European parties' performance in electoral competition

Abstract: This article focuses on competition for votes between parties, as it existed in Western Europe in the period of the direct election to the European Parliament in 1989. Following earlier research by Van der Eijk and Niemöller, an instrument is introduced to measure the probability of party choice of EC citizens which establishes the likelihood of respondents to vote for any of the nationally relevant options/parties. A number of substantive conclusions about political parties'competitive performance result from this research. First, a single mechanism seems to structure electoral competition in all EC member-countries. Second, the competitive performance of political parties is not affected by their governmental status, their ideological position, and the degree of politicisation of the electoral environment. And third, parties'competitive performance is strongly affected by the degree of uniqueness of their electoral potential, their mobilising capacities, their ideological extremity and their sheer size.     

Europe at the Fin de Siècle

In 1968 he was a prominent spokesman for noncommunist intellectuals, and he later became a founding member and leader of the human and civil rights movement “Charter 77.” The danger of totalitarianism has been his constant theme.     

On democracy and debt

As we explained there is really little a priori reasoning for a clear prediction that authoritarian regimes will incur more foreign debt. In fact, some other empirical literature reveals that such regimes will face a higher supply price for such debt. Anderson presents a study of a single year using an admittedly crude measure of authoritarianism that finds that such regimes do issue more debt.This study provides a fuller examination of the empirical relationship between foreign debt and the nature of the polity's regime. Utilizing a continuous democracy variable and a continuous political liberty variable, it tests the relationship between debt and political variables. It finds little empirical support for the thesis that democracy or autocracy influence foreign debt levels. Generally the continuous variables are not significant if we use a linear in the logs specification. While a linear specification obtains results more consistent with the idea that level of democracy decreases debt, it also obtains results even less favorable to the idea that extreme forms of autocracy increase debt.     

Selling Oneself into Slavery: Mill and Paternalism

'Voluntarily acceding to slavery', Joel Feinberg has written, 'is too much for Mill to stomach', and so Mill espouses strong paternalism and contradicts his famous principle of individual sovereignty. Mill's critics have found incoherence where none exists, largely because they have failed to take seriously his own claim that the non- enforcement of slavery contracts is required by the principle of liberty. The refusal to enforce such contracts arises not from Mill's espousal of paternalism, but from the paradox of sovereignty. Reconstruction of Mill's solution to this paradox not only dispels the charge that he abandoned the sovereignty of the individual, but also contributes to the reinterpretation of his defence of freedom, as a result of which his entire doctrine of antipaternalism emerges as a coherent and defensible position.