This article looks at the role of the Party of European Socialists (PES) in its attempts to shape social democratic parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) towards a West European norm. It discusses how existing views in the academic literature on the role of transnational parties are inadequate. We argue that the PES did not play a key role in encouraging the establishment and development of parties in the CEE states from the 2004 enlargement in the early stages of accession. We contend that the overall influence of party federations has been limited, and that these limitations were as much in evidence before enlargement took place as they were afterwards.

With Lal Bahadur Shastri's sudden death in Tashkent in January of this year, India faced for the second time within eighteen months the problem of succession to leadership, The task may have been easier on the second occasion: for one thing, it was not a matter, as it had been in 1964, of finding a successor to a man revered for a full generation as a national leader; for another, there was to hand the experience of the first occasion. On the other hand, while Nehru's end had been for long foreseen and considered, and came as the culmination of a period of declining grip, that of La1 Bahadur occurred without warning. Moreover, for all the respect that Shastri had attracted, the atmosphere in which his replacement had to be sought was not that of the somewhat hushed apprehension in which he had been chosen. But while the second succession was thus accompanied by greater noise and bustle, and while the element of conflict and rivalry was now expressed in the taking of a vote to determine the issue, both operations went with every appearance of smoothness. India felt proud, and most of the world relieved, to find that there was a system that could take the strain. But what is that system ?

This article examines financial innovation as a source of structural power of finance originally identified by Susan Strange. I build a synthesis based on complex network theory and the field of evolutionary finance which yields a conception of finance as a complex ecological habitat. On the one hand, the interaction between various entities inhabiting the financial system endows this complex habitat with a tangible degree of autonomy vis-à-vis politics, society and economy. On the other hand, the evolutionary process guiding this financial ecology is built on complexity and innovation and hence is fragile. The structural power of finance today, therefore, is necessarily twofold: it manifests the effects of the endeavours (intentional and otherwise) of financial agents; crucially, it also rests on the seemingly boundless ability of the financial system to adapt, change and evolve.

There are various reasons why an author may wish to return, not to the ‘classic’ he wrote thirty years ago (this is a widely practised and accepted form of narcissism), but to a book he has only recently published. One such reason could be that he suffers from an acute case of what the French call esprit de l'escalier (spirit of the staircase) — thinking of the brilliant remark one might have made during the conversation only as one walks down the staircase after leaving the party. Another possibility is that the book was attacked and that some new ideas occurred to the author as he replied to his detractors. Also, upon reflecting on his book, the author may discover some connecting link between it and his earlier writings which he feels he would like to explore. While we are working on a new book we are often providentially protected by the illusion that we are engaged on an entirely novel and original enterprise. We may need this feeling to set out at all. Only after we are finished do we recognize that an argument we have put forth is closely related to points which we have made long ago or which, alternatively, stand in some tension to it.

This article argues that post-conflict consociational arrangements in ethnically divided societies incentivize moderation by political parties, but not policy differentiation outside the main conflict. This results in little policy-driven voting. Analysing party manifestos and voter survey data, we examine the evolution of party policy and cleavage voting under power-sharing in Northern Ireland 1998–2016. We find a reduction in ethno-national policy differences between parties and that ethno-nationalism has become less important in predicting vote choice for Protestants, but not Catholics. We also find little party differentiation in other policy areas and show that vote choices are largely independent of people's policy stances on economic or social issues. Our findings are thus largely consistent with a ‘top-down’ interpretation of political dynamics.

SCANDAL AND CORRUPTION ARE CUSTOMARILY THOUGHT OF in much the same ways as pigs and whistles; they go together. Strangely, however, academic studies of corruption seem to pay little attention to scandal. It is strange if only because in societies like this corruption tends to be obscure, a condition in which its participants wish it to remain, and it is to the occasional scandal that we are indebted for what knowledge is generally accessible. This is particularly true in Britain where the major scandals have usually been followed (sometimes illuminated) by official inquiries; certainly that has been the practice in this century from the Marconi shares scandal in 1913 to the Poulson scandal sixty years later which spawned both a committee and a Royal Commission. A closer look at the incidence of political scandal, this article will suggest, is an additional tool for the study of corruption and perhaps particularly so for comparative studies. A more fundamental (and more widely canvassed) problem, however, is so to define corruption as to facilitate reliable comparisons across temporal and cultural boundaries. We will first discuss that problem.

Since the separate independence of Senegal in June 1960, after the breakup of the Mali Federation, organized political opposition in Senegal has not been able to maintain the position which it enjoyed before independence. The failure of the opposition can be explained only in part by reference to the repressive measures adopted by the government over this period; it should also be seen as a result of the internal weaknesses of the opposition itself. The purpose of this article is to outline the various conditions which have enabled the governing party, the Union Progressiste Sénégalaise (UPS) of M. Leopold Sédar Senghor, to remain in power until the present time, despite its own lack of strict internal discipline or general sense of purpose.

This article is a study of the contradictions of conservatism. It shows that most modern writers since Oakeshott have defined conservatism in an abstract manner. Here I argue that their definition, although not wrong, is an incomplete definition which is only coherent because it is incomplete. It is only the first stage in understanding conservatism, which has to be understood also as a negation of rival ideologies and, further, as a political position which points to a tradition or truth outside itself and which can, in service of this tradition or truth, be radical. Since it is part of the standard definition of conservatism that it cannot be radical, this means conservatism, taken as a whole, contradicts itself.

The paper considers Mackie's defence of ‘populist’ democracy against the critique offered by Riker and the Rochester School. Riker has two arguments against populism: first that Arrow's theorem shows there is no such thing as the general will, second, that once we have chosen a social decision mechanism the results may not represent the true wishes of the population since people may vote strategically. Mackie argues Arrow's theorem is misleading since the independence condition is not itself substantively rational, and that manipulation never actually occurs. The paper shows that independence is needed for interpretation and prediction, and whilst Arrow's strong condition may not be ‘substantively rational’, examples show that no single decision mechanism, even Mackie's favoured Borda count is obviously superior. It then argues that every election can, in Arrow's terms, be considered as manipulated – though there is nothing substantively wrong in that. The paper ends by pointing out that in the absence of complete information market outcomes are also similarly manipulated.

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.

Coalition governments prevail at the European subnational level. Although some studies explain the formation of subnational government coalitions, we know little about the determinants of individual parties' likelihood of joining such coalitions. This article aims to fill this gap in empirical and theoretical ways. It shows that an important institutional constraint matters for political actors' strategies when forming subnational coalitions: the party affiliation of the directly elected head of the executive. Being the party of the head of the executive or being ideologically close to that party significantly increases a party's likelihood of joining a coalition. The empirical evidence results from multinomial choice models using a novel data set on subnational parties' likelihood of joining 92 coalition governments at the local level in Germany between 1999 and 2016. The findings have substantive implications for subnational institutional settings resembling ‘mixed’ political systems (i.e. neither purely presidential nor purely parliamentarian).

This article contends that intra-party dynamics based on particularistic exchanges constitute a double-edged sword for a political system. On the one hand, they provide party leaders with strategic flexibility, which can be essential for their party stability and for the governability of the political system. On the other hand, in permitting office holders to switch policies whenever they consider fit, these dynamics render governments unpredictable and unaccountable in partisan terms, thus debasing the quality of democratic representation. The hypothesis is illustrated by recent Argentine political development.

This Article Explores The Nature Of Contemporary Social democracy, questioning, with like-minded scholars, John Gray's interpretation of the relationship between social democracy and globalization, which asserts that social democracy is a historically exhausted project. Garrett, for example, in rejecting such assertions, argues that social democracy remains a distinctive and viable ‘project’ within the global economy, specifically in cases where strong left-of-centre parties are linked to ‘encompassing labour movements’. He has subsequently argued that social democracy in ‘Euroland’ (with or without encompassing labour movements) can pursue a less constrained fiscal policy, and expect a more accommodating monetary policy than some predict. Garrett thus insists that social democratic governments within the Eurozone are able to ‘use macroeconomic policy to lessen market dislocations and to redistribute wealth and risk in the ever more globalized economy’.

In the last few decades, ethno-regionalist parties have become leading players in many regional political systems across Europe. This increased representation has opened up new strategic opportunities for these parties, and in particular it has offered them the chance to participate in regional government. Based on a newly compiled data set of 282 governmental formations in Italian and Spanish regions during the period 1945–2011, this study develops and tests several hypotheses regarding the governmental participation of ethno-regionalist parties at regional level. These have been partly drawn from similar studies of ‘outsider’ party families, such as the Green parties or the radical right. A specific focus is then placed on multilevel dynamics, based on the idea that there is a relationship between party strategies at regional and state levels, and in particular on the perception that parties are willing to adopt compatible alliance strategies at the two levels (vertical congruence), at least under certain conditions. Both types of hypothesis (single-level and multilevel) are shown to be plausible when empirically tested on the cases of Italy and Spain. Special attention is given to the conditions under which vertical congruence is used by ethno-regionalist parties as an effective way of minimizing the risks associated with inclusion in governmental coalitions at regional level.

This article addresses the relative neglect of Territory and Power in informing the study of general state political development, both as a theoretical approach and in its application to the UK. It locates Territory and Power as a distinct contribution to two major schools of comparative research. The first section argues that Territory and Power provided an approach that was part of the intellectual turn during the 1980s to bring the state back into the analysis of politics. The second part argues that Territory and Power should be seen also as a contribution to the intellectual turn since the 1980s towards temporal analysis of political development. On these bases future researchers may find Territory and Power more accessible as a work that they can incorporate in their own research.

Northern Ireland’s consociational institutions were reviewed by a committee of its Assembly in 2012–13. The arguments of both critics and exponents of the arrangements are of general interest to scholars of comparative politics, power-sharing and constitutional design. The authors of this article review the debates and evidence on the d’Hondt rule of executive formation, political designation, the likely impact of changing district magnitudes for assembly elections, and existing patterns of opposition and accountability. They evaluate the scholarly, political and legal literature before commending the merits of maintaining the existing system, including the rules under which the system might be modified in future.

The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), victor in the civil war in 1991, has since transformed into an authoritarian party. While this transition is well covered in the literature, few studies have explored how the party’s ideology has adapted after its position was consolidated. This article addresses this gap, by analysing the EPRDF’s ideology of revolutionary democracy, and how the interpretation of it has changed over time. The Ethiopian case shows that wartime ideologies should not be considered as static remnants of the past. Instead, the ideology has served as a flexible political tool for controlling the state and for justifying or concealing major policy changes. More recent protests and ruptures in the ruling party, however, indicate that revolutionary democracy may have an expiry date. There seems thus to be a limit to how long a wartime ideology can provide power to uphold a rebel government’s hegemony and coherence.

This article investigates accountability in South Africa’s dominant party system by studying how the African National Congress (ANC) reacts to electoral incentives at the local level. It compares the ANC’s degree of responsiveness to voters across municipalities with different levels of political competition. The analysis focuses on whether and under which conditions the ANC is more likely to renominate better quality municipal councillors. It examines the relationship between renomination as ANC municipal councillor and local government performance – as measured by voter signals, service delivery and audit outcomes. The results show that the ANC does indeed adapt its behaviour to electoral incentives. In municipalities where the ANC has larger margins of victory, performance matters little for renomination. In contrast, in municipalities with higher electoral competition, local government performance is strongly correlated with renomination. These results suggest the need to expand dominant party research to topics of voter responsiveness and sub-national behaviour.

The persistence of subnational undemocratic regimes in new democracies has recently revived interest in intra-national patterns of democratization. This article offers new data and a methodological contribution to this literature, emphasizing the measurement of institutional variation across territorial units and levels of government. Developing new measures of the unevenness of democratic institutions within individual countries, and illustrating these measures with an original data set on electoral rules in Mexico at the federal level and across 32 subnational units, we provide tools to enhance the study of democracy, particularly at the subnational level and in federal or decentralized systems. More specifically, we develop measures of institutional characteristics across a country's spatial units and of federal-to-state institutional dissimilarity – what we call system-wide institutional incongruence.