Chapter 2 presents the book’s main argument about how party rules shape membership. Previous literature is split in its portrayal of party members – some scholars describe members as extremist ideologues, whereas others depict them as partisan loyalists. To reconcile these competing views, Chapter 2 develops a spatial model of membership in which members receive utility from government policy and party proximity, as well as features of party membership unrelated to ideology. The model demonstrates that party rules play a pivotal role in shaping a party’s overall membership level and distribution. The model predicts that decentralized parties attract more members than centralized parties, all else equal. However, decentralized parties’ members should be more ideologically extreme than their counterparts in centralized parties.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by comparing leadership elections in the two major UK parties following the Brexit referendum. While Conservative members of parliament acted swiftly to replace their leader, Labour was unable to follow suit, leading to an unprecedented internal crisis. These divergent paths, Kernell argues, can best be explained by attention to party rules. After briefly extending the comparison to discuss party rules in several other countries, Chapter 1 summarizes the book’s core arguments and the formal model, introduces the evidence, and provides a roadmap for the rest of the book.

Chapter 5 builds on the observational findings from the previous chapter to test the hypotheses using two survey experiments performed on a sample of British Labour voters. The first experiment manipulates the selective incentives available to members by changing the cost of joining. Not surprisingly, people are more interested in joining when fees are low. The second experiment manipulates the party’s instrumental incentives by stating members can (or cannot) select party leaders and parliamentary candidates, as well as attend events where they may formally participate in determining the party’s future policy direction. The findings support the hypotheses generated by Chapter 2’s formal model: decentralization increases membership, conditional on voter-party alignment.

Although they are stable, party constitutions are not immutable. Over the past decade, parties have become increasingly decentralized – especially with respect to leadership selection. Chapter 7 concludes by assessing the implications of the book’s findings for strategically motivated party leaders contemplating institutional change. The chapter also considers similarities and differences with US primaries and discusses how decentralized structures may shape candidate quality. Kernell concludes by discussing avenues for future research, arguing party – as well as electoral – institutions should be accounted for in studies of democratic responsiveness.

Chapter 4 tests the effects of entry costs and decentralized rules on membership. After describing overall membership trends, the chapter tests the effects of party decentralization on both aggregate membership and individual enrollment. In line with the model’s predictions, the empirical analyses reveal that voters are more likely to join decentralized parties, but that this relationship is driven by the preferences of extreme voters. The chapter also examines the effects of membership fees on enrollment and employs two member surveys from Canada to investigate how individuals’ reported reasons for joining relate to their participation in various party activities.

Chapter 6 shifts the focus from individual voter behavior to party responsiveness. Where decentralized rules foster internal competition, parties should select candidates and adopt positions that are more responsive to their core supporters and less responsive to the general electorate. To test these spatial hypotheses, Kernell employs computational simulations to identify vote-maximizing positions in the electorate and finds that decentralized parties adopt less competitive positions than their centralized competitors. All else equal, the electoral advantage for a party whose leaders select candidates over one whose members play a decisive role is close to 7 percent.

Can citizens check corruption through political participation policies? What the latter might mean can be a hotly contested question: smaller government, decentralization, deregulation, and term limits for elected officials are all significant reform ideas, but none qualifies as a silver bullet and all have their potential negative consequences. Factors such as representation of women in public office, news media coverage, and levels of education can have more influence on states’ levels of corruption. Political competition and lobbying regulations are also significant influences. Controlling campaign financing is a widely supported idea, but contributions, like lobbying, enjoy First Amendment protection, and the full consequences of various contribution limits, matching funds, and candidate-subsidy schemes are difficult to anticipate. Good politics might conceivably make for better government, but what those ideas might mean in practice and how to get there are controversial issues.

Regardless of the intellectual coherence of hierocratic theory and the pope’s formal status as head of the universal Catholic Church and lynchpin of its central administration, the practical reality of papal monarchy had to reconcile that curial centralism with the logistical impossibility of exercising and enforcing direct control over all of Catholic Europe. Configured by local variables and interests, the integration of regional churches and polities within the papal network rested insecurely on a delicate balance combining delegation of authority, administrative decentralization, and local acquiescence. Incomplete subjection left space for local agency to exploit the perceived benefits of papal authority and obstruct its unwelcome intrusions. Using England as a case study, this chapter considers various manifestation of those complex ties (the activities of papal emissaries, and responses to and exploitation of the legal, fiscal, and dispensatory claims and structures), emphasizing the bottom-up perspective on medieval papal monarchy.

This chapter explores a hardy perennial – the meaning of the American Civil War – from the standpoints of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It evaluates historian David Potter’s 1968 assertion that, from an international perspective, the defeat of the American South’s bid for independent nationhood and the emancipation of enslaved Blacks, the American Civil War resulted in an unprecedented marriage of liberalism and nationalism, a union unique in the formation of nineteenth-century nation-states. This marriage not only gave liberalism a strength it might otherwise have lacked but also lent nationalism a democratic legitimacy that it may not otherwise have deserved. It also explores how the end of the Cold War and the emergence of multiple decentralizing technologies (cell phones, social media, the internet, etc.) and other polarizing forces which have raised serious questions about whether a more than 150-year-old marriage can survive the centrifugal temptations of the new century.

Chapter 12 details the economic exploits of Nigeria’s colonial government and private foreign firms and explores the responses from local economic and political forces. The extraction and exploitation of Nigeria’s natural and labor resources were the primary driving factors behind British efforts, aiming to create a lucrative territorial possession that would fit snugly into a global imperial patchwork. To do so, the colonial government and some Indigenous polities promoted the construction of expansive, colony-wide infrastructure projects and extensive investments into its extraction economy, such as the development of commercial cocoa plantations. Such efforts yielded significant economic growth, but, as this chapter details, British actors would receive the most economic gains due to the attempted monopolization of these growing industries. The integration of indirect and legal forms of discrimination would harm local economic actors and non-British foreign firms, resulting in widespread poverty and social disturbance. With the onset of World War I and the economic depressions which followed, even this imbalanced economic growth would slow. Because Britain could no longer focus as much on its colonies, Nigeria’s growing class of educated elites would slowly gain more political representation.

The final chapter brings us back to the contemporary political dilemmas we face today and discusses how the recovery of premodern conceptions of the nation helps us think through the challenge of national pluralism and resurging nationalist sentiment. It encourages openness to some virtues of empire as a multinational form of politics, considers the merits of a pluralistic political order, and suggests new avenues for cultivating democratic solidarity in diverse polities. In particular, the chapter engages with liberal multiculturalist arguments to illustrate the advantages of medieval approaches to national diversity. In place of self-government rights, the book suggests legal pluralism and policies of recognitions as more fruitful arrangements for multinational polities. Moreover, the chapter applies the insights of the study to the European Union and the United States, respectively. It concludes by responding to a number of liberal nationalist concerns, especially the need for pre-political partnership to undergird democratic politics.

Chapter 2 defines leadership and outlines a leadership approach to studying China’s politics and economy, centered on the top-ranked individuals in public-sector organizations. It explains how the autonomy of Chinese public-sector leaders originates from multiple sources: the discretion built into the CCP’s cadre management system, guanxi (关系) with superiors and allies, decentralization of authority in the Chinese bureaucracy, and policy ambiguity and uncertainty. It critically reviews recent studies of China’s politics and economy to uncover the importance and influence of leadership. It concludes by discussing how a leadership approach helps to account for divergence, inaction, and subversion in reform outcomes.

This chapter surveys the economic, cultural, and political factors that transformed the Cuban audiovisual landscape beginning in 1989, elucidating the multiple challenges tackled by filmmakers: material shortages, intermittent censorship, and a sometimes tense relationship with the official Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). The chapter demonstrates that, in this richly inventive period, films of all length and genres, drawing on multiple media and replete with Cuban versions of manga, gangsters, and zombies, not only questioned what constitutes state-sponsored, independent, national, or transnational filmmaking, but also carried out a revision of Cuban history into contemporary everyday life. Key factors illuminated include the mentoring role assumed by seasoned director Fernando Pérez; the emergence of women filmmakers for the first time since director Sara Gómez (1942–1974); the entrepreneurial deployment of new technologies; the hybridity of local, international, official, and nonofficial funding sources; the diversification of constituencies and locales represented; and the critical importance of ICAIC’s annual Muestra Joven, or Festival of Young Cuban Filmmakers.