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Ralph Ellison offers crucial insight into the meaning of conscientious citizenship in American democracy. In doing so, he follows his nineteenth-century Transcendentalist forebears—Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman—who have become key figures in contemporary efforts to theorize liberal democratic character. At the center of Emersonian ethics is the idea of "awakening." "Awakening" is the Emersonians' name for honest and courageous confrontation with reality. Ellison broadens the Emersonians' vision by insisting that one cannot be "well awake" in America without confronting the ways historical white supremacy shapes one's identity and chances in life. Political theorists who draw inspiration from the Emersonians in theorizing democratic individuality need to pay attention to Ellison—for he demonstrates that one cannot achieve democratic individuality without awakening to race.

Did Thailand's multiple parties and factions influence cabinet and coalition durability in the period 1979 to 2001? If so, which one — parties or factions — was the more significant? Taking a Transaction Costs Analysis approach, this article addresses these questions and argues that intra-party factions, as the building blocks of Thai parliamentary politics, have been more important than parties, such that each additional faction in a cabinet triggers a reduction in the longevity of prime ministerial terms and cabinets while affecting the durability of coalitions. Furthermore, while factions tend to shorten parliamentary and cabinet terms, they have the opposite effect on coalition terms. The study suggests that where parties are less cohesive, informal institutions within parties are of considerable importance.

Christian democracy is still posing theoretical problems of definition and empirical puzzles of classification and interpretation. Analyses based on secularization theory produce puzzles and anomalies and have little to offer as explanations for the variation in Christian democratic power mobilization. Empirically, this article focuses on Christian democracy in The Netherlands and offers an explanation of the party's decline in the 1990s and its remarkable recovery. From this, lessons are drawn for further theory-building on party and party system change, and on Christian democracy. It seems that modern Christian democratic politics is evolving as neither religious nor secular, but as a version of unsecular politics.

Different scholars count `the number of parties' in different ways, partly because they examine different parts of the political process and for different reasons. Sartori's qualitative approach focused mainly on competition for government, but is now largely supplanted by the quantitative `effective number of parties' index, which deals with votes and seats. But some quantitative research requires us to look beyond votes and seats. For example, testing proportional and pluralitarian models of democracy requires us to count parties not just in terms of votes and seats but also in terms of legislative and cabinet power. I estimate party shares of legislative and cabinet power to test democratic norms at British and German elections and parliaments. So, the effective number of parties index needs to be, and can be, extended beyond votes and seats alone.

A review essay on books by (1) Lorez Jager, translated by Stewart Spencer, Adorno: A Political Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); (2) David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) & (3) Stefan Muller-Doohm, translated by Rodney Livingstone, Adorno: A Biography (Malden, MA: Polity, 2005).