IT IS NO EXCEPTION TO THE CONTINGENCY OF HUMAN THINGS that events can occur as expected: this happens so as to lull US for the next surprise. ‘A good election for poll takers’, said one headline, of Reagan's lopsided victory. His 18-percentage point margin was exactly predicted by Gallup and roughly approximated by others in a ten to 25 point range of misses. Once again it was confirmed that science can give mathematical expression to our expectations in politics. But the expected result was also a welcome sign that the American polity was healthy enough to reelect a president in whom few - and those more his supporters than his opponents - could have been disappointed. A people's ability to express gratitude to its leaders is more than a measure of political stability: it is one end of political stability and when exercised is the most ennobling act of popular sovereignty.

THAT THERE IS ROOM FOR DOUBT TODAY ABOUT WHAT LIES ahead for the Communities nobody will deny. The Community has been in trouble for at least five years, and despite the succession of summits the trouble has not been fully disposed of. The enlargement negotiations are the demonstration - or one more demonstration - of the difficulty the Community is having in coming to terms with itself. And, worse, a further process of what I might call ‘institutional drift’ is making its operation yet more intergovernmental.

I should like first to review the position as it now stands and how it is likely to develop in the short term. I will then go on to try to establish what can be done to rectify, or even reverse, the present trends. For unless they do change in the months ahead the prospects for progress in the longer term will be in jeopardy.

‘CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?’, THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER was reported to have replied to a question concerning the alleged crisis in sterling. In the case of the welfare state it might seem that the appropriate response would be ‘Which crisis? ’ since there are several on the menu - fiscal crisis, legitimacy crisis, crisis of ungovernability . Left, Right and Centre have become convinced that there is a crisis. This is after a period of history which had seen an unprecedented rise in the standard of living of the vast majority of the population living in what are normally regarded as welfare states.

EUROPE AT FIRST SIGHT SEEMS A WORD WITH A CLEAR MEANing; but a further look shows it to be most ambiguous.

The most obvious meaning is geographical: Europe is the north-west peninsula of the Asian land mass. But even this is not correct: there are three western peninsulas: Finland, Scandinavia and the main European. Usually the three are lumped together; but even at its narrowest point the sea which divides these is much wider than that which separates the Balkans from Anatolia - which is always reckoned to be Asia, and indeed one portion of which constituted the whole of Asia when that word was first used. I know this because I once swam across the Bosphorus, but would certainly never have tried the sound between Elsinore and Helsingborg.

THE IDEA OF THE WELFARE STATE IS CURRENTLY TREATED with more scepticism across the political spectrum than at any time during its development. Insofar as the institutions of the welfare state were consolidated during the period of Butskellite consensus which lasted until the late 1960s, in the more polarized political climate of today it is now seen on both the Right and the Left to embody many of the failures implicit in that consensus. It was assumed, so it was argued, that the fiscal dividends of growth could be used to increase welfare in a relatively painless way by maintaining the absolute position of the better off and using the dividends of growth via public expenditure on health, education and welfare to improve the relative standing of the worst-off members of society. In this way it was thought that the social and economic rights of citizenship could be extended within a market economy without putting excessive strain on that economy.

THE UNITED STATES IS THE WORLD'S SECOND LARGEST DEMOcracy (after India) and the largest of the older well-established democracies, with a very long and uninterrupted history of free elections. For this reason, it can be argued that the American democratic example has been and, should be an important model for other countries to follow. This article will focus on one important aspect of the American democratic system - the pattern of electoral rules - and it will emphasize the striking differences between the American electoral process and that of most other democracies. This contrast obviously affects the applicability of the American model to other countries that may be in the process of revising their electoral rules: because the United States is a deviant case in almost all respects, it presents clear alternatives to the more common attern but also dternatives that are so radical that they may ge difficult to transplant. The democracies with which the American pattern of electoral systems will be compared and contrasted are the 20 countries which, Me the United States, have been democratic without interruption for a relatively long time, that is, since approximately the end of the Second world War: the four large West European countries (Great Britain, France, West Germany, and Italy), the five Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland), the Benelux countries (the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg), Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, and five countries outside Europe (Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand).

THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY HAS BEEN IN A STATE OF ALMOST perpetual crisis since 1979: a financial crisis, institutional drift, the lack of long-term objectives. Nevertheless the patient efforts to bring back order into its affairs which were undertaken after the European Council at Stuttgart (1983) and tenaciously pursued by the European Commission under Mr Thorn's presidency, as well as by the successive presidents of the Council of Ministers, are at last coming to fruition. For the first time in many years, the heads of state or of government have been able to devote themselves in Milan to genuinely political reflections – to concentrate their thoughts on the future Europe and the means of building it. Even if the dialogue was only too often replaced by confrontation, nevertheless, the debate has begun and is bound to continue.

INSTITUTIONAL REFORM IS ON THE AGENDA OF THE EUROPEAN Communities again, perhaps more seriously than for a decade. The European Parliament's Draft Treaty on European Union and the Dooge Report provided a focus for assessing possible changes to the institutional ground rules and constitutional framework of EC negotiations. A central strand in the debate has been the concern of many practitioners to make the negotiating process more productive and effective, particularly given the prospect that enlargement to twelve wil make the EC more heterogeneous and less manageable. Aside from the constitutionalists, whose arguments for reform are essentially political, the pragmatists can be divided between proponents of better practice and the advocates of some Treaty amendments as necessary means to their end. This article seeks to shed some light on the character of the EC negotiating process in the hope of aiding judgments about the relevance of institutional rules to negotiating outputs.

THE WELFARE STATE IS WIDELY THOUGHT TO HAVE SOME connection with the ideal of equality. But what is the nature of that connection and what is the relevant sense of equality? The purpose of this paper is to identify two conflicting ideals of equality and to discuss their im lications for the political label these ideals ‘equality of welfare’ and ‘equality of resources’, though I shall define them somewhat differently from Dworkin. The conclusion I shall seek to establish is that both ideals have a place in our thinking about the welfare state, and that this is no accident. Both ideals may be traced back to competing conceptions of the person, each of which has a firm place in what may be broadly termed liberal thought.

IT IS NOT EASY TO EXPLAIN THE REASONS THAT LED TO THE appointment of Bettino Craxi as Prime Minister. First of all, there was certainly the political fatigue of the Christian Democratic Party which had held the premiership for 35 years. AIdo Moro, a great man and leader, had tried to mediate between the various currents within the party, as well as between the party and other allied parties (the Republicans, the Social Democrats, the Socialists). But what Moro really dreamt of was a possible alliance with the Communist Party to solve at least the most serious issues, such as terrorism and economic decline. He thought of repeating with the Communists the experience the DC had had in the early 1960s with the Socialists: widening the democratic area with the view of transforming the PCI into a social democratic trend. In order to obtain this he even considered letting the PCI take part in the majority at least if not in the government itself. His disappearance had serious repercussions, especially in the Christian Democratic Party where internal friction grew even stronger than in the past. This resulted in a great drop in the party's power and ability to manage the country politically even if, at least in part, it regained in the 1979 and 1983 elections the votes lost in the 1976 elections.

THE PROVISIONAL IRA'S ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE THE BRITISH Prime Minister and Cabinet at Brighton on 12 October 1984, represents the most dramatic move to date in a reputedly 20-year strategy of inducing the British to withdraw from Northern Ireland and leave Ireland to the Irish. Where nonviolent Irish nationalists have aimed, most notably through the New Ireland Forum Report published in May 1984, to persuade the British that the 1920 constitutional settlement dividing Ireland is inherently unstable and must be dismantled, the Provisional IRA has no faith in this course of action. The British, they calculate, will be persuaded not by the force of argument but by the argument of force. In this they can claim, with some justification, to be the true heirs of the Easter Rising of 1916. At that time the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which was to become the basic document of Irish republicanism, declared ‘… the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible’. Since the 1916 Proclamation was ratified by the first subsequent meeting of elected representatives of the Irish people, the first Dáil Eireann, in 1919, representing virtually all but the Ulster unionist minority, and since the right and the aspiration to Irish unity have been reaffirmed by all non-unionist Irish parties ever since, it must be a truth universally acknowledged that the division of Ireland is unjust and undemocratic and that the reunification of the country is the rightful aspiration of the great majority of its people.

IT IS PERHAPS A SIGN OF THE GREATER MATURITY OF THE discipline of political science today that the ‘great debate’ of the immediate postwar period on the essential nature of the subject has now died down. The vast quantities of ink that were spilled (and not a little blood) did not result in a victory for either of the two great camps - the traditonalists or the behaviourists - but in a recognition, however reluctant, that the subject of the study of politics was too great, and too complex, to be approached only from this angle or that, but required the application of many different methods, and of many different kinds of minds, if progress was to be made towards the better understanding of the ways in which man provided for his own overnance. However, if the students of political thought, of constitutions and institutions, now work alongside the practitioners of ‘empirical’, and indeed of quantititive, techniques for the study of politics, it is in large part due to the efforts of Carl Friedrich, who saw the need to maintain the intellectual unity of a subject which, since the time of Aristotle, had progressed, as indeed all subjects can only progress, by the continual interaction between those who contemplate its theoretical underpinnings and those who are knowledgeable about the data by which, in the end, the theories must be tested. The normative dimension of the study of man and his political activities, is an additional complication, but it does not absolve the theorist from the need to relate his theory to perceived reality, nor the empiricist from the necessity of placing his observations within a context which alone will give them significance.

WESTERN SOCIAL POLICY DEVELOPMENT IS NO LONGER A subject of interest only to welfare specialists and their students. Economic ill-fortune has had at least this one, positive effect. More — and more variegated — questions are being asked about relationships between public/social policy practice2 and economic performance, both within and between Western countries. However, the very fact that social scientists are now tackling this subject in broader fashion and from a variety of disciplinary and ideological erspectives, has served to highlight inconsistencies in the use of such supposedly standard terms as ‘social policy’, ‘social spending’ and ’welfare state’.

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT DID NOT SKIMP ITS PREPARATIONS for the European Council meeting in Milan on 28–29 June, when proposals for moves towards European Union were on the agenda for the European Community's heads of state and government. Much effort went into the ‘Howe plan’, which was seen as a model of British pragmatism: strictly practical proposals and no truck with the proposed intergovernmental conference to consider Treaty amendments or other high-faluting federalist notions. A success proportionate to the effort was certainly expected. But Mrs Thatcher left Milan without decisions on the British proposals, outvoted on the intergovernmental conference and angry with the partners who pushed her into a corner with the Dane and the Greek. It is too soon to unravel what was certainly a tangled tale, doubtless with errors all round and a generous application of Murphy's Law. But behind the tactical and political confusion, one element in the failure may have been the divergent approaches of the British and the majority of their partners to discussing the Community's future development.

IN THE WESTERN MEDIA RECENT EVENTS IN INDIA HAVE OFTEN been trivialized by comparison with a soap opera called Dynasty. A more appropriate analogy would be the Greek tragedy: the rejection of Mrs Gandhi at the polls in 1977; her sweeping return to power in 1980; the death of her heir apparent, Sanjay, in 1980; the invasion of the Golden Temple in June 1984; and on 31 October her assassination. Greatness, tragedy, hubris and nemesis are all there.

A fair assessment of Mrs Indira Gandhi's contribution to her country is far from easy, not least because she was regally enigmatic. Her friendships ranged from Michael Foot to Margaret Thatcher. Her presence was formidable yet both to old and non-political family friends she was a loving sister or aunt. Alone among Indian politicians she drew massive crowds and, Sikhs apart, her death was mourned by her opponents as much as her supporters. Indira had not expected to enter politics but by acting as her widowed father Pandit Nehru's hostess and confidante, and, in the late 1950s, as Congress General Secreta , she gained an invaluable apprenticeship in the techniques of political management and the art of statecraft. When Nehru's immediate successor as Indian Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, died after less than two years in office, Congress chiefs found it easier to nominate Nehru's daughter as their leader than to agree on one of their own number, particularly since they all underestimated her strength of character and purpose.

IN TOLSTOY'S STORY OF THE THREE HERMITS, A BISHOP (TRAvelling by ship) passes by chance the island on which they live and asks to be set ashore. He discovers that they know only the simple prayer: ‘Three in One, One in Three, Praise be His Name’. ‘It is not sufficient,’ he says, and teaches them the catechism. After some difficulty, they memorize the words, whereupon he returns to his ship. Later, in the moonlight, he sees the three old men running towards him across the waves. ‘My lord, my lord, we have forgotten’. ‘Go back,’ says the bishop, ‘go back: faith that enables you to walk on the water does not need any catechism’. Mr P. W. Botha has his tricameral constitution, three in one, one in three, but can he truly walk upon the water?

THERE ARE ONLY A FEW PASSAGES IN MARX AND ENGELS dealing with the relation they established between party, class and elections. After showing that the proletariat formed a well-defined class by virtue of its place in the relations of production, Marx and Engels emphasized that the workers had been able to overcome their isolation in order to organize themselves. To cease being simply a mass, atomized by competition, they formed an association to strengthen their ‘union’ and make possible their mobilization. Profiting from the use of the means of communication, the workers became conscious of their common interests: ‘the result was the organization of the proletariat into a class and then into a political party’. It was the whole class that transformed itsef into a political party: no division took place. Rejecting the Blanquist conceptions of elitist parties, Marx and Engels added that ‘all previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority’.

IN EARLY 1985, MOST POLITICAL OBSERVERS WOULD HAVE forecast the probability of Constantinos Karamanlis's reelection to his second term as president, which seemed the likely prelude to the election due before the end of October 1985. This, it was assumed, would have given Andreas Papandreou's Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) a good chance to repeat the advantage which his party undoubtedly enjoyed in its convincing victory at the election in October 1981, when a significant portion of the electorate, notably from the centre of the political spectrum, felt that it could well afford the risks of voting for all that was implied in PASOK's electoral slogan ‘Change’, so long as Karamanlis remained at the helm with the special powers reserved for the president under the 1975 constitution. The outlook was consequently for an election in or before the autumn of 1985. In fact, PASOK's victory on 2 June was achieved at a different time, for quite different reasons and in quite different circumstances.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO EXAMINE THE INCOME redistributive effects of the French system of social security in the light of the change of government that took place in 1981. Now, four years since the Socialists took over, it is time to assess their performance in an area in which many changes have been brought about in recent years as a result of the slow-down in economic growth. In this paper, social security includes the four following ‘risks’: health and sickness insurance, family policy, pensions and unemployment compensation. By income redistribution is meant ‘vertical’ redistribution from rich to poor or vice versa.