This review article examines the rise of democratic resilience as a central concept in the comparative study of regime stability and change. Over the past decade, resilience – understood not simply as institutional survival but as the capacity of democratic systems to adapt, regenerate and deepen democratic norms in the face of crises – has gained prominence in response to accelerating autocratisation. The article situates this shift within the diverse pathways through which democracies weaken and decline, including executive aggrandisement and growing political polarisation. While the existing literature has improved our understanding of autocratisation, much comparative research remains influenced by a relatively narrow set of Northern cases. As a result, it risks treating regional experiences as universal. Drawing on evidence from Africa, Asia and other parts of the Global South, the article argues for a comparative theory of democratic resilience that incorporates state capture, rapid authoritarian reversals and more diverse forms of aggrandisement.
This article seeks to explore the nature and determinants of political conflict in European Parliament (EP) debates within the unique context of the Rule of Law Crisis (RoLC). While previous research on this topic has mainly studied the ideological dimension of this conflict, we shift focus to the affective dimension, analysing the roles of negative sentiment and motive-based criticism through a quantitative analysis of 53 hand-coded debates. We find that negativity dominates, and that this tone is adopted by Members of the EP (MEPs) irrespective of the ideological orientation or geographical origin of their national party. However, concerning levels of motive-based cynicism are primarily driven by MEPs from more right-wing, Eurosceptic and, to a lesser extent, Central and Eastern European parties. These findings suggest that the EP, an institution traditionally geared towards compromise-building, is becoming increasingly susceptible to the normative jeopardies of negative and attack politics when it comes to the RoLC.
There are concerns about the distinctiveness of opposition party behaviour in parliaments, but the literature offers mixed findings. This article analyses how distinctive the opposition is from the government in its voting patterns and speech-making in four parliamentary democracies (Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, United Kingdom [UK]) over a long time span (1945–2020). Our results show a diversity of trends in opposition distinctiveness. Overall, the distinctiveness in terms of parliamentary voting behaviour increased up to the 1980s, and slightly decreased or remained stable thereafter in most countries. Opposition sentiment in speech-making follows a different pattern, particularly in the UK and Canada, where the increasingly positive sentiment of governing party MPs and the increasingly negative sentiment of opposition parties has led to significant divergence over time. These trends in opposition distinctiveness in voting and speech-making are shown to be related most strongly to opposition parties’ prior governing experience, in particular in Denmark and the Netherlands.
A characteristic feature of Westminster-style democracy is the convention that the opposition frontbench forms the basis of the new executive following changes in the party of government. Yet we know little about how this convention operates when it comes to individual appointments. This paper examines how frequently opposition frontbenchers have become ministers in the UK, the archetypal Westminster system. Across seven incoming governments, we find that around four-fifths of opposition frontbenchers were appointed to ministerial office, and roughly half retained responsibility for the same policy portfolio they had shadowed. At the government level, prime ministers’ idiosyncratic preferences affected overall levels of continuity, but these choices were constrained by electoral and party factors. At the individual level, we find no evidence that prime ministers retained their supporters in greater numbers, but party seniority, prior ministerial experience and time served in an opposition post were closely associated with portfolio continuity.
European Parliament elections (EPEs) are widely regarded as second-order contests. Their perceived lower importance is expected to produce a distinct set of electoral outcomes, chief among them the proposition that governing parties lose support in EPEs relative to preceding national first-order elections (FOEs). This article examines explanatory mechanisms behind this proposition, focusing on the previously unaddressed effects of clarity of responsibility. Particular emphasis is thus given to whether the expected losses vary with government parties’ size and cabinet role, and with other factors that shape responsibility attribution, including coalition size, ministerial portfolio shares and prior government experience. In addition, I also assess whether parties providing formal external support to governments face electoral penalties in EPEs. Covering all EPEs and corresponding FOEs from 1979 to 2024, the study also examines whether the second-order model and its key mechanisms, such as election timing, have shifted over time in response to broader transformations in European politics.
Collective action involving natural resources can be politically consequential. But organisers confronting resource interests or even just operating in natural resource-dependent areas face substantial obstacles. This paper tests three arguments about why such activists can nonetheless sometimes succeed: that local party dynamics are important to dispute outcomes, that small-scale and persistent campaigns have the best results, and that peacefully disruptive tactics are especially impactful. We conduct our analysis using a new dataset comprised of 1,525 reports of actions and their immediate outcomes from the Appalachian state of West Virginia, one of the United States’ major coal producers and a longstanding site of coal-related social conflict. Our results regarding parties and movement participation and persistence are mixed. And, while we find a significant negative correlation between disruption and concessions, we observe very different patterns for labour versus environmental actions: disruption appears to work for the former but not the latter.
How do voters react to the individual characteristics of crises following events such as pandemics or floods? In the aftermath of crises following such events, governments may find they are sanctioned by voters, because the crises can provide voters with important information concerning the qualities of incumbents in handling crisis or their responsibility for the ensuing hardships. However, existing research provides limited evidence concerning the characteristics of crises that voters rely on to evaluate the government’s responsibility for or performance in handling them. The present article addresses this gap by providing evidence obtained from a conjoint experiment conducted among British voters. The results show that when voters sanction governments following a crisis, they focus overwhelmingly on the government’s perceived crisis management performance. Voter perceptions of crisis management performance are driven by the severity of the crisis, prevention and relief spending, as well as the behaviour of the political elites. In contrast, voter perceptions of government responsibility for the crisis are affected less strongly by crisis characteristics, such as crisis severity, prevention spending and expert statements.
Social actors frequently mobilise against hybrid regimes, yet efforts to block harmful projects or constrain executive overreach rarely succeed. This paper develops a framework for explaining and predicting when such regimes concede to civic demands, focusing on two dimensions: (1) the extent to which meeting a demand would threaten key pillars of the regime's structural power; and (2) the degree to which an issue generates broad emotional resonance. Their configuration shapes the likelihood and form of concessions. The framework is tested through six campaigns between 2020 and 2024 in Serbia led by Move, Change, a major civic organisation opposing the Vu & ccaron;i & cacute; regime. Across all six cases, the issue's initial position in the two-dimensional matrix - and its movement over time - closely predicted regime behaviour. Low structural threat paired with high issue resonance tended to produce relatively swift concessions, whereas high-threat issues met sustained resistance. The paper advances research on authoritarian resistance by clarifying when civic pressure can meaningfully alter regime behaviour, while providing activists with a strategic planning tool for selecting and framing issues to maximise their leverage.
Giovanni Sartori suggested that in order to understand party systems, we need to focus on interactions between parties. These interactions have been conceptualised by Sartorian scholars as the structure of competition for control of the executive, and operationalised as patterns of government formation. This ‘government formation’ approach to party systems has limitations, chief among which is that it focuses on relations between government parties, but ignores other interparty relations. To mitigate these shortcomings while retaining a focus on interactions associated with competition for control of the executive, this study makes a case for describing party systems using data on parties’ coalition preferences. I demonstrate this ‘coalition preference’ approach by applying it to the Irish party system, a case characterised by significant party system change. The case study shows that this new approach provides a lens through which we can systematically describe party systems, which can complement existing approaches.
Economic sanctions are a critical tool of international diplomacy. Existing scholarship shows that citizens in democratic sender states value sanctions that are effective in producing policy concessions. However, they also seek to limit the adverse humanitarian consequences of sanction imposition. How do citizens trade off these objectives against each other? We develop a theory of sanctions preferences where citizens (1) value policy concessions, (2) hold humanitarian motivations and (3) hold beliefs about how policy change occurs in autocracies. We argue that citizens are conditional humanitarians - humanitarian concerns dominate effectiveness considerations only if policy concessions are unlikely. Results from a pre-registered willingness-to-pay experiment examining the preferences of German citizens on sanctions against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine confirm the predictions of our theory.
This article examines how bicameral institutional design shapes legislative cohesion in a presidential democracy. Differences in time horizon, electoral calendars and the legislative importance of bills generate systematic variation in coalition behaviour across chambers, even under similar electoral rules. Using 11,861 roll-call votes from the Chilean Congress between 2006 and 2018, we compare party coalition cohesion in both chambers using the Rice and Unity indices. Government coalitions are consistently less cohesive in the Senate than in the Chamber of Deputies, while opposition patterns vary by indicator and context. Cohesion increases for both coalitions in qualified majority votes and, to a lesser extent, in more advanced law-making stages, but absences - more frequent in the Senate - are used strategically. The Chilean case illustrates how bicameral differences in institutional design and time horizon condition legislative cohesion, with implications for the broader study of bicameralism and law-making in Latin America and beyond.
Memory work is important for far-right movements and parties but defies systematic scholarly analysis. I theorize that, depending on the electoral aspirations of far-right actors, their memory work involves not only the contestation but also the appropriation of the past, through hybrid memorial strategies, tactics and repertoires. I leverage original evidence from a unique dataset of party events and party archives as well as from in-depth interviews and event observations to demonstrate the mechanics of memory work undertaken by the far right in Cyprus. Using this empirically significant case, I show how the hybridity of the far right's memory work permits it to dispute the memory ownership of other actors (contention) while legitimating its place in memorial politics (convention). I also show that this hybridity is more than a transitory phase towards normalization - it is a strategic choice of far-right actors with growing electoral aspirations.
Choosing coalition partners is not only about size but also revolves around policy. Although this claim is undisputed at the national and regional levels, the role of ideology in local coalition formation remains contested. This study examines how policy positions and issue salience influence coalition formation after two consecutive elections in 30 municipalities in the Belgian region of Flanders. We apply for the first time the concept of preference tangentiality - the degree to which parties prioritize different policy areas - to the analysis of coalitions at the local level. Our findings reveal that ideological proximity increases parties' likelihood of forming coalitions, but only to the extent that they do not cooperate with the far-right Vlaams Belang. While preference tangentiality alone does not predict local coalition formation, it becomes important for ideologically coherent executives in which parties must differentiate themselves from their coalition partners. These findings enhance our understanding of policy-related factors in coalition formation at the local level.
Personalism is a pervasive phenomenon in Latin American politics. This article examines the rise of Javier Milei in Argentina as a particular variety of electoral personalism in a country that has undergone a profound economic and social crisis. We argue that Milei combined self-promotion appeals (similar to recent cases like Nayib Bukele in El Salvador) with context-specific appeals (such as salient ideological rhetoric and moral content) to blame the crisis situation in Argentina on the Argentine political class, pejoratively depicted as the casta. To support our theoretical argument, we provide empirical evidence based on qualitative and quantitative text analyses of Milei’s public appearances and social media posts to identify the salience of each particular appeal in his presidential campaign. Finally, we use public opinion data to illustrate how Milei’s electoral discourse appealed to the Argentinean voter, which ultimately accounts for his electoral success.
How does the politicization of identities like race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation shape populist activism on the left? In this article, I demonstrate that left-wing populists engaged in identity politics resort to two contrasting - but not incompatible - types of activism: identity-based advocacy and identity-based threat construction. The paper examines these types of activism by studying how four major populist leaders on the left - two leaders each from Europe (Jean-Luc M & eacute;lenchon and Sahra Wagenknecht) and Africa (Ousmane Sonko and Julius Malema) - have positioned themselves vis-& agrave;-vis specific identity groups. Building on the distinction between identity-based advocacy and threat construction, the article conceptualizes different types of identity-based populist references. The paper thereby contributes to existing research as it detects how left-wing populist leaders integrate identity politics into the discursive construction of the elite vs. the people antagonism. Finally, by facilitating comparative cross-area research on a specific branch of leftism, the paper also goes beyond existing debates about leftist identity politics.
In the face of populist challenges, citizens’ conceptions of democracy and process preferences are increasingly being studied, based on the assumption that democratic resilience is dependent on citizen support. However, the attitudes and behaviour of political elites are just as relevant. Elites were long assumed to lean towards an elite-centred, ‘institutional’ style of democracy. However, recent developments such as the rise of populism and political polarization suggest a different trend, as politicians themselves seem to be losing trust in institutions. We explore the actual distribution of legislators’ preferences in the process space today based on novel data from the United States and Germany, offering a comparative perspective. We measure process preferences on a continuum ranging from support for people-centred democracy to support for elite-centred democracy. Our findings demonstrate that the preferences of legislators in Germany are normally distributed along this continuum, while those of legislators in the more polarized United States lean towards a people-centred process. In both countries, control of government, seniority and electoral security are found to be important determinants of process preferences.
As democratic institutions around the world confront rising authoritarian pressures, the imperative to understand when and how citizens justify illiberal governance has increased. This study investigates how ideological orientations condition the relationship between populist attitudes and public support for martial law, drawing on the unprecedented 2024 declaration of martial law in South Korea as a focal case. Using original, nationally representative survey data, we find that populist attitudes do not uniformly predict support for martial law; rather, their influence is fundamentally shaped by respondents’ ideological leanings. Among citizens with strong populist orientations, those on the ideological right exhibit a significantly greater propensity to endorse martial law, whereas their counterparts on the left display pronounced resistance to such authoritarian measures. These findings highlight the ideologically contingent nature of populist attitudes and show how populism can serve to either legitimize or challenge authoritarianism, depending on individuals’ ideological orientations.
It is well established that attitudes towards immigration are linked to policy preferences and voting behaviour. However, we lack insights on the relevance of the other side of the migration coin: emigration. This is especially pertinent in the European Union (EU), which guarantees free movement of persons and where large-scale mobility gained momentum following the Eastern enlargement (East to West) and the euro crisis (South to North). Drawing on a 2021 survey conducted in nine peripheral EU countries, this study investigates whether concerns about emigration shape electoral behaviour. Findings indicate that such concerns reduce support for governing parties, but only among individuals with high levels of political trust, highlighting trust as a key moderating factor. At the country level, concerns about emigration favour radical-right parties, though not exclusively. In fact, the politicization of emigration can potentially benefit (or disadvantage) a range of parties depending on national political conditions.
In a semi-presidential system, which is the most common regime type in Europe, a separately elected president shares executive powers with the government. This dual-executive model incentivizes conflicts that reduce the capacity for effective decision-making. Alongside constitutional rules, the intraexecutive power balance is conditioned by informal practices in response to public opinion. Increasing public demand for a more powerful presidential role can thus ‘presidentialize’ dual executives. Utilizing novel survey data from Finland, we examine the factors that condition support for a stronger presidency. Relative to the country’s highly institutionalized and strongly government-driven political system, we find substantial support for a formally stronger and more confrontational presidency. This support is systematically connected with the typical features of a populist electorate (such as, for example, distrust in political institutions, male voters and ‘populist’ concerns) and we demonstrate that such respondents are also more willing to reduce the powers of parliamentary institutions. The strengthening of such attitudes can potentially destabilize semi-presidential regimes.
This study examines how party size shapes voters’ likelihood of engaging in protest, moving beyond a simple winner–loser categorization of parties. In European democracies, where coalition governments are prevalent, policy-making often requires compromises among parties with differing issue positions, leading to varying levels of voter representation. Junior coalition parties, overshadowed by majority partners, have limited decision-making influence, which increases the likelihood that their voters will protest to shape policy agendas. However, smaller coalition parties still offer better representation than those in opposition. As a key indicator of a party’s capacity to represent its voters, party size significantly shapes motivations for protest among both government and opposition parties. Using data from eight waves of the European Social Survey (2004–2018), the article finds that voters of junior coalition parties are more likely to protest than those of senior coalition partners. Additionally, smaller party size correlates with a higher probability of protest participation, particularly among opposition party voters.
