The invitation that I received to deliver the 1993 Stein Rokkan Lecture during the Joint Sessions of Workshops at the University of Leiden gave me the welcome opportunity, in the introductory remarks of my lecture, to honour the memory of the late Stein Rokkan and to pay tribute to his many scholarly contributions. But perhaps more than anything else, I said, he deserves to be honoured for his work as one of the Founding Fathers of the European Consortium for Political Research. The Consortium is one of the greatest success stories in the social sciences: it has created a high-quality and truly European political science out of the formerly disparate national political sciences in the different West European countries in an incredibly short time span.

Since Aristotle, the aim of cosmopolitans has been to develop a science of politics based on concepts, theories and empirical generalisations which travel beyond the national boundaries of any particular political system. Indeed, it can be argued that this is the sine qua non of any mature science. Developments which should lead towards a more cosmopolitan political science include the growth of regional and international organisations, the professionalisation of the discipline, and technological developments which expedite global communications. The international exchange of data, scholars and publications should facilitate the ability of political scientists from different countries to share a body of knowledge, methodological approaches, and intellectual concerns.

The history of global computer networks begins in the middle of the Cold War, in 1957, when US Department of Defense created ARPA, the Advanced Research Project Agency. Internet was born in 1972 as a result of various attempts at electronic data transmission, both in Britain and in the USA. While universities were initiators and benefactors of Internet in its early years of development, academic research and teaching on the net has been progressively joined by commercial services. This ‘privatisation’, which began in 1991, has changed the face of Internet. It is probably one of the main reasons for the most recent quantum leap in popular computer networking, the incorporation of Internet into the World Wide Web (WWW) which, with its associated ‘browser’ software (for example Navigator) has made the global computer network easily accessible to anyone with a computer and the motivation to use it to explore what is available.

Democracy is the most ambitious political project of the twentieth century, and the study of democracy has been one of the major preoccupations of modern political scientists. Stein Rokkan’s main concern was with the development of democratic mass politics in Europe. On this score, he found many lessons in the Norwegian experience. To Rokkan and to many other political scientists, a critical aspect of democracy was representation, the people’s ability freely to select representatives from their own ranks who would faithfully stand up for their interests. Before the advent of mass democracy, during the stage Robert Dahl (1971) calls competitive oligarchy, parliaments did not always represent all the people. Granting all adult citizens the freedom and authority to select these representatives was a precondition for the more inclusive democracy we now often take for granted. And when well-defined groups with distinctive interests suddenly became enfranchised, as did millions of European men and women during the first half of this century, the election of representatives who shared their most salient characteristics was a dramatic advance.

Irish political parties cannot be easily fitted into a conventional leftright framework. The Lipset–Rokkan centre-periphery concept is employed to explain this situation, and, in particular, to throw light on the persistent success of Fianna Fáil, the nationalist-populist party which has dominated the system since 1932. It is argued that Ireland affords an example of a polity in which the political concerns and style of the rural periphery came to ‘invade’ and dominate the urban centre for more than a generation. Evidence from a study of urban party activists indicates a persistence of rural political styles and ideological perspectives in a social contextwhich has been for well over half a century.

After a discussion of possible components in a definition of ‘cumulation’ and the relative lack of cumulation in political science, a scheme for research strategies is outlined with the aim of facilitating cumulation, or at least facilitating a diagnosis of the state of political science in this respect. The scheme includes three types of studies: (1) analysis of the formal properties of theoretical approaches in political science, (2) content analyses in the form of inventories of problems, propositions and concepts in the discipline, (3) evaluational analysis, i.e. an assessment of what ‘theory criteria’ to use for evaluating the approaches and of the probable relations between these criteria.

In recent years it has become increasingly difficult to maintain that the European party systems are stable and that they reflect the societal cleavage structures of the past. One developmental aspect of the party systems is singled out for description and analysis in this paper. It is argued that European party systems in terms of electoral volatility, i.e., rates of net change in the electorates, are drifting away fromeach other. Some of the party systems which have traditionally been considered volatile, apparently are becoming less so,while some other systems are taking on the character of highly volatile party systems. A simple set of hypotheses, based upon the notion of party space, is proposed in order to account for the variation observed. The data lend support to the hypothesis that electoral volatility is a function of the format of the party system and of short-term changes in that format.

The overriding conclusion of the majority of recent policy studies is that political factors play an insignificant role in influencing policy outputs. We establish a number of models, comprising both economic and political variables, which are used in an attempt to indicate the relative salience of rival determinants of public welfare commitment in advanced democratic states. Though we cannot dismiss some influence of economic factors, the main findings run counter to the conventional wisdom of policy studies in indicating the greater salience of political factors as determinants of public welfare outputs.

The composition of the directly elected European Parliament does not precisely reflect the ‘real’ balance of political forces in the European Community. As long as the national political systems decide most of what there is to be decided politically, and everything really important, European elections are additional national second-order elections. They are determined more by the domestic political cleavages than by alternatives originating in the EC, but in a different way than if nine first-order national elections took place simultaneously. This is the case because European elections occur at different stages of the national political systems’ respective ‘electoral cycles’. Such a relationship between a second-order arena and the chief arena of a political system is not at all unusual. What is new here, is that one second-order political arena is related to nine different first-order arenas. A first analysis of European election results satisfactorily justifies the assumption that European Parliament direct elections should be treated as nine simultaneous national second-order elections.

This article aims at defining the concept of ‘semi-presidential government’ and detailing the diversity of its practices. There are in fact three types of semi-presidential regimes: the president can be a mere figurehead, or he may be all-powerful or again he can share his power with parliament. Using four parameters – the content of the constitution, tradition and circumstances, the composition of the parliamentary majority and the position of the president in relation to the majority – the author seeks to explain why similar constitutions are applied in a radically different manner.

Although left-right scales are an inherent feature of much crossnational research, they have necessarily been created on a somewhat ad hoc basis, since the empirical foundation for valid cross-national scales rarely exists. This paper seeks to provide such a foundation by using judgements of party ideological position which are both explicit and non-idiosyncratic across a wide range of countries. These judgements derive from a so-called ‘expert’ survey of leading political scientists in Western Europe, the USA, and elsewhere. It is our hope that the scales which we derive in this way may prove useful in a wide variety of contexts of comparative research.

To what extent can the dramatic differences in social policy efforts in rich and poor countries be accounted for by genuinely political explanations? The hypothesis that is advanced in this article rests upon the combination of two schools of thought in comparative social policy analysis: socioeconomic models which focus attention on levels of economic wealth, need and demand for social security, and models of a comparative-historiographic and political-institutionalist nature. Empirical applications of socio-economic models with lagged dependent variables reveal the existence of two deviant families of nations: overspenders in social policy (such as overspenders of social-democratic complexion and of Christian-democratic composition) and underspenders (such as superpowers in East and West as well as Japan and East Germany). The residuals that can be derived from these models are amenable to an explanation which resides in comparative-historiographic political analysis of social policy.

Until recent years, two major trends in European politics – the growth of State services and increased political participation – have complemented the central role of parties. This paper argues that this complementarity may have started to come unstuck, and questions the future viability of the mass party as a result of a shift in the balance of perceived advantages of the mass party by both leaders and members. The paper discusses several potential costs and benefits of party membership for leaders and members. Using membership statistics and survey data the reasonableness of these arguments is explored.

Many previous theoretical analyses of multiparty coalition behaviour have been based either on one-dimensional policymodel or on a constantsum game interpretation. For theoretical and empirical reasons this paper focusses on a competitive two-dimensional model. In this model parties are concerned with policy outcomes but choose party positions both with a view to electoral consequences and as a basis for coalition bargaining. The political heart is proposed as the set of possible coalition outcomes. The heart is either the core of the political game or is determined by a small number of party positions.Under certain conditions an equilibriumin the choice of party positions can be shown to exist. The model suggests that parties can be categorized as either strong or weak core parties, anti-core parties or peripheral parties. This categorization of parties implies a typology of party systems, which gives some theoretical foundation for the occurrence of minority, minimal winning and surplus coalitions in many of the European countries in the postwar period.

The conventional wisdom concerning the choice between majoritarian electoral systems and proportional representation (PR) – and, more broadly, between majoritarian and consensus forms of democracy – is that there is a trade-off: PR and consensus democracy provide more accurate representation and better minority representation, but majoritarianism provides more effective government. A comparative analysis of 18 older and wellestablished democracies, most of which are European democracies, shows that PR and consensus democracy indeed give superior political representation, but thatmajoritarian systems do not performbetter inmaintaining public order and managing the economy, and hence that the over-all performance of consensus democracy is superior. This conclusion should also be tested among the growing number of slightly newer non-European democracies, which are already old enough to have proved their viability and can be studied over an extended period of time. If its validity is confirmed – and the evidence so far is very promising – it can have great practical significance for the future of democracy in the world.