The notion that states’ foreign and security policies are not exclusively driven by material interests is now firmly established. Whose ideas matter and in what way, however, has remained subject to debate. We advance this debate by studying the crisis diplomacy of liberal democracies towards North Korea during four crises around the country’s violation of international norms between 1993 and 2009. Although liberal democracies share a common perception of North Korea’s nuclear programme as a threat to international peace and security, they differ widely in either confronting or accommodating North Korea. We examine the explanatory power of two ideational driving forces behind the foreign policy of liberal democracies: the ideological orientation of the government, on the one hand, and a country’s political culture, on the other. Our analysis of 22 liberal democracies demonstrates that different domestic cultures of dealing with norm violations have a significant impact on crisis diplomacy: countries with punitive domestic cultures tend to adopt confrontational policies towards international norm violators; while left governments are not more accommodationist than right governments. Ideational differences across states are thus more pronounced than those within states.

This article examines the behavior of Greek political parties before, as well as during, the recent austerity period. Drawing on coalition oversight and blame avoidance literature, it argues that the unpopularity of austerity governments leads to extreme levels of dissent within the coalition. I operationalize this ‘intra-coalition opposition’ behavior using parliamentary questions, a legislative institution that has not been studied in the context of coalition politics. The analysis demonstrates that junior members in unpopular austerity governments increase their use of parliamentary questions to a degree that matches or even exceeds the formal opposition. However, intra-coalition dissent is conditional on the type of unpopular government policies, and on the ideology of coalition members. Specifically, using a new method of text analysis, I show that while the socialist Panhellenic Socialist Movement uses its parliamentary questions to avoid or minimize the blame associated with austerity policies, the conservative New Democracy does not, because left-leaning parties are electorally vulnerable to austerity measures. The results have implications for studying dissent in coalition politics in general, and the politics of austerity in particular.

This study explains redistribution and income inequality by revisiting traditional approaches. The predictions of the two dominant theories, the median voter hypothesis (the Meltzer–Richard model) and the power resources theory are regarded as contrasting, and have seldom been incorporated under a single framework. I develop a composite model of inequality by combining their core arguments within the framework of party competition. This study also analyses stages of inequality formation, namely market wage inequality and redistribution, and adds in a dynamic component to the model, completing the cycle of income distribution. The model is supported empirically with data from 18 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries from 1970 to 2009. I demonstrate the joint relevance and significance of the two theories, showing that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive and should be properly addressed from both theoretical perspectives.

If decisions are made in democracies in open procedures, the rhetoric of There is no alternative (TINA) raises certain questions. Tracing back the idea of necessity to symptomatic discourses, this article analyzes TINA as a political strategy in contexts such as Thatcherism, Third Way politics, and European crisis management, and sheds light on the specific characteristics of politics in the name of TINA. The analysis identifies distinct models of ‘one way’ discourses, reflecting political cultures and institutional settings and providing discursive trajectories. We examine the motivation for invoking necessity to justify unpalatable and normatively intricate policy decisions, and understand TINA politics in its double effect: as facilitating certain policies yet obstructing democratic and deliberative procedures. This allows us to address the question of whether the politics of our time shows a disposition to TINA as a means of responding to the rise and fall of political steering optimism.

The study of secession generally stresses the causal influence of cultural identities, political preferences, or ecological factors. Whereas these different views are often considered to be mutually exclusive, this paper proposes a two-stage model in which they are complementary. We posit that cultural identities matter for explaining secessionism, but not because of primordial attachments. Rather, religious and linguistic groups matter because their members are imbued with cultural legacies that lead to distinct political preferences – in this case preferences over welfare statism. Further, ecological constraints such as geography and topography affect social interaction with like-minded individuals. On the basis of both these political preferences and ecological constraints, individuals then make rational choices about the desirability of secession. Instrumental considerations are therefore crucial in explaining the decision to secede, but not in a conventional pocketbook manner. To examine this theory, we analyze the 2013 referendum on the secession of the Jura Bernois region from the Canton of Berne in Switzerland, using municipal level census and referendum data. The results lend support to the theory and suggest one way in which the politics of identity, based on factors like language and religion, can be fused with the politics of interest (preferences for more or less state intervention into the polity and economy) to better understand group behavior.

The study of clientelism has pointed in the direction of a pyramid structure in which selective benefits are distributed with the help of brokers to individuals or groups in exchange for political support. This approach treats the resources aimed to enhance electoral mobilization as endogenous and fails to explain what happens when brokers have very low capacity. To address these problems this article proposes a bi-dimensional model of clientelism that emphasizes the role of exogenous resources. Accordingly, the vertical linkage between political parties and the electorate is complemented by a horizontal nexus between parties and private contributors. In an environment characterized by low internal resources, parties involve external actors to get the necessary money. To illustrate how this mechanism works we focus on Romania between 2008 and 2012, a crucial case for the study of clientelism.

The literature on political budget cycles (PBCs) does not offer a full-fledged theory about the effect of democratization. However, it does imply a non-linear effect along the regime spectrum: positive at the autocratic end, negative at the democratic end. We theoretically develop and empirically test this implication by pointing to two countervailing effects of democratization: executive constraints and political competition. While the former contains PBCs, the latter stimulates them. Because of their empirical covariation, PBCs occur primarily in hybrid regimes where the decision-making powers of the executive are relatively unrestricted and politics is relatively competitive. We also show that while executive constraints and political competition condition PBCs, what triggers the fluctuations is electoral competitiveness. Only when incumbents fear electoral defeat, do they create PBCs. The study is based on novel data on public spending in 112 countries, covering the entire regime spectrum over the period from 1960 to 2006.

Much discussion of electoral integrity focusses on new democracies. This paper explores the determinants of electoral integrity in a major established democracy in order to begin to identify drivers of electoral integrity for comparative scholars to exploit further. It does so through a novel measure of electoral administration in Britain which is brought together with comprehensive data on spending on electoral administration, whether concurrent elections were being held, size of electorate, number of constituencies administered, type of administration overseeing local electoral administration, and various socio-economic measures. The results establish a range of relationships to electoral integrity which will inform subsequent debates on election quality in other democracies, whether advanced or otherwise. In particular, the findings point to the importance of administrative resources in delivering electoral integrity in advanced democracies.

How may we understand the occurrence of gradual but significant change following economic crisis? Theories of gradual institutional transformation offer important insights to analyses of long-term institutional change, but have so far shied away from dealing with institutional change during and following crisis, leaving the issue to more traditional critical juncture models. Instead of seeing gradual institutional change originating only in the efforts of rule takers to circumvent existing institutions – potentially leading to gradual change over longer periods of time – the paper suggests that in more abrupt processes of change characteristic of economic crisis, rule makers may also reinterpret the meaning of rules and redeploy them under significantly altered circumstances leading to gradual change. The paper suggests that the concept of bricolage is useful for understanding how policymakers create new institutional setups through the re-ordering of existing institutional elements. The empirical relevance of these arguments is demonstrated with a study of post-crisis special bank insolvency policies in Denmark and the United States, showing how in both polities new institutions were created from existing institutional elements.