The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (222 page)

Protectorate
,
protectorate

 
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Protestant parties are political parties which seek to promote or defend the interests of Protestant religion against proponents of Catholicism or anticlericalism or excessive liberalism in personal matters. The sectarian politics of Northern Ireland have led the Ulster Unionist, Official Unionist, and Democratic Unionist Parties to be clearly identified with the Protestant section of the population against the Catholic minority and the territorial claims of Eire, a Catholic state. Similarly, in Scandinavia Christian peoples' parties have emerged since the 1960s on the back of Protestant revulsion at sexual permissiveness. Otherwise political promotion and defence of the Protestant religion is either one among other non-religious defining elements of a political party, as in the case of the British Conservative Party and its upholding of the established Church of England, or one among other religious causes promoted by a political party against secularism, as is the case with the Dutch Christian Democratic Appeal. Protestant beliefs have been generally promoted since the 1960s within more general religious backlashes against secularism in the context of populist ‘moral majority’ movements within established parties, such as the American Republican Party. Nowhere does an exclusively Protestant party form a government, a feature of political systems which is encouraged by an increasing stress on interdenominational toleration and general dominance of non-religious issues in defining party systems in the West.
JBr 

 
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(1809–65)
French social theorist and the first thinker to make explicit use of the idea of
anarchism
to denote an ideal community free from the constraints of law, government, and state power. In using this term he deliberately and provocatively challenged his opponents to distinguish between anarchism as a new, revolutionary way of life capable of securing order and justice, and anarchy as disorderly lawlessness.
Proudhon's influence spread rapidly after the publication of
What is Property?
in 1840. In this work traditional rights of property ownership were attacked, but at the same time
communism
was rejected. For Proudhon the guiding economic principle of an anarchist community must be that of mutualism, which required a co-operative productive system geared towards genuine need rather than profit, and based on a moral respect for individuality within small-scale communities.
KT 

 
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PSBR
(Public Sector Borrowing Requirement)

The quantity of money a government has to borrow in order to finance its annual expenditure. The PSBR covers the gap between the government's income and expenditure, and is usually financed by the sale of government securities.
Keynes
argued that a high PSBR should be allowed when economic activity was depressed, enabling public spending when tax receipts are low, in order to encourage growth in the economy. Recently, with the growing influence of monetarist policies, it has been argued that government borrowing fuels inflation and crowds out private investment, and hence the PSBR should be tightly controlled at all stages of the economic cycle.

 
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Term coined in 1952 by R. B. McCallum and popularized by D. E. Butler to denote the study of elections and voting behaviour. From Greek
psephos
, the pebble thrown into one or another urn to cast a vote in democratic Athens.

 
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