When and why do parliamentary majorities in Europe suppress parliamentary minority rights? This article argues that such reforms are driven by substantive policy conflict in interaction with existing minority rights. Government parties curb minority rights if they fear minority obstruction due to increased policy conflict and a minority‐friendly institutional status quo. Empirical support is found for this claim using comparative data on all reforms in 13 Western European parliaments since 1945. A curbing of minority rights is significantly more likely under conditions of heightened policy conflict and these effects are stronger the more the institutional status quo favours opposition parties. Contrary to frequent claims of consensual rule changes from single‐country studies in Europe, these findings demonstrate the importance of competitive strategies in explaining institutional reform in European parliaments. The conditional impact of the status quo provides interesting theoretical links to historical institutionalist arguments on path dependence.

Under what conditions is decentralisation a salient issue for state‐wide political parties? It is argued in this article that the extent to which state‐wide parties emphasise decentralisation depends on their strategic considerations: on their overall ideology, on the electoral incentives created by the context in which they compete, and on the interaction between the two. The results of the analysis of party manifestos in 31 countries since 1945 are as follows. First, parties that pay greater attention to cultural matters relative to economic matters tend to talk more about decentralisation. Second, the systemic salience of decentralisation also encourages parties to talk more about decentralisation. Third, the larger the regionally based ethnic groups within a country, the more salience all state‐wide political parties will attach to decentralisation. Finally, only parties that put greater relative emphasis on cultural matters tend to respond to the electoral threat of regionalist parties. The influence of territorial diversity on the salience of decentralisation thus works through two channels and is partly conditioned by political parties’ ideological profile.

Parliaments often elect holders of important extra‐parliamentary offices such as heads of state, constitutional judges, heads of audit institutions and ombudsmen. What drives the behaviour of parliamentary actors and the outcome of such elections? This article explains actor behaviour theoretically, drawing on spatial factors, principal‐agent arguments about the importance of nonspatial candidate characteristics and signaling arguments about competitive considerations beyond the specific election. Empirically, it provides the first comparative analysis of such elections outside the United States Senate using original data on 100 elections for four external offices in 14 Western European parliaments. The findings show that spatial variables, nonspatial candidate characteristics and features of the competitive context systematically affect the election outcome. The article contributes to comparative parliamentary research in general by demonstrating how parliamentary activities, other than lawmaking, can be analysed using established theories and by showing that consensual aggregate outcomes can be explained within a competition‐based rational choice model.

The article offers a new defense of democratic meritocracy. Existing defenses of the hybrid regime have centered on ordinary citizens’ lack of sophisticated political knowledge and the importance of having particularly able individuals in charge of governing. But since electoral democracy also contains certain built-in mechanisms that, when combined with a functioning party system, are capable of reducing the cognitive burdens of average voters and empowering more competent individuals, such defenses fail to make a compelling case for democratic meritocracy. Specifically, they owe us a fully developed account of how those mechanisms of electoral democracy will be weakened by its other inherent features so that the hybrid regime becomes a desirable alternative. This article provides such an account by exploring how a well-designed democratic meritocracy can better avoid pathologies of unconstrained political competition that are not only troublesome in themselves but which also undermine electoral democracy’s ability to generate superior political outcomes.

Popular insurance models of judicial independence contend that electoral competition induces executives to establish or maintain independence as insurance against the risks associated with losing office. Existing accounts, however, focus only on variation in the likelihood of losing office, treating risks associated with losing as constant. This inattention to the model’s causal logic limits theoretical development and empirical conclusions. We model the demand for insurance rather than simply the likelihood of losing office, with empirical implications tested via instrumental variables. This paper offers a major development of the insurance account, with important implications for the study of judicial independence.

The implications of rising parliamentary representation of populist parties have been thoroughly studied but little is known about the impact of populist state leaders on party positions. In this article, we study mainstream parties' strategic responses when a populist takes over as the leader of a nation. We use content-analytical data and large language modelling to measure positions expressed in manifestos from parties from 51 democracies between 1989 and 2018. Employing methods for causal inference from observational data, we find that right-wing populist state leaders induce mainstream parties to differentiate their positions on multiculturalism, possibly leading to polarization of the party system. Under left-wing populist leaders, mainstream parties adopt more homogenous or differentiated positions, depending on the policy category and other contextual factors. Parties are generally more responsive in emerging than advanced countries and in presidential than parliamentary systems.

Court restructuring has become a salient national political issue, with proposals to increase the number of justices on the US Supreme Court gaining traction in response to various Court controversies. However, relatively little attention has been paid to state-level efforts, some successful, to increase the number of justices on state supreme courts. Although the number of justices on the US Supreme Court has not been changed since 1869, the size of most state supreme courts has been less stable. To place recent state supreme court expansions into context, this article analyzes the historical dynamics of state supreme court expansion. Analyzing an original dataset that includes every change made to the size of a state supreme court since 1789, it finds that court expansion has been more likely when the political competitiveness of a state is low and when state judicial selection and retention systems provide for lower levels of judicial independence.

What effect does political competition have in generating de facto judicial independence? We argue that competition in a legislature can drive increases in de facto judicial independence. Our game-theoretic model reveals that increased competition for seats impedes legislators’ ability to enact their platforms, regardless of government turnover probability, and increased legislative fractionalization also makes court intervention more likely. Utilizing a sample of democratic states, empirical evidence suggests when a country’s legislature is increasingly fractionalized among parties or has increasing seat turnover, we observe increases in de facto independence. This research provides new perspectives on the link between independence and competition.

The positions of the radical right parties (RRPs) concerning the family have generally been examined through a socio-cultural lens, but very little is known about their distributive preferences. Based on the theoretical insights from the literature on varieties of familialism and social investment, the article investigates the RRPs' family policy agenda in terms of preference and support for familialism and de-familialism. Furthermore, cross-country similarities and differences will be investigated through an explanatory framework that combines the literature on partisan politics with that on historical institutionalism. A content analysis of party manifestos has shown that the RRPs adopt a male-breadwinner policy agenda, mostly intended to please their authoritarian electorate. However, comparative empirical research has highlighted some cross-country differences. These are explained by considering the counter-feedback mechanism triggered by the policy legacies, which provides RRPs with divergent electoral incentives and disincentives to promote their family policy agenda.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a globally spread—but differently timed—implementation of school closures and other disruptive containment measures as governments worldwide intervened to curb transmission of disease. This study argues that the timing of such disruptive interventions reflects how governments balance the principles of precaution and proportionality in their pandemic decision-making. A theory is proposed of how their trade-off is impacted by two interacting institutional factors: electoral democratic institutions, which incentivise political leaders to increasingly favour precaution, and high state administrative capacity, which instead makes a proportional strategy involving later containment measures more administratively and politically feasible. Global patterns consistent with this theory are documented among 170 countries in early 2020, using Cox models of school closures and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. Corroborating the theorised mechanisms, additional results indicate that electoral competition prompts democratic leaders’ faster response, and that this mechanism is weaker where professional state agencies have more influence over policymaking.