The 1987 Constitution of Zimbabwe provided for an executive presidency elected directly by the people every six years, starting from 1990. In the 1996 presidential race, the full-blown severe impact of ESAP was destroying peoples’ lives across Zimbabwe. Electoral manipulation was utilised excessively and perpetrated blatantly, even when manipulating in this manner was not essential to winning. The 1996 election was marked by voter apathy, with only 32 per cent of the electorate participating. The main opposition parties remained moribund under an un-inspiring leadership of questionable figures like Abel Muzorewa, Ndabaningi Sithole and Edgar Tekere, and they did not consciously broaden their appeal to a wider social base. They stood little chance of dislodging the Zanu PF party from power. Civil society mobilised citizens around civic rights, human rights, and economic and women’s issues. The more prominent ones amongst them included the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), Zimbabwe Human Rights Organisation (Zimrights), the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP), the Women’s Action Group (WAG) and the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA). It was eloquent testimony to their growing strength and national credibility that some of them were able to organise a series of general strikes around both economic and political grievances.

This chapter quantifies the emergence and institutionalisation of public petitioning on an unprecedented scale in terms of the numbers of issues, petitions, and signatures. The decisive breakthrough in terms of the volume of public petitions to the House of Commons occurred in the late 1820s and was driven by a series of mighty mobilisations including anti-slavery and parliamentary reform. The chronology of petitioning in the UK followed a similar pattern as elsewhere, but the volume of public petitions to the Commons was exceptional when placed in historical and comparative context. The data demonstrates that the volume of petitions and signatures was underpinned by organised mass campaigns, but also a ‘long tail’ of petitions on small and medium-scale issues. Comparing signatures with electoral data reveals that, for most nineteenth century, more people petitioned than voted in parliamentary elections. For all the well-documented vitality of episodic election rituals, this chapter demonstrates that petitions to Parliament were the most popular, regular means of interaction between subjects and politicians for much of this period.

It has been nearly two centuries since an American presidential election has evoked a crisis of confidence like that following the election of 2016. Not since the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 has there been such a public display of anxiety concerning the methods by which we choose our chief executive. As in the contest of 1828 pitting the Democrat Jackson against his Federalist opponent John Quincy Adams, the presidential nominating process of 2016 produced a contest between a celebrity populist, widely seen as unqualified by experience or temperament, and a highly experienced and competent but deeply uninspiring political insider who had been anointed by establishment elites.

This chapter conceptualizes and classifies extremist right-wing parties by identifying their similarities to and differences from radical right-wing parties. It first produces a conceptual framework for identifying the two subgroups of the far right. Borrowing from existing literature on party families, it examines how various criteria such as the ideology, program, electorate, origins and international links of political parties can help distinguish between these two subfamilies. It then adds an important criterion this literature ignores, the type of political action parties undertake. Using this conceptual framework and the various criteria, the chapter then proceeds to the classification of forty-one parties in thirty countries.