Gisèle De Meur

Conditions of Authoritarianism, Fascism, and Democracy in Interwar Europe Systematic Matching and Contrasting of Cases for “Small N” Analysis

Comparative political analysis at the macrolevel of political systems can reduce the inevitably high complexity of such comparisons by the systematic matching or contrasting of cases, depending on the particular problem. Such “most similar systems” or “most different systems” designs, in Przeworski and Teunes terminology, thus constitute one of the major ways out of the usual “small N—many variables” dilemma. This article proposes a detailed and comprehensive method to establish such similarities and dissimilarities in a systematic and, at all stages, transparent way. The examples chosen refer to an analysis of the conditions of survival or breakdown of democratic systems in the interwar period in Europe.

Problems of equity in political representation (what we want and why we can't.)

In the frame of social choice, in the aggregation of preferences and more particularly in voting theory, we present two approaches of mathematical modelisation towards political representation. Together they lead, in Section 4, to a sketch of what is, in our sense, the nature, the ideal shape and the most common misuses of real-world modelisation, in particular, its mathematical modelisation.

Belgium: Crisis and Compromise

Belgium is one of the oldest parliamentary democracies, but it is also one of the European societies which is most deeply divided along ethno-linguistic, religious-secular and socio-economic lines, and these conflicts have brought about many tensions in the political structure. In the wake of the world economic crisis strong fascist or quasi-fascist movements emerged which brought the political system close to collapse. How Belgium weathered the storm of the 1930s within a democratic framework is, therefore, of particular interest for other similar conflict-prone societies.

Fischer subspaces of Hermitian manifolds

The finite groups generated by 3-transpositions, studied by B.Fischer [5]have a geometrical interpretation given by F.Buekenhout [1] under the name of Fischer spaces.This geometrical concept allows us to study the Fischer subgroups of primitive groups classified by Fischer, and in particular those of unitary groups PSU(n,4), symplectic groups PSp(n,2), orthogonal groups PO(n,2) and symmetric groups Sym(n).This problem is linked to the determination of groups of projectivities generated by clations in characteristic 2 studied by Wagner [9] and McLaughlin[8], and is related to Kantors work [7] on classical groups generated by long root elements, and to Enrights recent note on Fi22 and Fi23 [5].