While far-right parties tend to receive a small minority of votes in national elections, their presence in ruling coalitions is becoming much more common. In this article, I ask under what conditions mainstream parties are willing and interested in forming a coalition with a far-right party, given the potentially high costs associated with having such a partner in government. I characterize such moves as the co-optation of a growing political rival in an effort to minimize electoral threat. That is, as far-right parties become more threatening to the electoral success of a mainstream party, they will invite the party into their government, in an effort to stave off said threat. This characterization borrows from the literature of authoritarian co-optation to build on our current understanding of parliamentary coalition-building. Quantitative analysis utilizing cross-national, survey and spatial data is employed to support this theory.

The number of grassroots members of populist radical right (PRR) parties is on the rise, in contrast to the trend of membership decline in mainstream parties. While scholars have explained this by studying PRR parties' organizational strategies, I focus on party members and ask: Why do people join PRR parties? To answer this, I look not only at motivations, which is the dominant framework in party membership studies, but also at triggers – factors activating those motivations. Drawing on collective action scholarship, I argue that grievances and efficacy can work as triggers for joining PRR parties. Using interviews with 82 members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the League in Italy and the Sweden Democrats, I uncover three elements in the path to PRR party membership: disaffection, affiliation and action. As well as questioning established narratives on why citizens join parties, my findings provide a novel theoretical framework to investigate this form of political participation.

During their early political socialization young people start to recognize their agency as political actors and to develop their political identity. This article presents the findings of a comparative study across different types of youth activism in two cities, Athens and Cologne, which differ in their youth cultures of participation and the opportunities they provide to mobilize. Our data derive from in-depth qualitative interviewing, which is considered to be most fruitful for the exploration of the reasons behind activists' trajectories. We identified three groups of influences: micro-, meso- and macro-level influences, with micro-level influences being most visible in the path of social movement-related activism, meso-level influences being dominant in the path of partisan activism, and macro-level influences prevailing in grassroots activism. Finally, the implications of the differential impact of the studied socio-spatial contexts are critically discussed.

Political participation and party attachment in Western democracies have become more and more volatile. In turn, political campaigns seem increasingly dependent on short-term discursive windows of opportunity opened by dynamic debates on issues such as migration, climate, employment and economic policies. Based on panel data from nine European countries, we investigate how patterns and changes in the materialist and postmaterialist concerns of respondents affect electoral turnout and party switching. By relating these variables, we aim to uncover whether and to what extent underlying concerns – and thus short-term politicization – account for short-term patterns of electoral volatility. We pay special attention to young respondents, who are often framed as being particularly dynamic and less bound to traditional political loyalties. Our findings offer insights into short-term change in discursive opportunities for political mobilization and broader democratic engagement.

The EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) represents a bold integrationist step in European economic governance. Besides the size of the fiscal envelope, the novelty also lies in the new governance. Member states prepare integrated investment and reform plans and need to fulfil milestones and targets to access funding. This article assesses the balance of power in negotiating the plans and the effect on domestic policymaking. Based on five case studies, we show that the RRF has enhanced the steering capacity of the European Commission on reforms and investments, while member states remain ultimately in charge of the plans. Second, we argue that, while the RRF enhances the efficiency of the policymaking process and allows the fast-forwarding of reforms, it has also led to a contractualization of the relationship with the EU and a centralization of decision-making processes within member states. This latter aspect may hamper ownership and legitimacy in policy implementation.

The article explores how macro-level political factors in conjunction with micro- and meso-level factors affect interest-group access to policymakers. The analysis is conducted based on two original data sets: a population ecology database of Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian national-level energy policy, healthcare and higher education organizations, and an online survey of these populations. Combining the two data sets allows us to investigate both polity-, population- and organizational-level factors. As the sampled countries have recently experienced democratic backsliding, we also test the effect of closing deliberative structures. The analysis reveals that the political process influences access: legislative fractionalization affects access positively, while the closure of deliberative structures has a negative effect. Nevertheless, the political contextual factors are mediated through variables at both the population (e.g. the size of latent constituency) and organizational (e.g. expertise provision) levels, as well as the meso-level of interorganizational cooperation.

While digital technologies have induced profound global transformations, political scientists often lack the analytical tools to grasp their effects on politics. In particular, digitization's impact on dictatorships remains not only empirically understudied, but seriously under-conceptualized. How do new technological possibilities affect autocratic politics? This contribution starts from the inner logic of authoritarianism rather than from technical innovation. It first maps the ways in which autocrats employ various digital technologies to maintain power. This helps us identify seven core areas where dictatorial politics are transformed by the use of new tools. We delineate the key characteristics of these areas of change and conclude that, in their sum, technologically induced transformations significantly alter the nature of dictatorship if and when it is digitized.

In this article we examine the phenomenon of the use of sovereignist claims, not only by nationalist or populist leaders but also by actors who would not normally fall into these categories. We zoom in on two different cases: France and Italy. Through an analysis of Twitter we examine the discourse of the political leadership in election campaigns. We document some interesting commonalities, as well as some differences, concerning the emphasis on sovereignist claims. We produce an account of the patterns of use of sovereignist issues, we identify which parties/leaders have been the main promoters of sovereignist claims and how their competitors have responded to this challenge. Finally, we analyse the main drivers of sovereignist party discourses. Through regression analysis we show how, both in France and in Italy, the sovereignist supply has been influenced by ideology and citizens' demands.

Recent research suggests that party leaders can strategically impact the perceived left–right position of their parties by changing their selective emphasis on certain issues. We suggest that a party's ideological image can also be altered by the portfolio allocation of the coalition government in which the party participates. By controlling a portfolio, the party will have a more direct influence on the related issue and will frequently communicate the party's issue position publicly, thereby cultivating a perception of strong emphasis on the related issue. We run a cross-national party-level analysis showing that portfolio allocation matters with regard to the importance of the subdimensions for the general left–right dimension. In particular, the influence of sociocultural stances depends on the share of sociocultural portfolios. In addition, we show that the mechanism does not apply at the beginning of a government's tenure, but only after a year or longer in office.

While many scholarly works are concerned with how social protests promote democratization, this article addresses the causally reverse question: how democratization shapes the landscape of street protests. We use a unique database of 31 years of protest events in Taiwan, a smooth and successful case of authoritarianism-to-democracy transition, to engage in a dialogue with political transition theory, the institutionalization thesis and networked movement theory. The logistic regression analysis indicates that protest violence persists under consolidated democracy, but it is marginalized. We find an indirect effect from the growth of social movement organizations that foster the adaptation of festive and performative tactics, which are less confrontational in nature. Politicians' involvement, however, remains a constant source of disruptiveness. Our conclusion of contentious institutionalization finds that late-democratizing countries also gravitate towards becoming a ‘social movement society’ as advanced democracies do, but in a highly compressed period of time.

Sovereignism is at the crux of the current wave of radical right-wing populism (RRP). While sovereignism may concern different dimensions, claims by RRP parties and leaders about regaining sovereignty are increasingly associated with socioeconomic issues such as welfare, redistribution and international trade. Adopting a demand-side perspective, this article draws from an original cross-national survey to investigate the intersection between economic sovereignism, economic populism and globalization attitudes, and how such attitudes may shape RRP voting in Western Europe and the United States. Our results confirm that economic populism and sovereignism form coherent sets of attitudes together with perceptions of globalization, and that such attitudes have a significant effect on support for RRP actors. We find different patterns of association, however, across our European cases and the United States, which suggests that the relationship between populism, sovereignism and economic globalization is partly dependent upon national context and historical legacies.

Many opposition parties in electoral-authoritarian regimes identify as democracy movements. I ask: what ideologies do they publicly express? The first-glance answer is ‘democratic ones’, but there are many theories of liberal democracy, and they say little about living under or indeed confronting authoritarian regimes. I analyse the public messages of two such democracy movements: Chadema (Tanzania) and the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC, in Zimbabwe). I argue that they each articulate a homegrown vision of democracy in which they adapt democratic theory to make sense of their electoral-authoritarian circumstances. They do so by articulating that theory through the ‘populist logic’ conceptualized in the discourse-theoretic perspective. I call them anti-authoritarian (and democratic) populisms. Previous research has overlooked the distinctiveness of these ideologies because it has adopted concept configurations which invisibilize them. I argue that there are reasons to expect there to be a wider body of anti-authoritarian populisms articulated by democracy movements in electoral-authoritarian regimes in Africa, and indeed, worldwide.

We study whether and how governments influence public opinion about immigration policies in Europe. At the European level, conflicts about policy are generally territorial in nature – that is, they involve conflicts between member states, which are represented by their governments. Distinguishing between four types of situations, depending on whether the national governments support or oppose EU policy proposals, we formulate and test hypotheses concerning the positions of incumbent and opposition voters/non-voters on four different asylum-policy proposals in 16 European countries. We test both direct effects of incumbent cues on voters' preferences, and moderating effects, where the cueing affects the way in which individual attitudes to immigration and European integration translate into specific preferences for EU asylum and immigration policies. Our results suggest that voters, indeed, follow the cues provided by their governments when forming their preferences on EU policies.

In this article, we argue that party-system polarization and subjective perceptions of ideological party differences are conceptually and empirically distinct phenomena that affect electoral participation differently. Looking at 84 elections worldwide, we show that party-system polarization, and the sharp conflicts associated with it, depresses turnout because many citizens are put off by extreme party positions and unrewarding polemics. By contrast, the individual perception of differences between parties increases turnout because more citizens can find a party that is close to their own position and identify others as being further away. These opposite effects are possible because party-system polarization leads only some individuals to perceive differences between parties but leads others to avoid the emotionalized political arena. Moreover, individuals' ability to recognize differences between parties is not necessarily a consequence of party-system polarization. The contradictory findings in previous research are due to a conceptual and empirical blurring of these two essentially different aspects.

Right-wing populists often mobilize popular support by employing a people-versus-elite dichotomy in which they cast ‘the people’ as the underdog, or by ‘performing’ crisis to discredit the elite. Such ‘underdogism’, and the reliance on crisis more broadly, remains an effective strategy for as long as populists are in opposition. But what happens when populists gain power? One would expect that they would not be able to exploit their position as effectively and their appeal would weaken drastically. In certain cases, however, they still manage to sustain the underdog illusion. This article argues that memory politics are an important locus for populists to maintain their underdog rhetoric, and within that field the performance of victimhood is key. Building on theories about the performance of crisis and recent trends in research on memory politics in Central Europe, we propose a framework for understanding how governing right-wing populists justify vindictive policies and thus try to cement their power.

Why are politicians more likely to be prosecuted and convicted for corruption in some contexts rather than in others? Pulling together disparate threads of the literature on what we call the politics of criminal accountability, this review organizes current explanations along three levels of inquiry: (1) micro, encompassing characteristics of individual criminal-accountability agents and defendants, such as their partisanship and ideology, professional ethos, enforcement costs and judicial corruption; (2) meso, emphasizing the independence, capacities and coordination degrees of criminal-accountability institutions; and (3) macro, including the impact of political regimes, political competition, support from civil society, corruption levels and international norms. In doing so, we draw attention to methodological shortcomings and opportunities for research on the topic, providing a roadmap for this field of inquiry that also includes unexplored questions and tentative answers. Furthermore, we present new systematic data set that reveals a substantial increase in the conviction of former heads of government for corruption since 2000, underscoring the importance of the phenomenon and highlighting the need for further research into the politics of criminal accountability.