RESEARCH NOTE: "THE STUBBORN SILENCE OF PETRONIUS ARBITER"1

We trained hard — but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
From Petronii Arbitri Satyricon , AD 66, attributed to Gaius Petronius.     

Accountability in World Politics1

World politics has never been a democratic realm. Now, with interdependence and globalization prompting demands for global governance, the lack of global democracy has become an important public issue. Yet the domestic analogy is unhelpful since the conditions for electoral democracy, much less participatory democracy, do not exist on a global level. Rather than abandoning democratic principles, we should rethink our ambitions. First, we should emphasize, in our normative as well as our positive work, the role played by information in facilitating international cooperation and democratic discourse. Second, we should define feasible objectives such as limiting potential abuses of power, rather than aspiring to participatory democracy and then despairing of its impossibility. Third, we should focus as much on the powerful entities that are the core of the problem, including multinational firms and states, as on multilateral organizations, which often are the focus of criticism. Finally, we need to think about how to design a pluralistic accountability system for world politics that relies on a variety of types of accountability: supervisory, fiscal, legal, market, peer and reputational. A challenge for contemporary political science is to design such a system, which could promote both democratic values and effective international cooperation.     

TWO BOOKS ON FEDERALISM1

COMMUNISM AS A WAY OF LIFE
MAX BELOFF
Nuffield College, Oxford
LOCKE'S ATLANTIS ernesto de marchi
St. Antony's College, Oxford     

Rational Choice and Community Power Structures1

The community power debate concluded with each side believing they had won. Political theorists have generalized power, making empirical investigation very difficult; urban scholars have turned their attention to more manageable empirical problems. Rational choice advances the debate, exposing the errors of all sides and facilitating a new approach which transcends structural versus individualist methods. By separating various aspects of power in urban contexts, complementary techniques such as network analysis in a bargaining framework, semi-structured interviewing and the use of text databases permits a comprehensive investigation of agenda-setting and the mobilization of bias. The paper demonstrates the utility of this approach by comparing it to 'regime theory', the latest paradigm of urban research.     

Shifting Dimensions of Citizen Control1

European politics is still dominated by representative and parliamentary national systems of policy making. These systems can be seen as chains of political delegation from citizens through parliamentarians and executive office holders to civil servants. In these chains, a major trend for the past thirty years, and more strongly during the second half of that period, is a strengthening of agents' accountability to the principals. But, simultaneously, citizens' ability to exercise accountability through parliamentary democracy is eroding because of a decline in political party cohesion. Concurrently, constraints external to both the constitutional chain and political parties are growing stronger.
The changes along these three dimensions lead to a situation in which democratic principals commonly decide more about less. Thus, while reforms have strengthened the constitutional parliamentary chain of governance, there is also an ongoing de-parliamentarisation of modern politics. The main motivation for this special issue is to investigate this general phenomenon through a set of focused case studies of the Nordic (here known as 'Scandinavian') countries. These analyses show important differences in how these trends have been manifest. In one country, Finland, the parliamentary chain has actually grown in strength and importance in the last decade.     

International Relations Theory and International Distributive Justice1

International Relations theory emerged in the 1930s with the triumph of realism over utopianism, a triumph that created a discourse that has been unable to make a substantial contribution to the literature on international distributive justice which has burgeoned since the mid-1970's. The emergence of neorealist and neoliberal International Relations theory in the 1970's and 1980's made little difference; However, this consensus is now crumbling and a new body of International Relations theory, focusing on bounded communities and the ethics of inclusion and exclusion is emerging. This new work is more in tune with the concerns of political theory - although major differences remain.