the periphery clientelism created by the waning identity politics, Kemalist nationalists, Islamists and Kurdish separatists appear to have stopped squabbling among themselves and joined forces against Turkey's EU bid.

In the first of two articles the authors show what consociational theory may learn from the case of Northern Ireland, namely, the importance of external agencies in making and implementing consociational settlements, the relations between consociational and self-determination settlements, the ‘complexity’ of internal settlements, the merits of STV (PR) in electoral arrangements, innovations in using proportional representation decision rules to allocate ministerial portfolios, and conceptual modifications. A second article addresses what anti-consociationalists may learn from the same case.

This article offers a critical engagement with two important strands of left theorizations of European Union integration and globalization, namely, ‘new constitutionalism’ (a sub-form of neo-Gramscian analysis) and ‘structural dependence’ theory (rooted in a more orthodox Marxist approach). These approaches suffer, respectively, from an uncritical or one-sided approach to constitutionalism and competitiveness; and from a theoretical conflation of national with regional political economy. While new constitutionalism under-theorizes regionalism partly because of its implicit ‘methodological nationalism’ and attachment to the ethics of national political economy, structural dependence theory neglects regionalism in pursuing a highly pessimistic structuralist approach to globalization.

EU influence in encouraging and promoting democratic consolidation in Central and Eastern Europe has been extensive, though in a wide rather than deep sense. But, as shown by the enlargement process up to 2004, accession dynamics are the crucial force driving governments in the region to meet the EU's political conditionality. Despite the latter's deficiencies, it has by and large contributed towards democratic consolidation in the new member states notwithstanding some negative aspects of accession. The clear lesson for further enlargement in post-Communist Europe is that EU pressure and promise over integration will be decisive in new candidate states, even though their capacity to achieve the political conditions is more problematic. It follows too that any lessening of EU commitment is likely to undermine democratization efforts there.

This article examines the role played by national history in generating and sustaining the popularity of British Eurosceptic arguments. The core argument advanced is that the modernist approach to history prevalent among British historians and the society in which they work has to be considered the key reason for Euroscepticism retaining such a popular appeal in Britain. The overly reverential attitude to recent martial history on the part of the British, and an almost total neglect of the peacetime dimensions of modern European history since 1945, both serve to exaggerate the tendency in the country to fall back on glib images of Britain as a great power with a ‘special relationship’ across the Atlantic and Europe as a hostile ‘other’ to be confronted rather than engaged with constructively.

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 international controversy concerning the Hungarian ‘status law’ of 2001 attests to the vital importance of ethnic minority rights in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as within an enlarged European Union. The paper examines the unique challenges raised by the law from its initial adoption in June 2001 to its subsequent amendment in June 2003. It looks at the interaction between four principal kinds of actors: Hungary (a kin state legislating support for ethnic co- nationals in neighbouring countries), Romania and Slovakia (home states to sizeable Hungarian ethnic groups), the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia, and the European institutions that became involved in the dispute as mediators.

This article examines why political schools have emerged in Japan. While the roles of founding fathers, the angst of national decline and the perception of a ‘leadership deficit’ in Japan have paved their emergence, a fundamental reason for their existence is the failure of Japanese political parties to recruit candidates from broader social backgrounds beyond political dynasties, the bureaucracy and narrow interest groups. The article examines four political schools in Japan including the Matsushita Seikei Juku (MSJ, Matsushita Institute of Government and Management). I argue that while the MSJ has successfully produced many students who have won elections, it has not nurtured visionary leaders who can lead Japan out of its economic and political malaise.

In the second of two articles the authors show what integrationist critics of consociational theory can learn from the case of Northern Ireland, namely, that consociation may be more realistic than integration, that a ‘grand coalition’ may have more virtue than the ‘minimum-winning’ variety, that consociations can be both liberal and democratic, and that PR-STV has considerable advantages over integrationists’ preferred electoral system, the Alternative Vote.

Recent years have seen the institutionalization of minority governance in Sweden and New Zealand. Large, historic social democratic labour parties enjoy comparative security of tenure thanks to smaller, newer parties with whom they have signed long-term, detailed support agreements covering both policy and process. This trend toward ‘contract parliamentarism’ owes much to party-system dynamics, but also to the accretion of experience, to cultural norms and to institutional constraints – all of which, along with electoral contingency, explain why the trend has gone slightly further in one polity than in the other. While the trend seems to favour the left in general, its implications for the support or ‘servant’ parties, and – more normatively – for democracy itself, may be less favourable.

It is well known that in developed democracies the opposition tends to cooperate with the government. Spain is no exception: around 70 per cent of all ‘organic laws’ (constitutionally significant bills that require a parliamentary majority to be passed) are approved with the support of the main opposition party. We try to explain the variation in the level of consensus in the first seven legislative terms of the current Spanish democracy. We show that there are three key variables: the balance of power between government and opposition, the nature of the institutional actor that first proposes the bill, and the ideological significance of the bill.

The explanatory capacity of ideas has been contested on two grounds. First, ideas have been dismissed as epiphenomenal. Second, ideational explanations have been criticized for the limited importance that they ascribe to agency. This article examines the involvement of the European Commission in previously uncharted territory, namely the regulation of professional sport in Europe. It demonstrates that, in conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty created by the need to implement broad Treaty-based principles in new areas of socio-economic activity, ideas, first, act as road maps that direct the executive activity of the European Commission, legitimize it, and set limits to it by identifying the relevant deeply embedded conceptions of the nature of a given activity and by linking them to a wider, historically defined normative order. Second, ideas are also powerful political weapons used by political actors in their quest to advance their interests.