This article examines the conflict in political liberalism between the demands placed on education by liberalism and those placed on education by democracy. In so far as the principles of political liberalism entail both that the state not interfere with individuals' private commitments and that it ensure the maintenance of liberal democratic institutions, I suggest that it is rent by an internal tension that poses particular dilemmas for education. This tension is explored through three competing models of the school as a politically liberal institution, expressed in terms of a schematic analysis of three countries' approach to education: England, the United States and France. I argue that while all three countries capture important aspects of the politically liberal educational project, and while the American approach especially successfully and self-consciously addresses the balance between liberalism and democracy in constructing the school as a public square, no model in theory or in practice is able to meet the diverse and competing demands of political liberalism. In so far as any political system is viable only if it is able to maintain itself across generations, however, I conclude that political liberalism fails as a theory in at least one important respect, and that the problem of education thus deserves much deeper attention from liberal political theorists than it has yet enjoyed.

Members of the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) agreed to disband this ‘economic arm of NATO’ as of March 1994. Despite the demise of COCOM, member states agreed to continue applying their existing export control policies and, in December 1995, replaced COCOM with the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies. Such actions are in contrast to conventional views about a likely decline in co-operation among COCOM members with the end of the Soviet threat. After providing a brief history of COCOM operations, we derive six categories of multilateral co-operative behaviours and assess evidence for COCOM in each category for two five-year periods, 1985–89 and 1990–94. We find that multilateral co-operation in this security institution not only increased in most categories in the last years of the Cold War, but increased in every category after 1989. We then review the possible explanations for the increase in co-operation, and find that the emergence of a liberal community identity among COCOM members explains this outcome better than more conventional theoretical approaches.

This article investigates the interactions between democracy, political stability and economic growth. Two aspects of the study differentiate it from previous research. First, a simultaneous approach is adopted which combines the study of economic growth and political stability with that of economic growth and democracy. Secondly, a distinction is made between types of political instability, because different kinds of government change have different effects on economic growth and democracy. This analysis employs three-stage least-squares estimation, and utilizes aggregate data covering ninety-six countries from 1960 to 1980. The results indicate that democracy has a positive indirect effect upon growth through its impacts on the probabilities of both regime change and constitutional government change from one ruling party to another. In addition, the evidence indicates that the two kinds of political change mentioned above have significant and opposite effects on growth; that growth has a negative effect on regime change and a positive effect on the probability of the ruling party remaining in power; and that long-run economic growth tends to exert a positive effect upon democracy.

In this article we will review the literature on cabinet durability and cabinet termination. The fact that many cabinets in Western multi-party democracies do not serve out their full potential legal term in office has given rise to an important and growing body of research in political science. Cabinet durability is one of the three main features of cabinets, the others being cabinet party composition and allocation of portfolios. Each is of theoretical interest in itself, but of even greater interest for what it might tell us about broader questions of representation and governance. Each is also important as a development and testing ground for new methodologies. Our initial aim was to update the excellent review of cabinet durability done over a decade ago by Lawrence C. Dodd, ‘The Study of Cabinet Durability: Introduction and Commentary’, Comparative Political Studies, 17 (1984), 155–62, which became badly out of date because of the considerable volume of recent empirical and theoretical work. Subsequent to the initial submission of this article, we discovered that Paul Warwick, Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), had provided a substantial review of this literature in the course of elaborating his own model of government survival. We have incorporated references to that work here. However, while we agree with much of what Warwick has written, our perspective on the extent of progress in understanding the determinants of cabinet termination and on what remains to be done and how best to proceed is rather different from his.There is a voluminous literature attempting to predict the party composition of cabinets from the party breakdown in the legislature and other factors, such as the ideological propinquity of the various parties. An excellent recent review is Michael Laver and Norman Schofield, Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), which also contains important new theoretical contributions of their own. The literature on portfolio allocations had been relatively dormant since the work of Eric Browne and his colleagues, e.g., Eric C. Browne and Mark Franklin, ‘Aspects of Coalition Payoffs in European Parliamentary Democracies’, American Political Science Review, 67 (1973), 453–69; Eric C. Browne and Karen Feste, ‘Qualitative Dimensions of Coalition Payoffs: Evidence for European Party Governments, 1945–1970’, American Behavioral Scientist, 18 (1975), 530–56; Eric C. Browne and James Frendreis, ‘Allocating Coalition Payoffs by Conventional Norm: An Assessment of the Evidence for Cabinet Coalition Situations,’ American Journal of Political Science, 24 (1980); 753–68, until reinvigorated by the innovative work of Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle, ‘Coalitions and Cabinet Government’, American Political Science Review, 84 (1990), 873–89; Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle, Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) which provides a new model of the relationship between party composition, portfolio allocations and policy outcomes (see also David Austen-Smith and Jeffrey Banks, ‘Stable Governments and the Allocations of Policy Portfolios,’ American Political Science Review, 84 (1990), 891–906.

Interest in the relationship between political democracy and economic growth has been long-standing.See, for example, S. M. Lipset, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, American Political Science Review, 53 (1959), 69–105. Recently this work has been reanalysed b y J. Helliwell, ‘Empirical Linkages between Democracy and Economic Growth’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 225–48; and by R. Burkhart and M. Lewis Beck, ‘Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Th esis,’ American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 903–10. Recently, there has been an explosion of empirical research emanating from political science and economics that once again attempts to understand the relationship between democracy and economic growth. The goal in much of this research has been to explain the variation in per capita growth rates that exists across nations. This goal has translated into a straightforward empirical mod elling strategy: regress a country's growth rate on a democracy variable and a number of control variables and see whether the partial correlation between democracy and economic growth is statistically significant. The last few years has seen the publicat ion of over twenty empirical studies; however, the results are far from conclusive. In their recent review of twenty-one statistical findings investigating this relationship, Przeworski and Limongi explain that ‘eight found in favor of democracy, eight in favor of authoritarianism, and five discovered no difference.’ Of the thirteen studies surveyed by Sirowy and Inkeles, three find a negative effect of democracy on economic growth, four find this negative effect in some situations, and six find no relationship whatsoever.See A. Przeworski and F. Limongi, ‘Political Regimes and Economic Growth’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7 (1993), 1002–37; and L. Sirowy and A. Inkeles, ‘The Effects of Democracy on Economic Growth and Inequality: A Review,’ Studies in Comparative International Development, 25 (1990), 126–57. See also R. Levine and D. Renelt, ‘Cross-Country Studies of Growth and Policy: Methodological, Conceptual, and Statistical Problems’ (World Bank Working Paper, No. 608, Washington, DC, 1991). These conclusions are far from reassuring or instructive.

One of the salient characteristics of the British first-past-the-post electoral system is the amount of bias which it produces. Parties with large percentages of the votes (i.e. 25 or greater) almost invariably get even larger percentage shares of the parliamentary seats, whereas those with smaller vote percentages tend to get very few seats. That bias largely reflects the superimposition of a geography of constituency boundaries on the geographies of party support, so that different sets of constituencies can produce different levels and even directions of bias, as is clearly illustrated in studies using US data.See, for example, R. L. Morrill, ‘Ideal and Reality in Reapportionment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 63 (1973), 463–77. More generally on bias in electoral systems, see D. W. Rae, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws, 2nd edn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971); and R. Taagepera and M. S. Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).