In Continental Europe a New Debate Has Emerged Over the interpretation of the major changes that have taken place in political parties during the 1990s. A ‘fourth wave’ of democratic party-building originating in Eastern Europe has highlighted a number of new developments. Parties have emerged which are built around leaders, which have few members, are subsidized by the state and which direct their activities towards the media and the electorate rather than towards partyidentifiers. Recent contributions to this debate have sought to transform a picture of the decline of political parties by offering a new image of the party. The future of the party is to be found in what have been variously dubbed ‘professional framework parties‘, ‘media parties’ or ‘cartel parties’.

In December 1995 General Elections Took Place in Russia for the lower house of parliament, the Duma. In constitutional terms the Duma is a relatively weak body, comparable with the French National Assembly. It initiates and enacts legislation, but must find a two-thirds majority if it is to override a presidential veto. The December elections were, however, of a disproportionate significance. The fact that they were taking place was important in itself. The Duma elected in December 1995 was only the second Duma to be elected in post-Soviet Russia, and the first to be elected in relatively normal circumstances. (The preceding Duma had been elected in 1993 only after President Boris Yeltsin had used tanks against the old Supreme Soviet, created a new parliament almost literally out of its ashes, and legitimized his actions by means of a new constitution approved by a national referendum.)

The Analysis of Opposition in Asian Political Systems raises acute problems of definition. At one end of a continuum lie those polities in which an ‘opposition’ is either inconceivable (North Korea is perhaps the best example) or inevitably in a state of war or confrontation with the regime (as is the case in Burma/Myanmar). In cases at this end of the continuum opposition cannot be democratic in the systemic sense, unless the opposition realizes its programme and becomes a democratic government. At the other end of the continuum, however, the character, standing and potential of ‘opposition’ is very much a matter of debate. In these systems a multiplicity of non-governing political parties exist, and these parties contest elections and send members to legislatures, though they often operate under rules (informal as well as formal) and conditions which tend to prevent them from gaining power. The focus of this article will be upon these systems, which are here labelled – whether parliamentary or presidential – ‘constitutional’. ‘Constitutional’ is understood as entailing the existence of an embedded and more or less regularly operating set of electoral mechanisms which plays an essential part in the selection of the government.

There are Many Ambiguities Within The Literature on globalization. Some scholars speak of a world that is chunging others use the framework as part of a new univocal discourse to describe late twentieth-century capitalism. Apart from ‘globalization’, many other cartographic and navigational metaphors have been employed to describe the present world order. There is the loss of the ‘magnetic North’; an ‘emerging global civilization’; and a curious notion of an evolving ‘global civil society’. Master concepts like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘world politics’ have consequently become popular and are creeping into international relations discourse. In extreme cases the literature seems to suggest or imply that history is coming to an end on convenient Western socio-cultural terms only. Indeed it seems that proponents of globalization have come to proclaim universality afresh in similar vein to that of those who indulge in and perpetuate the notion of a post-Columbus 500-year capitalist historicism. I do not share the triumphalism of the liberal globalization discourse. It is certainly important to ask whether the wave of technological change, interdependent policy-making, international socialization of production, and time-space compression have or have not come to transcend or replace the complex web of centre-periphery relations. There remains generally a familiar interstate world system, albeit with the spatial and temporal limits to state, market and human interactions experientially compressed. Questions about who rules, who benefits or suffers, and whether prospects for social survival are better or worse remain as important as ever.

Why Do People Disagree About Politics? Like All Naive questions, this one rapidly launches us into fundamentals. Without disagreement, there would be no politics.

Some of the answers are obvious, and all the common ones line up with popular political projects. If disagreement were attributed to error, for example, to know the truth would transform our condition. Let us review the commonest answers in turn and look at the sources of political disagreement.