Amongst other events of historic significance, the year 1990 also marked the 10th anniversary of the nationwide foundation of the German Green Party. In several Lander of the Federal Republic, however, the party could look back on a somewhat longer organizational, and even parliamentary, history. The uncertainty about the nature of the anniversary was characteristic of a party which could not, throughout the first decade of its existence as a national political force, make up its mind whether it really wanted to become a party - or even a party with a unified organizational structure in all Land parties. In view of stagnant electoral results and intensified faction fighting, there was hardly any reason for jubilant celebration. Nevertheless, the anniversary caused some party activists to review the Greens advance from protest to parliament (Hermann & Schwegler-Rohmeis 1989; Schroeren 1990).

The concept of new social movements (NSMs) was initially introduced in the German social scientific discussion quite modestly as a provisional collective term (Roth 1983: 311; Rucht 1991b: 178, fn 6). By now it is a wellestablished category, although there is still no generally recognized meaning of the concept. Rather, there coexist various definitions of NSMs which are linked to competing theoretical perspectives. The situation is further complicated because there are also approaches to the study of the same phenomena which do not refer to any concept of social movements as an analytical category.

Within the last few years something akin to a paradigm-shift has been underway in the French-language political science literature dealing with contemporary France. Previously this literature had overwhelmingly focused on the distinctiveness and specificity of France's institutional arrangements under the Fifth Republic. It had therefore been concerned with elaborating particularist concepts and typologies to characterise both her political regime and also the political forces operating within, and shaped by, that institutional framework. In contrast, a growing body of recent writing is informed by a shared conviction that the contemporary period is indeed witnessing la fin de lexception française. Such works are therefore concerned with locating and identifying the sources of change through which French democracy is now, in the view of these authors, coming to be more closely aligned on the forms and processes characteristic of the practice of liberal democracy elsewhere.

The rational choice or the economic analysis of politics uses economic assumptions, such as individualism, self-interested motivation or instrumental rationality by actors, and the search for conditions of equilibrium in collective interactions, to better explain political processes.

Most recent studies in the field have tried to enhance the importance of institutions, generically identified with rules of decision, and to stress the importance of strategic behaviour in collective processes of interaction. For this reason, the main development of literature here surveyed starts from the academic discipline of economics, but proceeds to the analysis of traditional political subjects temporarily misconsidered in political science under juridical and sociological influence.

The theory of rational choice applied to political behaviour is a field of research in the intermediate area between political science and economics. In academies around the world, one can find political scientists as well as economists working in this interdisciplinary field. The Netherlands are no exception. In this survey, work will be reviewed by political scientists, scholars of public administration, economists and econometricians. Though the academic background of an author often helps explain the way in which a problem is approached and the tools that are used in analysing it, this review will only distinguish work on the basis of subject. Potentially, this has the advantage of allowing for a presentation of a broad spectrum of ways in which a subject can be addressed. A disadvantage, however, is that completely different approaches may be discussed side by side, which does not add to the readability of a paper.

In 1977 the prestigious Dutch Parliamentary Election Study could still write about voters in politics in masculine terms; unselfconsciously designating political man as standing for the whole, it could refrain from discussing women in politics. Safe in its assumptions about women, there seemed no need to pay them special attention. Before the second wave of feminism in the Netherlands, women and politics were hardly an object of study; to the degree that women's attitudes or (non)participation were discussed at all, they were seen as a matter for the sociology of the family, not a proper topic for political scientists. The quotation demonstrates the problem political scientists regularly face: the seemingly gender-neutral language of the discipline obscures the fact that it speaks constantly in a masculine idiom.

In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the analysis of public policies has witnessed in the last three decades a tremendous expansion and is now an established and developed field of research. Although this expansion has been promoted by various disciplines (ranging from economics to sociology, law and even philosophy) (Hansen 1983), political science has also played a prominent role, not only in substantive terms, but also in academic-institutional terms: especially in the USA (but largely also in the UK), public policies are primarily researched, debated and taught within Political Science departments.