Since the turn of the century, much comparative politics scholarship has examined whether and how income inequality affects the prospects of democratization and, to a lesser extent, whether democracy reduces inequality. What is lacking, however, is a close examination of the extent of income inequality in authoritarian regimes. This article examines the variation in inequality across authoritarian regimes and argues that electoral competition – in conjunction with party ideology and the extent of party institutionalization – helps explain the pattern of inequality under authoritarian rule. I find that electoral authoritarian (EA) regimes – regimes in which multiple parties legally compete in elections – have lower levels of inequality compared to non-EA regimes. I further find that inequality is lower in EA regimes with left-leaning ruling parties and more institutionalized party systems. This analysis highlights the value of exploring the dynamics and contingent effects of electoral competition in authoritarian regimes.

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.

Although Brexit had its short-term roots in economic and constitutional legitimation issues, it cannot be explained without considering the European geopolitical space, the EU's contrasting political formations in the security and economic spheres, and the fault lines these produce. Seen from a long-term geopolitical perspective, there have been recurrent problems in Britain's efforts to deal with the EU and its predecessors, and persistent patterns of crisis. The geopolitical environment, especially around NATO and energy security in the Middle East, first rendered non-membership of the EEC a problem, then made entry impossible for a decade, helped make EU membership politically very difficult for British governments to sustain, and then constrained the May governments’ Article 50 negotiations. These problems have a singularly British shape, but they cannot be separated from more general fault lines in the European geopolitical space.

In this lecture, I lay out my approach to populism, which falls within the now dominant ‘ideational approach’ of populism, discuss the complex relationship between populism and politics, and identify some of the main causes of the ongoing ‘populist Zeitgeist’. My main arguments are: (1) while populism is related to (real and perceived) ‘crises’, these so-called ‘crises’ are often catalysts rather than prime causes of the rise of populism; (2) populism is essentially an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism; and (3) populism can only be overcome by more rather than less liberal democracy. I illustrate my arguments on the basis of the recent rise of populism in Europe, but believe they also largely hold true beyond that specific regional and temporal context.

This article argues that post-conflict consociational arrangements in ethnically divided societies incentivize moderation by political parties, but not policy differentiation outside the main conflict. This results in little policy-driven voting. Analysing party manifestos and voter survey data, we examine the evolution of party policy and cleavage voting under power-sharing in Northern Ireland 1998–2016. We find a reduction in ethno-national policy differences between parties and that ethno-nationalism has become less important in predicting vote choice for Protestants, but not Catholics. We also find little party differentiation in other policy areas and show that vote choices are largely independent of people's policy stances on economic or social issues. Our findings are thus largely consistent with a ‘top-down’ interpretation of political dynamics.

Why are populist radical right parties (PRRPs) more successful in some countries than in others? This question is analysed here by focusing on Belgium. While Flanders (the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) was home to one of the strongest far-right movements in Europe, Wallonia (the southern, francophone part) has remained ‘immune’ to such tendencies. The article argues that different historical experiences have given rise to a hostile political environment for PRRPs in Wallonia, where mainstream parties and the media have created a successful cordon sanitaire. In Flanders, mainstream parties and the media have gradually become more accommodative towards PRRPs. By emphasizing the sociopolitical context in which parties operate, the findings suggest that the reactions of mainstream parties and the media are crucial to understanding the success of PRRPs. The conclusion reflects on potential lessons to be drawn from the Belgian case for mainstream parties and media practitioners elsewhere.

The recent success of right-wing populist parties (RPPs) in Europe has given rise to different explanations. Economic factors have proven to be significant mainly at the aggregate level. As for the individual level, it has been argued that the so-called ‘losers of globalization’ – the less educated and less skilled, profiles with higher job insecurity – are more likely to support RPPs. Nevertheless, RPPs perform strikingly well in countries less affected by the Great Recession, gathering high levels of support among profiles not considered the losers of globalization. Moreover, the effect of age on support for RPPs is not clear, as, on the one hand, the young are better educated and skilled, but, on the other, they suffered the effects of the economic crisis more. To address this puzzle, we focus on the impact of unemployment and employment insecurity among the youth on voting for RPPs in 17 European countries. We find that youth support for RPPs can be explained by the precariousness of the youth labour market.

Photographers are often inspired by politics but can they influence it? Drawing on the study of public policy and the history of photography, this article considers three ways in which documentary photographers enter the policy process. It considers the photographer as: a bureaucrat working within government networks to achieve individual and institutional aims; an advocate working with like-minded actors to advance shared political beliefs; an expert working within an epistemic community driven by a shared policy enterprise. These roles highlight the institutional channels through which photographers seek and sometimes secure political change and the contradictions and constraints they face in so doing. These contrasting perspectives are discussed with reference to the work of canonical and contemporary photographers engaged in national and international politics from 1890 to today.

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.

As scholars explore opportunities for democratic renewal, the potential of ballot structures to improve the quality of representation has been largely neglected. We argue that expressive ballots can improve the congruence of political preferences between voters and their vote choice and, subsequently, decrease parliamentary polarization. Recognizing that voters’ political preferences are more complex than a dichotomous party-vote allows, we propose the ‘assembly ballot’, which allows voters to choose their ‘ideal parliament’ by distributing 150 parliamentary seats across all participating parties. To assess the consequences of the assembly ballot for ideological congruence and parliamentary composition, we conducted a survey experiment with over 16,000 respondents around the 2017 Dutch parliamentary elections in which respondents cast a vote in a mock-election using the assembly ballot or a closed-list PR ballot. Results show that ideological congruence is, on average, significantly higher for voters voting with the assembly ballot for both the left–right dimension and the cultural dimension, while also producing a more centripetal, less polarized parliament.

Pushed by technological, cultural and related political drivers, a ‘new plebiscitary democracy’ is emerging which challenges established electoral democracy as well as variants of deliberative democracy. The new plebiscitary democracy reinvents and radicalizes longer-existing methods (initiative, referendum, recall, primary, petition, poll) with new tools and applications (mostly digital). It comes with a comparatively thin conceptualization of democracy, invoking the bare notion of a demos whose aggregated will is to steer actors and issues in public governance in a straight majoritarian way. In addition to unravelling the reinvented logic of plebiscitary democracy in conceptual terms, this article fleshes out an empirically informed matrix of emerging formats, distinguishing between votations that are ‘political-leader’ and ‘public-issue’ oriented on the one hand, and ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ initiated on the other hand. Relatedly, it proposes an agenda for systematic research into the various guises, drivers and implications of the new plebiscitary democracy. Finally, it reflects on possible objections to the argumentation.

The former rebel party Revolutionary United Front Party (RUFP) in Sierra Leone has struggled with a discredited wartime reputation and electoral defeats throughout the post-war period. In spite of this, the party has remained loyal to its wartime revolutionary ideas, symbols and political rhetoric. Why is this the case? In this article, I argue that the answer lies in the premises of party politics in war-torn states and new democracies on the African continent. In a political landscape where brokerage is power, retaining wartime identities can sometimes serve as a valuable source of (potential) patronage. With few other options for access to resources and opportunities, the core of the party membership has clung to its past as a means to both rally electoral support among the marginalized ex-combatant community and to get access to the long-awaited funds that were promised to them in the peace negotiations.

During the economic crisis, the radical left, especially in countries of the European South, continued its course from marginality to mainstream while social democracy found itself trapped in its previous strategic orientations. This article examines the two political families in a relational and comparative perspective, focusing on the interaction of social democratic and radical left parties that evolved in a series of national cases (Greece, Portugal, Spain and France) and in particular within the political and electoral cycle of 2015–17. The ideological, programmatic and strategic responses of these parties to the critical juncture of the crisis, which mark a convergence or deviation in the paths of the two ‘enemy brothers', shed light on their political and ideological mutations, transformations and/or adaptations.

In Europe, the rise of populism is coupled with the rise of Islamophobia, vividly evident with exponential increases in votes for anti-Islam political parties in national elections. These parties portray Islam and Muslims as threats and maintain a position that Islam (as a religion and culture) is a threatening contrast to European values. By analysing Islamophobic discourses of the French National Front, Alternative for Germany and the Dutch Freedom Party, this article argues that Islamophobic populism targets not only Muslims, but also the incumbent leaders. By looking at the current dynamics of public opinion, this article explains how Islamophobic populism functions as an electoral strategy.

Although scholarly interest in populism has increased as populist parties have risen across Europe, the subnational level has been largely overlooked. This article adopts an original subnational focus and explores an unlikely but increasingly prevalent political agenda: the combination of technocracy and populism. We focus on technocratic populism as a political and governance strategy at the municipal level and assess how the interaction of populism and technocracy plays out empirically in relation to administration and public policies and how the tensions and synergies between technocracy and populism are solved at the local level. The article argues that the local level is especially prone to this kind of intersection between technocratic and populist ideology. While the article is mainly an exercise in concept development, two illustrative cases at the city level, namely the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) in Rome and the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens) in Prague are used to support the argument.

Despite their alleged anti-systemness and ‘non-coalitionability’, radical right and radical left parties have, since the early 1990s, both supported and entered coalition governments in a number of European liberal democracies. Using the classical ‘size and ideology’ framework, this study sets out to examine how – or, put differently, under what circumstances – radical right and radical left parties are able to overcome the obstacles associated with governing and enter coalition governments. Inspired by previous observations regarding the complex and multicausal nature of radical government participation, the study relies on a configurational method. By means of a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 37 radical parties at 207 coalition formation instances in 22 (Western and Central and Eastern) European countries, the article sheds light on different paths that lead to government inclusion (and exclusion) of radical actors. The empirical evidence indicates that electoral success in combination with a fairly similar policy position to a weak prime minister party is sufficient for government inclusion. The paths to government exclusion, by contrast, underline the importance of ideological distance in combination with size-related factors.

Inspired by the famous Prisoner's Dilemma game theory model, Karin Marie Fierke introduced the Warden's Dilemma to explain self-sacrifice and compromise in asymmetric interactions and to show that such an explanation requires a social ontology. She applied her model to Irish Republican Army hunger strikes in 1980–1981. Her model, however, closely resembles what game theorists call a ‘nested game’. This article (re)introduces the nested Warden's Dilemma, focuses on the tripartite relationship inherent to the model and examines hunger strikes as part of a strategy potentially informed by instrumental rationality and knowledge of the Warden's Dilemma dynamic. After briefly discussing the implications of approaching self-sacrificial behaviour from a rationalist perspective, a case study of strategic non-violence in Myanmar (Burma) demonstrates how third parties can both diffuse instrumental rationality regarding political self-sacrifice and facilitate patterns of resistance that appear to capitalize on the Warden's Dilemma dynamic.

Centripetal approaches to democracy in divided societies seek to promote inter-ethnic accommodation and moderation by making politicians dependent on the electoral support of groups other than their own base. Such cross-ethnic voting stands in contrast to situations where politicians need only the support of their own co-ethnics to win elections. This distinction can be used to evaluate the utility of centripetal electoral systems in promoting voting across ethnic divides. To do so, this article begins by considering some critiques of centripetalism, showing that cross-ethnic voting is more common in both institutional design and actual practice than some critics believe. It then moves on to examine cases of cross-ethnic voting via ethnically designated party lists, cross-regional party formation rules, at-large communal or sectoral seat reservations, and uni-directional vote-pooling, using these cases to construct an index of strong, moderate and weak centripetal electoral systems.

How do parties that have long been confined to opposition behave once they take the decision to support government? This article analyses the case of the three Portuguese radical left parties that took such a move in the wake of the post-bailout 2015 election. Leveraging the concept of contract parliamentarism and the analysis of different data sources through different methods, we show that the three parties adopted a similar strategy after agreeing deals with the centre-left socialists. Specifically, while keeping close scrutiny on the executive action, the parties have voted consensually on most of the legislation proposed by the government. In exchange, the majority of policy pledges agreed with the socialists were implemented by the beginning of the legislature. Based on these findings, the article underlines the importance for supporting parties of conducting a thorough negotiation of policy goals and the timing of their implementation before joining the government, and of pursuing an autonomous discursive agenda.

Why does public trust in traditional leaders vary dramatically across African countries? This article argues that trust in traditional leaders is higher in cases where: (1) the French colonial authority did not interfere in traditional structures and allowed leaders to operate outside of the colonial apparatus (as opposed to the British practice of augmenting the authority of traditional leaders to extract on behalf of the Crown within the colonial structure); (2) leaders in the post-independence era were not hostile towards traditional leaders; and (3) citizens believe traditional leaders play a positive role in meeting local needs vis-à-vis contemporary elected officials.