‘Je pense donc je vote’: the confident assertion of the european Parliament's promotional campaign in France to encourage voters to participate in the 1999 European elections struck a spectacularly false note. The citizens not only of France, but of Europe as a whole, reacted with striking indifference to the prospect of the fifth direct elections to the world's only transnational parliament. In the elections held on 10-13 June, turnout fell in all but three of the fifteen member states, averaging less than half of the eligible electorate for the first time since 1979. Except in the two countries holding general elections on the same day – Belgium and Luxembourg – media coverage of the contest was distinctly muted. Even in those countries, the European component was secondary. Across the European Union, there was little sense of key choices being defined, let alone settled, by the election, whether on a national or continental scale. If political elites were engaged in trials of strength which they were unable to avoid, there was scant evidence of campaigning on the ground. In David Butler's memorable phrase, the European elections of 1999, as before, resembled ‘tactical exercises without troops’: army generals were active at the centre, conducting a theoretical, phoney war of interest largely to themselves.

On 2 june 1999 south africans went to the polls in the country's second democratic election. At issue in the electoral debate were: the government's mixed record of achievement since the first contest in April 1994; the prospect of significant improvement in economic performance and the promised delivery of social goods to the deprived black majority; the personality and capability of Thabo Mbeki, President Mandela's chosen successor; and the impact of victory for the African National Congress (ANC) on the status and role of the parliamentary opposition in the years to come. The first part of this article, therefore, seeks to provide a commentary on events since 1994 to set the 1999 election in context.

Perhaps the most encouraging feature of South Africa's political development has been the survival and consolidation of the democratic process. Critics of the Mandela era tend to take this for granted; but it is no mean achievement especially in view of the violence which disfigured both the multi-party negotiating process and the run-up to the 1994 election and the threat of more to come to destabilize a new and untried regime.

Since the late-1980s, efforts to consolidate democracy in Thailand and the Philippines have been accompanied by marked contrasts both in levels of developmental success and degrees of subsequent economic decline. In Thailand, extraordinary rates of growth in the decade prior to 1997 were followed by dramatic contraction; in the Philippines, the more modest and short-lived gains of the mid-1990s have been followed by economic standstill but not cataclysmic crash. Despite the major differences in the political economic foundations and economic performance of these two economies, Thailand and the Philippines currently face many common challenges of supplementing earlier neoliberal economic reform with the more daunting tasks of political and institutional reform. In particular, this brief and synoptic analysis will argue, both confront the need to enhance the quality of their democracies and the capacity of key bureaucratic agencies.

During the 1990s the israeli political system faced a number of major upheavals on both the macro- and the micro-political levels. As a result many of its basic features changed considerably. Presently, it is more difficult to predict future political behaviour in Israel than ever before.

One may point at the only successful no-confidence vote, which took place on 15 March 1990, as an event that symbolically initiated the new era. Yitzhak Shamir, the head of the Likud and the acting prime minister at the time, overcame the crisis, formed a new government, and continued to serve as prime minister. Yitzhak Rabin of the Labour Party took power following the 1992 elections. Shimon Peres of Labour succeeded Rabin as premier following Rabin's assassination in November 1995. Peres lost the 1996 elections to Likud's new leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. In the 1999 elections, Labour returned to power under the leadership of Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

A distinction can be drawn within political philosophy between those theories which emphasize the procedural element of discussion in politics (exemplified in the work of J. Rawls and J. Habermas) and those that are concerned with the grounds people will bring up in support of their position. Within the latter type there are theories that work from wants/preferences (e.g. J. Bentham and some modern utilitarians), those that emphasize certain ideals (e.g. the Utopian Socialists), those that look to needs and their positive development (e.g. K. Marx), and those that use people's true interests (e.g. the Frankfurt School theorists and broad utilitarians like J. S. Mill and H. Sidgwick). This article has a twofold aim: to show how Sen's ‘capability approach’ incorporates a theory of true interests that goes beyond even more sophisticated existing theories of true interests; and to explain why Sen refrains from using the language of interests and needs. If his approach is reformulated in terms of needs and interests, certain political ramifications – structural and institutional changes – become unavoidable requirements for the realization of his goals. One possibility is that Sen does not discuss his innovative work in these terms because he is unwilling to condone some of these practical political ramifications.