Research on legislative control dynamics has extensively examined how political parties use legislative tools to control portfolios and their respective heads in coalition governments. However, research has focused on partisan-run portfolios and has overlooked how control dynamics are affected when portfolio heads are independent, thus not affiliated with any party. This article addresses this gap by analysing parliamentary questions from 28 German city councils to determine how independent portfolios are controlled relative to partisan portfolios. The results show that all parties control independent portfolios more intensely than partisan portfolios. This is the case for both governing parties and opposition parties. However, while government parties control independent portfolios more than partisan portfolios, they still do so to a lesser extent than opposition parties.

Multilevel polities do not typically facilitate secession, so why did the European Union adopt Article 50? Revisiting formative debates from the 2003 Convention on the Future of Europe, we combine archival research with an original dataset of delegate debates over two levels: the existence and procedural operation of an exit article. This reveals essential new detail on the genealogy of Article 50. We locate this institutional innovation within a Rokkanian–Hirschmanian theoretical framework which treats exit closure as necessary for loyalty and resilience. Further refining this ‘polity’ perspective, we find many participants showed awareness of the potentially disruptive implications of an exit article. Yet, given extant tensions around ‘ever closer union’, a Eurocentric procedural design prevailed as a safety valve, granting EU authorities default control over any exit process. This European logic of ‘controlled opening' offers a potential blueprint for other integrating compound polities and international organizations facing backlashes from member states.

While we know that the far right thrives when migration is salient in public agendas, what happens when this issue is no longer under the spotlight? Building on 25 face-to-face interviews with activists mobilized against migration during COVID-19 in Italy, this article explores far-right framing of migration as a non-salient issue. We find that far-right groups indeed reframe their messages vis-à-vis a less favourable political setting; yet they are also able to seize fresh opportunities to reactivate opposition to migration, notably via prognostic frames delivering ostensibly depoliticized views that hijack solidarity principles and emphasize pragmatic and technocratic approaches to border control and migration management. In uncovering the discursive strategies used by far-right actors to bolster their credibility and appeal when out of their comfort zone, this article contributes to the scholarly understanding of politicization and highlights the mechanisms by which far-right ideas are becoming normalized in the public sphere.

This article examines how the identity of the citizens or ‘the people’ of Russia is constructed in the wartime speeches of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Drawing on a discursive approach to populism using post-foundational discourse analysis (PDA), the article first identifies in Zelensky's eve-of-invasion address an antiwar transnational populist construction of a common antiwar interest of ‘ordinary people’ in Russia and Ukraine against the Russian government's overtures towards war. After the full-scale invasion, this construction initially carried over into Zelensky's appeals to ordinary Russians as being under threat from and capable of resisting their own government, before his messaging shifted towards ascribing collective responsibility for the invasion to Russian citizens, following the revelation of the Bucha war crimes. Ultimately, antiwar transnational populism remained a short-lived and contextually bounded phenomenon, limited to an initial phase until early April and briefly resurfacing in Zelensky's appeal to ‘indigenous peoples’ of the Caucasus and Siberia in late September 2022.

This review article provides a comprehensive overview of the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and populism. We analyse the demand and supply sides of the populist phenomenon during the pandemic. On the demand side, we focus on the interplay between populist attitudes and COVID-19 restrictions by assessing the role of conspiracy theories, social media and alternative news media. On the supply side, we identify similarities and differences in the responses of populist actors globally. Hence, we focus on the main ideational varieties of the contemporary populist phenomenon (right-wing, left-wing and valence populism) while also distinguishing between populists in government and opposition. The analysis reveals that complexity is the defining feature of both the demand and supply sides of populism in times of pandemic.

In this article, we examine party positions on sovereignty issues in European countries based on an analysis of party supply. First, we develop an index of sovereignism reflecting the multidimensional articulation and differentiated emphasis put by parties on sovereignist issues. By applying the index to Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) data, the analysis maps all EU member states. Second, we integrate in the analysis party- and country-level data (including the orientations of domestic public opinion). Through multivariate regression analysis we show how party ideology, contextual factors and public mood favoured the spread of party-based sovereignism in European countries.

People in political decision-making across the globe tend to be much older than the average voter. As such, parliaments and cabinets are unrepresentative of the larger population. This has consequences: it risks favouring policies geared towards the interests of older cohorts, it might alienate youth from voting and could push parties to appeal (even more) to older voters. In this review, we synthesize the growing literature on youth representation. We do so by: (1) delineating the group of young politicians, (2) discussing why youth ought to be present in politics, (3) empirically depicting the state of youth representation, and (4) illustrating the factors that help or harm youth to enter politics. This synthesis shows the degree to which young people are absent from decision-making bodies across the national, subnational and supra-national levels and attempts to make sense of the reasons why there is such a dearth of youth as candidates and representatives. We conclude by discussing gaps in research and suggesting several avenues for future work.