Improvement of services is one of the principal objectives of reforms introduced into local governments, although this objective does not always guide the formulation of the contents of these reforms. A more rigorous analysis of the implications of service improvement should concentrate on local public goods, on their nature and, above all, on their supply and production—aspects hitherto only slightly developed. To start, one can try to infer certain local institutional characteristics which would be the most suitable for the purpose of service improvement. Certain authors who adopt this course anticipate a quasi-market model for local government services. A critical examination of this model shows that it is no longer suitable and that a preferable model is one which we can call “community co-responsibility.”

At the centre of the debate raised by the development of Eurocommunism is the question of violence and its role in the Western European revolutionary process. This article first examines the major approaches taken by the French, Italian and Spanish Communist parties on this question. The purpose is to see whether these approaches are consistent with Lenin's thoughts. The body of the study focusses on Lenin's various views on the role of violent struggle and its use by the workers' party to achieve the socialist revolution. Lenin's view on this matter gives four meanings to the word constraint, each of which refers to a specific situation: The emphasis is on the evolution in the thinking of the Bolshevik leader concerning violence under the pressure of reality without denying the resulting theoretical profile. The analysis concludes by outlining the points of agreement and conflict between Lenin's thoughts and the ideas of Marchais, Berlinguer and Carillo.