Volume 3, Issue 4

The article explores the roots and dynamics of political consensus on EU membership in Hungary. Employing a principal-agent theory of the political process, it emphasises the role of various forms of competition in the healthy functioning of a representative democracy. An informal discussion of the Hungarian case is followed by a game theoretical model of party collusion under circumstances when a new political dimension offers an opportunity for political representatives to weaken electoral control. A key lesson of the empirical findings as well as the formal model is that collusion among political representatives within individual nation states and collusion among states may, under specific circumstances, reinforce each other.

The question of who should provide public services has continued to gain attention among scholars and practitioners. Existing studies on public service delivery have primarily focused on the `make' or `buy' decision, resulting in their lack of knowledge in public/private joint service delivery, especially at the county level. This study fills the research lacuna by incorporating the institutional theory of local governance and government capacity. Using the 2002 ICMA Survey on Local Governments' Alternative Service Delivery, this study examines what factors account for the adoption of public/private joint service delivery in American counties. Probit analysis is employed to estimate county choice of joint service delivery in 2002. Overall, the findings suggest that the reformed political structure has a modest influence on joint service delivery. The findings also suggest that government capacity has negative influence on joint service delivery.

By means of a re-analysis of the most relevant data source – the International Social Mobility and Politics File – this paper criticizes the newly grown consensus in political sociology that class voting has declined since World War II. An increase in crosscutting cultural voting, rooted in educational differences, rather than a decline in class voting proves responsible for the decline of traditional class-party alignments. Moreover, income differences have not become less, but more consequential for voting behavior during this period. It is concluded that the new consensus has been built on quicksand. Class is not dead – it has been buried alive under the increasing weight of cultural voting, systematically misinterpreted as a decline in class voting, due to the widespread application of the so-called Alford index.

The article discusses the problem that was recently raised in Lithuanian historical literature and public discourse by G. Beresnevi?ius, A. Bumblauskas, S.C. Rowell: was the medieval Lithuanian state (Grand Duchy of Lithuania; GDL) an empire? Traditional historiography did not use concepts of ``empire" and ``imperialism" in the work on GDL. For Non-Marxist Russian historians, GDL was simply another Russian state, so there could not be Russian imperialism against Russians. For Marxist historians, imperialism was a phase in the ``capitalist formation," immediately preceding the socialist revolution and bound to the specific period of world history, so the research on precapitalist empires and imperialism was suspect of anachronism. For the opposite reason, deriving from the hermeneutic methodology, the talk about how the medieval Lithuanian empire and imperialism was an anachronism for Non-Marxist Polish and German historians too, because they considered as Empires only polities that claimed to be successors to Roman Empire. However, the Lithuanian political elite never raised such claims, although theory of the Lithuanian descent from Romans (Legend of Palemon) could be used for this goal. Using the recent work in comparative historical sociology of empires by S.N. Eisenstadt, I. Wallerstein, A. Motyl, B. Buzan, R. Little, A. Watson, M. Beissinger, Ch. Tilly, Th.J. Barfield and M. Doyle, the author argues that GDL was an empire because it was (1) the greatest state in Europe in the late 14-early 15th century, (2) militarily expansive in all directions if not held in check by superior military power, (3) displayed the territorial structure characteristic for empires, consisting of metropole and periphery, (4) had an informal empire and sphere of hegemony, (5) established imperial ``Pax Lituanica" on broad territories securing long-distance trade roads. Typologically, it was a patrimonial empire, typologically distinct from the ``barbarian kingdoms" created by ancient Germans and Vikings. After the internal crisis in 1432-1440 that is interpreted as ``Augustan threshold" (in M. Doyle's sense), the Lithuanian empire evolved into a federal state by the early 16th century. Drawing on the distinction between ``primary empires" and ``shadow empires" proposed by Th.J. Barfield, GDL is classified as subtype of ``shadow empires," called ``vulture empires." GDL started as a ``vulture empire," using for its expansion a geopolitical situation created by the decline of the Mongol empire and aspiring to unite under its power all lands of the former Kiev Russia. The most important outcome of the failure of the Lithuanian imperial project is the emergence of the three different Eastern Slave peoples (Belorussian, Ukrainian, Great Russian), while the probable outcome of its success would be the continuation of the undivided old Russian ethnicity.