Political parties around the world are adopting primaries to select leaders and legislative candidates. While a large, though inconclusive, literature has emerged in the American context to explore the consequences of primaries, little attention has been devoted to other national contexts. Exploring patterns of financial donation, this study examines whether individuals who supported a losing leadership candidate are less likely to exhibit subsequent financial commitment to the party compared to those donors whose preferred candidate won the internal election. Drawing upon a novel dataset that includes tens of thousands of donors to recent leadership elections in Canada, we demonstrate that intra-party winners (i.e. those who supported the winning leadership candidate) are more likely to be financially committed to the party in the year after the election than those who supported losers. Results suggest that open and inclusive elections, while participatory in nature, may come at a cost for political parties as losers withdraw from the party in the wake of their loss.

This article explains why only some post-neoliberal populists successfully keep themselves in power, thereby dominating political systems over the long term. Based on cross-regional dual paired comparisons of ‘crucial’ cases in the Andes and Central Europe, it advances a theory emphasizing societal reactions rooted in prior neoliberal critical junctures. I argue that where well-established and programmatic social democratic parties engaged in bait-and-switch reforms, subsequent populists mobilized extensive electoral coalitions with core support from former leftist constituents, based on which they built organizational capacities for the provision of national public goods that reinforced their popularity over the long term. By contrast, where personalistic leaders politicized regionally based divides through identity-priming appeals and then disproportionately hurt core supporters through bait-and-switch reforms, subsequent populists mobilized more segmented electoral coalitions, built less cohesive parties and provided limited public goods, which undermined their popularity as incumbents. By underscoring parallels in two different world regions, the article challenges institutionalist accounts of populist domination and offers a novel societally focused perspective.

How do right-wing populist leaders address a public health crisis? This article addresses the evolution of right-wing populist leaders' communication tone and style during the COVID-19 pandemic. By analysing the Twitter accounts of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Narendra Modi, we explore how right-wing populist leaders control the portrayal of a health crisis from above, shift blame and consolidate support. We argue that while all three leaders initially downplay the pandemic, once they acknowledge the severity of the crisis, they vary in the extent to which they give importance to the coronavirus and shift blame. While Trump uses Twitter to praise himself and his policies, and to polarize the electorate, Modi and Johnson employ Twitter to inform the public and deliver solidarity messages. The frequency of Twitter use and the tone of the language leaders employ depend on the domestic context of that country. Our findings contribute to the scholarship on populist communication.

In this article we propose an innovative comparative analysis of cabinet reshuffles in Latin American presidential systems, focusing on personal incentives as drivers of ministerial turnover. We analyse when and why risks of reputational damage to a president drive cabinet changes. These risks are contingent and dependent upon the interaction between a president's reputational assets, on the one hand, and the high ‘walk-away value’ of the minister, on the other. We argue that ministerial turnover is a function of presidents' political and reputational resources as well as of exogenous factors. However, who is fired from the cabinet depends on the ministers' walk-away values and how threatened the president feels by them. We analyse cabinet changes in single-party and multiparty presidential governments in Latin America. Our results confirm the explanatory power of personal incentives to better understand the mechanisms that drive cabinet reshuffles.

The storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021 was a presidential attempt at a self-coup. To make the case, this article reviews elements of the Capitol assault and the events leading up to it, in light of the key conceptual components of a self-coup, and how those compare to attributes of other kinds of attacks on governments. The Trump self-coup will then be compared and contrasted empirically to other self-coups perpetrated by leaders. It is found that what separates successful self-coups from those that fail is whether the military backs the undertaking. Thus, a section is included on US military behaviour in response to Trump's attempts to gain military adherence for his political actions.

This article argues that the impact of veto points on a government's policy outcomes depends crucially on the degree of institutionalization of the party system. Specifically, the article claims that two dimensions of party system institutionalization – stability of relations between parties and between parties and voters – condition the ability of the opposition to block governments' policy plans through veto points. It showcases this argument by applying the method of causal process tracing to a comparative analysis of health policy reforms in Slovakia (2002–2004) and Hungary (2006–2008).

THE DENIAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOCIALIST STATES CAN BE seen as the natural outcome of Marxist praxis: Marxist teaching about the nature of the class struggle and the conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat from bourgeois values is not only theoretically alien to the concept of universal human rights, but its implementation by Marxist revolutionaries in the circumstances expected to prevail is likely to require the denial of such rights to ever-widening sections of the society if political power is to be secured and retained.

ONE HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT ASPECT OF THE PROCESS OF INTEGRATION in the European Community is the transfer of social sectors from the national political systems to the Community system. One such sector is agriculture. This article will focus on a limited, but significant part of the activities performed by the Community institutions: the collective decision-making process with reference to the common agricultural policy.

During Its First Two Years Or So In Office The Blair Government gave great prominence to its programme of constitutional reform. But more recently its priorities appeared to shift back to more familiar issues. As the election approached social and economic policies were brought to the top of the political agenda, and for the most part opposition parties too have been content to follow suit. All this ref lects the familiar belief that both politicians and most of the electorate in Britain are more interested in ‘bread-and-butter’ issues and the aspirations fuelling them than in constitutional arguments and abstractions. Nor is this view at all surprising. The British constitution is an elusive and ambiguous matter and its history has been one of continuous, often imperceptible, institutional adaptation rather than one marked by periodic formal amendment and revision. As a result the constitution as a whole has usually been taken for granted. It has been assumed to be sound in essentials, though no doubt capable of improvement here and there in response to serious political or social pressures.

There Has Been Much Concern In The Past Few Years About the ‘decline of parliament’ in West European democracies. In the United Kingdom, criticism of the New Labour government has included its apparent neglect of Parliament demonstrated by the style and strategies of the government, ranging from reduction in the time allotted to prime minister's question-time and the utilization of the mass media rather than Parliament as the forum for important policy statements, to the government's refusal to accept reforms to the method of appointments to House of Commons select committees, as recommended by the House of Commons Liaison Committee. Strong party discipline, coupled with sanctions which can affect the political careers of MPs for failure to obey the edicts of the party leadership, have limited the autonomy of MPs in Britain, and, to a varying degree, in other West European countries also. Certainly the German Bundestag has been criticized for being too much under the control of the leaderships of the political parties, in terms of voting on legislation, the stage-management of debates and the choice of leaders of the parliamentary parties (the removal by Chancellor Schröder of Scharping as leader of the SPD parliamentary party in 1998 at the instigation of Lafontaine, the then party chairman, is a notorious instance).

IN BRAZIL, THE RISE OF SCIENTISM AS AN IDEOLOGY IN THE 1870s was part and parcel of a changing social setting. The great war with Lόpez's Paraguay, a big financial burden and no easy victory, laid bare several bottlenecks in economy and society. By the end of the conflict, comprehensive claims for modernization had entered the agenda of new political parties, reformist, liberal and republican. In the huge post-bellum tropical Empire (1870–89) a protracted poIitical struggle for the abolition of slavery, mounting pressures from urban groups claiming a number of liberal reforms, and the growth of umilitarynrest (the ‘Military Question’, 1883–86) tended to dovetail, thereby threatening the monarchy. Intellectually as well as politically the halcyon days of peaceful monarchic rule (1845–68) were gone. The liberal-conservative compromise was doomed. Its would-be philosophical expression – the pious eclecticism of Cousin's Brazilian disciples – began to falter under the combined assault of readers of Darwin and Renan, Spencer and Haeckel – and, last but not least, Comte.

THROUGHOUT THE WORLD, NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE bringing greater specialization and scale of production, and hence more need for interdependence among the economies of nation states. Nowhere is this need more keenly felt than in Europe, both East and West.

EVERY HUMANITARIAN ACTION TAKES PLACE WITHIN A POLITICAL context. This means that all humanitarian organizations, such as those which operate under the sign of the Red Cross, must devise a humanitarian policy which will be valid in the long term, based on a thorough analysis of the political context, the characteristic features of an epoch, the structures of political societies, the interaction of profound forces and the world political system. This humanitarian policy in its turn entails the development of a humanitarian strategy which is distinct from the tactical moves imposed by the diversity of situations and crises. Neglect of this work of reflection results in contradiction and confusion and, worse still, humanitarian activity can be degraded into a tool of politics.

The March 1996 Australian Federal Election Was The most important Australian election for more than a decade. It resulted in the return of the Liberal-National coalition to office after thirteen years in opposition, ending a period of unprecedented Labor-initiated change, first under the leader-ship of Bob Hawke and since 1991, Paul Keating.

The election was also important because the new government will in all probability lead Australia into the new millennium and guide the country through a period of intense change in the Asia Pacific region; how the Liberal-Nationals approach the whole question of Australia's changing relationship with the world will shape Australia's future and wellbeing for decades to come. And finally, the election was notable for making John Howard prime minister during his second period as Liberal leader, a prospect that Howard himself had once ridiculed as akin to ‘Lazarus with a triple bypass’.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) came into effect on 1 July 2002. This article gives an account of the historical background to the ICC and an overview of the Court's Statute, remit and powers. It is argued that the ICC is a highly politicized legal institution which will only be effective through inter-state cooperation. Despite its lengthy historical antecedents and legal precedents, prudence suggests that — due to the nature of international politics — the establishment of the ICC should be viewed as the beginning of a cumulative process of reforming the politics of international justice rather than the end of a process of transformation in international law.

This article examines how Hollywood blockbuster movies made since the 1970s have commonly presented a distorted and conventional narrative of American history, in respect both to domestic incidents and to engagements abroad. Equally distorting is the image of America as a highly homogeneous society projected through popular television shows. These patterns are investigated in the following way. First, the article presents an overview of how early Hollywood movies dealt with the country's immigrant and racial diversity. Secondly, the effect of mobilization in both the Second World War and the cold war in inducing a narrow sense of national identity in movies is examined. Thirdly, these two sections provide a prelude to the analysis of historical distortion and ideology in selected major Hollywood blockbusters.

AS LONG AS FRANCO LIVED, ALL MILITARY, LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE powers centred on his person. Regional autonomies were suppressed, unions outlawed and political parties banned on the metaphorically medical grounds that ‘Spain’ was historically addictive to the ‘demoliberal system of inorganic democracy’. But Admiral Carrero Blanco, Franco’s éminence grise, was assassinated on 20 December 1973. His death marked the burial of Franco’s plans to perpetuate the regime beyond his grave. Juan Carlos, son of Don Juan - the heir to Alfonso XIII’s throne - pledged at his inauguration in November 1975 to create ‘a real consensus of national concord’. Spain was to become a full member of Europe, ‘with all that this implies’. Neither pledge was attainable without at least a major reform, or at most a dismantling of the regime’s characteristic institutions: the National Movement and the state syndicates. Both were eventually accomplished by a de facto alliance between the monarch and all political forces in the country opposed to a maintenance of the status quo.

Research during the past six decades has found that parties joining coalition governments receive payoffs, in the form of government posts, in proportion to their coalition share. These findings, however, do not indicate which coalition partners receive payoffs that will most enable them to influence their preferred policies. This article joins recent qualitative analyses of coalition allocation and examines payoffs in terms of the salience of positions relative to the policy goals of the parties receiving them. The single-country study of eight Israeli governments from 1992 to 2015 integrates quantitative and qualitative analyses of coalition payoffs. This article contributes to coalition allocation research by expanding the scope of coalition payoffs to include junior ministers and committee chairs, and by distinguishing payoff outcomes for different party families. The results show an edge for formateur parties in obtaining policy-salient ministerial payoffs and an advantage to non-formateurs for policy-salient deputy (junior) minister positions.