AT THE TIME OF INDEPENDENCE FIFTY YEARS AGO MAHATAMA Gandhi suggested that the Indian National Congress, which he successfully led to independence, should be disbanded. As its function was to produce a coalition which could achieve independence from British rule, its historical role was over. This was an entirely logical, yet an entirely unpractical suggestion. Politicians active inside the Congress wished, not unnaturally, to turn their sacrifices into potential investments in an independent state. Independence was accompanied by partition of the country which degenerated into riots and massacre of civilians. There was no other political organization except the Congress to establish effective government. In any case, Congress was too successful a political organization to be dissolved purely by the power of argument. The Congress, therefore, turned from an independence movement into a governing party, a difficult transformation under all circumstances, and flourished. The historical significance of the recent general elections in India, the eleventh after independence, seems to be the actual realization of Gandhi's suggestion. India must now find a political structure which can function without the overwhelming presence of the Congress, a party universally reviled but, ironically, treated as indispensable.

ON TUESDAY, 5 NOVEMBER 1996 BILL CLINTON WAS REelected President of the United States by a comfortable margin. In addition, the Republicans retained control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Although these results were generally unsurprising, the election was an important one for students of American electoral behaviour. In particular, the results were widely expected to cast new light on two distinctive strands of thought in the literature: claims that we are in the midst of a realignment of the electorate towards the Republicans; and claims that American voters now consciously choose divided government so as to limit the scope of government and avoid the extremes in both parties. The second part of this article will address these questions and will discuss their implications for President Clinton's second term. First, however, it will be useful to examine the results in more detail.

ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING ASPECTS OF THE 1996 US presidential election was the evident inverse relationship between the results that year and those of the election contested exactly one hundred years earlier. Most of the states won by Bill Clinton were carried by the Republican William McKinley in 1896, while nearly all the states won by Bob Dole were those carried by William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic candidate. In 1896 there were 45 states, and of them 28 were won by the Democrats and 17 by the Republicans in the 1996 presidential election. Twenty-one of the 28 Democratic states in 1996 (or 75 per cent of the total) had been Republican a hundred years earlier; 15 of the 17 Republican states in 1996 (or 88 per cent of the total) went for the Democrats in 1896. This impression of the two election years being mirror images of each other, at least so far as the pattern of presidential results is concerned, is even more evident when looking at the distribution of Electoral College (EC) votes. (The five states created since 1896 are omitted from the entire discussion.) Of the 358 EC votes the 282 that went to the Democrats were from ‘McKinley states’, and they constitute 78 per cent of the Democrat total. In the case of the Republicans, 133 out of 148 EC votes were from ‘Bryanite states’ - that is 90 per cent of the 1996 Republican EC vote.

THE GENERAL ELECTION IN JAPAN OF OCTOBER 1996 brought back the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to a position of predominance, if not preponderance, in the House of Representatives. Out of 500 seats, the LDP acquired 239, while the second largest New Frontier Party (FNP) won 156, the newly-formed Democratic Party 52, the Communist Party 26, the Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ) 15, and the Sakigake New Party two seats. Prior to the general election, the LDP, the SDPJ and the Sakigake had cooperated in a coalition government with 211, 30 and 9 seats, respectively. After the election, the LDP formed a minority government without making a formal coalition arrangement with the much enfeebled SDPJ and Sakigake. Why was the LDP able to make this sort of comeback? Why have ‘reformist parties’, starting with the New Japan Party, the Renewal Party, the New Frontier Party and most recently the Democratic Party, experienced such a brief period of increased power before their fall (or stagnation)? These are the questions that this article addresses in describing and explaining Japanese politics today.

AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY DRAWS TO ITS END, TWO MEN, Hitler and Stalin, appear to stand out even in its violent history for the scale of the suffering and destruction which they inflicted on millions of innocent people. But at once, the question arises: how far have the roles of Hitler and Stalin been exaggerated? Is it any longer possible, in the twentieth century, to hold individuals responsible for events on this scale? Should the responsibility rest not with these men but with the movements and regimes with which they are identified? This is the question which I want to discuss.

IN RECENT YEARS IT HAS BECOME A COMMONPLACE OF BOTH academic and financial discourse that we are living in a new economic and political world in which financial globalization is destroying the economic autonomy of individual states and hence the foundations of the nation-state as the focus of political authority and the possibilities of politics. Of course, other threats to the nation-state exist — most crucially, the inability to reconcile its virtual monopoly of political authority, and the constraints it imposes on cooperation between states, with ecological causality — but it is the macro-economic crisis of the state which has captured most attention. Undoubtedly, the contemporary international financial environment makes macro-economic management an extremely difficult practical task for many states. With the daily value of foreign exchange transactions amounting to over $1200 billion, governments run the perpetual risk that their choices, or indeed those of other governments, will precipitate an unsustainable rise or fall in the value of their currency. At the same time they must, if they wish to borrow in international capital markets, pursue policies which will secure, and retain, the confidence of international investors. This, of course, creates a very considerable incentive for governments to choose policies which, in both fiscal and monetary terms, prioritize low inflation over growth and employment.

‘IF YOU WANT QUICK RESULTS, PLANT LETTUCE; ENDURING results take longer.’ So said Léon Walras, France's greatest nineteenth-century economist and predecessor at Lausanne of Pareto, whom Sammy Finer wrote about with admiration. Finer's last and greatest work in three volumes and over 1,600 pages will be published in May 1997 by Oxford University Press. Unlike his contemporary political scientists, Sammy Finer had the self-confidence and breadth of vision singlehandedly to take on an immense work and almost bring it to completion before death imposed its own premature conclusion. As a foretaste of its contents, the first Finer Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Keele on 10 May 1995, is published in this journal, with which he had an especially close affinity. It can only suggest, in the most succinct way, what is to come. I am confident that the study of comparative government will never be the same once the whole breathtaking work appears in all its magnitude.