In 2005, after the making of the Constitution of Iraq and the making of Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement, many analysts expected the imminent break-up of Iraq, and that the South Sudanese would eventually opt for federalism and power-sharing rather than secede from Sudan. Six remarkable parallels in the histories of Iraq and Sudan suggest that analysts should have predicted that the Kurds and the South Sudanese would have been equally ardent secessionists in the early twenty-first century. Yet Kurdish nationalist leaders chose federalization in and after 2005, whereas South Sudanese nationalists eventually chose secession after a brief federal power-sharing experiment. The different choices of the respective nationalist leaders were therefore critical, but some plausible explanations of their different choices do not withstand scrutiny. The differing outcomes, so far, are necessarily but not sufficiently explained by the different geopolitical neighbourhoods of Iraq and Sudan. The author suggests that secessions are also driven by political parties who are willing to downsize their state rather than modify the existing regime, and by nationalists who calculate that they are unlikely to have political pivotality in a federal democracy. One implication is that federal power-sharing bargains have a better chance of working in deeply divided places when potential secessionists believe that they may have political pivotality within a federation.

Compromise is routinely evoked in everyday language and in scholarly debates across the social sciences. Yet, it has been subjected to relatively little systematic study. The introduction to this inter-disciplinary volume addresses the research gap in three steps. First, we offer three reasons for the study of compromise: its empirical omnipresence in politics, its theoretical potential to bridge the rationalist-constructivist divide, and its normative promise to recognize the plurality of society. Second, we introduce different approaches to the coherence, legitimacy and limits of compromise found in the existing explanatory and normative literatures. We discuss why these literatures need to speak to one another, and identify possible applications in empirical research. Third, we conceptualize compromise as one possible solution to a conflict. Distinct from both dissensus and consensus, all compromises share three characteristics: concessions, non-coercion and continued controversy. However, different types of compromise can be distinguished by how mutual, costly and painful concessions are; by whether all forms of coercion are absent; and by the degree to which the relevant parties’ grounds for conflict are transformed. We conclude by discussing the challenge and appeal of ‘politics as compromise’ in plural and complex societies.

This paper investigates the effects of the global economic crisis (GEC) on political change. A number of emerging European economies have experienced political turnover, but in other emerging and transition economies, government turnover and regime change have been comparatively rare. Two factors – incumbent governments' responsibility for the current crisis and their responsiveness to its domestic economic effects – shape the political effects of the GEC. Outside Europe, most emerging economies have experienced this crisis as an external shock to trade and investment rather than a domestic financial crisis. As a consequence, their governments have experienced less severe economic contractions, and have been able credibly to portray themselves as victims of, rather than causes of, the economic difficulties that they currently face. By placing political turnover in emerging Europe in comparative perspective, this argument provides a new perspective on the consequences of economic integration on national politics for emerging economies around the world.

In mid-2011, it certainly looks as if England does not love coalitions, or at any rate the coalition that is governing it. The phrase was coined by Benjamin Disraeli in 1852. This article begins with the context in which Disraeli spoke, then gradually broadens its scope from England to the UK to the set of advanced democracies. Modern political economy has a great deal to say on the subject of coalitions. In conclusion we return to the prospects for future coalitions and minority governments in the UK.

This article provides a social psychological analysis of the neglected issue of ‘intergroup compromise’. We discuss the factors that promote respondents' willingness to compromise with two very different outgroups. We present a framework in which altruistic motivations (such as empathy) and egoistic motivations (such as trust and symbolic threat) act as proximal predictors of compromise, with intergroup contact as a distal predictor. We found that respondents who had more positive contact with homosexuals perceived them to be less threatening, and felt more empathy towards them, and in turn, were more likely to compromise with them on group-specific issues (controlling for the general tendency to compromise). We also found that respondents who had more negative contact with Muslims perceived them to be more threatening, and in turn, were less likely to compromise with them. We discuss these results with reference to recent developments in intergroup relations and the state of public discourse in contemporary Britain, examine their implications for intergroup relations in pluralistic contexts, and make suggestions for future research on willingness to compromise with outgroups.

Policy transfer has become a crucial aspect of the contemporary world of policy-making. However, the relationship between the actual process of policy transfer and the ‘success’ of policy outcomes generated by that transfer is an under-researched area. This article addresses the following key question: what factors affect the success, or otherwise, of policy transfer? This question is explored using a putatively successful case of policy transfer, the Gateway Review process between 2001 and 2010, focusing particularly on three of the early transfers of this process from the UK to Victoria and then to the Commonwealth level and New South Wales in Australia.

Under what conditions and to what extent do external officeholders in parliamentary democracies constrain the cabinet's freedom of action? The article argues that we must analyse both institutional powers and officeholders’ incentives to use them to obtain an unbiased estimate of the expected constraint. It measures the incentives dimension via the selection method of external officeholders and develops an index to capture the likelihood that such officeholders hold preferences deviant from those of the cabinet. Analysing original data on four external constraint institutions in 25 European democracies, the article shows major variation in the incentives to constrain the cabinet across both offices and countries. Furthermore, it demonstrates that institutional powers and incentives for their use are empirically largely independent dimensions.

Can extremist parties benefit from a backlash against European Union integration? A theoretical model that integrates demand-side, supply-side and political opportunity space explanations for extremist party success is used here in an effort to predict the conditions under which extremist parties may have utilized increased public discontent with EU integration to increase their vote share in national legislative elections. The plausibility of the model is then tested against the evidence in 14 EU member states from 1992 to 2006, with the use of matrices and political opportunity space maps. In the majority of the elections examined, extremist parties increased their vote share in circumstances fitting the theoretical model.

Can conservatives be feminists? This article examines the issue by exploring the case of the British Conservative Party, drawing on a new survey of party members. Under David Cameron's leadership, reforms have been made to the party's parliamentary selection procedures and distinct women's policies developed, thus addressing both the descriptive and substantive representation of women. We examine party members' attitudes towards three types of gender issue: basic orientations towards gender roles and relations; specific policy measures relevant to the substantive representation of women; and the descriptive representation of women. Detailed empirical analysis reveals that there is significant support for progressive liberal feminist positions on each of these dimensions in the party, and that sex, age and basic ideological dispositions drive such attitudes to varying degrees. Even so, support for a liberal feminist position on the descriptive representation of women – that is, the aspect of gender politics where the leadership has been most active – remains on the whole quite limited.

Many of the violent conflicts of the post-Cold War period have involved peoples who have historically been victims of interstate politics. Compromise is highly problematic in contexts of this kind, given that sovereign powers tend to attach the label ‘terrorism’ to acts of resistance and the resistance tends to claim an experience of injustice. Given a situation where compromise is seen by actors on both sides to be impossible, how would anything other than a ‘rotten compromise’ be possible? The article develops a framework called the Warden's Dilemma which is then put to use in the empirical exploration of two historical cases: the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland in 1980–81 and the martyrdom of Polish Solidarity's priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, a few years later.

In the 2010 Swedish general elections the nationalist party Sverigedemokraterna (SD) crossed the threshold and entered parliament. The other parties in parliament reacted with strong antagonism; the mainstreaming of the ‘radical right’ had finally come to Sweden. This article analyses the media coverage of the SD following the 2006 elections, when it emerged as a high-profile party in the public arena. The presence of the SD in Swedish politics encourages both SD allies and opponents to emphasize their views on what constitutes social cohesion in Sweden. We see the public debate surrounding the SD as a rhetorical struggle between different nationalist claims.

This article aims to start filling a gap in contemporary research on the rotating EU presidencies. In particular, the article pays attention to the role played by domestic factors in the development and fate of EU presidencies. What is the level of conflict between the government and the opposition during EU presidencies? This question is central for us and we address it through an in-depth analysis of one single case, Sweden, through a comparative examination of the role that domestic politics played in the Swedish EU presidencies of 2001 and 2009. In conjunction with our four main explanations for the varying degrees of political conflict during EU presidencies we present four hypotheses that could be advanced in the comparative study of EU presidencies.

The aim of this article is to determine the EU's effect on British–Irish and Greek–Turkish cooperation. It examines the EU's actual and potential role in fostering British–Irish and Greek–Turkish cooperation as well as its policies to Northern Ireland and Cyprus themselves. Domestic bureaucratic capacity and institutional design are put forward as explanations for the success of the British–Irish relationship rather than EU membership per se. In the case of Cyprus, the article suggests that increased bilateral cooperation with respect to disputed territory is unlikely to occur in the absence of faster bureaucratic change in both Greece and Turkey. EU membership is not a causal factor in the evolution of cooperation and conflict resolution.

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.

How do actors, once they have reached agreement on a compromise, make this compromise persist? Being rooted in mutual concessions, it can never be taken for granted that compromises, once agreed upon, stay in place. Contestation about compliance is something that is very much to be expected and does not inevitably destabilize a compromise. Whether such a destabilization occurs or not depends on how actors communicate with one another. I contend that whether compromise persists or not has a great deal to do with the interplay of offensive and defensive rhetorical strategies that actors employ. I identify six offensive strategies (recourse, elaboration, entrapment, accusation, ostracism, abandonment) and six defensive ones (accommodation, placation, denial, deflection, inattentiveness, rejection), and chart the degrees to which offensive–defensive exchanges of strategies are conducive to reproducing compromises. Recourse–accommodation interplays on the one hand (most conducive) and abandonment–rejection interplays on the other (least conducive) form the poles of the spectrum of exchanges. I probe my theoretical framework by inquiring into the stability of the grand compromise that underpins the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The findings support my framework. The parties have tended to stay away from heavy rhetorical artillery and stuck to less robust rhetorical strategies. Elaboration and placation strategies have played a particularly important role for making the grand compromise persist.

Besides systemic changes that lead to the re-prioritization of foreign policy objectives, foreign policy change is also a result of domestic policy entrepreneurs’ pursuit of a political return. Their potential to orchestrate change depends on the existing entry barriers that emanate from the political and institutional features of the domestic policy-making process. It is accentuated by system-wide developments and security crises that illustrate old policy failure. This article discusses the role of policy entrepreneurs in foreign policy change by reference to the Greek–Turkish rapprochement in the late 1990s that resulted in Turkey receiving the status of EU candidate country in 1999.

Two attempts at grand compromise have underpinned global order since the end of the Second World War. The first, a compromise between laissez-faire liberalism and domestic interventionism, famously described by John Ruggie as ‘embedded liberalism’, legitimated and stabilized a multilateral order for 50 years. A second attempt, this time between North and South at the end of the Cold War around a discourse of ‘sustainable development’, remains uneasy, conflict prone and much less institutionalized. They are compared and contrasted by asking whether they are truly compromises or reflect domination and hegemony, what conditions led to them, and what drivers of change have limited and challenged them. Ultimately, differences in their bases of legitimacy offer lessons for the prospects of building a new grand compromise in the wake of contemporary strains on global governance.

This study uses the case study of a ‘transitioning’ country, Turkey, in exploring institutional endurance and change. In this context it uses the framework of Arend Lijphart's majority and consensus democracy in order to uncover patterns of institutional evolution and persistence which have implications for the nature of its democratic transition. This is achieved through a step-by-step exploration of the key dimensions of democracy discussed by Lijphart. This empirical study seeks to demonstrate that despite the introduction of anti-majoritarian institutions in 1961, Turkey has never consolidated consensus democracy. Instead, since 1982 the trend has been a move towards a system more in line with the majoritarian regime established under the 1924 constitution. As such, the study offers a useful case study of the dynamics of political transformation in the face of institutional persistence, suggesting a need for tracing the history if we are to identify institutional patterns in contrast to the more generalized democratization frameworks.

Analysis of political regionalism and regionalist parties has traditionally neglected the case of Germany. We argue that this is a curious ommission. This article looks to redress this balance by applying frameworks created for understanding the determinants of regionalist party success to the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) and the eastern Germany Party of Democratic Socialism (1990–2005, PDS). Although very different in terms of their politics, both parties have been successful as they have followed strategies and tactics evident in the broader regionalist parties' literature. This article therefore deepens our knowledge of regionalism in Germany, while also testing regionalist literatures in a new country-context.