This article makes the case for a novel democratic subtype, populist democracy, indicating a situation in which both the party in office and at least the major opposition force(s) in a pluralist system are populist. Based on a minimal definition of populism as ‘democratic illiberalism’, and through the comparative analysis of post-authoritarian Greece and post-communist Hungary, the article reveals the particular stages, as well as the causal mechanisms, that may prompt the emergence of populist democracy in contemporary politics. It also points to the tendency of such systems to produce polarized two-party systems, and it calls for further research on the topic.

The persistence of subnational undemocratic regimes in new democracies has recently revived interest in intra-national patterns of democratization. This article offers new data and a methodological contribution to this literature, emphasizing the measurement of institutional variation across territorial units and levels of government. Developing new measures of the unevenness of democratic institutions within individual countries, and illustrating these measures with an original data set on electoral rules in Mexico at the federal level and across 32 subnational units, we provide tools to enhance the study of democracy, particularly at the subnational level and in federal or decentralized systems. More specifically, we develop measures of institutional characteristics across a country's spatial units and of federal-to-state institutional dissimilarity – what we call system-wide institutional incongruence.

External actors engaged in peace building often induce domestic elites to share power. This article explores the effectiveness of external incentives in establishing, maintaining or reforming power-sharing. Adopting a rationalist approach to socialization, the research investigates the strategic interaction between external and internal actors in two cases of contemporary power-sharing: Northern Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina. External incentives will probably be more effective when they uphold a peace agreement that satisfies groups’ structural preferences on constitutional issues. External incentives can, under certain conditions, lead to internalization and the potential ‘habitualization’ of power-sharing as norm-conforming behaviour. The strategy of external actors will be less effective when their socialization efforts are inconsistent and coercive, viewed as threatening to one or more of the contending groups.

Slovenia stands out as the only post-communist country to have established a corporatist system and centralized wage bargaining at the national level in the 1990s. This article analyses the emergence and sustainability of Slovenian corporatism as well as the ways in which it has shaped policymaking during the economic crisis. Drawing on recent advances in institutional analysis, this article develops a coalitional argument to account for the emergence of centralized wage bargaining in the 1990s and for decentralization in more recent years.

While the literature on directly elected mayors has largely neglected the relationship between mayors and their parties, studies of party transformation have generally ignored how changes in local democratic rules and practices affect parties. This article addresses these questions using a qualitative case study of the relationship between mayors and the three faces of their parties (in local public office, local central office and on the ground) in Genoa and Lausanne. Based on interviews with the mayors, elected representatives and party members, it finds in the two cases that, as long as these mayors can count on high levels of popularity and are not nearing the end of their term, they are ‘party detached’. When these factors do not apply and/or party institutionalization increases, the relationship with the party in local central office (although not with the party in local public office or on the ground) becomes more significant.