Suchergebnisse

These Words Spoken By President Clinton At His Inauguration on 20 January 1993 can usefully serve as a leitmotif for the present issue of the journal Government and Opposition. The issue is itself the outcome of a conference organized by the journal and the Department of Government of the University of Manchester. The theme was the 'Influences of Domestic and International Factors on Processes of Policy-Making'. However, this title does not quite catch the interactive quality of the phenomenon which the group was seeking to examine. Increasingly, it has been contended, policies at the domestic level whether in what we once called the first, second or third worlds are being profoundly influenced by international or 'global' considerations. But it is also the case that international agreements are being accommodated to the sensitivities of the domestic politics of the partners.

ALTHOUGH THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE WAS AT the centre of classical political thought it has been only intermittently addressed in more recent theoretical writings. To the degree that modern political writing has concerned itself with the question of the kind of knowledge appropriate and possible in politics, it has focused on the capacity of core decision-makers to absorb and assess the information presented to them by experts.