This study maps the general lines of semi-presidential research with regard to theory, topics and methods. It identifies research gaps and provides recommendations for future studies. The review includes a general screening of 327 publications covering the period 1970–2015, and a close reading of sixty-five selected publications. The findings suggest that the inconsistent use of regime type definitions has limited the possibilities for generalizations. The study tracks the influence of some seminal articles, as well as the recent trend of focusing on the role and powers of the president. The article calls for more studies beyond Europe, and suggests that the field would benefit from including Historical and Normative Institutionalism. Finally, it suggests the need for studies on public administration that are relevant to the functioning of semi-presidential government.

Some presidents facing term limits attempt – often successfully – to scrap tenure restrictions, while others step down when constitutionally required. Whether democratic, partly democratic or non-democratic, there is considerable variation among electoral regimes as to whether presidents respect term limits. This article focuses on what is at stake for a president required to leave the highest political office. It argues that for a given level of executive constraints, the value of holding political office in polities with large public sectors and prevalent corruption, combined with the probability of retaining assets and immunity after leaving office, influences whether presidents attempt to overstay their tenure.

During the Great Recession, governments across the continent implemented austerity policies. A large literature claims that such policies are surprisingly popular and have few electoral costs. This article revisits this question by studying the popularity of governments during the economic crisis. The authors assemble a pooled time-series data set for monthly support for ruling parties from fifteen European countries and treat austerity packages as intervention variables to the underlying popularity series. Using time-series analysis, this permits the careful tracking of the impact of austerity packages over time. The main empirical contributions are twofold. First, the study shows that, on average, austerity packages hurt incumbent parties in opinion polls. Secondly, it demonstrates that the magnitude of this electoral punishment is contingent on the economic and political context: in instances of rising unemployment, the involvement of external creditors and high protest intensity, the cumulative impact of austerity on government popularity becomes considerable.

Data has been taken from the Hungarian National Assembly, where the mandate type (single member district (SMD) vs. party list or proportional representation (PR)) changes for a number of legislators each term, to explore whether and how such changes lead to changes in legislators’ voting behavior. When the electoral system under which a legislator was elected changes from PR to SMD, then the rate at which the legislator defects against the party line of voting increases significantly. Contrary to expectations, when the electoral system changes from SMD to PR, there is no significant change in the voting behavior of legislators. Additional robustness tests confirm these results. The lasting influence of reputations and habits may account for the asymmetric results.

This article extends theoretical arguments regarding the impact of economic globalization on policy making to electoral turnout and considers how distinct dimensions of globalization may produce different effects. It theorizes that constraints on government policy that reduce incentives to vote are more likely to be induced by foreign ownership of capital, while compensation through increased government spending is more likely (if at all) to be the product of structural shifts in production associated with international trade. Using data from twenty-three OECD countries from 1970–2007, the study finds strong support for the ownership-constraint hypothesis in which foreign ownership reduces turnout, both directly and – in strict opposition to the compensation hypothesis – indirectly by reducing government spending (and thus the importance of politics). The results suggest that increased foreign ownership, especially the most mobile capital flows, can explain up to two-thirds of the large declines in turnout over recent decades.

Scholars seeking to understand political competition in Europe have proposed various models of political dimensionality. While most scholars draw on data from the supply side of politics (political parties), demand-side (voter) studies remain few. In this article we compare the two approaches. The main difference is that while supply-side approaches suggest a single model of dimensionality that can be applied to all EU countries, demand-side approaches suggest a greater degree of divergence. In particular, the bundle of issues commonly identified by supply-side studies as TAN/GAL not only fail to form a coherent dimension when viewed from a demand-side perspective, but incorporate issues of EU integration in some (northern European) cases, but not in others.

The distinguishing features of recent electoral politics in Wales have been the continued predominance of the Labour party and the failure of the nationalist party, Plaid Cymru. Since 1945 Labour has taken between twenty-one and thirty-two of the thirty-six seats at each general election and not less than 47 per cent of the vote. There has been some weakening of Labour's position since the high point of 60·6 per cent in 1966, but the party still secured 46·9 per cent of the vote in 1979, and rode out the Conservative victory in Britain as a whole with the loss of only two seats in Wales. Some variation in the Labour vote can be explained in terms of general shifts in British politics. However the enduring weight of Labour support in Wales in unpropitious times requires further explanation.

The objective of this study is to assess and compare the relative impact of issues and the economy on the vote in democratic elections. There is a rich and vast literature dealing with issue voting and an equally impressive literature concerning economic voting. For the most part, however, these amount to two separate streams of research. Relatively little attention has been paid to where these literatures overlap and less still to the simple but basic question: which matters most, the issues or the economy?

The main debate in the issue voting literature recently has been between the directional and proximity models. That debate, engaging both technical and conceptual issues, has focused entirely on how issues play in an election, whether voters prefer the party that is closest to their own position or the party that is the strongest defender of their side on an issue. The question of how much issues affect the vote, however, has been neglected. Indeed, both the proximity and directional schools implicitly agree that issues matter, and so challenge the Michigan school's strong scepticism on the import of issues. Given that the difference between the two models is often quite small, a more fruitful line of investigation might be to return to the equally fundamental ‘how much’ question.

Political cleavages are often understood as deriving from either deep-rooted social divisions or institutional incentives. Contemporary Northern Ireland provides a test of the mutability of apparently entrenched cleavages to institutional change. Research undertaken before the ceasefire in the 1990s found noticeable asymmetries in the patterns of cleavage within the unionist and nationalist blocs. Within the unionist bloc, economic ‘left–right’ issues formed the main ideological division between the two major unionist parties. This contrasted with an ethno-national source of ideological division between the two nationalist parties. However, the emergence of a consociational form of government structure since then has demonstrated the ability of institutional incentives to reform some aspects of party competition swiftly. As evidence of this, we show that between 1989 and 2004 there was little change in the sources of support for Sinn Féin relative to the SDLP, but the influence of left–right ideology within the unionist bloc was negated as the influence of ethno-nationalism dramatically increased.

Previous research suggests media attention may increase support for populist right-wing parties, but extant evidence is mostly limited to proportional representation systems in which such an effect would be most likely. At the same time, in the United Kingdom’s first-past-the-post system, an ongoing political and regulatory debate revolves around whether the media give disproportionate coverage to the populist right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP). This study uses a mixed-methods research design to investigate the causal dynamics of UKIP support and media coverage as an especially valuable case. Vector autoregression, using monthly, aggregate time-series data from January 2004 to April 2017, provides new evidence consistent with a model in which media coverage drives party support, but not vice versa. The article identifies key periods in which stagnating or declining support for UKIP is followed by increases in media coverage and subsequent increases in public support. The findings show that media coverage may drive public support for right-wing populist parties in a substantively non-trivial fashion that is irreducible to previous levels of public support, even in a national institutional environment least supportive of such an effect. The findings have implications for political debates in the UK and potentially other liberal democracies.

While interest groups are consulted at different stages of policy making to provide expertise and legitimacy, their influence is often criticized as being undemocratic. Yet, we know little about how their participation in policy making affects citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of governance. Based on survey experiments conducted in the UK, the United States and Germany, our study shows that unequal participation between group types reduces the benefits of interest group consultation for citizens' perceived legitimacy of decision-making processes. Importantly, these legitimacy losses cannot be compensated for by policies that represent the opinion of the under-represented groups and are even greater when policy decisions favour the over-represented groups. Moreover, we show that citizen perceptions of how economically powerful and representative of society different types of interest groups are act as important drivers of legitimacy evaluations. Our results provide important new theoretical and empirical insights into when and why interest groups affect democratic legitimacy.

Dunleavy's bureau-shaping model has breathed new life into existing debates about the behaviour of senior bureaucrats. This article assesses the utility of this model as an explanation of the development of Next Step agencies in the last decade in Britain, using data drawn from a series of extensive interviews with senior civil servants. Our conclusion is that, although the bureau-shaping model represents a significant advance on previous models of bureaucratic behaviour that stress budget maximization, it is flawed. In particular, we argue that: it pays insufficient attention to the broader political context within which civil servants operate; mis-specifies bureaucrats' preferences; and oversimplifies the distinction between managerial and policy advice work. More specifically, we suggest that any explanation of the development of Next Steps agencies needs to recognize that: politicians rather that civil servants played the major role in their creation; the strategic calculations of bureaucrats were significantly more sophisticated than the model assumes; and the consequence of the reforms has been that senior civil servants have played a greater, rather than a more limited, management role.

This paper attempts to survey the present state of what I have called ‘mathematical political theory’. In a strict sense of theory’, this happens to be roughly coextensive with ‘political theory’, but the addition of the word ‘mathematical’ seems necessary (for the time being) to avoid confusion with the other usages of ‘political theory’: the exegesis of the outstanding political philosophers of the past is certainly not political theory; nor is most of what is now called ‘empirical political theory’. However, the scope of the survey is widened in a few places to include some related studies which, although they are not mathematical, are nevertheless ‘analytical’.

Though ordinary Russians have embraced many aspects of democratic culture, their learning to tolerate their political enemies has been the most difficult democratic lesson for many. In this article, I analyse change in political tolerance in Russia, using panel data I collected in 1996 and 1998 in a nationally representative sample of Russians. Two bodies of theory are considered to generate hypotheses about change: the conventional cross-sectional model of the aetiology of tolerance; and experiential theory, based on perceptions of the performance of both the economic and political systems. The dynamic character of the model is provided by perceptions of the performance of the economy, of the political system and of the seriousness of the crime problem in Russia. Many of my findings are unexpected. For instance, tolerance seems to beget tolerance, in the sense that, over time, those who are tolerant tend to perceive diminishing threats from their political enemies. Yet threat perceptions are sustained by perceptions of the political and economic conditions in contemporary Russia. Perceptions of the change in crime are especially important since they seem to exacerbate perceptions of political threat, thereby eroding both political tolerance and support for democratic institutions and process. Paradoxically, threat is also sustained by democratic values – those who support democratic institutions and processes are more likely to perceive threats from their political enemies, a finding peculiar to the unsettled Russian case. Thus, this analysis goes some distance towards discovering the causes of changes in both Russian tolerance and intolerance.

An ‘analytic narrative’ is the presentation of crucial historical events, using the intuitions of rational choice theory, to clarify the motivations and beliefs of the principal actors. This article attempts to understand a dilemma embedded in the Declaration of Independence: the expected costs of war against Britain far exceeded any possible benefits, if these are construed simply as the removal of colonial taxation. Furthermore, war against Britain necessitated an alliance with a potential aggressive power, France. An analysis is presented indicating that the benefits also included the enormous reward of the west and the ‘costs’ incorporated possible future aggression by France and Spain. The narrative is extended to the Ratification of the Constitution in 1787, to suggest that the Federalists, and Madison, justifiably feared Spanish aggression in the Mississippi Valley. In the 1790s, consensus (about credible threats by the European powers) fragmented, and this led to entirely different policy preferences by Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans. Napoleon's imperial intentions in Louisiana were, however, thwarted by the defeat of the French forces in Haiti in 1802–03. The result was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803–04.While the necessary causes of these various constitutional transformations can be appreciated, there appears to be an element of contingency, or happenstance, embedded in the sufficient causes. The purpose of the exercise is to attempt to understand the possibly chaotic basis of rapid institutional change.

Government formation in multiparty systems is of self-evident substantive importance, and the subject of an enormous theoretical literature. Empirical evaluations of models of government formation tend to separate government formation per se from the distribution of key government pay-offs, such as cabinet portfolios, between members of the resulting government. Models of government formation are necessarily specified ex ante, absent any knowledge of the government that forms. Models of the distribution of cabinet portfolios are typically, though not necessarily, specified ex post, taking into account knowledge of the identity of some government ‘formateur’ or even of the composition of the eventual cabinet. This disjunction lies at the heart of a notorious contradiction between predictions of the distribution of cabinet portfolios made by canonical models of legislative bargaining and the robust empirical regularity of proportional portfolio allocations – Gamson’s Law. This article resolves this contradiction by specifying and estimating a joint model of cabinet formation and portfolio distribution that, for example, predicts ex ante which parties will receive zero portfolios rather than taking this as given ex post. It concludes that canonical models of legislative bargaining do increase the ability to predict government membership, but that portfolio distribution between government members conforms robustly to a proportionality norm because portfolio distribution follows the much more difficult process of policy bargaining in the typical government formation process.

Contemporary US Supreme Court nominations are unavoidably and inevitably political. Although observers worry that political contestation over nominations undermines support for qualified nominees and threatens the Court's legitimacy, there is little empirical evidence to support these claims. The authors argue that political contestation over judicial nominations provides cues that shape the public's impressions about nominees and the Court and polarizes public opinion across partisan lines. Data from a conjoint experiment administered in the first days of the Trump presidency support this argument. Political rhetoric attributed to President Trump and Senate Democrats substantially polarized partisans’ views of nominees and evaluations of the Court's legitimacy, with Republicans (Democrats) expressing significantly more (less) favorable attitudes. Additional analyses suggest that contestation generates divergent partisan responses by affecting views about the nominee's impartiality. These findings challenge existing perspectives that depict attitudes toward the judiciary as resistant to partisan considerations and have important implications for the Court's legitimacy in a polarized era.

While concerns about the public's receptivity to factual information are widespread, much less attention has been paid to the factual receptivity, or lack thereof, of elected officials. Recent survey research has made clear that US legislators and legislative staff systematically misperceive their constituents' opinions on salient public policies. This study reports the results from two field experiments designed to correct misperceptions of sitting US legislators. The legislators (n = 2,346) were invited to access a dashboard of constituent opinion generated using the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Despite extensive outreach efforts, only 11 per cent accessed the information in Study 1 and only 2.3 per cent did so in Study 2. More troubling for democratic norms, legislators who accessed constituent opinion data were no more accurate at perceiving their constituents' opinions. The findings underscore the challenges confronting efforts to improve the accuracy of elected officials' perceptions and suggest that elected officials may indeed resist factual information.

Does increasing economic globalization influence aggregate policy mood toward the role and size of government in the United States? Drawing on insights from international political economy scholarship, this article suggests that the impact of trade on aggregate preferences will depend on citizens’ exposure to trade. It hypothesizes that employees of import-competing, export-oriented and multinational firms will adopt a ‘compensatory’ model in which higher levels of imports (exports) lead to a liberal (conservative) shift in policy preferences for more (less) government. It distinguishes between intrafirm and non-intrafirm trade flows. It measures policy mood using Stimson's ‘Mood’, and estimates Error Correction and Instrumental Variable models. Trade flows strongly influence Mood in a manner consistent with hypotheses drawn from international political economy and heterogeneous firms (or ‘new new’) trade theory.