This article compares the use of people outside government to consider electoral reform in three countries using the single-member plurality electoral system. The composition of electoral reform bodies, ranging from commissions of experts (New Zealand) and ex-politicians (Britain) to assemblies of randomly selected citizens (British Columbia), appears to have influenced how well their recommendations were received by the public. Governments should be careful not to assume that they can retain control of the electoral reform process once they let it out of their hands, as the cases of New Zealand and British Columbia show, where majorities of the voters chose reform.

One of the recurring topics in the history of sovereign nation-states is the way in which national identity, and social and cultural differences are dealt with politically. In the Netherlands, that has always had a strong tradition of social citizenship, the government has recently responded to plural nationhood and its problems by turning to new concepts of citizenship. In this article, it is argued that notions of citizenship are, in the end, used to reinforce Dutch sovereignty by creating and maintaining national cohesion. The underlying assumption in public policy is that a strong sense of national citizenship that replaces the old model of social citizenship is the only way to reconcile differences and safeguard peace in contemporary post-industrial society. Three Dutch policy sectors – integration, welfare and child protection – are examined to see how these concepts have taken shape in public policy.

On one hand, NGOs are seen as experts because of their proximity to the problems they address. They provide knowledge relevant to the solution of these problems and can bring this into the political process. They are able to increase the efficiency of global governance by participating in the policy-formation processes of international organizations. In this paper I will explain the role and functions of NGOs as described in the debate about their legitimacy and theorize – while applying Ernst Haas's theory of organizational learning – on the mechanisms likely to lead to their increasing integration into international institutions as well as the implications of this integration.

Besides seat maximization, what factors motivate an incumbent regime in the grey zone between democracy and dictatorship to alter a relatively institutionalized parliamentary electoral system? To answer this question, this article seeks to uncover the rationale guiding the 2005 changes to Russia's electoral system. It presents evidence to suggest that the same strategies that allowed Russia's current party of power to use the existing electoral system to its advantage in the 2003 Duma election, threatened to spoil the fruits of that advantage in the years to come. Yet it also points out that moving from a mixed electoral system to a purely proportional system could be good for Russian democracy in the future. As a result, the work contends that seemingly authoritarian incumbents will promote reforms that aid the future cause of democracy when these same reforms serve their more immediate interests.

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is sometimes taken to have been the real pioneer of many of the policies introduced by New Labour since 1997 under the general rubric of the ‘new social democracy’. This article considers the heritage of the ALP's 13 years in power (and its subsequent 10 years in opposition). The conclusion considers the lessons that may be learnt about the past (and the future) of Labour in the UK.

‘Being American’ is a two-sided identity called ‘citizenship’. This involves a set (the state) and its members (citizens). The citizen (say Whitman) may be ‘fully’ American, just as some particular nation (say Native American, African, British, Jewish) may be so. But no one citizen (the patriot), or subset of citizens (perhaps the ethnic group), nor even the set of all citizens (past and present) reflects or symbolizes the whole of what ‘being American’ might mean. Nor can we reduce America's multitudes, and multitudinous practices, to one thickset/hotfoot Creed producing the sexy ‘American’/‘Un-American’ binary. Being American hangs upon a paramount constitutionalism that coolly reconciles, without melting, underlying identities. ‘Constitutionalism’ is informed by some abstract notion of justice, is grounded in mutual regard and equal liberty, and mere possession of ‘a constitution’ does not suffice to deliver it.