Whatever their specialisation, research scholars and political science teachers are confronted on a daily basis with the need for information on means of locating texts or sophisticated bibliographical notes, research procedures in statistics, electoral results and various other data on current affairs. To meet this need, they avail of libraries, government agencies, private institutions and statistical data collections of great diversity, as well as numerous compilations of bibliographical references, abstracts of published articles and specialised indexes. Fortunately enough, they may also avail of the informal assistance of well-informed persons who allow them to save time while engaged in amiable conversation.

Since the late 1980s we have witnessed a strong and rapid growth in attempts to influence EU decision making. This article will summarise empirical evidence and discuss explanations for this development. This phenomenon has attracted little attention so far, and we therefore seek not only to comment on such literature as exists but also to pinpoint issues for further research.

The world has seen dramatic changes is the last few years. This platitude is commonly illustrated by the collapse of the Soviet ‘empire’, the normalization of relations with South Africa and Vietnam, and the establishment of Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall membership of the United Nations has increased, with some 25 new independent states. But while the number of national states is increasing rapidly, the uniqueness and independence of the types of political organizations are in decline.

In political theory and to an even greater extent in the day-to-day-practice of teaching political science, ‘democracy’ as well as ‘institutions’ are usually treated as pre-existing contexts for individual and sometimes for collective actors. ‘Democracy’ in particular is very often perceived either as an institution or as a set of institutions. This structuralist approach has long dominated research and discussion. Little has changed since March and Olson in a famous article claimed that institutions are ‘political actors in their own right’ (1984: 738), and that ‘political institutions can be treated as actors in much the same way we treat individuals as actors’ (1984: 742). The present article will present an alternative perspective, referring extensively - though not exclusively - to the German literature. I will first argue that the analogy with individual actors is not appropriate to understanding ‘institutions’, then raise the actual problematic of an unhistorical approach towards institutions in democracies, and in conclusion briefly tackle the perspectives of institutional change and reform.

Once upon a time, when the discipline of politics established itself in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, scholars focused on the state and had a notion of political man - the statesman - operating within the constraints and opportunities integral to a nation’s history and constitutional system of rule. For much of the twentieth century, political scientists have been much less attentive to the state: they have seen it as a woolly abstraction and so have chosen to redefine and expand their frame of disciplinary reference to embrace other things. Political scientists got increasingly excited about the significance of the political behaviour of ordinary individuals and groups in the larger society. Moreover, they often argued that this behaviour pressed in to determine the actions and policies of elected governments in the West.

If politics is the organised choice of alternatives, it arguably did not exist in Russia before the 1980s. There were certainly elections at which citizens periodically voted and returned a government. There was a political party, in which almost 10 percent of adults were enrolled; and there was a system of courts, a network of public associations, and a well developed mass media. Beyond this, there were regular struggles for influence within the leadership, and a wider ‘cryptopolitics’ with many similarities to bureaucratic politics in other systems (Rigby 1964).

One of the best indicators of the principal academic concerns addressed by different national political science communities is the content of their journal literature. The list below indicates the extent and the richness of this literature by reporting the contents of selected west European political science journals during 1994. Since the object of this listing is not to provide a general overview of European political science journal literature but rather to draw attention to its regional diversity, the basis on which journals have been selected needs to be carefully specified. An effort has been made to identify a single journal in each country: that which is published by or associated with the country’s national political science association.