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The article investigates recent health reforms and reform attempts in Switzerland. A substantial reform, the revision of the health insurance law in 1994, is followed by a long period of refused reform proposals and incremental change. In order to explain policy change and policy stability in health policies, we apply veto-player theory to partisan and parliamentary debates on reform proposals of the health insurance from the end of the 1980s until today. Shifts in ideological positions of parties, especially with regard to the objective of solidarity, allowed for a new win-set in the 1990s that was at the base of the law revision. Since then, the win-set is empty as parties did not change their preferences. New and substantial reforms will only be possible, it is concluded, if the pivot player, the Christian-democratic party, changes its ideological positions to a significant extent. Adapted from the source document.

This study explores the issue of "strategic voting" in India by using individual-level, nationwide survey data from the 2004 general election. It finds that Indian voters are more "strategic" than "expressive" if their preferred party is unlikely to win a given parliamentary seat. Furthermore, the variables of being Muslim and education are found not to be statistically significant determinants of strategic voting.

This study of new political parties in the Third Wave democracies of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela conceptualizes the early life of a party as a developmental phase. The analysis uses latent trajectory modeling to identify five qualitatively distinctive performance profiles, which the author calls "explosive," "contender," "flash," "flat," and "flop" trajectories. This finding challenges the conventional approaches used in the study of new party performance, where scholars classify parties using subjective criteria, often into the successful/failed dichotomy. In unstable party systems, where we expect greater diversity in the performance profiles of new parties, latent trajectory modeling is preferred because it yields a result more consistent with extant theorizing on new parties. In stable systems, as in the case of Chile, the approaches can yield similar results. Nevertheless, the case of Venezuela (1958–88) demonstrates that even in stable party systems, the modeling approach used here can identify important variation that alternatives might miss.

AbstractScholarship on Eurasians has often addressed issues of migration, collective identity and debates around home. Women performers however do not find themselves discussed in these histories of Eurasian peoples in India. This paper aims to account for individual agency in shaping one's identity within the meta-narratives of collective identity of migrant peoples. I focus on two Eurasian women entertainers in the colonial cities of Benares and Calcutta who chose to forget their mixed-race past to fashion successful careers using new identities as tawa'if singers and actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This, I shall argue, was possible within the wider context of emergent colonial modernities in colonial India. By choosing micro-level case histories of these celebrity entertainers, I want to argue for including popular culture as an arena of identity-making within histories of migration and gender. To engage with popular culture, I shall extend our perception of historical 'archive' to include a varied set of materials such as biographical anecdotes, discographies, songbooks, and address the fields of poetry, music and history. Through this project I hope to rethink ideas of gender, culture and agency within wider debates of migration and identity-making.

Recent readings of Hegel by significant American philosophers have insisted on the link between recognition & rationality. In these readings, autonomy is defined as the capacity to give the reasons behind one's actions. This paper takes a critical distance towards these Kantian interpretations & returns to earlier German readings of Hegel, culminating in Axel Honneth's ethics of recognition, which placed stronger emphasis on the genetic dimension of recognition. The paper argues that this shift in perspective allows us to take recognition in a more substantive sense & make fuller use of the concept's critical potential. In particular, it allows us to use recognition as a diagnostic tool to identify more precisely the social & cultural obstacles to the realization of autonomy. Adapted from the source document.

For two works that would seem to have a convergent objective, there is a radical dissimilarity between Le Hezbollah. Un acteur incontournable de la scene internationale?, by Herve Pierre, and Le Hezbollah, etat des lieux, by Sabrina Mervin (dir.). Pierre's book is a memoire of a master of international relations of the IEP (Institut d'Etudes Politiques), while Mervin's is a collection of articles that look at the topic from an anthropological and socio-historical perspective. W. A. Butler

Council officers as public managers are expected to work for the community. Yet, it has been argued that council officers working under a politicised employment relationship are likely to be more committed to the elected councillors than to the community. This proposition has been examined through a survey of senior council officers across Australia and the results are presented in this article. This study develops an analytical approach which combines for the first time the multi‐focus and the multiple bases of managerial commitment approaches, applies this to the case of Australian local government managers and finds that although most senior council officers perceive that their employment is politicised they remain committed to the community. Based upon these findings, it is argued that a conceptual framework utilising a combined multi‐focus and multiple bases approach is more appropriate to the study of commitment of local government managers and to managers in the public sector in general than the use of either approach alone.