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.

Unity and peace in Europe, freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe: Government and Opposition's founding editor Ghiţă Ionescu – the centenary of whose birth this special issue commemorates – might have been contented to see that two of his main ideals have now by and large been realized. At the same time, in contemporary Europe we can observe a huge variety of forms of opposition to the conventional holders of power, who appear to have been unable to respond successfully to new and pressing societal and economic challenges. The old convictions that once characterized politics in the European liberal democracies are gradually eroding, while the volatile and fragmented polities of the new post-communist democracies in the East are only adding to the increased uncertainties. The ongoing financial and economic crises have exacerbated many of the existing tensions, between new and old generations, between groups with levels of educational attainment, and between the domestic and supra-national levels. European democracies in the twenty-first century are thus having to contend with various challenges that are aimed, directly or indirectly, at the core of the political system, including the populist disregard for some of the fundamental values of liberal democracy and the rule of law, the variety of anti-establishment parties and movements challenging the democratic legitimacy of a discredited financial and political class, and the unclear outcomes of further European integration. Taken together, the contributions to this special issue suggest, these developments may cast a different light on our empirical and normative understanding of the European models of liberal democracy and the welfare state

IT HAS BEEN ARGUED THAT FACTIONALISM WHILST APPARENT IN THE Labour Party has no counterpart within the Conservative Party. For example, the authors of a study on the opinions of backbench conservative MPs concluded that disagreements are amongst ‘ad hoc groups’ and that as new issues arise ‘the coherence of the former groups dissolves and new alignments appear. . . .’ A more recent survey of conservative backbenchers concurs with this and argues that the ‘criss-crossing pattern of cleavage (amongst conservative MPs) inhibits the development of Tory factions analogous to those in the Labour Party. Allies on one issue either become enemies on the next, or else simply do not feel strongly enough on the next issue to want necessarily to work together.’ A similar sort of conclusion has been reached by Richard Rose who states that the Conservative Party contains differing sets of political attitudes which remain constant whilst the party member will constantly shift from one attitude to another. Thus he concludes that the Conservative Party is a party of tendencies rather than factions; that it lacks a hard core of organized members within the party adhering to a set of principles which they are attempting to impose on the party in general. These conclusions are typical of a general belief about the political process within the Conservative Party.

Slovenia stands out as the only post-communist country to have established a corporatist system and centralized wage bargaining at the national level in the 1990s. This article analyses the emergence and sustainability of Slovenian corporatism as well as the ways in which it has shaped policymaking during the economic crisis. Drawing on recent advances in institutional analysis, this article develops a coalitional argument to account for the emergence of centralized wage bargaining in the 1990s and for decentralization in more recent years.

Women’s representation is highest in local assemblies in some countries, while others display the largest share of female office-holders at the national level. Drawing on a new data set mapping the representation of women at all four levels of government in Germany during the 2000s, we argue that differences in party system configurations across echelons explain these distinct patterns and provide evidence for this claim. We show that left-wing parties, the main source of female office-holders, perform better at higher echelons, while minor parties and independent representatives, which favour male candidacy, win more seats at the lowest levels of government.

Does the demand for more direct democracy by populist parties have any implications for their internal decision-making? To answer this question, a novel large-scale research project analyses the 2017 candidate selection of all Bundestag parties, including the populist Alternative for Germany. Some 1,334 individual nominations of seven parties are compared using quantitative indicators along three dimensions of intra-party democracy (IPD): competition between aspirants for candidacy, inclusion of members and nomination-related communication. It shows that the AfD is living up to its promise of practising grassroots democracy: in all results it ranks at the top by a wide margin. A new populist organizational model seems to have emerged following neither the classic hierarchical and leader-oriented mode of many other European right-wing populist parties nor the delegate assembly mode typical of German parties. Our further development of IPD concepts, newly elaborated measuring methods and surprising empirical evidence improve the understanding of democratic decision-making in populist parties.

While new institutionalism with its path-dependence theory has proved to be an especially powerful device for explaining the stability and inertia of public policies, its focus on the stickiness of institutions has contributed to conceptual deficits in grasping and explaining actually occurring policy change which have attracted much criticism. With reference to the critical case of German labour market reforms, policy learning is identified as a key mechanism in the paradigmatic transformation of social policy. Pursuing the argument that learning does not happen in a vacuum and is institutionally embedded, policy learning is conceptually enriched with insights from new institutionalism to develop an institutional account of learning. Such an approach to policy learning and a stronger emphasis on ideas address the stability bias in new institutionalism and its path-dependence theory by accounting for knowledge-based institutional change.

BARON HOLBACH'S EPIGRAMMATIC DESCRIPTION OF RELIGION as ‘the “eau de vie” of the people’ will undoubtedly outlive the memory of its author. On the other hand, Kingsley's advocacy of Christian socialism to the masses clearly implied the presumption that religion could also be their amphetamine. This latter possibility was systematically explored by Troeltsch with reference to Christianity. Weber deepened the analysis of the revolutionary potential of religion and extended it to the other world religions of salvation. There was something the philosophes did not know; religion could be revolutionary.

The concept of ‘securitization’ has become particularly influential in the post-9/11 world. This paper aims to scrutinize and, ultimately, reject an emerging set of claims about political economy which draw upon this framework. The contention that US foreign economic policy is increasingly subject to a process of securitization misrepresents the substance of contemporary US foreign policy, the political environment in which it is articulated and the process by which it is made. Pursuing this argument, the paper sets out a framework within which to understand the evolution of contemporary US policy, paying attention to distinctive forms of the economic–security nexus; the form of ‘ad hoc reactivism’ that has consistently characterized US foreign economic policy; the set of commercial and wider economic goals to which policy responds; and the dynamics of competition for leadership in key regions.

ULTIMATELY, POLITICAL PARTIES ARE FOR GOVERNING; BUT who shall govern? In some countries the decision rests by broad agreement on the normal waxing and waning of electoral sympathies. Not so in Southern Europe today. Hopes or fears of continuismo, have combined since the mid-1970s to raise divisive issues about the governing credibility of many parties, as Portugal and Spain inaugurated a party system after decades of no-party politics, Greece reinstated party competition after a briefer military rule, and Italy's parties underwent the most complicated electoral and coalitional test in thirty years of democracy.

Otherwise said, the complexity of coalitional preferences does not reflect a generic situation of competitive multi-party politics. It reflects a specific situation of crisis of founding coalitions, and therefore points to a lingering issue of legitimation. Who then, shall govern in Southern Europe, and with what legitimacy? The question admits no easy answer.

I am beginning to wonder whether ‘free collective bargaining’ is still compatible with the traditional practices of parliamentary democracy. I am equally beginning to wonder, what, if this is indeed the case, parliamentary democracy can do about it.

Traditionally, trade unions have been regarded and consequently studied as components of a system of industrial relations. Manifestly they may also be regarded as components in a system of political relationships. In this context many union practices which are regarded as normal in the industrial sphere take on a problematical, sometimes even a mysterious aspect.

Niche parties often originate in social movements, yet the latter’s role in shaping these parties has received scant attention. I argue that movement roots can help niche parties achieve both vote- and policy-seeking goals by keeping core issues salient, bolstering issue ownership and securing allies in civil society. Employing interviews with movement, as well as Green and Pirate party leaders in Sweden and Germany, I identify three mechanisms (electoral pressure, grassroots linkage, elite orientation) that lead to programmatic alignment. This article extends an emerging research agenda that highlights how social movements shape party politics and offers evidence that niche party–movement interactions open new avenues for political representation counterbalancing mainstream parties’ increasing detachment from civil society.

Recently several populist parties have become part of coalition governments in multiparty democracies, specifically in Western Europe. Based on the inclusion-moderation thesis, academics assume that incumbent populist parties tone down their populist rhetoric as a result of the daily businesses of deliberation and compromises in coalitions. However, while the assumption of tamed populists in power is widespread, there is little empirical work dealing with the topic. Using a classical quantitative content analysis of 1,210 Facebook posts published by populist parties in Italy, Spain, Austria and New Zealand, this article examines whether opposition parties are more populist and nativist than those in coalition governments. The findings indicate that populists do not decrease the degree of anti-elite and people-centred messages when they are in power but rather change the type of elites they attack and the antagonist groups they juxtapose. We should therefore rethink the validity of the inclusion-moderation thesis for populist parties in coalition governments.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO ESTABLISH THE RELEVANCE OF the question that forms its title for contemporary political theory. It is not an obvious question, both because it is not obvious what the answer is, but also because it is not obvious what it means in contemporary terms. In order to establish its significance, it is necessary first of all to establish what the question does mean, and what the term ‘corporation’ means within it. It is, ultimately, a philosophical question, and the idea of the ‘corporation’ has therefore to be understood in a more abstract sense than is usual in contemporary political discourse. Because of this, the question has a tendency to sound archaic, if not obscure, when set out in philosophical terms. Nevertheless, I hope to demonstrate its continuing relevance by looking at one particular attempt to answer it, undertaken by a political thinker who was self-professedly not a philosopher, writing in a setting that was recognizably modern. The thinker was the legal historian F.W. Maitland, who produced in the early years of this century a series of essays in which he set out the contemporary significance of a problem which he believed went to the heart of the identity of the modern state. Of course, the question of the state's corporate identity is a perennial theme of European, and more particularly German, political philosophy, but Maitland wanted to demonstrate that it was also a question of practical significance, even for those who are traditionally unmoved by grand philosophical themes. That it is still of practical significance I hope to illustrate by applying some of Maitland's conclusions to one of the fundamental questions of contemporary politics: the question of the nature of the welfare state.

THIS ARTICLE WILL ATTEMPT TO SHOW THAT WHILE MOST OF the recent writing on ‘corporatism’ is intellectually stimulating it does not enable any fuller understanding of the forces shaping government actions than the ‘pluralist’ and ‘parliamentarian’ theses which it has questioned.

INSTITUTIONAL REFORM IS ON THE AGENDA OF THE EUROPEAN Communities again, perhaps more seriously than for a decade. The European Parliament's Draft Treaty on European Union and the Dooge Report provided a focus for assessing possible changes to the institutional ground rules and constitutional framework of EC negotiations. A central strand in the debate has been the concern of many practitioners to make the negotiating process more productive and effective, particularly given the prospect that enlargement to twelve wil make the EC more heterogeneous and less manageable. Aside from the constitutionalists, whose arguments for reform are essentially political, the pragmatists can be divided between proponents of better practice and the advocates of some Treaty amendments as necessary means to their end. This article seeks to shed some light on the character of the EC negotiating process in the hope of aiding judgments about the relevance of institutional rules to negotiating outputs.

This article argues that the relationship between capitalism and democracy is not immutable but subject to changes over time best understood as movements across distinctive growth and representation regimes. Growth regimes are the institutionalized practices central to how a country secures economic prosperity based on complementary sets of firm strategies and government policies. Representation regimes reflect conditions in the arenas of electoral and producer group politics that confer influence on specific segments of the population. The emphasis is on how economic experiences and changes in the structure of electoral cleavages alter the terms of political contestation, thereby giving voice to specific sets of interests and altering the balance of influence between capitalism and democracy. The analysis examines how the growth and representation regimes of the developed democracies have changed through three post-war eras to yield distinctive distributive outcomes in each era.

‘ONE OF THE PECULIARITIES OF THE SUBJECT OF OPPOSITION IS THAT, although the problem of opposition is one of the oldest, very few works have ever dealt with it specifically and exclusively.’ These introductory remarks to their 1968 volume by Ghiţa Ionescu and Isabel de Madariaga still hold remarkably true, despite a number of subsequent works and collections devoted to the subject. Their explanation was that although opposition is the altera pars of government it is a concept which is necessarily relative to that of power upon which political action centres and around which political science moulds itself.

RECENT YEARS HAVE SEEN THE RECRUDESCENCE OF AN HISTORICAL dimension in comparative political studies, which is almost certainly a reflection of the increased interest in problems of political development that began to be seriously displayed from the early 1960s onwards. Among the more interesting contributions in this respect have been Lipset's, and, in particular, Rokkan's, working-out of a diachronic analysis of patterns of political cleavage and resulting party systems, the increasing focus on crises and sequences in political development, and, of course, Barrington Moore's historical analysis of the Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. All these approaches have in common an attempt to infuse the generalizing and typological approach so typical of the modern social sciences with a deeper historical appreciation of the particular contexts within which political change occurs.

Are ‘grand coalitions’ – coalitions that include the two largest parties in a parliamentary system – good or bad for democracy? This article analyses that question in light of the recent rise of populist parties that large mainstream parties may try to exclude from government by forming grand coalitions with other large mainstream parties. I call this the ‘sterilization’ logic and note that mainstream parties’ ability to do this varies widely. Where parties have previously used grand coalitions primarily according to a ‘clientelistic’ logic – for example, Austria – mainstream parties may well be unable to rally the party system against insurgent populist challengers. Where mainstream parties have used grand coalitions exceptionally and for major institutional ‘renovations’ – for example, Germany – the grand coalition remains a viable option for responding to insurgent challenges, though this strategy is also quite risky. This article considers the implications for democracy by tracing recent developments in the context of the euro crisis and the European refugee situation. The major empirical referents are Austria and Germany – two countries with extensive experience and literature about grand coalitions – but the article draws out the implications of the analysis for other European parliamentary contexts.