SCANDAL AND CORRUPTION ARE CUSTOMARILY THOUGHT OF in much the same ways as pigs and whistles; they go together. Strangely, however, academic studies of corruption seem to pay little attention to scandal. It is strange if only because in societies like this corruption tends to be obscure, a condition in which its participants wish it to remain, and it is to the occasional scandal that we are indebted for what knowledge is generally accessible. This is particularly true in Britain where the major scandals have usually been followed (sometimes illuminated) by official inquiries; certainly that has been the practice in this century from the Marconi shares scandal in 1913 to the Poulson scandal sixty years later which spawned both a committee and a Royal Commission. A closer look at the incidence of political scandal, this article will suggest, is an additional tool for the study of corruption and perhaps particularly so for comparative studies. A more fundamental (and more widely canvassed) problem, however, is so to define corruption as to facilitate reliable comparisons across temporal and cultural boundaries. We will first discuss that problem.

This article is a study of the contradictions of conservatism. It shows that most modern writers since Oakeshott have defined conservatism in an abstract manner. Here I argue that their definition, although not wrong, is an incomplete definition which is only coherent because it is incomplete. It is only the first stage in understanding conservatism, which has to be understood also as a negation of rival ideologies and, further, as a political position which points to a tradition or truth outside itself and which can, in service of this tradition or truth, be radical. Since it is part of the standard definition of conservatism that it cannot be radical, this means conservatism, taken as a whole, contradicts itself.

The paper considers Mackie's defence of ‘populist’ democracy against the critique offered by Riker and the Rochester School. Riker has two arguments against populism: first that Arrow's theorem shows there is no such thing as the general will, second, that once we have chosen a social decision mechanism the results may not represent the true wishes of the population since people may vote strategically. Mackie argues Arrow's theorem is misleading since the independence condition is not itself substantively rational, and that manipulation never actually occurs. The paper shows that independence is needed for interpretation and prediction, and whilst Arrow's strong condition may not be ‘substantively rational’, examples show that no single decision mechanism, even Mackie's favoured Borda count is obviously superior. It then argues that every election can, in Arrow's terms, be considered as manipulated – though there is nothing substantively wrong in that. The paper ends by pointing out that in the absence of complete information market outcomes are also similarly manipulated.

This Article Explores The Nature Of Contemporary Social democracy, questioning, with like-minded scholars, John Gray's interpretation of the relationship between social democracy and globalization, which asserts that social democracy is a historically exhausted project. Garrett, for example, in rejecting such assertions, argues that social democracy remains a distinctive and viable ‘project’ within the global economy, specifically in cases where strong left-of-centre parties are linked to ‘encompassing labour movements’. He has subsequently argued that social democracy in ‘Euroland’ (with or without encompassing labour movements) can pursue a less constrained fiscal policy, and expect a more accommodating monetary policy than some predict. Garrett thus insists that social democratic governments within the Eurozone are able to ‘use macroeconomic policy to lessen market dislocations and to redistribute wealth and risk in the ever more globalized economy’.

This article contends that intra-party dynamics based on particularistic exchanges constitute a double-edged sword for a political system. On the one hand, they provide party leaders with strategic flexibility, which can be essential for their party stability and for the governability of the political system. On the other hand, in permitting office holders to switch policies whenever they consider fit, these dynamics render governments unpredictable and unaccountable in partisan terms, thus debasing the quality of democratic representation. The hypothesis is illustrated by recent Argentine political development.

This article develops a theory to account for the variation in electoral systems in electoral authoritarian regimes. We argue that resource-rich dictators are incentivized to employ proportional representation systems to alleviate the threat from the masses and pre-empt the emergence of new opposition, while resource-poor dictators tend to choose majoritarian systems to co-opt ruling elites in the legislature. Using cross-national data on electoral authoritarian regimes, we find strong empirical evidence supporting our theory. We also explicitly illustrate the causal links between natural resources and electoral systems with additional statistical analyses and comparative case studies on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

In this article, we study how polarization affects the propensity of supporters of non-viable parties to cast a strategic vote. To do so, we rely on Canadian election panel surveys from the Making Electoral Democracy Work project that were specifically designed to identify strategic voting. We find that the polarization between viable parties increases the probability of a supporter of a non-viable party casting a strategic vote, because it increases how much she likes her favourite viable party, and decreases how much she dislikes her least favourite viable party. Polarization thus increases strategic voting because it alters partisan preferences.

This article addresses the relative neglect of Territory and Power in informing the study of general state political development, both as a theoretical approach and in its application to the UK. It locates Territory and Power as a distinct contribution to two major schools of comparative research. The first section argues that Territory and Power provided an approach that was part of the intellectual turn during the 1980s to bring the state back into the analysis of politics. The second part argues that Territory and Power should be seen also as a contribution to the intellectual turn since the 1980s towards temporal analysis of political development. On these bases future researchers may find Territory and Power more accessible as a work that they can incorporate in their own research.

It is widely assumed that a representative democracy requires an enlightened citizenry in order to function properly. The competence of citizens has been studied extensively and the sociodemographic determinants of political sophistication are particularly well known. Much less is known about whether and how citizen competence affects electoral behaviour and outcomes. This article reviews the existing literature on these topics. Despite the widespread consensus that, generally speaking, citizen competence matters for electoral outcomes, the review produced a mixed result: some studies suggest that the political left would benefit from a better-informed electorate, while other studies suggest the opposite. Although the majoritarian electoral context is overrepresented in the evidence, the review shows that at the individual level, political knowledge greatly increases a person’s ability to match personal preferences with the right candidate or party in an election. The article also identifies several gaps in existing knowledge, thereby suggesting future research questions.

The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), victor in the civil war in 1991, has since transformed into an authoritarian party. While this transition is well covered in the literature, few studies have explored how the party’s ideology has adapted after its position was consolidated. This article addresses this gap, by analysing the EPRDF’s ideology of revolutionary democracy, and how the interpretation of it has changed over time. The Ethiopian case shows that wartime ideologies should not be considered as static remnants of the past. Instead, the ideology has served as a flexible political tool for controlling the state and for justifying or concealing major policy changes. More recent protests and ruptures in the ruling party, however, indicate that revolutionary democracy may have an expiry date. There seems thus to be a limit to how long a wartime ideology can provide power to uphold a rebel government’s hegemony and coherence.

This article investigates accountability in South Africa’s dominant party system by studying how the African National Congress (ANC) reacts to electoral incentives at the local level. It compares the ANC’s degree of responsiveness to voters across municipalities with different levels of political competition. The analysis focuses on whether and under which conditions the ANC is more likely to renominate better quality municipal councillors. It examines the relationship between renomination as ANC municipal councillor and local government performance – as measured by voter signals, service delivery and audit outcomes. The results show that the ANC does indeed adapt its behaviour to electoral incentives. In municipalities where the ANC has larger margins of victory, performance matters little for renomination. In contrast, in municipalities with higher electoral competition, local government performance is strongly correlated with renomination. These results suggest the need to expand dominant party research to topics of voter responsiveness and sub-national behaviour.

The persistence of subnational undemocratic regimes in new democracies has recently revived interest in intra-national patterns of democratization. This article offers new data and a methodological contribution to this literature, emphasizing the measurement of institutional variation across territorial units and levels of government. Developing new measures of the unevenness of democratic institutions within individual countries, and illustrating these measures with an original data set on electoral rules in Mexico at the federal level and across 32 subnational units, we provide tools to enhance the study of democracy, particularly at the subnational level and in federal or decentralized systems. More specifically, we develop measures of institutional characteristics across a country's spatial units and of federal-to-state institutional dissimilarity – what we call system-wide institutional incongruence.

Unity and peace in Europe, freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe: Government and Opposition's founding editor Ghiţă Ionescu – the centenary of whose birth this special issue commemorates – might have been contented to see that two of his main ideals have now by and large been realized. At the same time, in contemporary Europe we can observe a huge variety of forms of opposition to the conventional holders of power, who appear to have been unable to respond successfully to new and pressing societal and economic challenges. The old convictions that once characterized politics in the European liberal democracies are gradually eroding, while the volatile and fragmented polities of the new post-communist democracies in the East are only adding to the increased uncertainties. The ongoing financial and economic crises have exacerbated many of the existing tensions, between new and old generations, between groups with levels of educational attainment, and between the domestic and supra-national levels. European democracies in the twenty-first century are thus having to contend with various challenges that are aimed, directly or indirectly, at the core of the political system, including the populist disregard for some of the fundamental values of liberal democracy and the rule of law, the variety of anti-establishment parties and movements challenging the democratic legitimacy of a discredited financial and political class, and the unclear outcomes of further European integration. Taken together, the contributions to this special issue suggest, these developments may cast a different light on our empirical and normative understanding of the European models of liberal democracy and the welfare state

As they become more successful, populist radical right parties face a tension between keeping their nativist credentials and moderating their appeal to gain new voters. We argue that differentiating party messages to core supporters and the wider electorate allows parties to pursue both goals. We outline and empirically illustrate the previously underexplored phenomenon of selective messaging based on the communication strategy of the Hungarian Jobbik party throughout its lifespan (2006–19) in partisan outlets, press releases and Facebook. Using a dictionary approach, we map the co-evolution of populist and nativist mobilization under conditions of supply- and demand-side changes. Our results show the decline and transformation of Jobbik's nativist appeal, and an increasing reliance on populism. The trend is not uniform; Jobbik relies on nativism as a function of targeting party identifiers or the general electorate in specific media outlets. Our findings show the importance of mapping parties’ programmatic appeal across platforms and over time.

While debates about far-right populism often concentrate on Central and Eastern Europe, research on these parties predominantly focuses on Western countries. Addressing this remarkable gap, this article revisits the ‘protest voting’ explanation for electoral support for the far right. Using European Social Survey data (2002–16) from 22 countries, we show that political dissatisfaction is a stronger explanatory factor when far-right parties are in opposition, but is a less important determinant of electoral support when they are in government. Previous findings based on Western Europe – which similarly showed that the anti-elite hypothesis is less relevant when far-right parties join government coalitions – travel well to post-communist European countries. In Hungary and Poland, we even find that far-right voters have become less distrustful of national political institutions than the rest of the electorate. Our conclusion implies that anti-elite populism is context-dependent and has limited use for understanding successes of leaders such as Wilders, Salvini and Orbán.

Women’s representation is highest in local assemblies in some countries, while others display the largest share of female office-holders at the national level. Drawing on a new data set mapping the representation of women at all four levels of government in Germany during the 2000s, we argue that differences in party system configurations across echelons explain these distinct patterns and provide evidence for this claim. We show that left-wing parties, the main source of female office-holders, perform better at higher echelons, while minor parties and independent representatives, which favour male candidacy, win more seats at the lowest levels of government.

IT HAS BEEN ARGUED THAT FACTIONALISM WHILST APPARENT IN THE Labour Party has no counterpart within the Conservative Party. For example, the authors of a study on the opinions of backbench conservative MPs concluded that disagreements are amongst ‘ad hoc groups’ and that as new issues arise ‘the coherence of the former groups dissolves and new alignments appear. . . .’ A more recent survey of conservative backbenchers concurs with this and argues that the ‘criss-crossing pattern of cleavage (amongst conservative MPs) inhibits the development of Tory factions analogous to those in the Labour Party. Allies on one issue either become enemies on the next, or else simply do not feel strongly enough on the next issue to want necessarily to work together.’ A similar sort of conclusion has been reached by Richard Rose who states that the Conservative Party contains differing sets of political attitudes which remain constant whilst the party member will constantly shift from one attitude to another. Thus he concludes that the Conservative Party is a party of tendencies rather than factions; that it lacks a hard core of organized members within the party adhering to a set of principles which they are attempting to impose on the party in general. These conclusions are typical of a general belief about the political process within the Conservative Party.

This study uses the case study of a ‘transitioning’ country, Turkey, in exploring institutional endurance and change. In this context it uses the framework of Arend Lijphart's majority and consensus democracy in order to uncover patterns of institutional evolution and persistence which have implications for the nature of its democratic transition. This is achieved through a step-by-step exploration of the key dimensions of democracy discussed by Lijphart. This empirical study seeks to demonstrate that despite the introduction of anti-majoritarian institutions in 1961, Turkey has never consolidated consensus democracy. Instead, since 1982 the trend has been a move towards a system more in line with the majoritarian regime established under the 1924 constitution. As such, the study offers a useful case study of the dynamics of political transformation in the face of institutional persistence, suggesting a need for tracing the history if we are to identify institutional patterns in contrast to the more generalized democratization frameworks.

Slovenia stands out as the only post-communist country to have established a corporatist system and centralized wage bargaining at the national level in the 1990s. This article analyses the emergence and sustainability of Slovenian corporatism as well as the ways in which it has shaped policymaking during the economic crisis. Drawing on recent advances in institutional analysis, this article develops a coalitional argument to account for the emergence of centralized wage bargaining in the 1990s and for decentralization in more recent years.