How do political parties react organizationally when the competitive context changes? Are all parties equally accustomed to adapting? In recent decades, the emergence of an electorally volatile and publicity-oriented style of politics has pushed Western parties to replace member-centred mass organizations with centralized ‘media agencies’. However, as has long been speculated, parties’ ‘genetic’ heritage may condition their adaptive capacity and threaten their competitiveness. This study presents the first comprehensive quantitative test of the impact of party ‘genetics’ on the ease of parties’ organizational professionalization in the cartel party era (1983–2018). It utilizes uniquely fine-grained time-series data on the financial and staff resources of central party offices to compare the adaptive processes of two ‘genetically’ distinct major Finnish parties – a social democratic mass party and a conservative cadre party. The study finds that although both parties have professionalized under strong external pressure, the ‘genetically’ election-driven cadre party case adapted much faster, and the member-oriented mass party case continues to invest much more in its membership organization.

A large body of scholarship shows that autocrats can use corruption strategically to strengthen their political hold, such as by distributing rents to their supporters. However, this scholarship often overlooks how corruption may also politically damage autocrats. I argue that corruption often brings substantial political costs alongside its advantages, resulting in a ‘corruption dilemma’ for autocrats. I show that in recent years, public anger over corruption has led to numerous anti-government protests and has been a major cause of autocrats being ousted from power. How politically costly corruption is depends on factors such as the public's tolerance for corruption, whether the autocrat is accountable to quasi-democratic institutions and whether the autocrat can credibly claim to be fighting corruption. The case of Malaysia illustrates how relying on corrupt practices to stay in power can backfire even in a long-standing authoritarian regime. My analysis advances our understanding of corruption's mixed role in authoritarian durability and authoritarian strategies of rule.

We examine the performance of four parliamentary democracies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK – as they confront the need for a substantial fiscal policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research covers the period 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2020. We score the four countries on nine components of democratic accountability using Mark Philp's distinction between formal and political accountability. We conclude, first, that to appreciate the nuanced character of accountability, it is important to have a set of operational measures that identify specific aspects of performance. Second, preparation is important for resilience: countries that demonstrated strong accountability before the pandemic maintained relatively high accountability standards during the crisis; weaker accountability mechanisms showed less resistance to the expanding power of the executive. Finally, it is easier to be accountable when outcomes are favourable, but favourable outcomes include adherence to the norms of democratic accountability.

Is legislative power flowing to the executive branch over time? Beginning in the 1990s, comparativists began to investigate delegation to the executive under different executive formats. Hypothesized causes include collective action problems due to legislative fractionalization, the presence of a dominant pro-executive faction, preference congruence vis-à-vis the head of government, and challenges posed by economic crises. We test these four hypotheses on a data set containing 2,020 country-year observations of democracies and semi-democracies between 1976 and 2014. Using V-Dem data, we derive annualized measures of shifts in executive–legislative relationships. Contrary to stereotypes of executive dominance, relative gains by legislatures are no less frequent than gains by executives, and economic crises do not advantage political executives in consistent ways. Surprisingly, some of the factors expected to benefit executives seem to enhance assembly authority as well. Robust democracy maintains interbranch power relations in equilibrium, while lower levels of polyarchy are associated with greater ‘noise’ in the relationship.

As they become more successful, populist radical right parties face a tension between keeping their nativist credentials and moderating their appeal to gain new voters. We argue that differentiating party messages to core supporters and the wider electorate allows parties to pursue both goals. We outline and empirically illustrate the previously underexplored phenomenon of selective messaging based on the communication strategy of the Hungarian Jobbik party throughout its lifespan (2006–19) in partisan outlets, press releases and Facebook. Using a dictionary approach, we map the co-evolution of populist and nativist mobilization under conditions of supply- and demand-side changes. Our results show the decline and transformation of Jobbik's nativist appeal, and an increasing reliance on populism. The trend is not uniform; Jobbik relies on nativism as a function of targeting party identifiers or the general electorate in specific media outlets. Our findings show the importance of mapping parties’ programmatic appeal across platforms and over time.

This article develops a theory to account for the variation in electoral systems in electoral authoritarian regimes. We argue that resource-rich dictators are incentivized to employ proportional representation systems to alleviate the threat from the masses and pre-empt the emergence of new opposition, while resource-poor dictators tend to choose majoritarian systems to co-opt ruling elites in the legislature. Using cross-national data on electoral authoritarian regimes, we find strong empirical evidence supporting our theory. We also explicitly illustrate the causal links between natural resources and electoral systems with additional statistical analyses and comparative case studies on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

The appointment of committee chairs to monitor the actions of ministers belonging to coalition partners has received considerably less attention than other mechanisms of policing the coalition agreement at executive or legislative level. We take a longitudinal perspective focusing on 11 Belgian cabinets (1980–2018) to study the determinants of such appointments and whether there is a substitution effect between shadow chairs, junior ministers and coalition agreements. Our findings indicate that the probability of appointing a shadow committee chair is higher when the ideological distance between the minister's party and the coalition is larger. Other key findings are that ministers facing hostile junior ministers tend to be shadowed by committee chairs as well, while shadow chairs are also more frequent in minimum winning coalitions.

Coalition governments prevail at the European subnational level. Although some studies explain the formation of subnational government coalitions, we know little about the determinants of individual parties' likelihood of joining such coalitions. This article aims to fill this gap in empirical and theoretical ways. It shows that an important institutional constraint matters for political actors' strategies when forming subnational coalitions: the party affiliation of the directly elected head of the executive. Being the party of the head of the executive or being ideologically close to that party significantly increases a party's likelihood of joining a coalition. The empirical evidence results from multinomial choice models using a novel data set on subnational parties' likelihood of joining 92 coalition governments at the local level in Germany between 1999 and 2016. The findings have substantive implications for subnational institutional settings resembling ‘mixed’ political systems (i.e. neither purely presidential nor purely parliamentarian).

Right-wing populists across Western democracies have markedly increased references to Christianity in recent years. While there is much debate about how and why they have done so, less attention has been paid to how Christian communities react to this development. The present study addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of Christian responses to right-wing populist politics in Germany, France and the US. It relies on quantitative studies, survey data and the qualitative analysis of 39 in-depth interviews with right-wing populist leaders, mainstream party politicians and church officials. The findings of this analysis suggest a potential ‘religious vaccination effect’ among Christian voters against right-wing populism but underline its connection to elite actor behaviour. Specifically, the availability of a ‘Christian alternative’ in the party system, as well as religious leaders’ willingness and ability to create a social taboo around the populist right seem critically to impact religious immunity to populism.

While there are some signs of revitalization, social democracy has witnessed a deep electoral crisis over the last decades. The causes for the decline of social democratic parties are highly contested among researchers. This article provides a systematic review of the literature which spans several fields such as party politics, political sociology and political economy. Four kinds of explanations (sociological, materialist, ideational and institutional) are distinguished and scrutinized on the basis of empirical studies published since 2010. The findings indicate that there is not one explanation that stands out but that the electoral crisis of social democracy is a complex phenomenon with multiple causes, such as socio-structural changes, fiscal austerity and neoliberal depolarization. In addition, the findings suggest that a liberal turn on sociocultural issues does not necessarily lead to vote losses. Further research should explore more deeply how short-term and long-term factors have worked together in the process of social democratic decline.