Superficially, the period of Conservative rule since 2010 has been one of electoral stability. The Conservatives emerged as the largest party in four general elections in a row. As a result, the party has retained the reins of power for fourteen years. This represents the second longest period of government tenure for any one party in post-war British politics. Yet, in truth, it has been a period of unprecedented electoral instability and political change. Two of the four elections produced a hung parliament, an outcome that had only occurred once before in the post-war period, while a third only produced a small overall majority. After the first of these hung parliaments, in 2010, Britain was governed by a coalition for the first time since 1945, while in the second such parliament, between 2017 and 2019, a minority government entered into a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionists. The right of prime ministers to call an election at a time of their own choosing was taken away, only to result in parliamentary tussles that, in the event, failed to stop two prime ministers from eventually holding an election well before the parliamentary term was due to come to an end.

During the 1960s, Cuba attempted to provide leadership to the Latin American Left, and to the region’s numerous Cuban-inspired guerrilla movements in particular. In the process, Cuban leaders departed from Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy, garnering harsh criticism from their Soviet and Chinese allies. Yet Cuba found a steadfast supporter of its controversial positions in North Korea. This support can in large part be explained by the parallels between Cuban and North Korean ideas about revolution in the Third World. Most significantly, both parties embraced a radical reconceptualization of the role of the Marxist–Leninist vanguard party. This new doctrine appealed primarily to younger Latin American militants frustrated with the old communist and social–democratic organizations. It was appealing because it captured the sense of urgency created by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and provided a path of immediate revolutionary action. The impact of the Cuban/North Korean concept of the party went beyond polemics and theoretical debates. It had a tangible influence on strategies and tactics employed by revolutionary movements in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, and Bolivia, as they took up arms in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter examines how a state becomes a party to a treaty, including signature, initialling and ratification, where applicable. Whether a state can participate in a multilateral treaty depends on the terms of the treaty. The practice of the Council of Europe is examined. Signature may express consent to be bound but often signature will be subject to ratification. Ratification is the international act whereby a state establishes on the international plane its consent to be bound. It is to be distinguished from the domestic process which enables a state to ratify. Advice is given on the form and content of an instrument of ratification. A state may also consent to be bound by acceptance, approval or accession. Accession is primarily the means by which a state may become a party if it is unable to sign the treaty. The chapter also examines rights and obligations prior to entry into force, the possibility of withdrawing consent to be bound, and the ways in which treaties might be developed.

Authoritarian regimes vary with respect to regime–opposition relations, along a continuum of more open to more closed, focusing on the degree of competition the regime permits during elections. The particular political opportunity structure facing any individual opposition group varies according to the strategies that the regime uses in dealing with that particular group: inclusion, co-optation, or exclusion. The microfoundations of both party formation and political mobilization do not operate in isolation or in the same way as they do in established democracies, but in fact interact with the effects of the political opportunity structure that existed during the prior authoritarian era. An examination of the common competing explanations for party formation and political mobilization show that, while each explanation arguably does play a role in shaping these outcomes, they are limited in their comparative utility and frequently fail to explain the actual variation observed in these cases. Instead, mechanisms link the structure of state–opposition relations and the political opportunity structure facing different groups to their relative decisions around party formation as well as to the tactics and effectiveness of political mobilization in founding elections. Finally, the common causes of opposition group dissolution interact with the opportunity structure of the authoritarian era.

Chapter 5 expands the tracing of the theorized causal mechanisms beyond Egypt to see how far these mechanisms travel and if they operate in the same way across other cases of founding elections. Each case comparison begins with an analysis of the processes of party formation, linking the political opportunity structure of the authoritarian era to the contours of the ideological landscape and the strategic incentives facing different groups at this juncture. Each case then examines the evidence for the mechanisms linking the authoritarian era political opportunity structure to the organizational and persuasive resources available to each political group and their ability to use different mobilization tactics. As in Egypt, opposition groups that were excluded from electoral participation possess similar organizational and symbolic resources and thus are able to use more effective voter mobilization tactics than other political groups, resulting in their electoral success. The accounts find evidence for this causal chain in Tunisia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Zambia, but the mechanism operates differently in the case of Brazil, offering useful insight into the scope conditions under which the mechanisms theorized in the Egypt case operate elsewhere.

It has been nearly two centuries since an American presidential election has evoked a crisis of confidence like that following the election of 2016. Not since the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 has there been such a public display of anxiety concerning the methods by which we choose our chief executive. As in the contest of 1828 pitting the Democrat Jackson against his Federalist opponent John Quincy Adams, the presidential nominating process of 2016 produced a contest between a celebrity populist, widely seen as unqualified by experience or temperament, and a highly experienced and competent but deeply uninspiring political insider who had been anointed by establishment elites.

National convention delegates are chosen through a bewildering array of procedures that vary from state to state. Because states, for the most part, determine not only whether parties hold a primary or caucus, but also which voters are eligible to participate, delegates arrive at the national convention having been selected by very different constituencies that have very different policy ideas and very different levels of commitment to their respective parties.

The result is that neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party is able to express a clear ideological message through its presidential nominations. Presidential candidates seeking to win delegates in different state elections must appeal to the electorate in each state—and the state electorates differ greatly because the state-imposed voter eligibility rules differ greatly from state to state. As a result, candidates who articulate a clear and consistent message will draw different levels of support from the primary electorate in the various states, even when their messages appeal to similar proportions of party members and non-party members in each state.