Around the turn of the century, political developments in Northern Ireland, Fiji and Papua New Guinea encouraged claims that preferential voting systems could steer polities in the direction of ‘moderate’ multi-ethnic government. Sixteen years later, we have a longer time period and larger volume of data to reassess these verdicts. This article investigates ballot transfer and party vote–seat share patterns in the seven deeply divided polities with some experience of preferential voting for legislative elections or direct presidential elections (Northern Ireland, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Estonia, Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Southern Rhodesia). We find little support for centripetalist claims that such systems encourage ‘moderate’ parties. We argue that where district magnitude is low, where voters are required to rank preferences and where ticket voting prevails, departures from vote–seat proportionality may favour ‘moderate’ parties, but such heavily engineered systems may simply advantage the larger parties or yield erratic outcomes.

AT THE TIME OF INDEPENDENCE FIFTY YEARS AGO MAHATAMA Gandhi suggested that the Indian National Congress, which he successfully led to independence, should be disbanded. As its function was to produce a coalition which could achieve independence from British rule, its historical role was over. This was an entirely logical, yet an entirely unpractical suggestion. Politicians active inside the Congress wished, not unnaturally, to turn their sacrifices into potential investments in an independent state. Independence was accompanied by partition of the country which degenerated into riots and massacre of civilians. There was no other political organization except the Congress to establish effective government. In any case, Congress was too successful a political organization to be dissolved purely by the power of argument. The Congress, therefore, turned from an independence movement into a governing party, a difficult transformation under all circumstances, and flourished. The historical significance of the recent general elections in India, the eleventh after independence, seems to be the actual realization of Gandhi's suggestion. India must now find a political structure which can function without the overwhelming presence of the Congress, a party universally reviled but, ironically, treated as indispensable.

Democracy is far less fragile than we sometimes imagine. Although hard to establish, it is remarkably robust and is corrupted only by dint of persistent effort. Yet, as Rousseau wrote of freedom, once lost, democracy is nearly impossible to regain. Today, the forces of democracy face a new source of corruption all the more sinister because it appears so innocuous, often even identifying itself with the liberty it undermines. Having survived the nation-state and in time subordinated it to its own liberal purposes, can democracy now survive globalization? Only if democracy is globalized.

At present, the encompassing practices of globalization have created an ironic and radical asymmetry: we have managed to globalize markets in goods, labour, currencies and information without globalizing the civic and democratic institutions that have historically comprised the free market's indispensable context. Put simply, we have removed capitalism from the institutional ‘box’ that has (quite literally) domesticated it and given its sometimes harsh practices a human face.

This article is a contribution to an emerging scholarship on the role of rhetoric, persona and celebrity, and the effects of performance on the political process. We analyse party leader Ed Miliband at the UK Labour Party Conference in Manchester in 2012. Our analysis identifies how, through performance of ‘himself’ and the beginnings of the deployment of an alternative party narrative centred on ‘One Nation’, Ed Miliband began to revise his ‘received persona’. By using a range of rhetorical and other techniques, Miliband began to adapt the Labour narrative to the ‘personalized political’. The article sets out the theoretical framework for the analysis and returns to the implications for the theory of leadership performance in its conclusion.

Why is it that ruling parties with origins as rebel movements fighting against perceived injustices and exclusion often abandon the ideas and visions of state transformation that they had articulated when they were fighting? Using the case of the Conseil National pour la Défense de la Démocratie–Forces pour la Défense de la Démocratie (CNDD-FDD) in Burundi, this article shows that rather than experiencing an abrupt ideological change when the CNDD-FDD became a ruling party, there had always been ideological divergence within the movement. Over time, progressive ideas of inclusive state transformation were repeatedly sidelined in favour of a focus on resistance, and then state capture. Paradoxically, then, once it became a ruling party the CNDD-FDD reverted to governance practices that were akin to those that had led it to take up arms in the first place. This is not because of an absence of commitment to progressive ideas among some CNDD-FDD members, but because the internal dynamics of the CNDD-FDD meant that those factions relying on power politics eventually gained the upper hand over those that articulated a more progressive, inclusive vision, due in part to their ability to back their ideas with force.

After a Period of Stability of More Than Five Years, the European Monetary System (EMS) was forced into a series of realignments of the participating currencies' central rates in the months after September 1992. Following renewed turmoil on the currency markets in July 1993, on 2 August 1993 the ministers and central bank governors of the Community decided ‘to widen temporarily the obligatory marginal intervention thresholds of the participants in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System to ± 15 per cent around the bilateral central rates’. Although this measure was repeatedly emphasized as being ‘of limited duration’, as was the determination of some ministers to reach Monetary Union, these events have been designated as the ‘death’ of the EMS or its ‘breakdown’, and the Bank of International Settlements in its latest Annual Report called it ‘the most significant and far-reaching currency market crisis since the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods-system’.

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.

This article argues that the relationship between capitalism and democracy is not immutable but subject to changes over time best understood as movements across distinctive growth and representation regimes. Growth regimes are the institutionalized practices central to how a country secures economic prosperity based on complementary sets of firm strategies and government policies. Representation regimes reflect conditions in the arenas of electoral and producer group politics that confer influence on specific segments of the population. The emphasis is on how economic experiences and changes in the structure of electoral cleavages alter the terms of political contestation, thereby giving voice to specific sets of interests and altering the balance of influence between capitalism and democracy. The analysis examines how the growth and representation regimes of the developed democracies have changed through three post-war eras to yield distinctive distributive outcomes in each era.

This article argues that after the Golden Age of capitalism, corporatist methods of policy-making have come to depend on specific modes of party competition. In contrast to previous studies of corporatism, which have argued that corporatism depends on strong social democratic parties, this article suggests that the competition between well-defined left-wing and right-wing ‘blocs’ has become detrimental to corporatism. In countries with mixed governments or traditions of power-sharing, on the other hand, corporatism thrives. These conclusions are based on a comparison of four traditionally corporatist countries – Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland – from the early 1970s to the late 1990s.

MAY I BEGIN WITH A DASH OF HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE? I DO SO AS A health warning, to myself as much as to anyone else. Just as the great Lord Salisbury once said that too much poring over maps tended to drive nineteenth-century ministers and military chiefs mad, an excessive concentration on prime-ministerial styles can propel scholars and commentators smack bang into the Tommy Cooper school of analysis – here you have collective cabinet government then, just like that, when the premiership changes hands, you switch to overbearing prime-ministerial government. There has been a good deal of this since Tony Blair entered No. 10 exactly 214 days ago.

How do parties that have long been confined to opposition behave once they take the decision to support government? This article analyses the case of the three Portuguese radical left parties that took such a move in the wake of the post-bailout 2015 election. Leveraging the concept of contract parliamentarism and the analysis of different data sources through different methods, we show that the three parties adopted a similar strategy after agreeing deals with the centre-left socialists. Specifically, while keeping close scrutiny on the executive action, the parties have voted consensually on most of the legislation proposed by the government. In exchange, the majority of policy pledges agreed with the socialists were implemented by the beginning of the legislature. Based on these findings, the article underlines the importance for supporting parties of conducting a thorough negotiation of policy goals and the timing of their implementation before joining the government, and of pursuing an autonomous discursive agenda.

Sweden's referendum on whether to join EMU produced an emphatic No. The murder of one of the Yes side's leading representatives thus appeared not to have affected the result. Cleavages exposed in the referendum on EU membership nine years previously were even more apparent this time; yet No-voters were also to found across the political, regional and social spectrums. As well as describing the campaign and explaining the outcome, this article focuses on the campaign strategies adopted by parties and other actors. Lessons from previous campaigns had been learned by the opponents of EMU, but largely forgotten by its supporters.

The November 2002 general elections in Turkey produced an Islamic-leaning government, supported by one of the biggest majorities, bringing the relationship between Islam and democracy under scrutiny. This paper examines the nature of this relationship and the current political situation in Turkey. It argues that Turkey's long-running aspiration for democratization has now a reasonable chance of success. This argument is supported by the findings of a Q study, conducted in Turkey during the 2002 election campaign, indicating strong support for dialogue, particularly within the Turkish Muslim community. Yet, it will also argue that turning this possibility into a success depends on the implementation of the right deliberative framework. Habermas's discourse theory of democracy provides the essentials for this. However, particularly in the context of a divided society, like Turkey, it has to be complemented with a better emphasis on deliberation as a social learning process, as in Dryzek's theory of discursive democracy.

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.

Previous studies show that in multiparty systems the formation of minority governments can be a rational choice. To ensure survival and policy implementation, minority governments make concessions to non-cabinet parties. In this study, we empirically analyse the pay-offs given to support parties under minority governments. We argue that the content of support agreements is conditioned by support party type. Results are based on a two-stage empirical investigation: a text analysis of 10 explicit support arrangements for minority governments in Romania and a within-case comparison of two Romanian minority cabinets with different support arrangements. We employ an original data set of support agreements and elite interviews with former minority cabinet members. We empirically confirm that ethno-regional parties are mostly policy-seeking and target benefits for their specific groups. In contrast, mainstream parties make stronger claims for office distribution. The analysis challenges the widespread understanding that all support parties are mostly policy-seeking.

This article takes a comparative look at two historically and geographically interconnected waves of large-scale unrest: the colour revolutions of the post-communist region during the 2000s and the Arab uprisings of 2011. From this vantage point, it considers the power of alternative approaches in explaining the resilience or breakdown of autocratic regimes in the face of exogenously inspired protests. These explanations centre on the destabilizing impact of sudden economic downturns, the varied resilience of authoritarian subtypes, linkages to the outside world, the advantages of resource wealth and the threats posed by leadership successions. Drawing a deliberate comparison between these two waves of contention reveals several findings: first, structural factors such as resource wealth, monarchical political organization and weak political links to the outside made autocrats more resilient in the face of regional protest waves. Second, regimes temporarily undergoing leadership transitions were more vulnerable amidst regional waves.

INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS ARE TAKEN BY EACH INDIVIDUAL FOR HIMSELF (regardless of whether he is inner- or other-directed). Group decisions imply that decisions are taken by a ‘concrete’ group, i.e. a face-to-face interacting number of individuals which may thus be said to share (partake) such decisions. Collective decisions are hardly amenable to a precise definition; but they are generally understood to mean decisions taken by the ‘many’. We then have collectivized decisions. Collective and collectivized decisions may be said to share the property of not being, in any meaningful sense, individual decisions. Even so, collectivized decisions are very different from all the others. Individual, group, and collective decisions all make reference to an actor, to who makes the decision. Collectivized decisions are, instead, decisions that apply to, and are enforced upon, a collectivity regardless of whether they are taken by the one, the few, or the many. The defining criterion no longer is who makes the decision, but its scope: whoever does the deciding decides or all.

Why do democratic institutions struggle to maintain their vitality and legitimacy in hard times? In this special issue of Government and Opposition, we identify a loss of solidarity as the root cause of Western political dysfunction over the past decade. The argument is developed in four parts. The first part is theoretical insofar as it sketches the causal mechanism that describes what we mean by democratic dysfunction. Here we set out some of the key concepts that are central to our project. The second part is empirical insofar as it offers four negative illustrations of the fundamental problématique, which gives us the opportunity to suggest why this collection of research articles is relevant to the contemporary debate on democracy and its discontents. The third part explores the many possible sources of democratic dysfunction, which we have organized around two thematic clusters. Here we introduce the other articles in our special issue. The fourth and last part suggests implications of living in a democratic world with waning solidarity, allowing us to draw preliminary conclusions and suggest avenues for future research.

The article offers an interpretive approach to understanding Jim Bulpitt's Territory and Power in the United Kingdom. The first two parts interpret Bulpitt's text by locating it respectively in its historical and contemporaneous contexts. It argues that Territory and Power belongs in a broader movement to rethink the state in a way that accommodates the rise of new behavioural topics. Territory and Power also defends modernist empiricist approaches to institutions and other mid-level topics against the positivism and general theories of behaviouralism. The final part points to an interpretive approach to the state as an alternative to the behaviouralism and institutionalism that lurk behind Bulpitt's ideas. A thoroughly interpretive approach would decentre territory and power, revealing them to be contingent and shifting products of struggles over meanings.