Legislatures in parliamentary systems are frequently seen as weak policy actors, and this is nowhere more true than of the British Westminster parliament. But real-world changes, and recent research, suggest that Westminster’s influence is significant and growing. This raises new questions about which non-government actors are influential, and we explore this through analysing 4,361 amendments proposed to 12 government bills. Assessing non-government amendment ‘success’ presents challenges, however, since many such proposals are clearly not sincere attempts at legislative change. We thus make two substantive contributions. First, we quantitatively assess the influence of different groups at Westminster, showing both non-government influence and cross-party working to be more extensive than traditionally assumed. Second, we link predictions about opposition and backbench parliamentarians’ motivations to the legislative amendment process, proposing a typology of motivations for such amendments, with wider application. Overall, we argue that understanding non-government parliamentarians’ diverse motivations shows that they ‘fail’ far less often than commonly assumed.

When some members of yesterday’s opposition organizations enter the state upon democratic breakthrough, does this empower or weaken the mission of the organizations left behind? While little research has been directed at this important element of democratization, I leverage the existing interdisciplinary social movement literature to create a series of forward-reaching arguments, based on identities, networks and opportunity structures. In the context of current studies, each of these factors should provide advantage to organizations with colleagues now in the state. By contrast, I argue that identities and personal networks developed during the struggle provide movement activists with opportunities to influence minor issues, but that new and differing institutional pressures create schisms on broader policy that turn prior bonds into a liability rather than an asset. I use elite interviews and media analyses in the case of post-democratic breakthrough Poland to evaluate three competing arguments, focused on identities, networks and institutions.

Despite extensive research on electoral turnout in developed democracies, we know relatively little about the determinants of electoral participation in (electoral) autocracies. Yet, electoral mobilization is crucial to understanding electoral authoritarian regime dynamics and democratic regression. This article studies the ‘socioeconomic roots’ of electoral authoritarianism by using original local-level data from a prominent contemporary electoral authoritarian regime, Russia. The article shows how the electoral mobilization of certain institutionally and socioeconomically state-dependent demographic sectors was a key part in Russia’s transition from a competitive to hegemonic authoritarian regime between 2000 and 2004. An original local-level data set allows us to test the hypotheses using multilevel models, controlling for several socioeconomic and contextual variables at both regional and local levels. The results support the hypotheses of electoral mobilization in specific demographic areas and show interesting variations in turnout patterns between the subnational units.

The reach of social media is prodigious. Its ubiquitous nature has reshaped the ways in which government agencies can communicate with citizens. But amidst the rush to embrace the opportunities of Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, governments have had to lay down rules to govern how and when public service departments should use social media. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of the formal rules and guidelines in place across four Westminster jurisdictions – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK – to identify the types of behaviours and activities that are seen as desirable when public servants are reaching out to the wider public through social media. The article argues that the horizontal communication patterns associated with social media are fundamentally at odds with the hierarchical structures of the Westminster system of government.

While previous research has generally shown that economic performance is an important predictor of satisfaction with democracy, differences between political systems on the majoritarian-consensual dimension have not been as marked as expected. What has been neglected in previous studies is how the interaction between economic performance and type of power-sharing arrangement co-produce democratic satisfaction. This study uses multiple rounds of data from the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2013 involving 31 countries. The results show that short-term changes in economic performance and government fractionalization interactively increase or decrease levels of political support. The effect of economic performance on satisfaction with democracy becomes weaker the more fractionalized a government is. Satisfaction with how democracy works in a country remains relatively high in systems with fractionalized coalition governments when the economy is performing poorly. But when the economy performs extraordinarily well, satisfaction with democracy is even higher in countries with a dominant party in charge of government power.

Through the comparative analysis of the participatory mechanisms established in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, this study explores under which conditions such mechanisms are more likely to deepen or undermine democracy. While the informal participatory mechanisms established in Bolivia have produced, though imperfectly, significant democratic benefits, in Ecuador and Venezuela crucial participatory mechanisms have appeared to favour the concentration of power in the executive, contributing to the strangulation of representative institutions, the erosion of the separation of powers and the development of government-dominated social groups. By shedding light on the undemocratic manipulation of participatory mechanisms, an area still largely unexplored, this study contributes to a better understanding of the risks and opportunities associated with the deepening of democracy.

Using Przeworski et al.’s paradigmatic work on democracy and development as a touchstone, this review examines East Asia’s lessons for comparative politics. It focuses particularly on the challenges that China and South-East Asia present for modernization theory, a foundation stone of political science. In most of the rich world, including north-east Asian cases of modernization such as Korea and Taiwan, economic development and democratization have tended to go hand in hand. In South-East Asia, by contrast, almost none of the expected relationships between democracy and development seems to work. The most striking anomaly of all today is China, which appears to be moving ever further away from democratic reform as it grows richer. This disjuncture between theory and practice is explored, along with other, more positive, East Asian contributions to scholarship on democracy and development.