This article explores why there have been such different trajectories in regard to same-sex marriage in Australia and Canada. Canada was one of the first countries to introduce same-sex marriage (in 2005) and, at time of writing, Australia still had not done so.1 The comparison is particularly interesting given that Australia and Canada have relatively similar political institutions except that Australia has no Charter of Rights. Miriam Smith has suggested that institutional factors explain the different trajectories of policies on same-sex marriage in Canada and the US. However, the shift in comparative lens to Canada and Australia provides new insights into the key role of factors influencing ‘political will’ in regard to same-sex marriage in both countries. Those multiple influences do include institutions but also the role played by party electoral strategies. Consequently, the article provides insights into the factors that can influence minority group rights in different national democratic settings.

In this article, we study how polarization affects the propensity of supporters of non-viable parties to cast a strategic vote. To do so, we rely on Canadian election panel surveys from the Making Electoral Democracy Work project that were specifically designed to identify strategic voting. We find that the polarization between viable parties increases the probability of a supporter of a non-viable party casting a strategic vote, because it increases how much she likes her favourite viable party, and decreases how much she dislikes her least favourite viable party. Polarization thus increases strategic voting because it alters partisan preferences.

It is widely assumed that a representative democracy requires an enlightened citizenry in order to function properly. The competence of citizens has been studied extensively and the sociodemographic determinants of political sophistication are particularly well known. Much less is known about whether and how citizen competence affects electoral behaviour and outcomes. This article reviews the existing literature on these topics. Despite the widespread consensus that, generally speaking, citizen competence matters for electoral outcomes, the review produced a mixed result: some studies suggest that the political left would benefit from a better-informed electorate, while other studies suggest the opposite. Although the majoritarian electoral context is overrepresented in the evidence, the review shows that at the individual level, political knowledge greatly increases a person’s ability to match personal preferences with the right candidate or party in an election. The article also identifies several gaps in existing knowledge, thereby suggesting future research questions.

To what extent are incumbent governments affected by the state of the economy when it comes to premature dissolution? This article investigates this research question using a data set on parties and governments for 18 West European countries for the period 1945–2013. In addition to investigating the general effect of the state of the economy on government termination, we hypothesize that macroeconomic conditions affect cabinet termination in different ways depending on the type of government that is in power. Using Cox proportional hazards models to estimate how different government types are impacted by the same changes in the economy, our results indicate that economic changes do matter, but that they mainly affect coalition governments. Our results also indicate that there is a difference between minority and majority governments when it comes to the type of termination. Minority coalition governments resolve to early elections, not replacements, presumably because a minority government does not survive defection. Majority coalition governments, in contrast, show sensitivity towards both types of terminations.

A correlation between the strength of civil society and democratization is often assumed to imply a causal relationship between the two variables. In fact, this correlation may be spurious, both phenomena being shaped by deeper social processes related to modernization and individualization. An excessive focus on ‘civil society assistance’ may paradoxically hamper the deeper changes necessary for the development of a vigorous associational life and of democratic representation. It would therefore be more prudent to focus democratic assistance on the establishment of stable and efficient social and political institutions, and on the maintenance of key social infrastructures crucial to political legitimacy.

This article explores issues of energy supply security from the perspective of the EU–Russian energy relationship and of competing foreign energy policy paradigms. Using approaches developed by Peter Rutland within the context of Russia's energy policy towards the CIS and the three pillars of EU energy policy as a starting point, the article concludes that the overall EU–Russian energy relationship can be best explained through a framework of mutual interest and dependency: that is, the EU is becoming increasingly, but not totally, dependent on Russian energy, particularly gas; and Russia is becoming increasingly, but not totally, dependent on European markets. Nevertheless, other paradigms continue to yield useful insights in relation to individual components of the EU–Russian energy relationship.

This article examines how violent separatist groups moderate. Using the case of Sinn Féin and the IRA in Northern Ireland, it shows that moderation is a multidimensional process, entailing a change in strategic behaviour but not necessarily in the goals or values of a separatist group. For Irish republicans, moderation entailed giving up violent revolution and embracing peaceful reformism, but it did not require changing long-term goals, accepting the legitimacy of British rule in Northern Ireland, or distancing themselves from their history of armed struggle. Moderation was possible because both Irish republicans and the British state distinguished between republicans’ strategic behaviour and their political goals, with the British state neither expecting nor demanding a change in the goals of republicanism, and republicans showing a willingness to change tactics to bring them closer to their long-term goal of a united Ireland. This finding has important implications for the moderation of other radical separatist groups.

THE TERM ‘MAJORITY RULE’ IS OFTEN USED EITHER AS A synonym of democracy or as one of its defining characteristics. An important contribution that the scholars belonging to the consociational school have made to democratic theory is to point out that this close identification of majorit rule and democracy is fallacious. Majoritarian democracy, of which the Westminster model is the ideal type, is not the only form of democracy; the major alternative is consociational democracy. Furthermore, majority rule is not necessarily the best form of democracy; especially in plural societies - that is, societies deeply divided by religious, ideological, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, or racial cleavages into separate sub-societies with their own political parties, interest groups, and media of communication - consociational democracy is the more suitable democratic model.

There Exists An Extensive Literature On The Political Economy of external liberalization in emerging markets. However, the remarkable progress of Estonia and Latvia in external liberalization has not yet been addressed systematically in the academic literature from a political economy angle. This article aims not only to make a contribution to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on trade policy reform, but also to address three other issues.

THE NOW FAIRLY EXTENSIVE LITERATURE ON THE EUROPEAN Communities, much of which sets out to analyse ‘the European decision-making process’, has tended to concentrate on how this process looks from the perspective of the Community itself and of its institutions. National governments and actors in the six political systems have been discussed primarily in so far as they are participants in the Community system. However, if we are to reach an understanding of the impact of the Communities on national processes, then some attention must be given to how the Communities are viewed from the national capitals, to the extent to which Community business impinges on the governmental systems in the member states and to the importance given to European matters among the competing issues which vie for prominence in national politics. Any analysis of the politics of European integration which looks from the Communities outwards makes the assumption that European issues are the only ones that count; but if those same issues are examined from a national perspective, we need to ask whether they represent simply one bundle of issues among many, or whether they have come to add a new dimension to the full range of governmental business and political debate. In other words, has the advent of the European Communities changed the political configuration of the six national systems, and, if so, marginally or fundamentally?

Today's Democratic Theory Offers Sketches Of Tomorrow's democratic polity. How innovative, and how compelling, are the visions it offers us? This article explores possible democratic futures by scanning a selection of today's key democratic innovations – cosmopolitan, deliberative, ‘politics of presence’, ecological, associative and party-based direct models – in the light of a set of six central issues useful for examining the core aspects of democratic theories. It concludes by suggesting a way forward in which insights from diverse innovations might helpfully be accommodated within an overarching framework. Overall, it represents a deliberate attempt at a bird's eye view of the subject; the aim is to be suggestive rather than definitive. The scope of the analysis is broad but quite strictly qualified in the following ways: the six innovative ideas scrutinized arise from, and largely address, countries of the rich North rather than the developing South; they do not exhaust the range of current innovations in democratic theory; and they are based largely on English-language sources.

Consociational theory posits that political elites in divided societies will show a stronger ‘spirit of accommodation’ than the groups they represent, and that this prudent leadership on behalf of the elites explains why divided societies hold together. Belgium has long been considered to be one of the best examples of such a consociational democracy. Yet in this country the spirit of accommodation of prudent leaders was questioned and discussed publicly during the 2010–11 political gridlock. The question is therefore whether Belgian political elites are indeed less radical and hold less extreme views than voters, as suggested by consociational theory. To explore this question, this article relies on survey data gathered during the historically long government negotiations of 2010–11 between members of all six Belgian assemblies. This original data set on MPs is compared with data on voters gathered in 2009 and 2014 in order to contrast their views on the reform of Belgium’s federalism. The results show that voters are less radical than MPs on this question, but the data also reveal that MPs are strongly divided within communities and also within party. Neither communities nor parties are monolithic blocks.

Rather Than Signalling The End Of War, As Many Liberal Minds had hoped, the end of the cold war has seen ‘hot’ war moving firmly to centre-stage, while at the same time presaging a reclassification of its predominant forms and purposes. Since 1990 there has been a rash of what Kaldor calls ‘new wars’. Although often highly localized, they confound settled understandings of inter-state or civil war by virtue of the diverse range of protagonists involved, the issues over which they are fought, and their consistently brutal impact upon civilians. A virtual revolution in media technology has also made such wars publicly visible to an unprecedented degree. In spite of the fact that new wars are often fought without recourse to the most sophisticated or destructive of military technology, the horrific impact upon populations caught up in them has clearly assaulted public sensibilities worldwide and generated a chorus of demands that something should be done about them. Consequently, the political and ethical dimensions of going to war in response to such threats have also moved in from the periphery to the centre of public and intellectual debate. As Walzer has recently observed, the ‘chief dilemma of international politics is whether people in danger should be rescued by military forces from outside’. From the point of view of the key members of the international community at least, armed ‘humanitarian intervention’ is no longer just a form of war but has become virtually synonymous with permissible war itself.

WHATEVER MAY BE IN DOUBT ABOUT THE CURRENT CRISIS IN the Labour Party, one thing is clear. In a sense true of no other internal crisis in the 62 years since the loose and inchoate ‘Labour Alliance’ of 1900 first became a true political party, with individual members and a distinctive claim to power, the arguments which have provoked it concern the rules of the game as well as moves within the game: the way in which party decisions are made and enforced, as well as the content of the decisions themselves. This, of course, is why the arguments are so fierce and the crisis so deep. Policy defeats can be revised later if Fortune's wheel turns again. Constitutional defeats damage the losers permanently. It is true, no doubt, that both sides in the current struggle have exaggerated the likely consequences of the changes forced through at the October party conference. The old French saying that there is more in common between two deputies, one of whom is a Communist, than between two Communists, one of whom is a deputy has not suddenly lost all relevance to Westminster merely because Labour MPs will have to face compulsory reselection between general elections, or because the party leader is elected in an electoral college. Reselection will not re-make the Parliamentary Labour Party in the image of constituency management committees, and the creation of an electoral college will not free the leader from the need to win and hold the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues. When all the necessary qualifications have been made, however, there can be no doubt that the constitutional changes will shift the balance of party power to the advantage of the Left and to the detriment of the Right — as, of course, they were intended to do. That is what the struggle has been about; and the media have been right to concentrate their attention on that aspect of it.

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century Iceland was ranked as the least corrupt country in the world by Transparency International and enjoyed top positions in most comparative indices of governance and development. In 2008 the banking system collapsed and the country found itself in a serious financial crisis, a crisis which some observers believe was caused by clientelism and other forms of behaviour related to corruption. This article sets out to analyse how the crisis affected general political support and, in particular, the importance of perceptions of corruption in that process. Using survey data we show that political support plummeted after the crisis and that public evaluations of the extent of corruption became the most important determinant of support. The results have implications for how we ought to approach the issue of corruption, even in so-called ‘least corrupt’ settings. The findings also call into question the validity and reliability of frequently used measures of corruption and governance.

Masculine identity confers advantages over the feminine ‘other’, but works differently and in a twofold way. ‘Man’ as the generic representation of ‘the human’ is only apparently de-gendered or gender-neutral. It is in fact gendered masculine and defined within heteronormativity and homophobia. However, there are also overtly gendered roles for men, though these are characteristically represented in selective and flattering ways. Men therefore have little need for an ‘identity politics’ to work against an oppressive norm. Rather they are positioned against each other within competitive hierarchies, which are co-defined with the values and structures of militarism and capitalism.

This article studies the ideological reactions of communist regimes to the advent of a post-communist world. It examines two cases of reformed communist regimes (China and Vietnam) with two relatively unreformed cases (North Korea and Cuba) to understand different legitimation strategies employed during and after the downfall of the Soviet Union. Theoretically, the article compares two ideal-type approaches to ideology in autocratic regimes. The first approach emphasizes semantic ‘freezing’ over time. The consistency and coherence of ideology is underlined. The second approach argues that the success of an ideology lies in its ability to be a dynamic, adaptive force that can react with changing circumstances. Four parameters help to distinguish the freeze-frame end from the adaptation pole: (1) the autonomy over semantic changes, (2) the timing, (3) the velocity and (4) the distance that an ideology moves. Using qualitative case-based analysis that is enriched with quantitative text analysis of communist party documents, this article compares these contending conceptions of ideology with each other in the four cases. Sharing similar starting conditions in the 1970s, the article shows how China and Vietnam harnessed a flexible legitimation strategy while North Korea and Cuba adopted a comparatively rigid legitimation approach.

Authoritarian regimes seek to prevent formal and informal organizations in society from engaging in mobilized dissent. What strategies do they use to do so, and what explains their choices? I posit that state actors in autocracies use four mechanisms to control societal organizations: repression, coercion, cooptation and containment. How they control these organizations depends on whether they think they might undermine political stability. Two factors inform that assessment. First is whether state actors think societal organizations’ interests are reconcilable with regime resilience. Second is whether groups are in national or international networks that are either cohesive or incohesive. While the irreconcilability of interests influences state actors’ perceptions of groups as subversive, network cohesion shapes organizations’ capacity for large-scale mobilization.

Although populist figures are often thought to thrive during crises that allow them to ‘perform’ decisive leadership, the US experience under Donald Trump during the COVID-19 crisis demonstrates that the opposite may sometimes occur. Despite its scientific and medical prowess, the US suffered more coronavirus cases and deaths than any other country in the world during the first year of the pandemic, and this abysmal performance was largely attributable to a failure of government. Fixated on the pandemic's economic effects and its potential political fallout, the Trump administration's framing of the crisis tried to minimize the public health emergency, externalize blame through a focus on the Chinese scapegoat and accuse the media and Democrats of hyping the pandemic to undermine Trump's presidency. In responding to the pandemic, Trump and his allies cast doubt on scientific and medical expertise that called for more aggressive testing, mask wearing and social-distancing measures. Trump delegated responsibility for crisis management to subnational governments and the private sector, and he politicized their efforts to regulate social behaviour in the public interest, intensifying partisan polarization.

The role of compromise in EU politics has been widely recognized by scholars and practitioners alike. At the same time, the systematic conceptual, analytical and normative study of compromise has remained an exception. This is surprising, given that the study of compromise can be linked to three broader questions at the heart of integration: (1) How does the EU accommodate diversity? (2) What makes supranational rule normatively justifiable? (3) Who or what defines the limits of cooperation? Against this backdrop, this article sheds light on the concept of compromise, on the role of compromise in legitimizing supranational governance and on the limits to compromise in the European polity. I argue that the EU – a divided, multilevel and functionally restricted polity – is highly dependent on the legitimizing force of ‘inclusive compromise’, which is characterized by the recognition of difference. This is true for horizontal or micro-level relations between political actors (where compromise works through concessions as well as justification, perspective-taking and empathic concern in a process of ‘procedural accommodation’), and for vertical or macro-level relations between systems of governance (where compromise works through ‘constitutional compatibility’). Given the legitimizing force of inclusive compromise, I subsequently identify the limits to such agreements and, thus, to supranational cooperation; I argue that these limits are issue specific and depend on where the costs of cooperation are borne. The article concludes by outlining routes for follow-up empirical research.