When Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, the Soviet empire consisted of Cuba and six reliable satellites in Eastern Europe, the bloc was dominated politically and economically by the Soviet Union, and East–West interactions were kept to a minimum. Soviet military capabilities at this time, moreover, were clearly inferior to the military power of the West. And while East–West relations were testy, they had improved in the aftermath of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

People who take part in acts of civil disobedience or political violence are discontented about something. That is a truism. The interesting research problem is to identify particular kinds of discontent that are associated systematically with aggressive political behaviour-discontent that operates as a ‘precondition’ of aggressive behaviour in contrast to discontent that is peculiar to particular groups at particular times and places and serves only as a ‘precipitant’ of aggressive behaviour.

Roughly two centuries ago the Marquis de Condorcet and Chevalier Jean-Charles de Borda originated a research tradition – by no means a continuous one – that over the decades has produced results casting doubt on many widely used collective decision-making procedures. The phenomenon known as the Condorcet effect or the Condorcet paradox is the well-known problem of the simple majority rule. The paradox bearing the name of Borda is less commonly known, but it also relates to a procedure that is widely used, namely the plurality principle. Either one of these paradoxes is serious enough to make these procedures suspect unless one is convinced that the situations giving rise to these paradoxical features are extremely rare. In this article we review some voting procedures that have been introduced in the literature. We aim at giving a synthesis of the assessments of procedures with respect to various criteria.

The relatively recent proliferation of books and articles on Spain and Portugal is obviously a consequence of the profound socio-political changes that have occurred in those countries over the past decade. The range and variety of this growth area of academic literature has been considerable. It is almost as if after more than forty years of dictatorship, everybody wanted to acquire, in a few years, the knowledge they had been deprived of before. New journals newspapers, books and booklets appear and disappear from bookstores and newspaper stands with amazing rapidity, revealing the importance of the anxieties and frustrations created by so many years of intellectual and physical repression and censorship. In the light of this publishing explosion this article will attempt to review the major contributions to the debate on the Spanish and Portuguese transitions to democracy, with the intention of delineating the most prominent issues and themes (political, social and economic) involved.

The purpose of this brief note has been to test the behavioural postulates of the neighbourhood effect. The results do not support the construction that minority voters are converted to the majority view by local information flows. These findings suggest the model of the neighbourhood effect needs to be amended and that alternative explanations of the polarization trends need to be examined more closely.