Electoral authoritarian political systems have a hybrid nature, possessing very significant authoritarian features alongside elections that can produce openings for political change. The risks that elections pose to regimes are diminished if they can build winning coalitions involving voters beyond their core of loyal support. This paper considers how the construction of voter coalitions might be conceptualized in the Russian electoral authoritarian context, with reference to the case of the 2020 vote on constitutional reform, which was conducted with the primary aim of extending President Vladimir Putin's term in office. Using data from a national survey of Russians conducted immediately after the vote, our analysis indicates that the regime's success, even taking into account allegations of widespread fraud, was the result of its offer of additional constitutional amendments that were able to target voters beyond Putin's core support.

How did the Russian government deal with popular dissatisfaction from the effects of COVID-19 and the policies it adopted in its wake? And how successful was President Vladimir Putin in evading blame given that Russia is de facto highly politically centralized under the president? We analyze data from a national probability sample of Russians conducted following the first wave of the pandemic in July/August 2020. Our results indicate that Putin’s blame-deflecting strategy appears to have been broadly but not entirely successful.

In the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of July 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky's new party, Servant of the People (SN) won a majority of seats in the context of what had been a 'frozen cleavage' dividing party voters along a single geo-cultural dimension: pro-West/anti-Soviet versus anti-West/pro-Russian positions. Analysing a unique set of surveys of public and expert opinion, we find that its unprecedented success stems from the extreme weaknesses of the existing and often discredited parties rather than ideological shifts. Our findings also question whether challenger parties in other contexts, including consolidated democracies, must compete on new issue dimensions in order to succeed electorally.

Much of the literature on populism, particularly in contemporary advanced democracies, focuses on its disruptive power to shake up mainstream party systems, to criticize the functioning of democratic institutions, and to mobilize critical citizens against elites. This chapter considers how populists construct regimes when they have established themselves in power, taking cases from post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe as examples. We identify specific governmental policies, ideological tenets, institutional designs, and discursive practices that enable populists to stabilize their rule and forge representational linkages with large blocks of the population. The chapter questions, however, whether the success of populists in power in these cases provides an indication of how populists might succeed in advanced democracies or whether it is a result of the peculiar political conditions of post-Communism, the absence of which suggests limiting conditions in other contexts.

We start from the premise that the content of political competition is regularly remade by shifting contexts and by the strategic activity of political actors including parties. But while there are naturally thousands of potential issues on which politics can be contested, there are in practice and for good reasons ways in which structure and limits come to reduce the competition to more cognitively manageable and regularized divisions—in short, to issue dimensions. It is highly timely to return to these questions since, we argue, the social, political, and economic turbulence of recent years raises the possibility that the ideological structure of how parties present themselves to voters may be radically shifting. The papers in this special issue, therefore, each tackle an important aspect of the shifting character of the issues that underlie party competition in various European settings. In this article, we provide an overview of the relevant “state of the art” on issue dimensionality and how the subject is situated within the broad framework of understanding party competition.

With Vladimir Putin having commenced his second term, the issue of the constitutional limit of two successive terms for the president has again become politically salient in Russia. In this article, two specialists of Russian politics investigate public support in 2018 for term limits. They address three questions. Why does the issue of term limits matter? To whom in Russia does it matter? Is opposition to abolishing terms limits likely to be politically divisive? Their findings point in general to a shift in the level and character of support for term limits since 2012. Opposition to term limits has grown over time, and while in 2012 support for term limits was drawn from supporters of more authoritarian leadership, today it includes engaged democrats with negative views of the economic situation. They also find that supporters of term limits remain more likely to support political protest.

While newly contested issues connected with internationalism, such as European integration and migration, have become more politically salient, much of the literature sees these as largely the domain of ideologically extremist and challenger parties. By contrast, building on work by Kriesi et al, this article argues that international issues are far more embedded in party stances across the left- right spectrum than the niche and extremist models or Kriesi et al suggest. Accordingly, we develop a typology for categorizing parties according to their stances on left-right ideology and their positions on integration. Our analysis employs expert surveys on the stances of all electorally significant parties conducted in 24 European countries in 2013. The results have important implications for understanding the impact of international issues on how parties now appeal to voters.

When do parties use emotive rhetoric to appeal to voters? In this article, we argue that politicians are more likely to employ positive affect (valence) in their rhetoric to appeal to voters when parties are not ideologically distinct and when there is uncertainty about public preferences. To test these propositions, our article uses well-established psycholinguistic affect dictionaries to generate scores from three time series of political text: British party manifestos (1900-2015) and annual party leaders' speeches (1977-2014) as well as U.S. Presidents' State of the Union addresses (1880-2016). Our findings corroborate our expectations and have important implications for the study of party competition by illuminating the role of valence in the way politicians communicate their policies.

ABSTRACT Democracy as a form of civilian rule must navigate a path between clerical and military powers, both of which are highly engaged in the politics of post-Mubarak Egypt. The authors ask in this article how mass support for democracy changed in Egypt between 2011 and 2014, and how this support is connected with views on religion and the role of the military. This question is important for understanding the prospects for democracy in a major state in the Arab world. It is also of comparative interest because of what change in the social and ideological drivers of mass attitudes may tell us about the nature of democratic support more generally. The authors’ analysis is based on nationally representative surveys of Egyptians in 2011 after the country’s first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections and in 2014 after the removal of the Islamist President Morsi. The findings indicate that Egyptians in large numbers favour both democracy and unfettered military intervention in politics. The authors also observe important shifts in the social bases of support for democracy away from religion but also from economic aspiration. Negative political experience with democratic procedures in 2011–2013 seems to be the strongest factor behind the observed decrease in democratic support.

Ukraine's 2014 parliamentary election, which took place in the aftermath of the Maidan revolution of February 2014 and at the height of war in the East of the country, appeared to produce significant party political realignment. In particular, support for parties that had represented the Russian element of the ethno-linguistic/geo-political cleavage that had dominated electoral competition in Ukraine since independence collapsed. The paper considers whether 2014 was a ‘critical’ or ‘realigning’ election for Ukraine. Our argument is that the 2014 election lacked the conditions that critical elections theory posits as necessary and that, on the contrary, there are strong theoretical reasons to expect cleavage stability in these volatile electoral circumstances. We offer evidence for this continuity drawn from surveys undertaken among Ukrainian voters from 1995 to 2014.

While the ‘critical citizens’ literature shows that publics often evaluate democracies negatively, much less is known about ‘critical parties’, especially mainstream ones. This article develops a model to explain empirical variation in parties’ evaluations of democratic institutions, based on two mechanisms: first, that parties’ regime access affects their regime support, which, secondly, is moderated by over-time habituation to democracy. Using expert surveys of all electorally significant parties in twenty-four European countries in 2008 and 2013, the results show that parties evaluate institutions positively when they have regular access to a regime, regardless of their ideology and the regime’s duration. Moreover, regime duration affects stances indirectly by providing democracies with a buffer against an incumbent’s electoral defeat in the most recent election. The findings point to heightened possibilities for parties to negatively evaluate democracies given the increased volatility in party systems in Europe.

Given the rise of EU-scepticism in Germany and elsewhere, spatial models suggest that the SPD and the CDU/CSU have incentives to move towards a more critical position about integration. However, mainstream parties have developed a pro-integration reputation over several decades so it is difficult for them to adopt a stance reflecting outright opposition to Europe's integration. A comparison of party positions in 2008 and 2013 shows that the SPD hardly changed its policy stances on EU issues, whereas the CDU/CSU moved noticeably to a more EU-critical stance. However, situating German parties within the West European universe of party families shows that both remain quite positive about integration. The upshot of this is to illustrate the blind corner' of party representation on integration issues in the German party system which created electoral opportunities for the Euro-sceptic AfD.

Scholarship on European party competition has for some time accepted that issues are structured along economic left-right and libertarian-authoritarian dimensions. While newly contested issues connected with internationalism, such as European integration and migration, have become more politically salient, much of the literature sees these as largely the domain of ideologically extremist and ‘niche’or ‘challenger’parties. By contrast, building on work by Kriesi, this paper argues that international issues have produced far greater sorting of party stances across the left-right spectrum than the niche and extremist models suggest. Moreover, we seek to explain how contention over integration has extended to include stances on national political institutions as a divide that cross-cuts left and right. Our analysis employs expert surveys on the stances of all electorally significant parties conducted in 24 European countries …

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Most studies of public opinion regarding constitutional change focus on ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in consolidated democracies, but in comparative terms most institutional change takes place in unstable political contexts. We contend that mass preferences towards institutional choices are likely to differ significantly in turbulent contexts as compared to stable polities. In this article, we consider the issue of public preferences towards proposals for regional decentralisation in the context of post-Soviet Ukraine, a society that has been in the throes of political change for the last decade. Using surveys conducted in war-torn Ukraine in 2014, we find that under conditions of political uncertainty, the institutional preferences of citizens are connected to group identities and ideological orientations rather than instrumental concerns.

Drawing on surveys conducted in Russia from 2001 to 2014, this article considers citizens’ conceptions of the nation in the Putin period; whether views of the nation have been shaped by political, economic and social developments over this 15 year period; and the correlates of these national perspectives in terms of regime support and political mobilization. We find, first, that understandings of the nation are multidimensional at the mass level, and in part reflect the main nationalist discourses in Russia. Second, we describe how contextual changes over this period – political, economic and social – relate to the ways in which the nation is understood. Third, we consider how different understandings of the nation connect to political attitudes and behaviors. The findings of this research have implications for how we should analyze nationalism and its bases of support in Putin’s Russia.

How should mainstream parties react to increasing Euroscepticism among voters? Robert Rohrschneider and Stephen Whitefield argue that the failure of mainstream parties to alter their positions on European integration in light of these shifts in public opinion has left a significant representational gap for extreme anti-integration parties to fill. They notice a difference between western European and eastern European countries, remarking that the latter have better managed to integrate growing scepticism about the EU, although the examples of Hungary and Poland demonstrate that the adoption of Eurosceptic stances is by no means a firewall against extreme politics.

Stephen Whitefieldtalks to Colin Hay about Britain’sprojection of its place in the world today, set in the contextof the diminished sense of Britishness and the story of thelong decline of the country itseelf

The crisis in Ukraine has produced a new narrative about Vladimir Putin’s leadership. In contrast to the stated modernising goals of his first two presidencies–the achievement of greater state efficacy and the improvement of living standards and prosperity for ordinary Russian citizens–Putin has been recast as the saviour of the Russian nation. This new narrative includes a mission to protect the citizens of the ‘Russian World’that live beyond the borders of the Russian Federation. In some analysis, this has led to parallels with Slobodan Milosevic’s political journey in the former Yugoslavia (Whitmore, 2014).Yet, while Vladimir Putin has shown strong patriotic instincts throughout his political career, he is not a natural nationalist. In an article titled ‘Russia: The Ethnicity Issue,’which Putin published in January 2012 ahead of the presidential election, his ambiguous support for ethnically-based nationalism was apparent. He warned about the dangers that ethnic chauvinism posed to the territorial integrity of the Russian state:‘I am convinced that the attempts to preach the idea of a “national” or monoethnic Russian state contradict our thousand-year history,’he averred,‘this is a shortcut to destroying the Russian people and Russian statehood, and for that matter any viable, sovereign statehood on the planet’(Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 2014). Moreover, his regime’s relationship with the nationalist leadership in eastern Ukraine, and their ideological backers in Russia, has not always been cordial during the Ukrainian conflict. Putin’s commitment to the creation of a new territory,‘Novorossiya,’which would lead to the breakup of Ukraine, has been questioned by …