Since the end of the bipolar era, the military activism of several Western powers has raised questions about parliamentary control, fostering growing research and analyses on the features, drivers and consequences of the different kinds of oversight exercised by legislative assemblies. Within this scholarly debate, this article focuses on the under-studied case of Italy. How did Italian parties vote on military operations abroad in the post-Cold War era? In order to answer this question, the article presents the first detailed and comprehensive set of data on parliamentary votes over the deployment of the Italian armed forces in the post-Cold War era (i.e. from the beginning of the 1990s to the recent operation against ISIL). Thanks to this extensive new empirical material, the article assesses selected arguments developed by the literature on political parties and foreign policy, paving the way for further research.

While the grand narratives of political leaders and leadership in parliamentary democracies tend to centre on victorious campaigners, prime ministers ‘inheriting’ the office from their predecessor between two parliamentary elections are a widespread occurrence in constitutional practice. Focusing on four Westminster democracies (Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), this article inquires how such heirs apparent have fared in terms of prime ministerial performance. Although in light of their experience, expertise and public recognition, heir apparent prime ministers can be, and have been, considered to be particularly well placed to succeed, when eventually securing the most powerful political office, most of them have actually been conspicuous under-performers. The single most important and strongly counter-intuitive finding of an empirical investigation of different prime ministers is that extensive experience in government, both in terms of duration and diversity of ministerial offices held, seems to correlate more with failed rather than particularly successful premierships.

Armed insurgents seeking to seize the state often aim to transform the nature of state power. Yet for insurgents who become ruling authorities, how do radical visions of state power influence governance after the urgency of war? This article examines state-building in the liberation movement for Western Sahara, a partially recognized state which has ruled an exiled civilian Sahrawi population in Algeria from wartime through to a prolonged ceasefire. Drawing on in-depth qualitative fieldwork, and engaging with theories of radicalism, post-war sociopolitical reconstruction and anomalous forms of state power, the article traces how post-ceasefire international and domestic contexts created conflicting pressures and opportunities for both the moderation, and the continuation, of Sahrawi refugees’ wartime radical governance. This case of insurgents-turned-rulers suggests how radicalism and moderation are overlapping processes, how moderation is not necessarily an ‘undoing’ of radicalism, and how radical ideas matter for leadership and grassroots militants in different ways.

Although there has been extensive research on electoral system choice at the national level, we know relatively little about the dynamics of deciding the rules of the game for sub-state institutions. This article examines the factors that influenced the choice of a proportional electoral system for the new Scottish Parliament in 1999. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with key participants, we challenge the conventional rational choice explanation for the adoption of the mixed-member proportional (MMP) system. Although rational considerations on the part of the Labour Party were involved in the choice of MMP, our findings suggest that, as at the national level, theories of electoral system choice need to consider normative values as well.

Most studies see demand for populist forces driven by broad sociological factors that make certain issues salient among specific constituencies. However, this argument is not normally tested at the individual level. We propose a theory of populist voting which argues that populist attitudes are themselves important predictors of voting, interacting with ideological positions. We test this theory through a comparison of recent voting in Chile and Greece, two countries where the contexts for activating populist attitudes are very different. We find that despite similar levels of populist attitudes across both countries, these attitudes explain much more of the vote in Greece than they do in Chile, and that in both countries they interact with ideological positions in predictable ways.

The 2010–11 Arab uprisings continue to prompt a great deal of discussion. By focusing specifically on Tunisia and Egypt, this article aims to present a more dynamic account of revolutionary moments in these countries. It does so in two ways. First, the changing nature of structures and mechanisms of authoritarian domination over time is explored. Second, the convergences of different social classes and political forces during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt are not treated as unique and static occurrences. By showing how the two revolutionary networks gradually emerged and enlarged, a truer picture is thus provided. By doing so, this article aims to contribute to a more nuanced interpretation of the two revolutionary outbursts and to the development of the fourth generation of revolutionary studies.

Although the internet is severely censored in China, negative reporting and critical deliberations of political institutions and policy issues, especially low-profile ones, have been abundant in cyberspace. Given such a mixed pattern of online information, this study explores the complexity of the effect of the internet on regime support by parsing it into direct effect and indirect effect. It argues that the internet indirectly erodes its viewers’ overall support for the authoritarian regime by decreasing their evaluation of government performance. The findings from a mediation analysis of a Beijing sample support this argument. The result of one analysis also indicates that the direct effect of internet use on regime support can be positive. Such findings about the effect of the internet in China help advance our understanding of both political and theoretical implications of the spread of the internet in authoritarian countries.

The endurance and indeed the growing electoral support manifested by the Angolan opposition party UNITA since its defeat as an armed movement in 2002 defies generally gloomy prognoses both for opposition parties in dominant party systems and for defeated rebel movements that recast themselves as political parties. This article examines social service and training projects implemented by UNITA in the Angolan Central Highlands. I argue that the case of UNITA illustrates the need to take into account the importance of resources that accrue outside of the space of formal politics, including historical narratives and social relationships, which UNITA has mobilized and built upon in order to expand its vote share and consolidate its place within electoral politics.

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.

The literature on party system change and electoral volatility in post-communist Europe tends to make a clear-cut distinction between Central and Eastern European (CEE) party systems and Western European (WE) ones. The former are unstable and unpredictable and electoral volatility is driven by the continuous emergence of new political parties. Conversely, electoral stability is the rule in the latter, and volatility is associated with electoral shifts among established parties. This conventional wisdom suffers from three potential sources of bias: case selection, time coverage and method. By correcting these biases, this article investigates whether the traditional division between CEE and WE party systems has been levelled as regards volatility. To do so, it presents evidence based on an original data set of electoral volatility and its internal components covering 31 WE and CEE party systems since 1990. It finds that a process of asymmetric convergence in the levels of electoral volatility is taking place between the two regions, with Western Europe approaching Central and Eastern Europe with increasing electoral instability.

The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), victor in the civil war in 1991, has since transformed into an authoritarian party. While this transition is well covered in the literature, few studies have explored how the party’s ideology has adapted after its position was consolidated. This article addresses this gap, by analysing the EPRDF’s ideology of revolutionary democracy, and how the interpretation of it has changed over time. The Ethiopian case shows that wartime ideologies should not be considered as static remnants of the past. Instead, the ideology has served as a flexible political tool for controlling the state and for justifying or concealing major policy changes. More recent protests and ruptures in the ruling party, however, indicate that revolutionary democracy may have an expiry date. There seems thus to be a limit to how long a wartime ideology can provide power to uphold a rebel government’s hegemony and coherence.

This article examines the effects of electoral systems on issue ownership. This study argues that electoral rules significantly affect issue ownership because they prompt candidates to adopt different types of electoral campaigns. Compared to the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system, the mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system prods candidates to change the pattern of electoral campaigns from candidate-centred to issue-centred competition. In particular, partisan issue effects are more effective in gaining votes under the MMM. To support the argument, I find evidence from content analyses of party manifestos and multinomial logistic regression models of electoral surveys between the pre-reform and post-reform elections in Japan.

Whilst much has been written about the opportunities and perils of Green participation in national coalition governments, analysis of Greens supporting minority governments is less common and has not focused on comparative-historical trends as this article does. We look beyond single case studies of Green-supported minority governments in order to establish historical party trajectories and policy impact over time in three countries with different political systems. The extent of the comparative work here has never previously been undertaken and establishes that repeat instances of such support can provide the basis for more stable and effective future interparty governing relationships. However, we argue that, whilst trust can build between parties to minority government arrangements over decades, it is not assured, and, whilst Green parties may achieve ministerial control after repeat instances of supporting minority governments, the benefits of doing so are not guaranteed.

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.

This article reviews recent attempts to develop multi-method social scientific frameworks. The article starts by discussing the ontological and epistemological foundations underlying case studies and variance-based approaches, differentiating approaches into bottom-up, case-based and top-down, variance-based approaches. Case-based approaches aim to learn how a causal process works within a case, whereas variance-based approaches assess mean causal effects across a set of cases. However, because of the different fundamental assumptions, it is very difficult for in-depth studies of individual cases to communicate meaningfully with claims about mean causal effects across a large set of cases. The conclusions discuss the broader challenges this distinction has for the study of comparative politics more broadly.

Despite the explosion of populism research, there is a shortage of comprehensive analyses of the ideational varieties of populist parties and of the different roles they play in contemporary party systems. In order to overcome such limitations, I provide a state-of-the-art review of the literature on the classification of populist parties and make three innovative contributions to populism research. First, by adopting a truly pan-European perspective to cover, in addition to EU member countries, contexts that are generally overlooked, including but not limited to Liechtenstein, Russia, Serbia and Ukraine, this review article provides an empirical application of the ideational approach to populism to 66 contemporary parties. Second, it highlights the major shortcomings of common approaches to the study of populist parties in contemporary party systems, which almost invariably treat them as ‘challengers’ or ‘outsiders’. Finally, it pushes the agenda further by providing a classification and empirical overview of the three interactive patterns characterizing the 66 populist parties under analysis: non-integration, negative integration and positive integration.

On 17 March 2016 the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (Partîya Yekîtî ya Dêmokrat, PYD) unilaterally proclaimed the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria in three cantons, Afrin and Kobane in northern Aleppo province, and Jazira in Hassakeh. The party's ideology claims to endorse the participation of civilians and certain Arab tribes and minorities in its governance councils. However, the PYD and its armed militia, the People's Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG), have been accused of committing human rights violations against civilians and installing one-party rule. Given its stated normative commitments and ideas on democracy, this ideology–practice gap begs the question: what factors facilitated the PYD to conform to its democratic pronouncements on power-sharing and inclusivity under certain conditions and, conversely, what factors permitted their abandonment or violation? By analysing the PYD's governance record and strategies in northern Syria between 2012 and 2018, this article argues that the PYD displayed a mix of democratic adherence and transgression in its governance practices. This has meant that the PYD engaged hybrid mechanisms of democracy-building, coercion, displacement and violence in order to consolidate territorial control and assert ideological hegemony. I argue that complex networks of local, state and third-party interests complicate Kurdish self-rule in Syria, requiring a multilevel approach to understand the interrelated challenges to democratization in the post-war transition. I identify four major types of relations that have influenced the PYD's hybrid governance practices: intra-organizational factionalism; civilian–rebel relations, especially in mixed demographic areas; international sponsors and rivals; and rebel–regime relations.