To Grasp Fully The Nature And Significance Of The Economic policies at the heart of dominant political projects, those policies have to be studied in the round. They have to be grasped as complex totalities which touch all aspects of the political agenda; and they have to be seen as constructed and contested wholes, whose contradictions, internal inconsistencies and conceptual limits are as vital to their trajectory as are their axioms, theories and content. Academically and professionally, the study of policy in this rounded way is often a more difficult task to complete than might be expected, in part because of the powerful divisions within and between the intellectual disciplines which comprise the social sciences.

‘If A Majority Of People In Northern Ireland Ever Voted To become part of a United Ireland what would you do?’ At first sight the question may seem plucked from the realms of constitutional fantasy. A united Ireland seems an unlikely prospect, at least in anything but the long term. Even proponents of unity predict a 15–20 year wait. Yet the 1998 Good Friday Agreement empowers the people of Northern Ireland to decide their own constitutional future. As a result questions on Northern Ireland's future constitutional status, and public reactions to possible changes in that status, are relevant to current political debate.

It is important to note that the principle of consent is not a new constitutional invention. It has had a long association with Northern Ireland. It is argued that the peace process and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement have refocused attention on the long-standing consent principle. While consent was part of the constitutional furniture it was often overlooked during the Troubles.

This article re-examines consent in the light of the peace process. It draws on evidence from the 1998 and 1999/2000 Northern Ireland Life and Times surveys, as well as a number of in-depth interviews with senior politicians and policy-makers involved in the peace process and the negotiations on a political settlement. First it considers the changing significance of the consent principle to Northern Ireland's constitutional status, arguing that the principle has assumed a renewed immediacy. Secondly, the article reports the findings of the two most recent Northern Ireland Life and Times surveys in relation to constitutional preferences. While public attitudes towards a unitary Ireland or continued Union within the United Kingdom have been surveyed regularly, as far as the authors are aware no previous survey has asked whether people would accept or oppose constitutional change if it was supported by a majority of Northern Ireland's citizens. In other words, no survey has gauged the level of public acceptance of the consent principle. The key question is: would unionists be prepared to come quietly if a majority of Northern Ireland's citizens voted to accept a united Ireland?

On 13 May 2001, Italy Elected To Power A Centre-Right Coalition headed by the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi. Forza Italia, the political party founded by Berlusconi in 1994 when he first decided to enter politics, became the most widely supported political force in the country with almost 30 per cent of the popular vote. Forza Italia's success was partly a result of its ability to ‘cannibalize’ the votes of two of its smaller coalition partners, the Biancofiore, an electoral coalition between the Christian Democratic Centre (CCD) and the United Christian Democrats (CDU), and the Northern League (Lega Nord), both of whom saw their share of the vote fall sharply. The other party in Berlusconi's ‘House of Freedoms’ coalition, the National Alliance (AN), the formerly neo-fascist party that now sees itself as a pillar of the democratic right, held steady in electoral terms but remains very much a junior partner in the coalition.

There Exists An Extensive Literature On The Political Economy of external liberalization in emerging markets. However, the remarkable progress of Estonia and Latvia in external liberalization has not yet been addressed systematically in the academic literature from a political economy angle. This article aims not only to make a contribution to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on trade policy reform, but also to address three other issues.

Today's Democratic Theory Offers Sketches Of Tomorrow's democratic polity. How innovative, and how compelling, are the visions it offers us? This article explores possible democratic futures by scanning a selection of today's key democratic innovations – cosmopolitan, deliberative, ‘politics of presence’, ecological, associative and party-based direct models – in the light of a set of six central issues useful for examining the core aspects of democratic theories. It concludes by suggesting a way forward in which insights from diverse innovations might helpfully be accommodated within an overarching framework. Overall, it represents a deliberate attempt at a bird's eye view of the subject; the aim is to be suggestive rather than definitive. The scope of the analysis is broad but quite strictly qualified in the following ways: the six innovative ideas scrutinized arise from, and largely address, countries of the rich North rather than the developing South; they do not exhaust the range of current innovations in democratic theory; and they are based largely on English-language sources.