Despite more than two decades of research on semi-presidential regimes, we still know very little about the actual coordination between the president and the prime minister. Through an in-depth analysis of Lithuanian semi-presidentialism, this article underscores the importance of institutional design on intra-executive balance of power. Drawing primarily on interviews with top-level civil servants and office-holders, it argues that in the absence of written rules or other strong norms guiding intra-executive coordination, presidents enjoy more discretion in designing their own modes of operation. Coordination depends on the initiative of the president, with ad hoc practices further weakening the position of the prime minister. While Lithuanian semi-presidentialism has functioned smoothly, the personality-centred politics commonly found in Central and East European countries create favourable conditions for presidential activism.

How much public and elite support is there for the use of a citizens’ assembly – a random selection of citizens brought together to consider a policy issue – to tackle major, deadlock-inducing disagreements in deeply divided places with consociational political institutions? We focus on Northern Ireland and use evidence from a cross-sectional attitude survey, a survey-based experiment and elite interviews. We find that the general public support decision-making by a citizens’ assembly, even when the decision reached is one they personally disagree with. However, support is lower among those with strong ideological views. We also find that elected politicians oppose delegating decision-making power to an ‘undemocratic’ citizens’ assembly, but are more supportive of recommendation-making power. These findings highlight the potential for post-conflict consociations to be amended, with the consent of the parties, to include citizens’ assemblies that make recommendations but not binding policy.

In this article, we argue that individuals’ expectations about their future economic prospects are a crucial missing determinant of their degree of satisfaction with democracy. To investigate this link, we collected an original, nationally representative data set on young skilled unemployed Italians using the innovative quantitative expectations data methodology (Manski 2004). Controlling for current local labour market conditions with administrative province-level data and for a rich array of individual-level determinants, we show that those expecting greater job insecurity and instability have lower current satisfaction levels with democracy. By better conceptualizing and operationalizing individuals’ expectations, we advance the theoretical framework on satisfaction with democracy and show that expectations are an important and often overlooked determinant of the current level of satisfaction with democratic institutions.

El Salvador’s FMLN is an oft-cited example of a rebel movement which successfully embraced electoral democracy. This article examines the ideological dimensions of this transformation. In the course of the Salvadoran peace process, the FMLN substantially overhauled its ideological orientation and associated modes of engagement with the state and the broader political system. Moderation unfolded in four subsequent stages: the resignification of revolution as a process of reform, the FMLN’s rebel-to-party adaptation, the electoral consolidation of the FMLN, and the FMLN as the party in government. Over the years, while electoral politics invited public moderation, Leninist dogma continued to dominate internal party politics. This article finds that the post-war FMLN has employed seemingly contradictory ideological repertoires in parallel. This ambivalence, strongly rooted in the war, has facilitated the FMLN’s electoral ascendency. It has also strained democratic consolidation in El Salvador.

Mega-events present a special venue for the practice of risk management. This article analyses the management of security risks in the case of two sporting mega-events, the London 2012 Olympic Games and the FIFA 2006 World Cup in Germany. To what extent do strategies and practices of risk management resemble each other across events? And what explains similarities or differences in the tools of risk management observed in each of these cases? First, this article explores three theoretical explanations for the choice of particular policy tools or instruments. Second, it introduces the tools of government approach as a means of conducting a direct comparative analysis of risk management across political and organizational settings and over time. The tools used for security risk management at the two mega-events are then compared and the different logics of tool choice are evaluated. This analytical approach offers a basis for future comparative inquiry into tools of risk management used in public and private organizations. The empirical findings highlight the particular importance of national political systems in influencing tool choice.

The reach of social media is prodigious. Its ubiquitous nature has reshaped the ways in which government agencies can communicate with citizens. But amidst the rush to embrace the opportunities of Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, governments have had to lay down rules to govern how and when public service departments should use social media. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of the formal rules and guidelines in place across four Westminster jurisdictions – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK – to identify the types of behaviours and activities that are seen as desirable when public servants are reaching out to the wider public through social media. The article argues that the horizontal communication patterns associated with social media are fundamentally at odds with the hierarchical structures of the Westminster system of government.

After the fall of communism the ascendancy of neoliberalism seemed assured. Democratic government and free market capitalism had been universalized and any serious alternatives to them had disappeared. Rather than the end of ideology, neoliberalism is the latest version of the western ideology, proclaiming universal values and modernity, in the form of the liberal global order and globalization. Critics argue that neoliberalism is chiefly associated with the United States and Britain, and is best understood as a form of hegemony, concerned with the projection of Anglo-American values, policies and institutions around the world, including a particular model of capitalism and military interventions, and a particular conception of the West.

Until the early 1990s, the Italian political system was regarded as anomalous among advanced democracies because of its failure to achieve alternation in government. Since then, that problem has been overcome, but Italy has been popularly viewed as continuing to be different to other democracies because it is ‘in transition’ between regimes. However, this position itself is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain because of the length of time of this so-called transition. Rather than focus on what is rather an abstract debate, it may be more fruitful to analyse what, in substance, is distinctive about Italian politics in this period: the manner in which a debate over fundamental institutional (including electoral) reform has become entangled in day-to-day politics. This can best be exemplified through an analysis of two key electoral consultations held in 2006: the national elections and the referendum on radically revising the Italian Constitution.

This article first looks at developments in the external dimension of EU migration and refugee policy, as highlighted by a succession of Commission Communications and Council or European Council conclusions that have emphasized the need to integrate migration and asylum more firmly into the Union's external policies. It then looks at one particular recent experiment with externalizing refugee policy, namely the invention of ‘Regional Protection Programmes’. Finally it asks what this concept of regional protection has meant in normative terms, before suggesting ways in which the space afforded protection has been altered.

In violent conflicts in places like Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, economic interests have crowded out ideologically articulate mass-based social movements for reform or revolutionary change to a degree that was not apparent during earlier anti-colonial struggles. Some scholars offer a ‘looting model’ of rebellion that explains the predations of politicians and warlords but it is not clear why people who receive few benefits from this – or even suffer great harm from them – fail to support ideologues instead, or why self-interested violent entrepreneurs do not offer political programmes to attract more followers. Yet some groups defy this ‘looting model’. Explaining why armed groups vary so greatly in their behaviour provides a means to address important questions: is it possible to construct public authorities out of collapsed states in the twenty-first century, or do local predations and global conditions preclude indigenous state-building in these places? Why do social movements for reform there seem so ineffective? What conditions have to be present for them to succeed? This article considers the nature of rebellion in failing states, focusing on Nigeria to find clues to explain variations in the organization of armed groups.

Coalition governments prevail at the European subnational level. Although some studies explain the formation of subnational government coalitions, we know little about the determinants of individual parties' likelihood of joining such coalitions. This article aims to fill this gap in empirical and theoretical ways. It shows that an important institutional constraint matters for political actors' strategies when forming subnational coalitions: the party affiliation of the directly elected head of the executive. Being the party of the head of the executive or being ideologically close to that party significantly increases a party's likelihood of joining a coalition. The empirical evidence results from multinomial choice models using a novel data set on subnational parties' likelihood of joining 92 coalition governments at the local level in Germany between 1999 and 2016. The findings have substantive implications for subnational institutional settings resembling ‘mixed’ political systems (i.e. neither purely presidential nor purely parliamentarian).

Besides systemic changes that lead to the re-prioritization of foreign policy objectives, foreign policy change is also a result of domestic policy entrepreneurs’ pursuit of a political return. Their potential to orchestrate change depends on the existing entry barriers that emanate from the political and institutional features of the domestic policy-making process. It is accentuated by system-wide developments and security crises that illustrate old policy failure. This article discusses the role of policy entrepreneurs in foreign policy change by reference to the Greek–Turkish rapprochement in the late 1990s that resulted in Turkey receiving the status of EU candidate country in 1999.

This article examines the ideological function of ‘models’ of citizenship in shaping the contours of public debate and the ability of refugee women to make claims in the public sphere. Key elements of Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation are explored: ideology works by interpellating (‘hailing’) individuals, providing them with a social and juridical identity that constitutes them as subjects. The article argues that ‘models’ of citizenship serve as vehicles for processes of interpellation that restrict claim-making, through the imposition of a dominant hierarchy of identities and needs. These processes become visible through analysis of Somali refugee women's experiences in republican France.

Although semi-presidentialism is a popular form of governance in new democracies, we have little empirical evidence supporting its popularity. In this study, I attempt to reassess democratic performance of new semi-presidential regimes from 1974 to 2009 as a function of four broadly cited risk factors: divided minority government, cohabitation, presidential powers and president-parliamentarism. The results are more encouraging than previous research has suggested. First, divided minority government is positively associated with higher levels of democracy, even though it, along with a strong presidency and president-parliamentarism, makes executive instability more likely. Second, perils of cohabitation are not substantiated with regard to executive instability and quality of democracy. Third, none of the caveats against semi-presidential systems makes them more vulnerable to democratic breakdown. However, a failure to check presidential powers appears to be a serious risk for semi-presidentialism. As presidents enjoy more powers, the levels of democracy tend to decrease. This finding has a substantive implication for countries that already practise semi-presidential governance or contemplate a move in that direction: checking presidential powers is critical to facilitate democratic consolidation in semi-presidentialism.

In recent literature on post-Soviet electoral revolutions in places where attempts at regime change through popular protest did not succeed, opposition groups are often simply regarded as ‘failed’. And yet, opposition actors exist and participate in the political life of their country. Building on the Belarusian and Azerbaijani cases, we argue that opposition actors are maintained in a ‘ghetto’, often virtual, tightly managed by the ruling authorities who exert monopolistic control over civic activities. Opposition actors adapt to the restricted conditions – accepting a certain level of dependency. They thus develop various tactics to engage with the outside, striving to reduce the ghetto walls. To this end this article proposes a typology of what we call oppositional ‘resistance models’: electoral, in the media, lobbying and through education. The models highlight what makes ‘opposition’ in authoritarian states and are a step towards a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon in this context.

Institutionalization as a ‘process theory’ moves beyond the specification of a dichotomous variable – either an institution exists or it does not – to a continuous variable – whereby an institution can be more or less institutionalized. But if institutionalization is to be conceived in this way, then the specification of independent variables and the measurement of the degree of institutionalization become crucial to the understanding of the process. The essence of the argument presented in this article is that in the study of legislatures both the specification and measurement of institutionalization have been deficient. The comparative potential of the concept of legislative institutionalization has been limited by a failure to use common criteria and measures of institutionalization. As a general theory, institutionalization is of value in explaining how institutions become organized and how they become differentiated from other political organizations, but equally other organization theories might more usefully be deployed to explain institutional change in legislatures thereafter.

Like many party systems across Western Europe, the Dutch party system has been in flux since 2002 as a result of a series of related developments, including the decline of mainstream parties which coincided with the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties and the concurrent dimensional transformation of the political space. This article analyses how these challenges to mainstream parties fundamentally affected the structure of party competition. On the basis of content analysis of party programmes, we examine the changing configuration of the Dutch party space since 2002 and investigate the impact of these changes on coalition-formation patterns. We conclude that the Dutch party system has become increasingly unstable. It has gradually lost its core through electoral fragmentation and mainstream parties’ positional shifts. The disappearance of a core party that dominates the coalition-formation process initially transformed the direction of party competition from centripetal to centrifugal. However, since 2012 a theoretically novel configuration has emerged in which no party or coherent group of parties dominates competition.

The literature on losers’ consent identifies clear distinctions in perceptions of democracy between electoral losers and winners. However, little of the literature addresses the complexities of mixed member electoral systems or compares this winner–loser divergence to that of non-voters. An analysis of post-election surveys in Germany in 2009 and 2013 allows for a disaggregation of types of losers and non-voters. Results find that voting for a district candidate from a losing party has a greater effect on perceptions than voting for a losing party in the proportional representation tier, while losing in both appeared to slow the decline in positive evaluations of the system. Meanwhile clear distinctions between perceptions of different types of non-voters emerge.

ONCE IRAN HAD CALLED FOR AN ISLAMIC REVOLUTION, THERE was speculation that the message might elicit a similar response elsewhere in the Islamic world. In fact, soon after the events in Iran, a group of foreign journalists arrived in Turkey and rumour had it that they had come to report on the Islamic revolt expected in Turkey as well. The expected, however, did not take place: instead, had the journalists stayed on, what they would have witnessed was the breakdown of democraci, and the installation of authoritarian rule by the staunchest de enders of secularism, the Turkish military. Islamic politics had been instrumental in exacerbating the democratic crisis, and hence the military takeover was partially directed against the Islamic politics of the National Salvation Party (NSP) and the street politics of radical Islamic groups. Islamic politics was strong enough to figure in the equation of democratic breakdown, but far too weak to detonate an Islamic revolution.

The purpose of this essay is to look into the nature of Islamic politics in Turkey in terms of its past ventures in society, its recent involvement in party politics and its prospects for the future. Our fundamental assumption is that the specific characteristics of Islamic politics in Turkey are closely bound up with the state-dominant nature of Turkish political culture and society. More specifically, we attempt to show that changes in the nature of Islamic politics and movements, their organization, aims and strategies, have been in large part shaped by the changing structure and ideology of the state and the centralist elites.