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.

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.

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.

WELFARE STATES ARE NATIONAL STATES, AND IN EVERY country welfare is a national concern, circumscribed by the nation's borders and reserved for its residents alone. In the course of centuries, these states have emerged from and against one another, in mutual competition, and in the past century this process of state formation in the West went in tandem with the collectivization of care. The welfare state is the national state in its latest phase. It may be succeeded by another stage which we may eventually see.

THE ELECTIONS TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT IN JUNE 1989 will be only the third ever to be held simultaneously in independent nation states. The first two direct elections, however, were marked almost everywhere by disappointment; not only was turnout low −60.7 per cent in 1979 and 57.0 per cent in 1984, but the elections seemed to be more in the nature of plebiscites on the performance of national governments, rather than genuinely transnational, and politicians found it difficult to demonstrate their relevance to a wider public. It is true that small radical new parties, such as the Front National were able to exploit the elections to their own advantage. But this, of course, did not endear the European elections to liberal democrats.

Health Care Has Been Called ‘The World's Most successful industry’. That success is long-standing. In every nation for which we have reliable long-term evidence the proportion of Gross National Product devoted to health care is much higher than was the cast a generation ago. The state has been central to that expansion. In all advanced industrial nations it regulates health care industries; in many it pays most of the cost of care; and in some it directly employs those who do the caring. In the 1980s, however, most countries tried to slow down the growth of health care spending, or even to cut it absolutely. The ‘health care state’ is as a consequence being reshaped across the advanced capitalist world: its power structures are changing; the conditions under which it funds and delivers services are being altered; and its relations with the ‘consumers’ of care are being transformed.

This article analyses the 2005 French referendum debate on the EU Constitutional Treaty as an instance of depoliticization. Particular emphasis is placed on the argumentative strategy of President Chirac as, despite the treaty's focus on institutional reform, he eventually chose to justify the document in terms of social policy: an ultimately unconvincing strategy because voters believed it was contradicted by current EU policy priorities. On this evidence, pace Glyn Morgan, prioritizing a justification of EU finality over that of institutions and policies does not seem appropriate. Rather, the priority for integration is to overcome elites' strategies of depoliticization during referendum campaigns.

REALITY IS UNTIDY AND WE SHOULD THANK OUR LUCKY stars for the fact. Liberty thrives on (and in) interstices. The reality of Hayek's world would be no less unbearable than that of Marx's. There is in fact no capitalist society, nor is there a socialist one. All variants of really existing capitalism — and socialism — are mixtures of both, and those which have come closest to the concepts were also the least attractive. The first question to address to any real society is therefore not whether it can be labelled this way or that, but what is the peculiar blend of ingredients which makes it tick.

The lack of effective political parties is one of the dominant characteristics of modern Arab polities. The role of opposition to the authoritarian regimes is therefore left to a number of civil society organizations. This study examines the interactions among such groups in the context of the traditional transition paradigm and it analyses specifically how religious and secular organizations operate and interact. The empirical evidence shows that such groups, far from attempting any serious coalition-building to make common demands for democracy on the regime, have a competitive relationship because of their ideological differences and conflicting policy preferences. This strengthens authoritarian rule even in the absence of popular legitimacy. The article focuses its attention on Algeria and Jordan.

We examine the performance of four parliamentary democracies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK – as they confront the need for a substantial fiscal policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research covers the period 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2020. We score the four countries on nine components of democratic accountability using Mark Philp's distinction between formal and political accountability. We conclude, first, that to appreciate the nuanced character of accountability, it is important to have a set of operational measures that identify specific aspects of performance. Second, preparation is important for resilience: countries that demonstrated strong accountability before the pandemic maintained relatively high accountability standards during the crisis; weaker accountability mechanisms showed less resistance to the expanding power of the executive. Finally, it is easier to be accountable when outcomes are favourable, but favourable outcomes include adherence to the norms of democratic accountability.

Jim Bulpitt understood the UK as an eminently political creation, emphasizing the role of elites in managing diversity. He can be criticized for underplaying the ideology of union, for dismissing Labour unionism and for an excessively central and Tory perspective. His insights, however, remain useful in analysing the current collapse of unionism, if not of the Union itself. His key concept of central autonomy explains why current neo-unionist efforts to forge Britishness are unlikely to succeed, since they imply a stronger territorial articulation of the state itself.

This study examines whether the sex of the selector matters for advancing women's inclusion in politics and how the political context shapes selectors’ preferences and behaviour. It focuses on an under-researched area – the political appointments ministers make in their ministerial departments – and thus sheds light on the conditions under which women access appointed office. It analyses six governments in Spain between 1996 and 2018, using a mixed methods approach that includes statistical analyses of political appointments and interviews with former ministers. It finds that women ministers, as individuals, did not appoint more women than men ministers did at any time. However, women's presence is highly relevant. In more gender-balanced political contexts, men and women ministers appointed more women. Moreover, the context changed, in part because critical political actors pushed for it. This imbued a new political sphere, subcabinet-appointed offices, with representational significance.

The current research examines the ability of legislators to be re-elected through fulfilling their three roles: legislation, oversight and representation. This study also re-examines Mayhew's claim (1974) that most legislators are motivated by a desire to be re-elected, and that this desire drives their legislative activity through its utility in advertising, credit claiming and position taking. We argue that the skills required for selection and re-election are different from those required for enacting legislation. Thus, we distinguish between two types of legislators – those who are electable and those who are successful in the legislature.

This article develops a theory to account for the variation in electoral systems in electoral authoritarian regimes. We argue that resource-rich dictators are incentivized to employ proportional representation systems to alleviate the threat from the masses and pre-empt the emergence of new opposition, while resource-poor dictators tend to choose majoritarian systems to co-opt ruling elites in the legislature. Using cross-national data on electoral authoritarian regimes, we find strong empirical evidence supporting our theory. We also explicitly illustrate the causal links between natural resources and electoral systems with additional statistical analyses and comparative case studies on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

The European Union is caught between technocracy and the politics of the exception, eroding in the process the very political sphere that makes democracy work. Partly a cause of this erosion and partly an effect, the EU retreats into the ‘rule of rules’ when faced with what are, in fact, profoundly political problems. Whether it be in response to the eurozone crisis, EU–Russia–Ukraine relations or the influx of refugees, the EU's policies led to conflicts over geopolitics, sovereignty and redistribution. Its apolitical responses were as ubiquitous as they were inadequate. They reflect Germany's preference for consensual politics, which is paradoxically enforced by Angela Merkel's dictum about there being ‘no alternative’. In order to think of alternatives to the Europe that exists, we need to revive ‘the political’, theorized by the likes of Carl Schmitt, Max Weber and Hannah Arendt at times when democracy was under duress.

Through the analysis of legislative speeches made by prime ministers and party representatives in parliamentary sessions in Japan from 1953 to 2013, we argue that it is possible to place parties according to a dimension that captures their confrontational nature within a parliamentary democracy and its evolution over time. Using this dimension extracted via a well-known scaling algorithm (Wordfish), we develop an index of the intensity of the government–opposition divide that is directly related to the dynamics of the electoral cycle of Japanese politics. We then show how this new index greatly facilitates the investigation of two important aspects of Japanese legislative politics (the survival rate of governments and the speed of passage of cabinet bills) compared to a situation in which we focus on more traditional measures capturing the ideological position of the parties alone.

Despite increasing research into populist parties in power, their impact on subnational institutions has been neglected. Taking a novel multilevel perspective, this article inquires into the policy consequences of populist radical right parties (specifically, the FPÖ and Lega) in local government, and the effect of their simultaneous participation in national government. The article shows the expansion of exclusionary policy that follows their concurrent presence in national and local government. The process that leads from national government entry to local policy influence is traced using interview and newspaper data. The article argues that the influence of central parties over these ‘showcase’ localities is rooted in different multilevel governance configurations. These vary cross-nationally according to two factors: the strength of mayors’ linkages with higher government levels in the different institutional settings and, due to the different extent of party nationalization, the strategic value of the municipality to the central party.

EPOCHS OF MAJOR SOCIAL CHANGE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A SPURT to intense intellectual effort. The emergence of the new nations and their economic and political modernization constitutes one such epoch in history. The phenomenon has demanded from the student of society new modes of understanding and analysis, has provided him with both a challenge and an opportunity, and has called for new insights and a continuous re-fashioning of conceptual schemes. What is more, the nature of the change in these societies differs in significant respects from the experience of earlier epochs. It is neither the cumulative result of an outburst of creativity that marked the scientific and industrial revolutions in the West, nor a sharp break with the past brought about by a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’ revolution, although undoubtedly both of these strands are involved in varying proportions. A deliberate attempt at condensing several centuries into a short span, the occurrence of ‘simultaneous change’ in so many spheres of life, the phenomenon of cultural dualism in so many societies, and the complex interactions caused by the constant closing in of national and international horizons, have led to a situation of continuous flux and readjustment that seems to have neither a beginning, nor possibly an end.

THE PARTICULARISTIC CHARACTER OF THE POLITICAL WORLD, THE separation of political communities into poleis, territorial-states or nation-states, has always provoked the universalist criticism of borders as artificial and incompatible with universal humanity. Such demarcations were even suspected of being one of mankind's greatest evils. Edmund Burke, for example, wrote in his A Vindication of Natural Society – a response to Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality – that ‘this artificial division of mankind, into separate societies, is a perpetual source in itself of hatred and dissention among them’.

FOR SOME YEARS NOW, WESTERN ACADEMICS AND POLICY-MAKERS HAVE embraced the cause of democratic reform in Central and Eastern Europe. To take but one well-known example, President Clinton in the 1994 State of the Union Address cited the absence of war among democracies as a reason for promotion of democracy around the world. Assistance to former Warsaw Pact and newly independent states has been made conditional to varying degrees on the acceptance of democratic change. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Union, the United States Agency for International Development and associated non-governmental organizations have unleashed armies of promoters of democracy throughout the region to: observe elections; monitor human rights; draft new constitutions and laws defending civil and political rights; train judges and police personnel; and organize and assist political parties, media and non-governmental pressure groups. In short, they have sought to transplant the fabric of civil society and democratic institutions. These armies have landed on terrain often quite foreign to them and have often displayed little sensitivity to the social, economic and political context in which they are operating. This may have contributed to results other than those intended.