The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (171 page)

 
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The belief that Christ's second coming would inaugurate a thousand-year period of divine rule on earth. Because Christ's second coming has been expected after the appearance of anti-Christ, and great misfortunes, this belief has been associated with political radicalism—especially hopes of overthrowing oppressive government— and some believers have seen revolution as the prelude to the millennium.
AR 

 
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(1608–74)
Poet and political pamphleteer. His pamphlets in support of divorce where the companionship of marriage had failed fell foul of parliamentary censorship in 1643, which led to one of the most powerful defences of freedom of the press,
Areopagitica
. His association with the Independents (Congregationalists) led him towards an anti-monarchist position. In The
Tenure of Kings and Monarchs
(1649) and in Latin pamphlets for foreign consumption, written as Latin Secretary to the Council of State, he defended the execution of Charles I on the grounds that kings were given power in trust for the good of the people and this power could be revoked if it was abused. With the Restoration he retired from politics to write his poetry.
CB 

 
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In
game theory
, sometimes used as a synonym for
maximin
. Two more precise references are:

(1) the
minimax theorem
, a fundamental result for zero-sum games. If such a game can be expressed in a matrix such as that given below (where, as the game is zero-sum, the pay-offs to You are simply the pay-offs to Me with the sign reversed), then it always has an equilibrium at its ‘saddlepoint’, for example the starred cell in the example below. A saddlepoint is simultaneously the lowest point in its row and the highest in its column. (Think of the shape of a horse's saddle and its position on the horse's back.) The reasoning is that I can guarantee myself at least 3 by choosing row I
₂
: I am
max
imizing my
min
imum pay-off compared with row I
₁
, where I might get as little as -2. You can hold me to at most 3 (and therefore restrict your loss to -3) by choosing column Y
₃
, which
minimizes your max
imum loss. Therefore I will play my strategy 2; you will play your strategy 3. I will get 3; you will get -3. Not all games have such a saddlepoint; but there is a unique minimax point for every game, although it may involve a ‘mixed strategy’ of playing each of several different strategies with a certain probability.

(2) 
minimax regret
is a decision principle proposed to explain why many people vote, even though they must know that it is highly unlikely that their individual vote will make any difference ( see
paradox of voting (2)
. If my side loses and I did not vote, I would regret my failure to vote much more than I would have resented the time it would have taken to vote. So I ‘do my bit’ in order to minimize the maximum regret I can feel after the event.

 
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Member of a national government, either in charge of a government department or available to work in a variety of policy areas at the behest of the head of government (‘minister without portfolio’). The number of ministers has grown throughout the Western world as a function of government growth.
In a Westminster system where members of the executive are drawn from the legislature, ministers are generally responsible for framing government policy and for steering government bills through Parliament. Ministers give political leadership to officials throughout the central machinery of government and in so doing may act in varying degrees as policy initiators, departmental managers, or policy publicists. They are criticized on several grounds. Ministers are rarely experts in the policy area to which they are appointed, and seldom have had experience of managing large organizations before entering government. Nor are they generally kept in the same position for more than two years. Confronted by a heavy workload and limited knowledge, ministers become heavily reliant on their civil servants, especially in relation to routine and reactive policy-making.
In Britain, ministers comprise members of the cabinet, and ministers of state and parliamentary undersecretaries of state with specific departmental responsibilities. At any one time they number a little over one hundred. Under the supposed convention of ministerial responsibility ministers are to be responsible to Parliament for the conduct of their departments, the action of every civil servant being regarded as an action of the appropriate minister. For every action deemed to be of doubtful competence, integrity, or legality, ministers are answerable and ultimately required to resign. It is doubtful whether in practice the convention of ministerial responsibility has ever worked in this way, censure and/or resignation being entirely dependent upon the attitudes of the minister concerned, the prime minister and back-bench MPs. The last case of a ministerial resignation for this reason was in 1954, for an action far less culpable than many which ministers have since brazened out. With the growth of government it has become questionable whether ministers should be held to account for civil servants' actions of which they have little or no knowledge. The convention of ministerial responsibility remains a convenient fiction underpinning the political legitimacy of governmental action.
JBr