The article researches an interesting phenomenon of the fall of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) – the most successful populist right-wing party in British history. After soaring relatively high in British politics, in 2017 general election UKIP suffered a sharp drop from its electoral peaks. The inquiry explores UKIP’s 2017 electoral results and demographics of its support (or lack thereof) and examines some of the reasons behind Party’s collapse. More specifically, it focuses on three aspects of UKIP’s 2017 performance: 1) party’s message; 2) party’s leadership and 3) party’s election campaign. The article also discusses which British political party(ies) has/have benefited most from UKIP’s spectacular defeat and reflects on Party’s future prospects.

In the contribution is provided a discussion on the development of securitization of expressions of hate speech on the internet, i.e. “cyber hate”, in Germany. The authors focus through the theory of securitization firstly on the process and individual steps, which led to establishment of instruments for countering cyber hate on social media. Next is described how these efforts resulted in creation of so called “Task Force” group, build from members of government, private and non-profit sectors, and how has the perception of social media with regard to security threat of extremism been developing. From the provided analysis emerges that there was a shift in the discourse from understanding the social media platforms as passive “instruments misused for dissemination of extremism” to stronger perception of their “accountability for removal of the hate speech content”. It is therefore a shift, which leads to their perception as active subjects, which are jointly liable for the illegal content and which obligation is to directly contribute to solving its removal. Currently last significant component in this development is the adoption of progressive legal framework for improvement of the enforcement of law in the online social networks environment (Gesetz zur Verbesserung der Rechtsdurchsetzung in sozialen Netzwerken), which strengthens the position of the state in enforcement of the required measures. For this reason the authors pay significant attention to this legislative act and provide thorough analysis, which they further reflect in a general assessment of the development in countering cyber hate on social media in Germany and also in broader European context.

This article aims to main shifts of German party system since 1990 with a specific emphasis on Bundestag elections 2017. The main development and changes that can be explicitly traced in the survey period will be described here. An important question is how German party system has modified not only during last years but primarily after recent elections. In the first part are analysed main starting points related to bases of German party system, as well as the Bundestag elections overview. The second part of analysis focuses on a party system comparative indicators and its comparison. It primarily aspires to explain the main new trends that determine the German party system. It is possible to find several crucial points in the German party system development. Overall, the main finding is that German party system detected new dispositions like (a) fragmentation, polarisation and segmentation, (b) different hegemons role and (c) programmatic shifts after 2017 elections. The German party system at the federal level is accustomed to the fact that representatives of six political parties met for the first time in the deputies’ seats. It is a big deal as well as the fact that the third most powerful subject became the right-populist Alternative for Germany.

Liberal thought – especially when inspired by Kant – always had universalistic ambitions. Faith in its own philosophical dominance is a natural consequence of liberal thinking, starting with its inception during the enlightenment. However, these tendencies are deeply problematic. The relation of liberalism towards the future (postulating its “final victory”) and towards the past (adoption of ahistorical and acultural normative standpoint) is in the final analysis indefensible. However, the fact that liberal thinking cannot defend its commonplace presuppositions does not mean that it is indefensible as such. It might still be superior to other types of political regimes.
The second part of the article consists of an argument that defends liberalism without its universalist ambitions. It starts from a concept of recognition and claims that liberal regimes are currently the only ones that can provide a generally acceptable recognition to their citizens. This is true not only for what is traditionally conceived as “western world”, but across the globe. The reason for this unique standing of liberal regimes is a fact (prominently defended by Charles Taylor) that people in contemporary societies do not understand their value as mediated through some external entity (tribe, church, family, nation). They perceive the source of their value as coming from “inside”. This is deeply problematic for illiberal regimes – a challenge they cannot overcome, but that liberal regimes can.

The aim of this text is to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the theory of consociational democracy. Following an introduction, discussion and criticism of this theory, the paper briefly discusses other selected models of institutional arrangements being designed to facilitate stable democracies in divided societies, centripetalism or integrative (inclusive) majoritarianism and integrative consensualism, respectively. These two models of conflict management in plural societies have grown from the criticism of the original consociational framework. While the consociational model is based on a communal perspective and its main objectives are inclusiveness and proportionality, the latter two models build on an integrative perspective on conflict management in plural societies while they place the main emphasis on electoral system as a key institution for inter-ethnic accommodation. While centripetalism focuses on the moderation and accommodation of conflict, integrative consensualism seeks to synthesize both previous models to eliminate their shortcomings and to show their positive qualities. Empirical experience, however, shows that all the theoretical models represent “only” ideal types of conflict management. In the practice of constitutional engineering in heterogenous societies, there are often different combinations of these approaches, and rarely one of these types is applied in terms of the divided companies in pure form.

The article provides critical review of approaches to the concept of policy design. Five core streams of literature are distinguished: 1) classical scholar articles; 2) design thinking and practical use of policy design; 3) policy instruments; 4) new policy design literature; 5) post-positivist critique of policy design. The core ideas and assumptions of each stream are critically examined. It is argued that these streams not only differ in terms of epistemology and normative assumptions, but also in terms of empirical evidence upon which they are formulated. The article concludes with formulation of core discrepancies that the concept of policy design incorporates. It is argued that more empirical research is needed to avoid self-referential nature of the literature to which much of the scholarship tends.

The aim of this paper is to review the contemporary research on civil-military relations in Latin America. Existing researches of the civil-military relations in Latin America either work with the topic in general, accenting long-term trends (Pion-Berlin 2001), or they focus mostly on publishing output of prominent scholars in this scientific field (Pion-Berlin 2012). This particular text, however, aims at analyzing eighty-five scientific articles that were published between 1990 and 2015 in some of the leading journals. The first part of the text is quantitative and deals with the direction of research in civil-military relations in Latin America. This part uses criteria very similar to those used by a prior study by Gerald L. Munck and Richard Snyder (2007), which allows the comparison with the direction of research in comparative politics (Munch, Snyder 2007) and the direction of research in civil-military relations (Olmeda 2013). The next part of the text is qualitative and summarizes the results of causal research in this field. Based on the analysis of literature about research of civil-military relations in Latin America, we can claim that the contemporary research in this field, while not reaching the academic levels of the contemporary research in comparative politology, does nevertheless in many aspects surpass the general level of research of civil-military relations. Several avenues of prospective research can be suggested based on this review. In terms of methodology, it seems desirable to shift more attention to comparative studies, either using statistical methods or through set theoretic-methods. As far as topics are concerned, the following three directions of research seem most advisable: a deeper orientation on the topic of military entrepreneurship (Mani 2011a, 2011b), research of army on a lower analytical level than just dealing with the relationship between political and military elites and, above all, research of specific relationships between the army and some of the current left-wing regimes in Latin America - mostly because the growing de facto influence of the army in these countries (Diamint 2015).