Recent global developments, including the feminization of parliaments and the rise of gender quotas, have transformed the ways in which parties and legislatures operate. This introduction to the special issue ‘Candidate Selection: Parties and Legislatures in a New Era’ puts these recent developments in context, making the case for revisiting the ‘secret garden’ of candidate selection in light of this ‘new era’ in politics. It sets out a critical dialogue between party politics and gender politics scholarship and points to the need for more research on how political parties facilitate or block women’s access to political office. Building on the burgeoning research on gender and political recruitment, it outlines how a gendered and institutional approach allows us to retheorize candidate selection processes and opens up new avenues for empirically examining the pathways prior to election. The article then introduces the papers in this special issue and concludes by evaluating the main implications of gendering analyses of candidate selection and party politics more broadly.

Radical right parties are becoming increasingly likely candidates to participate in government coalitions in Western Europe. Comparative research on the electoral performance of these parties in government is still scarce. Our overview of the electoral effects of government participation of six parties in national governments shows that they do not run a higher risk of losing votes after government participation than other parties. There is considerable variation, however. Some radical right parties experienced great losses, while others won additional support. Focusing on the ways in which radical right parties conducted themselves in government, we explore why some parties won votes and others lost in post-incumbency elections. We compare their policy achievements with regard to immigration and integration policies, the performance of their ministers, and the party coherence of the six parties in office. Our analysis shows that policy records do not fully explain the variation in post-incumbency electoral results. Weak performance and internal party conflict prevent parties from credibly laying claim to the policy achievements of coalition governments and demonstrate that some of these parties were not ready for office.

While populist rule has become increasingly prevalent in the developing world, much of our knowledge about its implications remains anecdotal and contradictory. In this article, we conduct the most comprehensive large-N cross-national test of the consequences of populist rule to date. Using data on 19 Latin American states, we find that populism’s implications are mostly negative: (1) populist regimes tend to erode institutional and legal constraints on executive authority; (2) participation rates are not higher under populist governments or for populist campaigners; and (3) populist rule, even under left-wing populists, is not associated with more redistribution than non-populist democratic rule. We perform instrumental variable estimations and a quasi-experimental analysis to address the potential endogeneity of populism.

The ‘LITTLE TIGERS'’ REPUTATION AMONGST WESTERNERS (and for that matter with the Japanese) is rich in negatives. Exploitative, unprincipled, uncontrolled; minimalist on welfare, maximalist on profit: the unacceptable face of capitalism indeed, to those feeling themselves on the receiving end of the Tigers' determination to compete and get rich quick. Nevertheless the image is misleading. These are no chance miracles of laissez-faire capitalism unbound. On the contrary, the rise ‘from nowhere’ to world trading notoriety has to an extent been contrived in every case.

ANDREW SHONFIELD DID NOT DISCOVER THE HIDDEN AFFINITY between modern corporatism and modern capitalism. John Maynard Keynes should probably be credited with that insight, even if it is contained in just a paragraph cited in part by Shonfield) in his essay: The End of Laissez-Faire. Mihail Manoilesco, an economist of lesser renown and much less reputable politics, was probably the first to offer a systematic argument to this effect, but he located its site on the periphery of European capitalism and (mistakenly) believed that it could only be brought into existence through imposition from above, either by the state bureaucracy or by ‘un parti unique.’ For a while, Mussolini's corporativismo seemed to prove him right. With its ignominious collapse, the concept disappeared from respectable political discourse -except as an insult to throw at one's opponents.

The interest in procedures for political decision-making has grown tremendously during recent decades. Given the intense scholarly debate and the implementation of greater opportunities for citizen participation in many democracies, there has been surprisingly little interest in citizens’ conceptions of democracy understood as their preferences concerning the processes by which the political system works. Some recent attempts do, however, suggest that it is important to expand the study of public opinion from policy output to decision-making processes, and that there are coherent patterns in citizens’ expectations of the way in which political decisions come about. What is not clear, though, is whether citizens’ different conceptions of democracy have repercussions for how they engage in politics. Using the Finnish National Election Study of 2011 (Borg and Grönlund 2011), this article explores the relationship between citizens’ conceptions of democracy and patterns of political participation. Results demonstrate a distinct association between citizens’ ideals and the actions they take.

Little comparative evidence exists about what causes candidates to use negative campaigning in elections. We introduce an original comparative data set that contains experts’ information about campaigning strategies of 172 candidates competing in 35 national elections worldwide between June 2016 and May 2017. Analyses reveal several trends: incumbents run positive campaigns but are especially likely to attract attacks, candidates far from the ideological centre are more likely to ‘go negative’, candidates tend to attack frontrunners and rivals that are far from them ideologically, but they also engage in a logic of attack reciprocity with selected candidates. The comparative nature of the data also allows us to test whether variations in the context affect the use of campaign negativity; we find that the context matters mostly indirectly, by altering the effects of individual characteristics.

This article considers the issue of public accountability of transnational corporations (TNCs) in the light of the experiences of the past 30 years. It discusses the problem of accountability of corporations in general and examines the accountability gaps that are particularly severe as a result of the global reach and power of TNCs, notably those related to the collusion between government officials and TNCs, to regulatory competition, to state weakness and breakdown, and to political subversion. Then existing attempts to close those gaps are assessed, including intergovernmental cooperation, business ‘self-regulation’ and initiatives that involve nongovernmental organizations and supranational agencies in defining standards of conduct for companies and monitoring their compliance.

At First Sight it Might Appear Somewhat Curious to be studying the efficacy of the liberal democratic state just at that historic moment when liberal democracy seems to have triumphed on a global scale. Yet within contemporary Europe, the nature of political community and sovereign power have been thrown into question by the resurgence of ethnic nationalism, the intensification of regional integration and global turbulence. Taken together, these forces appear to deliver a fundamental challenge to the democratic ideals which underpin liberal democratic states. This article seeks to evaluate the nature of this challenge. It invites specific consideration of the consequences of these ‘threats from above’ and ‘threats from below’ for the character of the modern state.

Over the past years, parties often described as populist, such as SYRIZA in Greece, the Five Star Movement (FSM) in Italy and Podemos in Spain have made significant electoral breakthroughs, unsettling well-established party systems. In the literature, inclusionary populism has primarily been applied to Latin America whereas the three Southern European parties have been examined individually, but not in comparative perspective. The purpose of this article is to provide a comparative analysis, based on an original electoral manifestos content analysis, aimed at unveiling the ‘inclusionary populism’ features of the ‘new’ political parties that have emerged in Southern Europe. By focusing on the 2012–16 period, the article shows that the inclusionary category can be fruitfully applied also to European political parties; it finds different degrees of inclusionary populism (namely between SYRIZA and Podemos); and it proves that the FSM falls between the two exclusionary vs. inclusionary poles.

From the destruction of the twin towers on 11 September 2001 to the failure of trade discussions at Cancún in September 2003, issues are raised that not only concern large swathes of the world's population, but can only be adequately resolved by increased coordination and cooperation across borders. How such coordination and cooperation can be achieved, and how and to whom there should be accountability, are the themes of this article. The article is in six parts. The first part sketches the contemporary nature of global politics; the second examines problems and dilemmas of global public policy-making; the third explores how global governance can be strengthened; the fourth sets out the framework of a cosmopolitan polity which would place democratic accountability at its centre; the fifth unfolds a related concept of multilayered citizenship; and the final part explores the underlying cosmopolitan principles of the argument.

It is Part of Conventional Wisdom That Organized interests have a considerable impact on European policies and that economic interests in particular have had a greater influence on EC affairs than the European Parliament. Nevertheless, they have attracted relatively little academic attention in comparison with that devoted to parliamentary interest representation. This is even more astonishing if we take account of the leading role given to interest groups by the neo-functionalistic approach, which has dominated integration theory for a long time.

Recent years have seen the institutionalization of minority governance in Sweden and New Zealand. Large, historic social democratic labour parties enjoy comparative security of tenure thanks to smaller, newer parties with whom they have signed long-term, detailed support agreements covering both policy and process. This trend toward ‘contract parliamentarism’ owes much to party-system dynamics, but also to the accretion of experience, to cultural norms and to institutional constraints – all of which, along with electoral contingency, explain why the trend has gone slightly further in one polity than in the other. While the trend seems to favour the left in general, its implications for the support or ‘servant’ parties, and – more normatively – for democracy itself, may be less favourable.

This article argues that radical right parties can be seen as displaying three patterns of opposition towards European integration: rejecting, conditional and compromising. These three patterns are identified through the careful examination of party attitudes on four different aspects related to European integration and the EU. These include the idea of a common identity of European peoples, the principle of cooperation at a European multilateral level, the EU policy practice and the desire to build a future European polity. In light of this conceptualization of radical right opposition to European integration, the article conducts a qualitative analysis of party literature of 12 radical right parties from 10 European countries during the latter part of the 2000s.

Using Sartori's and Mainwaring and Scully's work on consolidation and institutionalization of party systems as touchstones, this article analyses the evolution of party systems with regard to stability and fluidity of legislative party configurations in Africa's democratic states. It examines the key issue of whether there is any stabilization of party systems in Africa today, and if so, under what circumstances such stabilization occurs. This article questions previous studies, arguing that we have not yet sufficiently solved the question of whether party systems as stable interactions exist in Africa. Providing a detailed analysis of elections in Africa's established and emerging democracies, and making a distinction between democratic and undemocratic countries, this study classifies Africa's 21 electoral democracies as fluid, de-stabilized, or stable party systems. A key finding is that institutionalization of these party systems has not occurred over an extended period, but rather, institutionalized party system configurations have been stable from the onset of multiparty elections. Conversely, the other large group of countries with non-institutionalized party systems seems to be perpetually fluid systems despite, in many cases, several successive multiparty elections.

Most studies of how refugees are represented focus on negative media representations. Less attention has been paid to sympathetic counter-representations. This article explores the representations preferred by refugee advocacy organizations and how they tend to exclude the mass of ordinary refugees and the difficult arguments required to defend refugee rights. The article outlines the rise of the health paradigm for understanding the conditions of refugees. The contemporary representation of refugees as traumatized victims is inspired by compassion. However, the trauma framework implies impaired capacity and the need for individuals to surrender their welfare to expert authorities. The article argues that casting refugees in the sick role risks compromising their rights. The article is informed by the writing of the sociologist Talcott Parsons on the sick role and the philosopher Hannah Arendt on refugees.

In the second of two articles the authors show what integrationist critics of consociational theory can learn from the case of Northern Ireland, namely, that consociation may be more realistic than integration, that a ‘grand coalition’ may have more virtue than the ‘minimum-winning’ variety, that consociations can be both liberal and democratic, and that PR-STV has considerable advantages over integrationists’ preferred electoral system, the Alternative Vote.

In this article, we summarize the individual demand-level factors explaining the radical right-wing vote in European countries. To do so, we first review 46 quantitative peer-reviewed articles featuring the individual vote choice in favour of a radical right-wing party as the dependent variable. To identify relevant articles, we use Kai Arzheimer’s bibliography on the radical right and employ the following inclusion criterion: the articles must be written in English, they must use the individual vote for a radical right-wing party as the dependent variable, they must use a quantitative methodology and they must include some type of regression analysis. Using this strategy, we conduct a meta-analysis of 329 relevant models and find that over 20 individual variables are tested. Because many variables such as attitudes towards immigration, employment, age, education and gender only show moderate success rates in attempting to explain an individual’s propensity to vote for the radical right, we complement the review of quantitative studies with an analysis of 14 qualitative publications. The review of these qualitative works shows that the processes through which somebody becomes a voter, supporter or activist of the radical right are often more complex than the commonly used surveys can portray them. Frequently, feelings of relative economic deprivation and dissatisfaction with the political regime trigger an awakening that makes individuals seek engagement. However, the processes behind this awakening are complex and can only be partially captured by quantitative studies.

In this lecture, I lay out my approach to populism, which falls within the now dominant ‘ideational approach’ of populism, discuss the complex relationship between populism and politics, and identify some of the main causes of the ongoing ‘populist Zeitgeist’. My main arguments are: (1) while populism is related to (real and perceived) ‘crises’, these so-called ‘crises’ are often catalysts rather than prime causes of the rise of populism; (2) populism is essentially an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism; and (3) populism can only be overcome by more rather than less liberal democracy. I illustrate my arguments on the basis of the recent rise of populism in Europe, but believe they also largely hold true beyond that specific regional and temporal context.