Very different views have been taken of the changes in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, and whether they can properly be considered a ‘revolution’. The evidence of Freedom House's annual surveys suggests that at least four distinct groups of countries may be identified, and that over time there has been no common trajectory. A majority of the former Soviet republics, indeed, have scores that were lower than those of the USSR in its final year. In the view of ordinary citizens individual liberties have improved considerably since the end of communist rule, but levels of political efficacy remain very low in comparative terms. Rather than conceive of these regimes as ‘in transition to democracy’, one may more fruitfully see them as a distinct system that has much in commun with semiauthoritarian regimes in other parts of the world.

In meeting the threat posed by terrorism, the democratic state also faces a paradox: those practices best suited to defending the state are often least suited to democracy. Such is the case with official secrecy, which has received renewed attention. Military and intelligence operations frequently depend on secrecy for their success. At the same time, democracy depends on openness, a fact too often neglected by democratic theory. Official secrecy subverts citizen autonomy and in so doing creates fertile ground for paranoid-style thinking. For the United States, a history of secrets and lies has left a legacy of distrust and paranoia.

While China has been the most important constraint on Hong Kong's democratization, another neglected constraint has been the limited mobilization power of the pro-democracy opposition in both civil and political society for most of the period from 1984 to 2002. The mobilization power of the pro-democracy opposition, mediated by their degree of internal unity and ability to capitalize on external political opportunities, affected its overall bargaining power vis-à-vis the Chinese and British government over democratization in different phases. The self-censorship among Hong Kong's media, plus economic recession since the Handover, further sapped the mobilization and bargaining power of pro-democratic forces.

This article presents an interpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notion of the general will through the example of the modern Palestinian predicament. ‘Being Palestinian’ focuses in particular on the continuing crisis of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, the Palestinian people being largely a refugee population. It discusses the mechanisms that express the general will for a stateless people, and demonstrates how particular political sentiments, negotiating positions, common understandings and political will are expressed, deliber-ated and understood within the Palestinian body politic, both across borders and within besieged national institutions.

Institutionalization as a ‘process theory’ moves beyond the specification of a dichotomous variable – either an institution exists or it does not – to a continuous variable – whereby an institution can be more or less institutionalized. But if institutionalization is to be conceived in this way, then the specification of independent variables and the measurement of the degree of institutionalization become crucial to the understanding of the process. The essence of the argument presented in this article is that in the study of legislatures both the specification and measurement of institutionalization have been deficient. The comparative potential of the concept of legislative institutionalization has been limited by a failure to use common criteria and measures of institutionalization. As a general theory, institutionalization is of value in explaining how institutions become organized and how they become differentiated from other political organizations, but equally other organization theories might more usefully be deployed to explain institutional change in legislatures thereafter.