In 2005, after the making of the Constitution of Iraq and the making of Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement, many analysts expected the imminent break-up of Iraq, and that the South Sudanese would eventually opt for federalism and power-sharing rather than secede from Sudan. Six remarkable parallels in the histories of Iraq and Sudan suggest that analysts should have predicted that the Kurds and the South Sudanese would have been equally ardent secessionists in the early twenty-first century. Yet Kurdish nationalist leaders chose federalization in and after 2005, whereas South Sudanese nationalists eventually chose secession after a brief federal power-sharing experiment. The different choices of the respective nationalist leaders were therefore critical, but some plausible explanations of their different choices do not withstand scrutiny. The differing outcomes, so far, are necessarily but not sufficiently explained by the different geopolitical neighbourhoods of Iraq and Sudan. The author suggests that secessions are also driven by political parties who are willing to downsize their state rather than modify the existing regime, and by nationalists who calculate that they are unlikely to have political pivotality in a federal democracy. One implication is that federal power-sharing bargains have a better chance of working in deeply divided places when potential secessionists believe that they may have political pivotality within a federation.

Under what conditions and to what extent do external officeholders in parliamentary democracies constrain the cabinet's freedom of action? The article argues that we must analyse both institutional powers and officeholders’ incentives to use them to obtain an unbiased estimate of the expected constraint. It measures the incentives dimension via the selection method of external officeholders and develops an index to capture the likelihood that such officeholders hold preferences deviant from those of the cabinet. Analysing original data on four external constraint institutions in 25 European democracies, the article shows major variation in the incentives to constrain the cabinet across both offices and countries. Furthermore, it demonstrates that institutional powers and incentives for their use are empirically largely independent dimensions.

Can extremist parties benefit from a backlash against European Union integration? A theoretical model that integrates demand-side, supply-side and political opportunity space explanations for extremist party success is used here in an effort to predict the conditions under which extremist parties may have utilized increased public discontent with EU integration to increase their vote share in national legislative elections. The plausibility of the model is then tested against the evidence in 14 EU member states from 1992 to 2006, with the use of matrices and political opportunity space maps. In the majority of the elections examined, extremist parties increased their vote share in circumstances fitting the theoretical model.

Radical right parties are becoming increasingly likely candidates to participate in government coalitions in Western Europe. Comparative research on the electoral performance of these parties in government is still scarce. Our overview of the electoral effects of government participation of six parties in national governments shows that they do not run a higher risk of losing votes after government participation than other parties. There is considerable variation, however. Some radical right parties experienced great losses, while others won additional support. Focusing on the ways in which radical right parties conducted themselves in government, we explore why some parties won votes and others lost in post-incumbency elections. We compare their policy achievements with regard to immigration and integration policies, the performance of their ministers, and the party coherence of the six parties in office. Our analysis shows that policy records do not fully explain the variation in post-incumbency electoral results. Weak performance and internal party conflict prevent parties from credibly laying claim to the policy achievements of coalition governments and demonstrate that some of these parties were not ready for office.

Besides systemic changes that lead to the re-prioritization of foreign policy objectives, foreign policy change is also a result of domestic policy entrepreneurs’ pursuit of a political return. Their potential to orchestrate change depends on the existing entry barriers that emanate from the political and institutional features of the domestic policy-making process. It is accentuated by system-wide developments and security crises that illustrate old policy failure. This article discusses the role of policy entrepreneurs in foreign policy change by reference to the Greek–Turkish rapprochement in the late 1990s that resulted in Turkey receiving the status of EU candidate country in 1999.

This article focuses on the populist strategy of the Turkish Justice and Development Party between the 2007 presidential election, when Turkish politics experienced an impasse, and the 2010 referendum over the constitutional amendments. As a means of analysing populism, the symptomatic approach is preferred over other theoretical perspectives, including empiricism and historicism. An analysis of the discourse articulated by Prime Minister Erdoğan leads us to the conclusion that he has continually appealed to the masses with an anti-institutional rhetoric that divides society into ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, thereby fulfilling the criteria of populism according to the symptomatic approach.