Since the collapse of communism, much scholarship has examined the efforts by the countries of east central Europe and the former Soviet Union to develop democratic regimes. The majority of such studies have focused on institutional development and the problems of democratic transition at the national level. Although this focus is not at all surprising given the highly centralized political structures that have been the legacy of the communist past, the efficacy, indeed the ultimate success or failure of democratization, may well rest largely on the ability of local government to satisfy citizen demands. Local government is most directly involved in delivering the goods and services that affect people’s daily lives. Hence, citizens often form their judgments of political systems based on the performance of local government. To the degree that democracy depends on the loyalty of the citizenry, local government is important to the survival of democracy.

Who rules is the central question posed by scholars studying local government. This issue lies at the heart of democracy. While it is nowhere the case that citizens rule directly, in a democracy their preferences must have some effect on public policy.

Among the most prominent generic signals of Dostoevskii’s The Possessed are those suggesting allegory. Allegory is one of several genres in the novel referred to by name. The narrator characterizes Stepan Trofimovich’s romantic poema as “some sort of allegory” (9) and remarks that, after the most intimate of encounters with his patroness, Stepan Trofimovich would sometimes “jump up from the couch and beat the wall with his fists,” all of which “without the slightest allegory“ (12). Concerning the climax of Iuliia Mikhailovna’s soirée, an allegorical representation of the various literary schools and tendencies of the day, the narrator reports, “It would have been difficult to imagine a more pitiful, tactless, talentless, and vapid allegory than that ‘literary quadrille’” (389). On a more fundamental level, the work’s second epigraph, the passage from the Gospel of Luke describing the exorcism of a possessed man and the flight of the demons into a herd of swine, provides an allegorical foundation for the entire action, projecting the work against biblical history.

Late in October 1918, in the shadow of impending defeat, nationalist revolutions rocked the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time the Austro-Hungarian representatives signed the Padua Armistice on November 3, imperial authority no longer existed in the Dual Monarchy. In Hungary the revolution of October 30 brought to power a coalition government led by the liberal pacifist, Mihaly Karolyi. The coalition included the Karolyi-led Independence Party, the Social Democrats, and the Radicals of Oszkar Jaszi. This revolutionary government's aim was to liquidate the semifeudal remnants of the old order by introducing democratic, political, and social reforms.

Over recent years, there has been a growing academic interest in the history of psychological disciplines and mental health in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. This article explores psychological sciences and social planning in post-Stalinist Hungary after 1956. The focus is on the psychology of work as a socially- and historically-situated discourse. The article demonstrates how psychologists started to promote their expertise to reform the practices of management and to “humanize” the conditions of work. They suggested practical remedies for everyday problems of worker motivation and social adjustment and introduced concepts from social psychology to improve the state of interpersonal relations at the workplace. The study argues that the workplace was a particular context in which a post-Stalinist reassessment of the government's ideology was acted out. To elaborate this more fully, both published texts and archival materials are analyzed in the framework of the governmentality thesis, as developed by Nikolas Rose. In this context, the concept of the “human factor” crystallized different but reconcilable interests between psychology experts and party politicians.

The splendid growth of Polish Romantic poetry in the second quarter of the nineteenth century almost overshadowed concurrent achievements in artistic prose, which are considerable and diverse.

It is true that the prose fiction of the period did not especially flourish. Nevertheless, Polish Romanticism brought forth one interesting and original prose genre, that of gawęda. Gawęda is a kind of short story which has as narrator an old, rather simple man, telling in a loose way and in colloquial language stories from old Polish life. It is true, the genre quickly degenerated into a stale traditionalism, but at its peak gawęda could boast a volume as noteworthy as Rzewuski's The Memoirs of Soplica. The realism of detail, vivid local color, humor, and raciness of this work command a high position for it in the history of Polish fiction.