What If? The Historian and the Counterfactual

This essay lays out why many scholars, particularly historians, are inherently skeptical of counterfactuals. It highlights several of the most obvious errors that are often made by those undertaking counterfactual reasoning. It also highlights how these articles go a long way toward developing effective rules for the appropriate and most effective use of counterfactuals.     

Free to choose,free to win,free to lose: the phenomenology of ethical space

This paper argues that, contrary to some points of view, most public administrators have sufficient discretion to act ethically; they have ‘ethical space’ within field constraints. This conclusion is arrived at by way of a theoretical perspective called phenomenology. Along the way we describe this orientation and try to show its relevance to practitioners.     

Terrorist sympathizers in The Netherlands

Abstract

The following remarks are excerpted from the 1987 Annual Conference on Domestic and International Terrorism sponsored by the Anti‐Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer Foundation of the Anti‐Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, in cooperation with the Institute for Studies in International Terrorism at the State University of New York (SUNY) and the U.S. Global Strategy Council. The meeting was held on December 14, 1987 in Washington, D.C., and chaired by Professor Yonah Alexander of State University of New York and The George Washington University.     

Conditions of success and political problems of a ‘media‐mediated personality‐party’: The case of Forza Italia

The emergence of Forza Italia should not be exclusively reduced to specific Italian conditions. This article attempts to explain the development and establishment of Forza Italia as part of a general change of politics in a modern, highly media‐oriented western society. The type of party represented by Forza Italia can be defined as a ‘media‐mediated personality‐party’. With regard to its structural organisation, it presents itself as an answer to tendencies of differentiation, individualisation and consumerisation in modern society. The leading organisational principle is not inner‐party democracy but inter‐party capability to compete. This model of organisation is seen as functional for a marketing‐based, media‐orientated political strategy. It represents a challenge for the type of democratic, mass‐membership party in western Europe. The 1996 elections in Italy, however, have also pointed out the limits of the model of the media‐mediated personality‐party.