THE SINGLE EUROPEAN ACT AND THE MAASTRICHT TREATY attempted to balance two principles of representation in their redesign of the institutional structures of the European Union: the one, based on the indirect representation of publics through nationally elected governments in the European Council and Council of Ministers; the other, based on the direct representation of publics through a more powerful European Parliament. There is much to be said for this balance, for neither of the two principles can, on its own, be an adequate solution at this stage in the development of the EU. The Council suffers from a non-transparent style of decision-making and is, in the view of many, closer to oligarchic than to democratic politics. On the other hand, the claims of the European Parliament to represent public sentiments on European integration are limited by low voter participation, the second-order nature of European elections and the still Protean nature of what we might call a transnational European demos. The EU lacks a single public arena of political debate, communications and shared meanings; of partisan aggregation and political entrepreneurship; and of high and even acceptance, across issues and member states, that it is European and not national majority views which should count in collective rule-making.

New modes of governance are said to create problems of political accountability. To understand this claim, we need a theory of accountability. Electoral accountability provides authorization and sanction, but it neglects the problems entailed in the requirement to provide explanation and justification. Political accountability in this discursive sense can be understood through the idea of public reason, where this is defined in terms of substantive rationality and an orientation to the public interest. This conceptualization leads in turn to the requirement of replicability and openness in public reasoning. The problem of accountability is one of securing the conditions under which the institutions within which policy deliberation takes place can merit the confidence of citizens in these terms, and the Commission White Paper on European governance is used to illustrate the application of these tests.

In this article, we examine the structure of party competition in Italy in the February 2013 elections. We rely on the spatial approach to party competition to analyse the most salient dimensions of the policy space in the Italian context. Our analysis is based on quantitative estimates from expert survey data. These data highlight the salience of the socioeconomic policy dimension and capture the change in the importance of the EU dimension. Finally, this study provides an analysis of potential coalition governments in the aftermath of the 2013 general election that is grounded on the spatial approach to coalition formation.

On the basis of an analysis of the European Union's common definition of the post-9/11 terrorist threat, this article provides a critical assessment of the EU's response. The EU has arrived at a reasonably specific definition of the common threat that avoids simplistic reductions and is a response that is sufficiently multidimensional to address the different aspects – internal and external, legislative and operational, repressive and preventive – of this threat. Yet the definition is undermined by differences between national threat perceptions. The preference for instruments of cooperation and coordination rather than integration, and poor implementation are having a negative impact on the effectiveness of the common response, the legitimacy of which is also weakened by limited parliamentary and judicial control.

Despite the proliferation of instruments of public consultation in liberal democracies, little is known of how the design and use of these instruments affect stakeholder participation in practice. The article examines participation in written government consultations in an analysis of approximately 5,000 responses to consultations in Denmark and the UK in the first half of 2008. It shows that participation is highly conditional upon system- and actor-level characteristics in practice. Our findings indicate that, even if liberal democracies have adopted similar procedures for actor consultation in the last decades, the design and application of crucial rules vary considerably between systems. They emphasize how the conduct of consultation is heavily conditioned by the design of these processes, which is in turn constrained by the historical legacy of state–society structures of the system in question.

This article demonstrates how party leaders (frontbenchers) and backbenchers use their access to UK Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) to represent the policy agenda. Building on comparative research on parliamentary questions and agenda-setting as well as taking account of the particular context of PMQs, we argue that party leaders and followers draw attention to different kinds of policy topics with the express purpose of influencing the government. Based on a content analysis of over 9,000 questions between 1997 and 2008, we demonstrate how the posing of questions affects subsequent agenda, varying according to whether questions come from the front or backbench, from government and opposition and from different parties. The findings demonstrate that PMQs helps both the opposition and backbenchers draw attention to issues that the government and opposition party leadership does not always wish to attend to.

This article directs attention to dynamics of refuge and governmentality in a region of the ‘global South’, South-East Asia, and brings into focus the major recipients of (forced) migrants, Malaysia and Thailand, neither of which is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, or the 1967 Protocol. Against the backdrop of the illuminating contrast offered by the Thai case, this article argues that, in the case of Malaysia, the mobilization of ‘volunteers of the nation’ in campaigns against ‘illegal migrants’ serves as a performative (re)enactment of ethnic identity and national citizenship in the making of Malays and Malaysians in this postcolonial ‘plural society’. The article explores the wider consequences of the (re)production of (il)legality and identity as a social reality experienced not merely by (forced) migrants, and not only at the border, but also by government officials and national citizens actively mobilized in high-profile campaigns to flush out ‘illegal migrants’ from markets, construction and plantation sites, as well as dwellings in kampong neighbourhoods, city blocks and jungle sites across Malaysia.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged nearly every aspect of life and superseded issues at the core of populist radical right (PRR) parties' ideology, dispossessing them of one of their main narratives. This also challenged the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a relatively young but strong PRR party in opposition. We explore how the party has adjusted its policy supply to this unprecedented situation and how this has affected its popularity among German voters, building our analysis on press releases issued by the AfD between January 2020 and March 2021, vote intention data and recent election results. Initially, the party's reaction was inconsistent, but from autumn 2020 the AfD focused on fuelling discontent with the government's lockdown measures, acting as a supporter of the anti-coronavirus demonstrations. It framed its response as elite critique. So far, its siding with the lockdown protesters, however, has not had any positive effect on support for the party.

Four faces of power are summarized, based on the established literature in political science and the work of Foucault: they are power over decision, the power of agenda control, hegemonic power and capillary power. The four faces correspond also to four strategies used by City elites in the UK to protect markets from democratic control. Strategies have developed out of conjunctural crises. The most recent strategy, which involved a form of capillary power, was greatly damaged in the financial crisis of 2007–8. Since then the City has been obliged to retreat to a reliance on the exercise of power over decision, which involves open lobbying.

This article raises the question of the link between new modes of governance and democratic accountability. Our definition of new modes of governance as modes refers to public policy-making that includes private actors and/or public policy-making by public actors that takes place outside legislative arenas, and which focuses on delimited sectoral or functional areas. We identify three different ways in which new modes of governance can be subjected to democratic control: parliamentary control, multi-stakeholder involvement and control through the public sphere and civil society at large. Building on a number of the illustrative insights from various empirical projects, we find that, in our cases at least, new modes of governance did not have a negative effect on existing patterns of democratic accountability. At the same time, neither multi-stakeholder policies nor the participation of civil society guarantee democratic accountability in the strict sense. We provide some evidence to the effect that, if institutionally linked to democratically elected governmental bodies – meaning, in this context, the European Parliament – it is more likely that negative externalities deriving from public policy-making in functionally segmented arenas of the European Union's multilevel polity will be dealt with in a more systematic way.

Comparing eight post-communist semi-presidential systems (Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Russia), comprising a total of 65 instances of intra-executive coexistence between 1991 and 2007, this article asks to what extent and in what ways president–cabinet conflicts increase the risk of cabinet instability. Previous studies of intra-executive conflicts in semi-presidential regimes have mainly been occupied with explaining why conflicts occur in the first place, and have neglected the question of how such conflicts are actually related to political outcomes. The present empirical investigation demonstrates that the occurrence of intra-executive conflict in transitional semi-presidential systems is likely to produce high rates of cabinet turnover.

Academic writing often portrays migrants as either passive victims of violence and aid recipients or as courageous heroes facing horrific indifference and hazards. This article recodes them and their activities as potent forces for reshaping practices of state power. In this depiction, displacement also becomes a lens for re-evaluating the nature of sovereignty in urban Africa. Through its focus on Johannesburg this article explores how migrant communities intentionally and inadvertently evade, erode and exploit state policies, practices and shortcomings. Rather than being bound by their ambiguous status, they exploit their exclusion to exercise forms of autonomy and freedom in their engagement with the state and its street-level manifestations. Through these interactions, displacement and the continued mobility of urban residents is generating new forms of non-state-centric urban sovereignties and new patterns of transnational governance shaped, but not controlled, by state institutions. To recognize these evolving configurations we must look beyond Manichaean perspectives to see the full nature and degree of territorial control.

It is well known that in developed democracies the opposition tends to cooperate with the government. Spain is no exception: around 70 per cent of all ‘organic laws’ (constitutionally significant bills that require a parliamentary majority to be passed) are approved with the support of the main opposition party. We try to explain the variation in the level of consensus in the first seven legislative terms of the current Spanish democracy. We show that there are three key variables: the balance of power between government and opposition, the nature of the institutional actor that first proposes the bill, and the ideological significance of the bill.

Policy transfer has become a crucial aspect of the contemporary world of policy-making. However, the relationship between the actual process of policy transfer and the ‘success’ of policy outcomes generated by that transfer is an under-researched area. This article addresses the following key question: what factors affect the success, or otherwise, of policy transfer? This question is explored using a putatively successful case of policy transfer, the Gateway Review process between 2001 and 2010, focusing particularly on three of the early transfers of this process from the UK to Victoria and then to the Commonwealth level and New South Wales in Australia.

In the midst of the economic crisis sweeping across the European continent, popular support for European integration has become a common theme in political discourse. This article revisits the debate regarding popular support for European integration. Although many journalists, politicians and pundits currently argue that the public is becoming increasingly sceptical of further steps towards integration, this study qualifies that claim and suggests that public opinion towards Europe is best described as ambivalent. Also, it shows that ambivalence regarding European integration is higher in Western than in Central and Eastern Europe. This is probably due to the fact that as citizens in Western Europe have gained more experience with the positive and negative consequences of integration over the years, they have also become more ambivalent about the European project. Rather than suggesting that citizens are by and large turning their backs on Europe, I put forward the view that we seem to be witnessing growing uncertainty about the future scope and depth of the integration process. This, I argue, could be viewed as a natural by-product of experiencing both the virtues and the vices association with membership. Consequently, attitude ambivalence as such may be demonstrative of a maturation of public opinion concerning European integration.

Despite their multiplication over the last 15 years, studies on the support for assemblies composed of citizens selected by lot are rare and the few that exist analyse citizens’ attitudes towards such mini-publics as consultative bodies associated with traditional representative institutions. In this article, we examine support for citizens selected by lot as new policymakers who take the most important political decisions instead of political representatives. We contrast support for this radical democratic innovation with support for two other reforms that increase citizen participation: generic support for a greater involvement of citizens in policymaking, and specific support for citizen-initiated referendums. The goal is to understand whether the drivers of support for citizens selected by lot overlap or differ from the drivers of support for other forms of citizen participation. We rely upon data from the 2017 French Election Study.

Inter-institutional cooperation between the congress and the presidency may be the best way to promote good governance in a regime of separation of powers. In order to evaluate the performance of different political institutions, especially the different frameworks associated with ‘presidentialism’ and ‘parliamentarism’, we adopt the criterion that policy outcomes coinciding with the median voter's preference can produce the highest satisfaction or social utility. From this perspective, proportional representation in congress can be very appropriate since it tends to establish a close correspondence between the median party's and the median voter's preferences. Likewise, cooperation – rather than conflict or mutual checks – between the median party in congress and the presidency for both legislative decisions and cabinet formation can favour socially efficient outcomes. A survey of some recent institutional reforms in democratic presidential regimes in Latin America shows that ‘parliamentarization’ of presidentialism is gaining acceptance, although intermediate formulae may be more conflictual than a global, more coherent institutional reform.

This article assesses the electoral performance of populist parties in three European countries: the Netherlands, Poland and the United Kingdom. In explaining the electoral performance of the populist parties in the three countries, the article considers the agency of political parties in particular. More specifically, it examines the responsiveness of established parties and the credibility of the populist parties. Whereas the agency of populist parties, or other radical outsiders, has often been overlooked in previous comparative studies, this article argues that the credibility of the populist parties themselves plays a crucial role in understanding their electoral success and failure.

Research on invalid voting has expanded rapidly over the past few years. This review article for the first time examines its principal findings and provides a new theoretical perspective on the origins of invalid votes based on a two-dimensional framework. The main results of 54 studies using both individual-level and aggregate-level data as well as the results of experimental and qualitative studies are analysed. The meta-analysis of all existing aggregate-level studies finds that compulsory voting, quality of democracy, fragmentation and closeness of the electoral race play important roles in explaining invalid voting. On the other hand, the research is accompanied by many theoretical and empirical contradictions that hamper the accumulation of knowledge in this field. We therefore conclude by suggesting the challenges for future research.

This article critically assesses the argument that oppositional coordination creates democratization by elections. It argues that the previously acknowledged democratizing effect of pre-electoral coalitions is better described as an alternation effect, by which coordinated oppositional parties are more likely to win elections. The positive effect of oppositional coalitions is, however, short lived and intimately connected with cases where the election is won by the opposition. Evidence of potential endogeneity is presented, which shows that coalitions are more likely when there is a realistic chance of oppositional victories. These results were derived by utilizing an original dataset of 251 authoritarian elections in 86 countries from 1973 to 2004.