Social Structure and Political Competition: The Italian Case
With the end of the Fourth French Republic and the apparently effective performance of the Fifth Republic, France no longer provides an obvious touchstone for studies of “unstable” democracies. Perhaps as a result of the search for another such example, there has been an increase in American scholarly interest in Italy. Recent research—when combined with the studies of LaPalombara, Barnes, and Zariski, and with the studies conducted by Italian political scientists—provides a fund of organized and readily available information which may be used to test both general hypotheses and specific ones about Italian politics.
Innerparteiliche Gruppierungen als Untersuchungsgegenstand der Parteienforschung
Innerparteiliche Gruppierungen sind ein organisatorischer Bestandteil der Binnenstruktur zahlreicher westeuropaischer Parteien. Um so erstaunlicher erscheint, das die Forschung uber parteiintern organisierte. Gruppierungen bzw. Faktionen (eine aus dem englischen Sprachgebrauch ubernommene Bezeichnung fur innerparteiliche Gruppierungen) auch gegenwartig noch weitgehend eine Domane der angloamerikanischen Politikwissenschaft ist und in der deutschen Parteienforschung, von wenigen Ausnahmen einmal abgesehen, kaum Eingang gefunden hat.
A Neolithic Downland Monument in its Environment: Excavations at the Easton Down Long Barrow, Bishops Cannings, North Wiltshire.
Excavations at the Easton Down long barrow were part of a wider programme of research into the Neolithic sequence and context of the Avebury area in north Wiltshire. The short barrow, on high chalk downland to the south-west of Avebury and the upper Kennet valley, and containing only a few inhumations according to Thurnam's 19th-century investigation, dates to the later 4th millennium BC. Test pits around the barrow produced very little struck flint, and virtually no colluvium in the adjacent dry valley to the west. The mound covered a thin calcareous turfline above a rubbly soil, probably formerly cultivated. The pre-barrow molluscan fauna, soil micromorphology and other environmental data indicate a clearance adjacent to woodland. In the secondary fill of the flanking ditches there is a succession from renewed woodland to open conditions in the Late Neolithic. The Easton Down monument falls relatively late in the regional sequence of long barrow construction. Its setting was probably one of scattered, non-permanent clearances in woodland. Woodland was still widespread on the higher downland of the region in the middle of the Neolithic. Renewed and bigger-scale clearance towards the end of the Neolithic may be connected with the construction of very large monuments elsewhere in the region. The later prehistoric landscape became both more open and less diverse.