Since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, the EU has been tested and contested as it struggled to come to terms with a series of crises, sometimes labelled a polycrisis. In response to crises, the EU has emerged as a collective power and the concept ‘Collective Power Europe’ (CPE) offers a promising lens with which to analyse the 21st-century European Union and the nature of the polity that is emerging. The aim of this article is to unpack the concept of CPE and to analyse its core features – collective leadership and framing, institutional coordination and the evolving policy toolkit – in response to three crises: Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

How do political parties react organizationally when the competitive context changes? Are all parties equally accustomed to adapting? In recent decades, the emergence of an electorally volatile and publicity-oriented style of politics has pushed Western parties to replace member-centred mass organizations with centralized ‘media agencies’. However, as has long been speculated, parties’ ‘genetic’ heritage may condition their adaptive capacity and threaten their competitiveness. This study presents the first comprehensive quantitative test of the impact of party ‘genetics’ on the ease of parties’ organizational professionalization in the cartel party era (1983–2018). It utilizes uniquely fine-grained time-series data on the financial and staff resources of central party offices to compare the adaptive processes of two ‘genetically’ distinct major Finnish parties – a social democratic mass party and a conservative cadre party. The study finds that although both parties have professionalized under strong external pressure, the ‘genetically’ election-driven cadre party case adapted much faster, and the member-oriented mass party case continues to invest much more in its membership organization.

There are conflicting theoretical expectations regarding students' protest behaviour in contemporary autocracies. On the one hand, in line with a resource model of political participation, university students are more likely to protest than their peers without higher education. On the other hand, university students in autocracies might refrain from high-risk activism in exchange for their own financial well-being and career advancement. To address this debate, the article leverages data on anti-corruption protests organized by the opposition politician Alexei Navalny in March 2017. Results show that anti-corruption protests were larger in Russian cities with a larger university student population. Next, employing individual-level data from the fifth wave of the European Values Survey, multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrates that university students participated in demonstrations at a higher rate than non-students of the same age. More broadly, these findings yield insights into subnational variation in mass mobilization in a repressive political regime.

An energetic scholarly debate discusses possible reforms of representative democracy. Some support participatory forms of democracy, others a more elite-driven or technocratic democracy. This study contributes to the growing literature on the subject by emphasizing political sophistication as a theoretically relevant predictor of attitudes to democracy: different models of democracy make different demands regarding the political sophistication of citizens. The analysis includes two dimensions and three measures of sophistication: personal sophistication measured as political knowledge and internal efficacy, and impersonal sophistication measured as assessment of others’ political competence. Using the 2011 Finnish National Election Study, we find that perceptions of the sophistication of others have a substantial impact on preferences for political decision-making, and that politically sophisticated people support representative democracy. The analysis shows that perceptions of others’ political competence, which has been largely neglected by previous research, is a both theoretically and empirically relevant predictor of preferences for political decision-making processes.

It is common wisdom that the increase in the number of women in parliament brought along a new diversity of perspectives presented in legislatures. So far, however, we know little about the implications of women's presence on party cohesion. Moving towards a more complete understanding of how women affect political processes, this article addresses the question, does gender affect vote defection from party lines, and if so, under what circumstances? We argue that the actual and perceived risk associated with vote defection in roll-call votes is gendered and that this is constraining the leeway of women to rebel. Analysing roll-call vote data of the German Bundestag (1953–2013) provided by Bergmann et al. (2018), we show that gender exerts a consistent effect only if electoral safety and policy content are considered: it is in feminine policy areas and at high levels of electoral security that women are more likely than men to rebel. This finding implies that taking different incentive structures into account is key if we want to understand gendered legislative behaviour.

A large body of scholarship shows that autocrats can use corruption strategically to strengthen their political hold, such as by distributing rents to their supporters. However, this scholarship often overlooks how corruption may also politically damage autocrats. I argue that corruption often brings substantial political costs alongside its advantages, resulting in a ‘corruption dilemma’ for autocrats. I show that in recent years, public anger over corruption has led to numerous anti-government protests and has been a major cause of autocrats being ousted from power. How politically costly corruption is depends on factors such as the public's tolerance for corruption, whether the autocrat is accountable to quasi-democratic institutions and whether the autocrat can credibly claim to be fighting corruption. The case of Malaysia illustrates how relying on corrupt practices to stay in power can backfire even in a long-standing authoritarian regime. My analysis advances our understanding of corruption's mixed role in authoritarian durability and authoritarian strategies of rule.

This article explores the gender dimension of ideology and representation by analysing the political parties that ran in the 2019 Polish parliamentary elections, using a novel analytical framework based on gender claims and gender-related policy pledges. This article demonstrates that a left and liberal ideology largely determines feminist and pro-LGBTQ+ promissory representation. However, the gender ideologies of right-wing political parties vary in their traditional types and can include a populist element. This article contributes to comparative gender and politics scholarship by examining gender ideologies in the Central and Eastern European context, where on the one hand, populism and anti-gender campaigns have taken hold, and, on the other, feminist and progressive movements have challenged traditionalism and illiberalism. This article also differentiates a scholarly meaning of gender ideology from its populist meaning.

This article proposes a novel theoretical framework to account for the combined effects of regime type and patterns of executive authority on legislative party unity. We argue that broad presidential legislative powers favour coordination between the president and legislative parties under pure presidentialism, whereas under semi-presidentialism, strong presidents increase the potential for intra-executive conflict, submitting parties to cross-cutting pressures. We expect higher levels of legislative authority to increase party unity under presidentialism but decrease under semi-presidentialism. Moreover, when presidents are endowed with limited legislative authority, semi-presidentialism produces higher levels of party unity than presidentialism, but for sufficiently high levels of legislative authority there should be no difference across regime types. Our analyses of 1,586 pooled observations for 72 democracies from all regions of the world using the V-Dem measure of party cohesion demonstrate that presidential legislative authority, in combination with regime type, is indeed a key predictor of party unity.

How do right-wing-populist incumbents navigate rhetorical strategic choices when they seek to manage external crises? Relevant literature has paid increasing attention to the role of ‘crisis’ in boosting the electoral success of right-wing populist candidates. We know a lot less about the rhetorical strategies used by right-wing populist incumbents seeking re-election. We draw on literatures on populism, crisis management and political rhetoric to conceptualize the rhetorical strategic choices of right-wing populist incumbents in times of crisis. We propose a framework for the choice of rhetorical strategy available to right-wing populist incumbents and illustrate it with a qualitative content analysis of Trump's tweets and White House press briefings during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find limited rhetorical adaptation to crisis and high degrees of continuity with previous rhetoric grounded in right-wing populism. This challenges prevalent assumptions regarding the likelihood of incumbent rhetorical flexibility in the face of crisis.

As in nearly all European Union (EU) policy areas, scholars have turned to analysing the role of national parliaments, in addition to that of the European Parliament (EP), in trade politics. Yet, there is limited understanding of how the parliamentarians at the two levels interact. This article fills the gap by conceptualizing these interactions as a continuum ranging between cooperation, coexistence and competition. We use this continuum to explore multilevel party interactions in EU trade talks and show how cooperation compels politicization – national parliamentarians mainly interact with their European colleagues in salient matters. However, we argue that the impact of politicization on multilevel relations between parliamentarians in the EP and national parliaments is conditioned by party-level factors. Hence, we account for how and why politicization triggers multilevel party cooperation across parliaments in the EU through ideological orientation, government position and policy preferences and show how this takes place in the case of trade.

We examine the performance of four parliamentary democracies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK – as they confront the need for a substantial fiscal policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research covers the period 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2020. We score the four countries on nine components of democratic accountability using Mark Philp's distinction between formal and political accountability. We conclude, first, that to appreciate the nuanced character of accountability, it is important to have a set of operational measures that identify specific aspects of performance. Second, preparation is important for resilience: countries that demonstrated strong accountability before the pandemic maintained relatively high accountability standards during the crisis; weaker accountability mechanisms showed less resistance to the expanding power of the executive. Finally, it is easier to be accountable when outcomes are favourable, but favourable outcomes include adherence to the norms of democratic accountability.

Interviews have been the basis for some of the greatest insights in many disciplines but have largely been on the backstage of comparative political inquiry. I first rely on bibliometric data to show the limited use of interviews in research published by major journals in the past 30 years. I then focus on how interviews are used to study a hard-to-reach population: far-right actors. Using the extant literature and reflecting on my field experience with far-right leaders and functionaries, I examine in detail how interviews help investigate this phenomenon; I analyse challenges related to interview access, rapport, analysis and ethics and offer remedies. I argue that comparativists using interviews need to address these challenges by explicating and reflecting on the process through which they collect interview data rather than solely focusing on the data itself.

Is legislative power flowing to the executive branch over time? Beginning in the 1990s, comparativists began to investigate delegation to the executive under different executive formats. Hypothesized causes include collective action problems due to legislative fractionalization, the presence of a dominant pro-executive faction, preference congruence vis-à-vis the head of government, and challenges posed by economic crises. We test these four hypotheses on a data set containing 2,020 country-year observations of democracies and semi-democracies between 1976 and 2014. Using V-Dem data, we derive annualized measures of shifts in executive–legislative relationships. Contrary to stereotypes of executive dominance, relative gains by legislatures are no less frequent than gains by executives, and economic crises do not advantage political executives in consistent ways. Surprisingly, some of the factors expected to benefit executives seem to enhance assembly authority as well. Robust democracy maintains interbranch power relations in equilibrium, while lower levels of polyarchy are associated with greater ‘noise’ in the relationship.

One of the sources of the incumbent advantage over the challenger in a two-candidate election is the possibility of referring to accomplishments in office. Incumbents exploit this resource in their campaigning rhetoric by putting greater emphasis on competence than challengers do. However, this tendency has not been tested outside two-party systems yet. In multiparty settings, the outgoing government, often formed by a coalition of parties, faces multiple opposition forces. This can change the strategic context of the competition, so the generalizations made in two-party systems may not be adequate. Using the Comparative Campaign Dynamics Dataset, I demonstrate that the tendency to put more emphasis on competence does not apply to government parties in multiparty elections in Europe. However, parties with better positions in the pre-electoral polls are more likely to emphasize traits associated with the ability to govern efficiently during the campaign.

Does the demand for more direct democracy by populist parties have any implications for their internal decision-making? To answer this question, a novel large-scale research project analyses the 2017 candidate selection of all Bundestag parties, including the populist Alternative for Germany. Some 1,334 individual nominations of seven parties are compared using quantitative indicators along three dimensions of intra-party democracy (IPD): competition between aspirants for candidacy, inclusion of members and nomination-related communication. It shows that the AfD is living up to its promise of practising grassroots democracy: in all results it ranks at the top by a wide margin. A new populist organizational model seems to have emerged following neither the classic hierarchical and leader-oriented mode of many other European right-wing populist parties nor the delegate assembly mode typical of German parties. Our further development of IPD concepts, newly elaborated measuring methods and surprising empirical evidence improve the understanding of democratic decision-making in populist parties.

Brexit has been at the centre of the last two British elections and the past legislative term. The UK's exit from the European Union was characterized by a series of parliamentary setbacks, with several government defeats, continuous rebellions and cross-party agreements made to secure control of the agenda. In the research reported in this article, we analyse the parliamentary Brexit process through careful examination of the 12 indicative votes held in Westminster in 2019 to find an alternative solution to Theresa May's exit agreement. We map the choices of each MP along two relevant dimensions, connecting them to the socioeconomic structure of their constituencies as well as to the preferences expressed in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Moreover, we associate these parliamentary behaviours – and thus MPs' attitudes towards compromise and responsiveness – to the gains and losses experienced during the subsequent 2019 general election.

Extant research in comparative politics has examined the role of institutional frameworks such as constitutional design, the nature of the electoral systems, parliamentarism and federalism on the quality of governance. Understanding variations on effective democratic governance has assumed a state-centric approach that has largely neglected how strong legislatures can drastically affect political outcomes. This study finds empirical evidence that the strength of national legislatures (in terms of its influence over the executive, institutional autonomy, its specified powers and institutional capacity) is correlated to effective democratic governance as measured by voice and accountability, governmental effectiveness, regulatory quality, control of corruption and rule of law entrenchment based on a cross-national analysis of 150 countries with available data from the period 1996–2016. The results hold even when the sample is restricted to developing countries, where party systems are more likely to be under-institutionalized. A sensitivity analysis also confirms that the relationship between strong legislatures and effective democratic governance is not attenuated or conditioned by its interactive effect with other institutional arrangements. Implications suggest that the substantive strength of national legislatures promotes higher levels of democratic accountability, and that the international community must focus on frameworks that strengthen global legislatures to avert political instability and creeping authoritarianism.

We explore whether including cultural reforms in an intra-state peace accord facilitates its success. We distinguish between accommodationist and integrationist cultural provisions and employ a mixed research method combining negative binomial regression on a data set of all intra-state political agreements concluded between 1989 and 2017, and an in-depth analysis of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland. We recognize the important reassuring effect of accommodationist cultural reforms in separatist conflicts. However, we also find that they have an important and hitherto overlooked reputational effect across all conflict types. By enhancing the reputation of negotiating leaders, accommodationist cultural provisions contribute to ending violence by preventing leadership challenges, rebel fragmentation and remobilization across all civil conflicts. By the same logic, and despite the overwhelming emphasis of peace agreements on integrationist cultural initiatives, integrationist cultural reforms problematize leaders' ability to commit to pacts and to ensure compliance among their rank and file.

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.

Existing studies of ethnic voting mainly focus on democratic elections. In electoral autocracies, politically subordinate ethnicity can help citizens coordinate against the incumbent. However, we argue that collective action will be constrained when the group grows large, as it becomes costly for its members to form common behavioural norms and carry out effective sanctions through shared ethnic ties under authoritarian repression. Drawing on unique historical surveys in Taiwan, we study how Taiwanese ethnicity and local ethnic demography jointly induced voters' defection against the hegemonic KMT regime. We find that the pro-defection or anti-incumbent effect of Taiwanese ethnicity fell as the share of Taiwanese citizens in a township increased. However, the relative size of the Taiwanese group no longer undermined pro-defection ethnic voting after the KMT lifted the ban on opposition parties. Our results illustrate that formal organizations play a critical role in sustaining the informational salience of ethnicity in the elections.