WHEN MANY COUNTRIES IN WESTERN EUROPE ARE EXPERIENCING A flux or even a teeming confusion in their party systems, West Germany stands out as a case of almost aberrant cohesion. The ageold yearning for ‘the German synthesis’ finds its apparent modern fulfilment in the party system. The uncomfortable extremes of left and right have for long hovered around virtual electoral extinction, and the rise of new movements – such as forms of neo-Poujadism in Scandinavia or the rediscovery of the territorial dimension of politics as in Britain – has left the Federal Republic untouched. The two major contenders for power, the SPD and the CDU, dominate the electoral scene, and in so doing seem to be locked in an embrace from which neither is able to escape.

IT IS INCREASINGLY COMMON TO FIND ANALYSES OF BRITAIN AS A corporate state, or more circumspectly as developing a tripartite system of economic and industrial policy-making. Unfortunately, such work is often marked by a lack of definitional rigour and an inadequate consideration of relevant empirical material. In view of these limitations in the literature our article has two aims. Initially it examines the relationship between corporatism and tripartism, showing that in many ways tripartism can be viewed as a variation on one strand of corporatist thought, and what is more that it is the strand which appears most relevant to discussions of Britain. Subsequently, against this background, we examine empirical evidence to establish how far Britain can be described as having a tripartite system of economic and industrial policy-making.

Quota laws have been widely adopted in Latin America, with significant increases in the number of women elected to parliament in some countries. However, it is far from clear whether the laws have produced the modifications in the gender regimes which inform internal party power structures and dynamics that would allow women to participate – as aspirants or selectors – on an equal footing with their male counterparts in the processes of candidate selection. This article seeks to identify critical nodes where the interplay between the different institutions – systemic, normative and practical – of candidate selection intersects with gendered power relations to facilitate or hinder not only women’s access to elective posts, but the terms of their access. Employing a feminist institutionalist analytical framework, this article presents the findings from qualitative case study research on candidate selection in Uruguay in 2009 and 2014 and situates them within the existing – albeit small – body of studies of gender and candidate selection in the Latin American region.

The democratic legitimacy of European governance is often said to rest on its ‘output’. However, such arguments also make the implicit ‘input’ claim that the community method and new modes of governance offer a more participatory and deliberative style of democratic politics to standard democratic processes, which is best suited to represent the European interest. We test such claims by analysing them from three different perspectives: functional, societal and delegatory. We conclude that they are grounded on a substantive conception of representation in which the agents of European governance ‘stand’ or ‘act’ for the European public. However, such claims are empty without formal democratic processes of authorization and accountability that ensure European governance effectively promotes the democratic values of political equality and responsiveness.

IN TERMS OF THE HISTORICAL CATEGORIES FORMULATED BY S. N. Eisentadt, the origins of the Ottoman-Turkish polity were imperial-bureaucratic rather than imperial-feudal or patrimonial. The regime was not patrimonial because the centre had its own distinctive normative system; the values of the centre were just a pale reflection of those of the periphery. The regime was not imperial-feudal for the centre did not have to face civil societal groups able to challenge it and impinge upon it. The members of the periphery could not develop horizontal loyalties; instead they competed among themselves for a limited number of privileges such as tax-farming rights or quotas for import or export which the centre granted. The Ottoman-Turkish peripheral elements did not develo into an aristocracy or a bourgeoisie with political influence. Consequently, the efforts towards modernization initiated during the nineteenth century took on a particular twist. Modernization meant Westernization, which in turn was perceived from the perspective of Enlightenment tradition. Informed by a ‘cast-iron theory’ of Islam ,the state's salvation was seen to lie in substituting reason for religion as the basis of public policy-making. The military and the bureaucratic elites came to see themselves primarily as the guardians of raison d'état.

This article offers a critical engagement with two important strands of left theorizations of European Union integration and globalization, namely, ‘new constitutionalism’ (a sub-form of neo-Gramscian analysis) and ‘structural dependence’ theory (rooted in a more orthodox Marxist approach). These approaches suffer, respectively, from an uncritical or one-sided approach to constitutionalism and competitiveness; and from a theoretical conflation of national with regional political economy. While new constitutionalism under-theorizes regionalism partly because of its implicit ‘methodological nationalism’ and attachment to the ethics of national political economy, structural dependence theory neglects regionalism in pursuing a highly pessimistic structuralist approach to globalization.

The risk of popular protest is one of the few deterrents against election manipulation in authoritarian regimes and unconsolidated democracies, but why are some fraudulent elections met with popular protest while others are not? We use data from elections in 108 countries, from 1980 to 2004, to show that the regime’s choice of election manipulation tactics affects the likelihood of post-election protest. Leaders signal their strength and resources by manipulating elections, but some manipulation tactics send stronger signals than others. We find that opposition groups are more likely to protest when relatively cheap administrative fraud is employed, but not when more costly forms of manipulation – extra-legal mobilization and voter intimidation – are used. This study demonstrates the importance of accounting for variation in electoral manipulation tactics, and the information communicated by those tactics, in explaining post-election protest and the stability of electoral authoritarian and newly democratic regimes.

In the past few years, a number of civil society coalitions have emerged in the illiberal city-state of Singapore. They are the unintended result of a controlled process of liberalization which was initiated by the government in the 1990s in response to growing demands for participation. In particular, the internet has contributed to a more assertive, independent and better organized civil society, which can be seen as a significant step in the process of political change in the city-state.

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.

It is often said that while many of the twentieth century's wars were fought over oil, those of the twenty-first will be fought over water. This paper seeks to counter this argument, as well as the assumption implicit in it that the two resources engender, or will engender, broadly similar types of conflict. Specifically it argues 1) that within the context of the contemporary global capitalism, oil and water are marked by starkly divergent political economies; 2) that the two resources thus have starkly contrasting impacts upon patterns of state formation; 3) that these factors together militate against the development of violent international water conflicts; and 4) that notwithstanding the above, water is already a significant cause of local violence in many parts of the global South.

Despite growing recognition that authoritarianism can be far more durable than transition theorists previously expected, transition theory assumptions continue to constrain attempts to understand authoritarian regimes. In particular, alternative avenues of political participation to opposition political parties and electoral contests are under examined. Singapore's authoritarian regime involves a range of such innovative institutional and ideological initiatives, one of the most significant being the Nominated Members of Parliament scheme. This promotes notions of representation different from democratic parliamentary representation that are not without appeal to targeted, emerging social forces. Singapore's political economy dynamics contribute to this responsiveness by obstructing independent power bases.

In the past, European election campaigns have been fought primarily at national level, organized and led by national parties. The European political parties had neither the financial nor the organizational means to lead pan-European election campaigns. The June 2009 elections, however, highlighted a different and potentially significant trend: new EU regulations provided for the direct financing of European political parties, allowing them to campaign directly in the elections. It is argued that these developments could lead to the Europeanization of European elections campaigns. This article applies the concept of Europeanization to the election campaigns of the Party of European Socialists and three of its member parties: the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, creating an ideal-type model of Europeanization. It concludes that in the three cases Europeanization is still in its infancy.

One of the recurring topics in the history of sovereign nation-states is the way in which national identity, and social and cultural differences are dealt with politically. In the Netherlands, that has always had a strong tradition of social citizenship, the government has recently responded to plural nationhood and its problems by turning to new concepts of citizenship. In this article, it is argued that notions of citizenship are, in the end, used to reinforce Dutch sovereignty by creating and maintaining national cohesion. The underlying assumption in public policy is that a strong sense of national citizenship that replaces the old model of social citizenship is the only way to reconcile differences and safeguard peace in contemporary post-industrial society. Three Dutch policy sectors – integration, welfare and child protection – are examined to see how these concepts have taken shape in public policy.

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.

The first year of COVID-19 confirmed the standing of the populist radical right in Italy. While sitting in opposition at the national level, Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini's League shared common criticism of the Conte II government but experienced diverging trajectories in terms of popularity. The first had enjoyed growing support since the 2018 general election, whereas the second lost out after leaving the government coalition in 2019. These changes can be partly attributed to the different agency of their leaderships. Looking at the League's performance at the helm of key regions affected by the pandemic, moreover, its governors elaborated different responses to the crisis, which ostensibly reflect the varying allegiances and visions animating the internal life of the party. Overall and collectively considered, the Italian populist radical right broke even during the first year of COVID-19, but the crisis exposed the first cracks in Salvini's leadership.

Can conservatives be feminists? This article examines the issue by exploring the case of the British Conservative Party, drawing on a new survey of party members. Under David Cameron's leadership, reforms have been made to the party's parliamentary selection procedures and distinct women's policies developed, thus addressing both the descriptive and substantive representation of women. We examine party members' attitudes towards three types of gender issue: basic orientations towards gender roles and relations; specific policy measures relevant to the substantive representation of women; and the descriptive representation of women. Detailed empirical analysis reveals that there is significant support for progressive liberal feminist positions on each of these dimensions in the party, and that sex, age and basic ideological dispositions drive such attitudes to varying degrees. Even so, support for a liberal feminist position on the descriptive representation of women – that is, the aspect of gender politics where the leadership has been most active – remains on the whole quite limited.

THE CONFERENCE OF THE EUROPEAN COUNCIL AT LUXEMBOURG in December 1985 was a considerable disappointment to advocates of European Union. Instead, as was once hoped, of proposing wide-ranging amendments to the Treaty of Rome, the Council contented itself with a rag-bag of minor changes. For the time being, therefore, the prospect of any fundamental reform in the working of the European Community should probably be ruled out.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the pressure for reform – fuelled as it is by a directly elected Parliament which feels itself excluded from the decision-making process in the Community – will disappear. The reformers will, no doubt, pause to regroup their forces so as to apply pressure more effectively when the issue returns once more to the agenda of European politics.

CONTEMPORARY WEST GERMAN FEDERALISM IS FACING A DILEMMA generated by the transformation of the party system after the second world war. Since the late nineteenth century highly complex political and administrative structures have developed in Germany and for most of the time federalism has been one of their important elements. Because of their complexity effective policy-making depended largely upon strategies of accommodation, bargaining and repartition of influence between rival groups and organizations. This has been the rationale of federalism as well as of multi-party coalition government.

This essay reviews five important recent books on party system institutionalization, party collapse and party building. The first section analyses broader lessons about party system institutionalization derived from these books. What have we learned about how party system institutionalization varies over time and space and about its causes? All five volumes underscore the difficulty of institutionalizing democratic party systems in contemporary Asia, Africa and Latin America. At the same time, they demonstrate that there have been some successful cases of party building and party system institutionalization. In all three regions, variance across countries is great. The three books on Latin America show that sharp conflict and programmatic differences are good for institutionalization, partially countering earlier arguments about the perils of polarization. Across regions, erstwhile authoritarian ruling parties have sometimes helped to forge institutionalized party systems under competitive regimes. The rest of the essay analyses the three single-authored books in some detail and provides brief overviews of the two edited volumes.