In this article, a study is presented of the ideological shift to the right that took place in the Swedish elite‐dominated public debate between 1969 and 1989. The first aim of the article is to present the results of a number of analyses of the shift. Two questions guided the analyses: first, what was the ideological content of this swing to the right? Second, how comprehensive was it? The results indicate that the shift could best be described as a neo‐liberalization of the debate, and that conservative ideas were still virtually absent from the arenas of public debate in the late 1980s. The comprehensiveness of the shift was studied (a) as the proportion of neo‐liberal ideas put forward as explicit statements in the debate arenas, and (b) as influence on the normative and descriptive use of political terms such as the Swedish words for “democracy”, “justice” and “equality”. The results showed a ‘neo‐liberalization’ of the usage of some of the terms. The second aim of the article is to suggest, by example, certain methods for the analysis of ideological change and to evaluate those methods.

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.

The article addresses a public sector principal‐agent relationship under a financial regime of block grants. Two types of questions arise in principal‐agent relations in this setting. The first is whether a public sector agent can force the principal to approve budgets that are away from the principal's ideal point, or if it is the principal that is the strong party in the relationship and can determine the agent's budget. The second is whether the agent can exploit a situation of asymmetric information or neglect from the principal, to lower efficiency. Predictions from different assumptions of the principal‐agent relationship are empirically tested on data from counties and county run hospitals in Norway. Results show that counties have the upper hand in the relationship and can set hospital budgets. However, agents reduce efficiency when budgets are increased and counties can not prevent efficiency from falling by monitoring the agent. Under a block grant financing system counties face a tradeoff between cost‐efficiency and production. Low budgets lead to high efficiency and low production. High budgets lead to low efficiency and high production.

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.

In this paper we analyse the literature on a particular aspect of immigrant integration in Western European welfare states: the extent to which this can be explained by conditions set by institutions, social rights and rights of residence. Our focus is on health care, old age insurance, housing and vocational training, and on the circumstances under which migrants have access to benefits from the general systems of social security. In particular, the assignment of a legal position by the rights of residence plays an essential role. The various legal groups have access to social benefits depending on their status of residence. The institutional framework of each welfare states is also relevant to the access that people have to social benefits. In the countries analysed, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, the individual security systems are organised according to different political concepts, each of them allowing immigrants access to their benefits to a different degree. On the whole, the degree and kind of governmental regulations seem to be crucially important for the integration of immigrants into the welfare state.

Standard economic voting models assume a dominant locus of policy responsibility, a single chief executive whose powers are fixed by certain inviolate institutional rules. The president‐centred US system serves as the paradigm here. However, economic voting may occur under a dual executive, whose powers change in response to the institutional rules themselves. France represents this second scenario. There are two executives, the President and the Prime Minister. Under conditions of cohabitation, with a partisan division of the power between the two offices, economic voting becomes more sophisticated. According to data from the 1993–1995 cohabitation, voters perceived that the Prime Minister, not the President, was responsible for the economy. Therefore, in the 1995 presidential contest, they directed their economic evaluations at the Gaullist party of the Prime Minister, not the Socialist party of the President.

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.

Over the past decade European political leaders have increasingly come to refer to ‘sustainable development’ as a legitimate focus of government activity. Starting from the premises that sustainable development is a complex and contested ideal, and that experiences with state planning in the twentieth century have been deeply ambiguous, this article reflects on the insights which political science can shed on the new social project of ‘planning for sustainable development’. The discussion centres on three relevant political science literatures — meta critiques of planning, ‘new governance’ debates, and enquiries into policy related learning. Consideration of these perspectives suggest that to the extent that it is possible for ‘planning for sustainable development’ to attain its declared objectives this will depend upon the integration of sustainable development norms into existing planning structures and modalities, the extensive development of co-operative management initiatives, and vigorous debates about alternative futures. Coordination among the inevitably disjointed and partially contradictory efforts of multiple agencies will rely upon the integrative potential of the sustainable development norm, central government initiatives, and collision, negotiation and mutual adjustment.

Frequent government crisis and high legislative output have distinguished Italy for over forty years. Previous explanations of the Italian legislative process have focused on the institutions established since the Second World War. In particular, the ability of the parliamentary committees to pass legislation, and the ‘polarized’ nature of the Italian party system have received a great deal of attention. This type of structural analysis has proved unable to successfully explain the significant variations in legislative output which have occurred since the early 1950s. This paper attempts to add to previous structural models by demonstrating that much of the variation which has occurred can be linked to the number of parties participating in the governing coalition. Furthermore, the paper questions previous interpretations of leggine (small laws) and the role they play within the legislative process by demonstrating their positive relationship to regular legislation.

Most decisions by the European Parliament are taken by an absolute majority of its members. Some decisions however – such as the approval of the budget of the European Union – require a two‐thirds majority. The paper analyzes the a priori voting strength of the member states when their representatives vote coherently. It is shown that the increase in votes for Germany in the 1994 reallocation enhanced its position. A less favourable effect, however, can be seen for the other large members (France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Spain). However, since votes in the EP tend to be cast according to partisan rather than national affiliation, the relative voting power of the political groups with respect to the two quotas is also analyzed. The tool to measure this is the (normalized) Banzhaf power index, partially extended to account for connected coalitions. The paper demonstrates that the distribution of votes between the present EU member states as allocated in proportion to their population size indeed roughly corresponds to their a priori voting power. However, the relative influence of the largest political groups, the European Socialists and the European People's Party, tends to be overestimated by their share of seats in the framework of the simple majority rule, but it is considerable if the quota is two‐thirds. Finally, under the two‐thirds majority rule, the European Liberal, Democratic and Reformist Party as well as the small groups appear to be almost powerless. The more the EP gains political leverage – a further increase in its institutional powers is to be expected in the framework of the ongoing Intergovernmental Conference – the more the distribution of voting power between the member states and between the political groups will be a crucial factor in the shaping of EU policies.

This article presents a comprehensive listing of election studies available at European data archives over the period since 1945 and a brief description of each. Each study includes survey questions on the behaviour, intentions or motives of voters in conjunction with an election to the national parliament based on a nationwide sample. The article lists the studies by country in alphabetical order, and follows a chronological sequence within each country. In each case, it describes the date of the study, the research design, the formal title of the study and the principal investigator, the size of the sample as measured by the number of respondents or cases, the number of variables, and the archive or archives in which copies of the study are 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(l97 1) 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.