Analysing how the roles of national parliaments and the European Parliament have changed in European economic governance since the euro crisis, this article argues that their situation has deteriorated in the post-Next Generation EU regime. It identifies structural factors impeding more effective parliamentary engagement, relates these to empirical evidence about the role of domestic legislatures and the European Parliament and mirrors these practices against constitutional interpretations concerning the democratic role of parliaments in budgetary matters. The broader Economic and Monetary Union architecture has grown to encompass a variety of rules and mechanisms, many of which are located outside of the treaties and the budget of the Union. As a result, parliaments lack formal powers that would guarantee them meaningful participation rights in European economic and fiscal governance. The key to more effective parliamentary involvement is ensuring that the parliaments can genuinely shape policies and that a strong link is established between elections and budgetary politics.

Sovereignism is at the crux of the current wave of radical right-wing populism (RRP). While sovereignism may concern different dimensions, claims by RRP parties and leaders about regaining sovereignty are increasingly associated with socioeconomic issues such as welfare, redistribution and international trade. Adopting a demand-side perspective, this article draws from an original cross-national survey to investigate the intersection between economic sovereignism, economic populism and globalization attitudes, and how such attitudes may shape RRP voting in Western Europe and the United States. Our results confirm that economic populism and sovereignism form coherent sets of attitudes together with perceptions of globalization, and that such attitudes have a significant effect on support for RRP actors. We find different patterns of association, however, across our European cases and the United States, which suggests that the relationship between populism, sovereignism and economic globalization is partly dependent upon national context and historical legacies.

This article examines the effect of country size on the professionalization of politicians in six European micro-states and a large-scale democracy – Germany – since 1980. The article revisits an ongoing debate about the extent to which either country size or government size are causal factors in the individual professionalization process. Using an original dataset consisting of 6,940 parliamentary mandates – 2,809 individuals – in national parliaments, the article shows that country size is a determinant of the degree of politicians' professionalization. The article further demonstrates that political parties' gatekeeper role is the key causal mechanism explaining the influence of population size on politicians' professionalization.

While many scholarly works are concerned with how social protests promote democratization, this article addresses the causally reverse question: how democratization shapes the landscape of street protests. We use a unique database of 31 years of protest events in Taiwan, a smooth and successful case of authoritarianism-to-democracy transition, to engage in a dialogue with political transition theory, the institutionalization thesis and networked movement theory. The logistic regression analysis indicates that protest violence persists under consolidated democracy, but it is marginalized. We find an indirect effect from the growth of social movement organizations that foster the adaptation of festive and performative tactics, which are less confrontational in nature. Politicians' involvement, however, remains a constant source of disruptiveness. Our conclusion of contentious institutionalization finds that late-democratizing countries also gravitate towards becoming a ‘social movement society’ as advanced democracies do, but in a highly compressed period of time.

This article explores women's access to ministerial power in an important but understudied arena of executive politics: cabinet committees. Specifically, we analyse the gendered patterns in the distribution of cabinet committee assignments in two ‘typical’ Westminster cases, Canada and the United Kingdom, and under two prime ministers, Justin Trudeau (2015–2021) and David Cameron (2010–2016), who both made explicit gender-equity pledges. Informed by previous research into gendered allocation of ministerial portfolios, we investigate the overall extent of women's committee assignments, the gendered dimensions of these assignments and the status of assignments, namely the ‘prestige’ of committee remits, whether committees were chaired by the prime minister and the allocation of chairing responsibilities across committees. In both cases, overall assignment broadly matched shares of women ministers at the cabinet level, but less so during the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition in the UK (2010–2015). Women's shares of committee assignments were likely to be lower on ‘masculine’ and ‘high-prestige’ committees compared to ‘neutral’, ‘feminine’ and ‘low-prestige’ committees, but commitment to gender equity is more evident in the Canadian case. While our aim is exploratory and descriptive, we offer several explanations for these patterns, including the supply of women ministers, departmentalism, party branding and the low public profile of cabinet committees.

While digital technologies have induced profound global transformations, political scientists often lack the analytical tools to grasp their effects on politics. In particular, digitization's impact on dictatorships remains not only empirically understudied, but seriously under-conceptualized. How do new technological possibilities affect autocratic politics? This contribution starts from the inner logic of authoritarianism rather than from technical innovation. It first maps the ways in which autocrats employ various digital technologies to maintain power. This helps us identify seven core areas where dictatorial politics are transformed by the use of new tools. We delineate the key characteristics of these areas of change and conclude that, in their sum, technologically induced transformations significantly alter the nature of dictatorship if and when it is digitized.

In this article we examine the phenomenon of the use of sovereignist claims, not only by nationalist or populist leaders but also by actors who would not normally fall into these categories. We zoom in on two different cases: France and Italy. Through an analysis of Twitter we examine the discourse of the political leadership in election campaigns. We document some interesting commonalities, as well as some differences, concerning the emphasis on sovereignist claims. We produce an account of the patterns of use of sovereignist issues, we identify which parties/leaders have been the main promoters of sovereignist claims and how their competitors have responded to this challenge. Finally, we analyse the main drivers of sovereignist party discourses. Through regression analysis we show how, both in France and in Italy, the sovereignist supply has been influenced by ideology and citizens' demands.

The article explores how macro-level political factors in conjunction with micro- and meso-level factors affect interest-group access to policymakers. The analysis is conducted based on two original data sets: a population ecology database of Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian national-level energy policy, healthcare and higher education organizations, and an online survey of these populations. Combining the two data sets allows us to investigate both polity-, population- and organizational-level factors. As the sampled countries have recently experienced democratic backsliding, we also test the effect of closing deliberative structures. The analysis reveals that the political process influences access: legislative fractionalization affects access positively, while the closure of deliberative structures has a negative effect. Nevertheless, the political contextual factors are mediated through variables at both the population (e.g. the size of latent constituency) and organizational (e.g. expertise provision) levels, as well as the meso-level of interorganizational cooperation.

Some scholars warn about democratic disaffection of young people potentially leading to processes of ‘democratic deconsolidation’. Conversely, others interpret young people's preference for non-conventional forms of participation as a manifestation of democratic renewal. We surveyed respondents from nine European countries and analysed differences in attitudes of opposition to democracy across age groups and how these preferences shape political mobilization. Our findings show that the youngest adult group is no less supportive of liberal democracy than older age groups. Second, although attitudes of opposition towards democracy decrease political mobilization, this association is independent of age. Thus, young people's critical views of democracy rarely translate into apathy for democracy. Finally, our results provide insights into intra-generational democratic attitude differences by showing how young people's individual attributes are likely to crystallize into different value configurations and patterns of democratic engagement over time but within specific contexts.

Recent research suggests that party leaders can strategically impact the perceived left–right position of their parties by changing their selective emphasis on certain issues. We suggest that a party's ideological image can also be altered by the portfolio allocation of the coalition government in which the party participates. By controlling a portfolio, the party will have a more direct influence on the related issue and will frequently communicate the party's issue position publicly, thereby cultivating a perception of strong emphasis on the related issue. We run a cross-national party-level analysis showing that portfolio allocation matters with regard to the importance of the subdimensions for the general left–right dimension. In particular, the influence of sociocultural stances depends on the share of sociocultural portfolios. In addition, we show that the mechanism does not apply at the beginning of a government's tenure, but only after a year or longer in office.

The EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) represents a bold integrationist step in European economic governance. Besides the size of the fiscal envelope, the novelty also lies in the new governance. Member states prepare integrated investment and reform plans and need to fulfil milestones and targets to access funding. This article assesses the balance of power in negotiating the plans and the effect on domestic policymaking. Based on five case studies, we show that the RRF has enhanced the steering capacity of the European Commission on reforms and investments, while member states remain ultimately in charge of the plans. Second, we argue that, while the RRF enhances the efficiency of the policymaking process and allows the fast-forwarding of reforms, it has also led to a contractualization of the relationship with the EU and a centralization of decision-making processes within member states. This latter aspect may hamper ownership and legitimacy in policy implementation.

This article presents and tests a new approach to early voting that pays attention to its institutional, political and demographic determinants. Using Australia's compulsory voting system as our case, we can compare early voting and election-day voting without having to consider the possibility of voter abstention that arises in voluntary voting systems. The research uses aggregate-level data from six national elections (2004 to 2019), as well as individual-level data drawn from Australian Electoral Study surveys of 2016 and 2019. The results show that institutional factors (density of polling places), political factors (level of competition between parties) and socioeconomic factors (age) all contribute to variations in early versus election-day voting. Levels of early voting are affected not simply by the characteristics of individual citizens but also by the institutional and political contexts within which those citizens vote.

Political parties around the world are adopting primaries to select leaders and legislative candidates. While a large, though inconclusive, literature has emerged in the American context to explore the consequences of primaries, little attention has been devoted to other national contexts. Exploring patterns of financial donation, this study examines whether individuals who supported a losing leadership candidate are less likely to exhibit subsequent financial commitment to the party compared to those donors whose preferred candidate won the internal election. Drawing upon a novel dataset that includes tens of thousands of donors to recent leadership elections in Canada, we demonstrate that intra-party winners (i.e. those who supported the winning leadership candidate) are more likely to be financially committed to the party in the year after the election than those who supported losers. Results suggest that open and inclusive elections, while participatory in nature, may come at a cost for political parties as losers withdraw from the party in the wake of their loss.

Right-wing populists often mobilize popular support by employing a people-versus-elite dichotomy in which they cast ‘the people’ as the underdog, or by ‘performing’ crisis to discredit the elite. Such ‘underdogism’, and the reliance on crisis more broadly, remains an effective strategy for as long as populists are in opposition. But what happens when populists gain power? One would expect that they would not be able to exploit their position as effectively and their appeal would weaken drastically. In certain cases, however, they still manage to sustain the underdog illusion. This article argues that memory politics are an important locus for populists to maintain their underdog rhetoric, and within that field the performance of victimhood is key. Building on theories about the performance of crisis and recent trends in research on memory politics in Central Europe, we propose a framework for understanding how governing right-wing populists justify vindictive policies and thus try to cement their power.

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.

The issuance of parliamentary questions (PQ) in presidential democracies reflects an effort to connect with the electoral constituency to advance the legislator's career. We postulate six hypotheses on the association between party affiliation, career advancement and district-level incentives and the issuance of PQs in Chile's presidential multiparty democracy. We test them using a novel dataset containing 68,424 inquiries (oficios legislativos) issued by Chamber of Deputies legislators in three legislative terms (2006–2018). Though district-level variables play a role in the issuance of PQs, incentives of political ambition do not. As opposition coalition legislators make more use of PQs than ruling coalition legislators, there is preliminary evidence to associate PQs with a possible oversight role.

The number of grassroots members of populist radical right (PRR) parties is on the rise, in contrast to the trend of membership decline in mainstream parties. While scholars have explained this by studying PRR parties' organizational strategies, I focus on party members and ask: Why do people join PRR parties? To answer this, I look not only at motivations, which is the dominant framework in party membership studies, but also at triggers – factors activating those motivations. Drawing on collective action scholarship, I argue that grievances and efficacy can work as triggers for joining PRR parties. Using interviews with 82 members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the League in Italy and the Sweden Democrats, I uncover three elements in the path to PRR party membership: disaffection, affiliation and action. As well as questioning established narratives on why citizens join parties, my findings provide a novel theoretical framework to investigate this form of political participation.

The vast majority of sub-Saharan countries have adopted constitutional clauses establishing that elected presidents cannot serve more than two mandates. While an extensive literature has examined why African leaders comply with or else try to manipulate term limits, the policy implications of the latter remain unexplored. Existing studies of other world regions suggest that setting a maximum number of terms presidents can serve tends to make them ‘lame ducks’ during their final mandate. We reconsider this argument, and posit and demonstrate empirically that constitutional limits can actually induce positive effects on second-term presidents' actions compared to their first terms. More specifically, the absence of electoral pressures, the concern for their post-presidential future and legacy-building motivations may lead to improvements in the rule of law, especially regarding the functioning of the judiciary. This article represents the first empirical investigation of the performance of Africa's second-term lame-duck presidents.

While far-right parties tend to receive a small minority of votes in national elections, their presence in ruling coalitions is becoming much more common. In this article, I ask under what conditions mainstream parties are willing and interested in forming a coalition with a far-right party, given the potentially high costs associated with having such a partner in government. I characterize such moves as the co-optation of a growing political rival in an effort to minimize electoral threat. That is, as far-right parties become more threatening to the electoral success of a mainstream party, they will invite the party into their government, in an effort to stave off said threat. This characterization borrows from the literature of authoritarian co-optation to build on our current understanding of parliamentary coalition-building. Quantitative analysis utilizing cross-national, survey and spatial data is employed to support this theory.