The Commonwealth of the Bahama Islands entered the international system as a sovereign state on July 10, 1973. It did so by sponsorship, which is to say that as far as relations between the Bahamas and the imperial country (United Kingdom) are concerned, independence has been granted, rather than taken or seized, with a minimal amount of difficulty. The identification of various issue-areas related to the entry of the Commonwealth into the international system is one way of indicating the various components that have gone into making up the “national interest” of that country, at least in the perspective of the state's policy makers. More concretely, the peculiar problems arising from its character as an archipelago state with a relatively open economy, make the questions to be resolved before and immediately after independence perhaps more complex than those faced by the other independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean that have acceded to full sovereignty in the last decade.

Canada became the odd man out in the Western Hemisphere when it declared war on Germany on September 10, 1939. Other than the Caribbean colonies of the various European belligerents, Canada was the only American country to become an active participant in the European war. The decision to go to war had been freely made by Parliament, but it was clearly determined by Canada's historic ties as a member of the British Commonwealth. As the only independent belligerent in the Americas, Canada's position clearly was anomalous, and the makers of Canadian foreign policy had to go to considerable effort trying to overcome the problems Canada faced as a nation at war in a hemisphere trying to avoid war.

Urban growth has been one of the most striking characteristics of twentieth-century Latin American history and the focus of considerable scholarly interest (Morse, 1971, 1965). For the most part the main academic concentration has been on the social and economic aspects of this phenomenon. Political considerations have been confined to speculations on the potential radicalism of slum dwellers or the spontaneous self-governing institutions of new communities. Little attention has been paid to the role of municipal politics and government in national life.

With these considerations in mind, the purpose of this paper is to trace the development of politics and the governmental process in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina between 1918 and 1930. This discussion will focus on a period when electoral reform opened up city politics for the first time to a large sector of the electorate and allowed, also for the first time, participation in municipal government of parties representing new social and economic groups.

As Latin American nations begin to marshal their rapidly growing human and material resources, they frequently encounter organizational infrastructures which are incapable of supporting the rapid process of modernization. Yet, these inadequate infrastructures seem to persist over time, leaving behind unrecoverable losses. Attempts to understand the problems of modernization must not only consider questions of social and economic development, but also questions reflecting on the development of organizational and administrative processes.

The central theme of this paper is the argument that the organizational and administrative mechanisms of societal and institutional governance have never quite broken loose from the historic legacy of Spanish colonialism and that the needs of modernizing nations are basically being served by administrative dinosaurs. Other writers have addressed themselves to the theme regarding the influence of colonial institutions on modern life, but the tendency has been to select general administrative practices and trace them across many nations in various periods of time.

Mexico's party deputy system, created in 1963, has just completed its first decade of existence; enough experience has now been accumulated to evaluate its impact on the Mexican political system. This essay will examine the system in its following aspects: origins, implementation, amendments, beneficiaries, and effects.

Since 1929 the government party (currently called PRI, Partido Revolucionario Institucional, but having existed under other names) has so completely dominated the electoral scene at the national level that only in the Chamber of Deputies has the opposition been able to take some electoral posts. Even in the Chamber, opposition groups have only been able to acquire a few seats by winning a majority of votes (Table l). PRI's success has been attributed to its superior organization, appeal, finances, and relationship with the government. The high point of majority-elected opposition in the Chamber came in 1952 when nine opposition deputies represented 5.5 percent of the Chamber. Between 1946 and 1964, no opposition party, of whatever ideological stripe, achieved more than six seats in the Chamber (3.7 percent).