In violent conflicts in places like Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, economic interests have crowded out ideologically articulate mass-based social movements for reform or revolutionary change to a degree that was not apparent during earlier anti-colonial struggles. Some scholars offer a ‘looting model’ of rebellion that explains the predations of politicians and warlords but it is not clear why people who receive few benefits from this – or even suffer great harm from them – fail to support ideologues instead, or why self-interested violent entrepreneurs do not offer political programmes to attract more followers. Yet some groups defy this ‘looting model’. Explaining why armed groups vary so greatly in their behaviour provides a means to address important questions: is it possible to construct public authorities out of collapsed states in the twenty-first century, or do local predations and global conditions preclude indigenous state-building in these places? Why do social movements for reform there seem so ineffective? What conditions have to be present for them to succeed? This article considers the nature of rebellion in failing states, focusing on Nigeria to find clues to explain variations in the organization of armed groups.

In this article, we argue that individuals’ expectations about their future economic prospects are a crucial missing determinant of their degree of satisfaction with democracy. To investigate this link, we collected an original, nationally representative data set on young skilled unemployed Italians using the innovative quantitative expectations data methodology (Manski 2004). Controlling for current local labour market conditions with administrative province-level data and for a rich array of individual-level determinants, we show that those expecting greater job insecurity and instability have lower current satisfaction levels with democracy. By better conceptualizing and operationalizing individuals’ expectations, we advance the theoretical framework on satisfaction with democracy and show that expectations are an important and often overlooked determinant of the current level of satisfaction with democratic institutions.

In recent literature on post-Soviet electoral revolutions in places where attempts at regime change through popular protest did not succeed, opposition groups are often simply regarded as ‘failed’. And yet, opposition actors exist and participate in the political life of their country. Building on the Belarusian and Azerbaijani cases, we argue that opposition actors are maintained in a ‘ghetto’, often virtual, tightly managed by the ruling authorities who exert monopolistic control over civic activities. Opposition actors adapt to the restricted conditions – accepting a certain level of dependency. They thus develop various tactics to engage with the outside, striving to reduce the ghetto walls. To this end this article proposes a typology of what we call oppositional ‘resistance models’: electoral, in the media, lobbying and through education. The models highlight what makes ‘opposition’ in authoritarian states and are a step towards a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon in this context.

Institutionalization as a ‘process theory’ moves beyond the specification of a dichotomous variable – either an institution exists or it does not – to a continuous variable – whereby an institution can be more or less institutionalized. But if institutionalization is to be conceived in this way, then the specification of independent variables and the measurement of the degree of institutionalization become crucial to the understanding of the process. The essence of the argument presented in this article is that in the study of legislatures both the specification and measurement of institutionalization have been deficient. The comparative potential of the concept of legislative institutionalization has been limited by a failure to use common criteria and measures of institutionalization. As a general theory, institutionalization is of value in explaining how institutions become organized and how they become differentiated from other political organizations, but equally other organization theories might more usefully be deployed to explain institutional change in legislatures thereafter.

Mega-events present a special venue for the practice of risk management. This article analyses the management of security risks in the case of two sporting mega-events, the London 2012 Olympic Games and the FIFA 2006 World Cup in Germany. To what extent do strategies and practices of risk management resemble each other across events? And what explains similarities or differences in the tools of risk management observed in each of these cases? First, this article explores three theoretical explanations for the choice of particular policy tools or instruments. Second, it introduces the tools of government approach as a means of conducting a direct comparative analysis of risk management across political and organizational settings and over time. The tools used for security risk management at the two mega-events are then compared and the different logics of tool choice are evaluated. This analytical approach offers a basis for future comparative inquiry into tools of risk management used in public and private organizations. The empirical findings highlight the particular importance of national political systems in influencing tool choice.

El Salvador’s FMLN is an oft-cited example of a rebel movement which successfully embraced electoral democracy. This article examines the ideological dimensions of this transformation. In the course of the Salvadoran peace process, the FMLN substantially overhauled its ideological orientation and associated modes of engagement with the state and the broader political system. Moderation unfolded in four subsequent stages: the resignification of revolution as a process of reform, the FMLN’s rebel-to-party adaptation, the electoral consolidation of the FMLN, and the FMLN as the party in government. Over the years, while electoral politics invited public moderation, Leninist dogma continued to dominate internal party politics. This article finds that the post-war FMLN has employed seemingly contradictory ideological repertoires in parallel. This ambivalence, strongly rooted in the war, has facilitated the FMLN’s electoral ascendency. It has also strained democratic consolidation in El Salvador.

WHEN MANY COUNTRIES IN WESTERN EUROPE ARE EXPERIENCING A flux or even a teeming confusion in their party systems, West Germany stands out as a case of almost aberrant cohesion. The ageold yearning for ‘the German synthesis’ finds its apparent modern fulfilment in the party system. The uncomfortable extremes of left and right have for long hovered around virtual electoral extinction, and the rise of new movements – such as forms of neo-Poujadism in Scandinavia or the rediscovery of the territorial dimension of politics as in Britain – has left the Federal Republic untouched. The two major contenders for power, the SPD and the CDU, dominate the electoral scene, and in so doing seem to be locked in an embrace from which neither is able to escape.

ONCE IRAN HAD CALLED FOR AN ISLAMIC REVOLUTION, THERE was speculation that the message might elicit a similar response elsewhere in the Islamic world. In fact, soon after the events in Iran, a group of foreign journalists arrived in Turkey and rumour had it that they had come to report on the Islamic revolt expected in Turkey as well. The expected, however, did not take place: instead, had the journalists stayed on, what they would have witnessed was the breakdown of democraci, and the installation of authoritarian rule by the staunchest de enders of secularism, the Turkish military. Islamic politics had been instrumental in exacerbating the democratic crisis, and hence the military takeover was partially directed against the Islamic politics of the National Salvation Party (NSP) and the street politics of radical Islamic groups. Islamic politics was strong enough to figure in the equation of democratic breakdown, but far too weak to detonate an Islamic revolution.

The purpose of this essay is to look into the nature of Islamic politics in Turkey in terms of its past ventures in society, its recent involvement in party politics and its prospects for the future. Our fundamental assumption is that the specific characteristics of Islamic politics in Turkey are closely bound up with the state-dominant nature of Turkish political culture and society. More specifically, we attempt to show that changes in the nature of Islamic politics and movements, their organization, aims and strategies, have been in large part shaped by the changing structure and ideology of the state and the centralist elites.

IT IS INCREASINGLY COMMON TO FIND ANALYSES OF BRITAIN AS A corporate state, or more circumspectly as developing a tripartite system of economic and industrial policy-making. Unfortunately, such work is often marked by a lack of definitional rigour and an inadequate consideration of relevant empirical material. In view of these limitations in the literature our article has two aims. Initially it examines the relationship between corporatism and tripartism, showing that in many ways tripartism can be viewed as a variation on one strand of corporatist thought, and what is more that it is the strand which appears most relevant to discussions of Britain. Subsequently, against this background, we examine empirical evidence to establish how far Britain can be described as having a tripartite system of economic and industrial policy-making.

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.

Although semi-presidentialism is a popular form of governance in new democracies, we have little empirical evidence supporting its popularity. In this study, I attempt to reassess democratic performance of new semi-presidential regimes from 1974 to 2009 as a function of four broadly cited risk factors: divided minority government, cohabitation, presidential powers and president-parliamentarism. The results are more encouraging than previous research has suggested. First, divided minority government is positively associated with higher levels of democracy, even though it, along with a strong presidency and president-parliamentarism, makes executive instability more likely. Second, perils of cohabitation are not substantiated with regard to executive instability and quality of democracy. Third, none of the caveats against semi-presidential systems makes them more vulnerable to democratic breakdown. However, a failure to check presidential powers appears to be a serious risk for semi-presidentialism. As presidents enjoy more powers, the levels of democracy tend to decrease. This finding has a substantive implication for countries that already practise semi-presidential governance or contemplate a move in that direction: checking presidential powers is critical to facilitate democratic consolidation in semi-presidentialism.

Despite more than two decades of research on semi-presidential regimes, we still know very little about the actual coordination between the president and the prime minister. Through an in-depth analysis of Lithuanian semi-presidentialism, this article underscores the importance of institutional design on intra-executive balance of power. Drawing primarily on interviews with top-level civil servants and office-holders, it argues that in the absence of written rules or other strong norms guiding intra-executive coordination, presidents enjoy more discretion in designing their own modes of operation. Coordination depends on the initiative of the president, with ad hoc practices further weakening the position of the prime minister. While Lithuanian semi-presidentialism has functioned smoothly, the personality-centred politics commonly found in Central and East European countries create favourable conditions for presidential activism.

Quota laws have been widely adopted in Latin America, with significant increases in the number of women elected to parliament in some countries. However, it is far from clear whether the laws have produced the modifications in the gender regimes which inform internal party power structures and dynamics that would allow women to participate – as aspirants or selectors – on an equal footing with their male counterparts in the processes of candidate selection. This article seeks to identify critical nodes where the interplay between the different institutions – systemic, normative and practical – of candidate selection intersects with gendered power relations to facilitate or hinder not only women’s access to elective posts, but the terms of their access. Employing a feminist institutionalist analytical framework, this article presents the findings from qualitative case study research on candidate selection in Uruguay in 2009 and 2014 and situates them within the existing – albeit small – body of studies of gender and candidate selection in the Latin American region.

The democratic legitimacy of European governance is often said to rest on its ‘output’. However, such arguments also make the implicit ‘input’ claim that the community method and new modes of governance offer a more participatory and deliberative style of democratic politics to standard democratic processes, which is best suited to represent the European interest. We test such claims by analysing them from three different perspectives: functional, societal and delegatory. We conclude that they are grounded on a substantive conception of representation in which the agents of European governance ‘stand’ or ‘act’ for the European public. However, such claims are empty without formal democratic processes of authorization and accountability that ensure European governance effectively promotes the democratic values of political equality and responsiveness.

IN TERMS OF THE HISTORICAL CATEGORIES FORMULATED BY S. N. Eisentadt, the origins of the Ottoman-Turkish polity were imperial-bureaucratic rather than imperial-feudal or patrimonial. The regime was not patrimonial because the centre had its own distinctive normative system; the values of the centre were just a pale reflection of those of the periphery. The regime was not imperial-feudal for the centre did not have to face civil societal groups able to challenge it and impinge upon it. The members of the periphery could not develop horizontal loyalties; instead they competed among themselves for a limited number of privileges such as tax-farming rights or quotas for import or export which the centre granted. The Ottoman-Turkish peripheral elements did not develo into an aristocracy or a bourgeoisie with political influence. Consequently, the efforts towards modernization initiated during the nineteenth century took on a particular twist. Modernization meant Westernization, which in turn was perceived from the perspective of Enlightenment tradition. Informed by a ‘cast-iron theory’ of Islam ,the state's salvation was seen to lie in substituting reason for religion as the basis of public policy-making. The military and the bureaucratic elites came to see themselves primarily as the guardians of raison d'état.

This article offers a critical engagement with two important strands of left theorizations of European Union integration and globalization, namely, ‘new constitutionalism’ (a sub-form of neo-Gramscian analysis) and ‘structural dependence’ theory (rooted in a more orthodox Marxist approach). These approaches suffer, respectively, from an uncritical or one-sided approach to constitutionalism and competitiveness; and from a theoretical conflation of national with regional political economy. While new constitutionalism under-theorizes regionalism partly because of its implicit ‘methodological nationalism’ and attachment to the ethics of national political economy, structural dependence theory neglects regionalism in pursuing a highly pessimistic structuralist approach to globalization.

In the past few years, a number of civil society coalitions have emerged in the illiberal city-state of Singapore. They are the unintended result of a controlled process of liberalization which was initiated by the government in the 1990s in response to growing demands for participation. In particular, the internet has contributed to a more assertive, independent and better organized civil society, which can be seen as a significant step in the process of political change in the city-state.

Political opposition has long been one of the most dramatically understudied elements of real-world politics in contemporary democratic and authoritarian regimes. The past decade or so has, however, witnessed an upsurge of new opposition research that begs for a major state-of-the-field review. Interestingly, recent scholarship has focused more on manifestations of opposition in authoritarian and hybrid than in democratic systems, which indicates a latent reconceptualization of political opposition (setting aside older distinctions between regime-loyal opposition and regime-challenging forms of resistance, dissidence and contestation). With a focus on party-based forms of opposition, which have been widely considered to mark the most effective form of opposition, this review article takes stock and highlights key issues for future research as well as some inherent obstacles to the emergence of a more integrated field of cross-regime opposition studies.

The Conclusions Reached at the meeting of the European Council in Maastricht, on 9 — 10 December 1991, on economic and monetary union and also on political union, form an impressive and complex whole, in which undertakings of major importance coexist with other more timid ones. A detailed analysis would overstep the limits of an article. Moreover, there are still some problems to be cleared up before the final drafts are agreed, even if the principal political decisions have already been taken. The remarks which I would like to submit here will therefore deal more with general questions, and I will limit myself to the more significant provisions of the Maastricht agreements.

It is often said that while many of the twentieth century's wars were fought over oil, those of the twenty-first will be fought over water. This paper seeks to counter this argument, as well as the assumption implicit in it that the two resources engender, or will engender, broadly similar types of conflict. Specifically it argues 1) that within the context of the contemporary global capitalism, oil and water are marked by starkly divergent political economies; 2) that the two resources thus have starkly contrasting impacts upon patterns of state formation; 3) that these factors together militate against the development of violent international water conflicts; and 4) that notwithstanding the above, water is already a significant cause of local violence in many parts of the global South.