Relationships between five central value orientations and party choice are examined in a comparative West European setting by using the second wave of the European Values Study from 1990. These orientations comprise two central conflict lines related to the Old Politics model for political cleavages, namely religious/secular and left-right materialist value orientations, and three new sets of value orientation which, according to theories of New Politics, should become important in advanced industrial society. The research problems are: To examine the comparative strength of the impact of the various value orientations on party preference in a comparative West European setting; To examine how voters of different party families are grouped along the various value orientations. Which parties have the most secular or religious, leftist materialist and post-materialist electorate, and are there consistent comparative patterns concerning where the voters for given party families are placed?; To focus upon the impact of the New Politics value conflicts.

Collective-action theory suggests that a country's economic size determines its contribution to international organizations, with large economies paying a disproportionate percentage of their GNP for maintenance of these organizations. This paper argues against this reigning paradigm, finding that it fails to predict current contribution patterns in the United Nations (UN). Instead, the paper offers a more elaborate model of burden sharing that takes into account the domestic political setting and international setting that helps determine a nation's contribution to international organizations.

The fall of the Berlin Wall led to fears of an influx of migrants from Eastern Europe. So far this ‘flood’ has not arrived, but new patterns of migration from East to West are emerging. In this paper we explore patterns of migration in the Czech Republic which has emerged as part of a ‘buffer zone’ between East and West Europe. We develop a preliminary typology of types of migration and some of the factors which govern migration in the Czech Republic by drawing upon more than 200 in-depth interviews with migrants in their own languages. Our conclusion is that the Czech Republic has become a ‘transit’ zone of migration. However, it is also increasingly a destination country in its own right, something which has hitherto received little attention in studies of East-West migration.