Since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, the EU has been tested and contested as it struggled to come to terms with a series of crises, sometimes labelled a polycrisis. In response to crises, the EU has emerged as a collective power and the concept ‘Collective Power Europe’ (CPE) offers a promising lens with which to analyse the 21st-century European Union and the nature of the polity that is emerging. The aim of this article is to unpack the concept of CPE and to analyse its core features – collective leadership and framing, institutional coordination and the evolving policy toolkit – in response to three crises: Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

This article explores the gender dimension of ideology and representation by analysing the political parties that ran in the 2019 Polish parliamentary elections, using a novel analytical framework based on gender claims and gender-related policy pledges. This article demonstrates that a left and liberal ideology largely determines feminist and pro-LGBTQ+ promissory representation. However, the gender ideologies of right-wing political parties vary in their traditional types and can include a populist element. This article contributes to comparative gender and politics scholarship by examining gender ideologies in the Central and Eastern European context, where on the one hand, populism and anti-gender campaigns have taken hold, and, on the other, feminist and progressive movements have challenged traditionalism and illiberalism. This article also differentiates a scholarly meaning of gender ideology from its populist meaning.

Interviews have been the basis for some of the greatest insights in many disciplines but have largely been on the backstage of comparative political inquiry. I first rely on bibliometric data to show the limited use of interviews in research published by major journals in the past 30 years. I then focus on how interviews are used to study a hard-to-reach population: far-right actors. Using the extant literature and reflecting on my field experience with far-right leaders and functionaries, I examine in detail how interviews help investigate this phenomenon; I analyse challenges related to interview access, rapport, analysis and ethics and offer remedies. I argue that comparativists using interviews need to address these challenges by explicating and reflecting on the process through which they collect interview data rather than solely focusing on the data itself.

Brexit has been at the centre of the last two British elections and the past legislative term. The UK's exit from the European Union was characterized by a series of parliamentary setbacks, with several government defeats, continuous rebellions and cross-party agreements made to secure control of the agenda. In the research reported in this article, we analyse the parliamentary Brexit process through careful examination of the 12 indicative votes held in Westminster in 2019 to find an alternative solution to Theresa May's exit agreement. We map the choices of each MP along two relevant dimensions, connecting them to the socioeconomic structure of their constituencies as well as to the preferences expressed in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Moreover, we associate these parliamentary behaviours – and thus MPs' attitudes towards compromise and responsiveness – to the gains and losses experienced during the subsequent 2019 general election.

We explore whether including cultural reforms in an intra-state peace accord facilitates its success. We distinguish between accommodationist and integrationist cultural provisions and employ a mixed research method combining negative binomial regression on a data set of all intra-state political agreements concluded between 1989 and 2017, and an in-depth analysis of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland. We recognize the important reassuring effect of accommodationist cultural reforms in separatist conflicts. However, we also find that they have an important and hitherto overlooked reputational effect across all conflict types. By enhancing the reputation of negotiating leaders, accommodationist cultural provisions contribute to ending violence by preventing leadership challenges, rebel fragmentation and remobilization across all civil conflicts. By the same logic, and despite the overwhelming emphasis of peace agreements on integrationist cultural initiatives, integrationist cultural reforms problematize leaders' ability to commit to pacts and to ensure compliance among their rank and file.

Recent scholarship on retrospective voting has shown that when they go to the polls, voters evaluate not only incumbent performance, but also the performance of parties in opposition. So far, however, these studies have not been able to identify how voters evaluate the performance of parties in opposition. The answers to a unique open-ended question included in a Belgian electoral survey in 2019 provide new insights into voters' minds. First, this study investigates what voters think about when they evaluate a party's performance in opposition. Second, it tests whether voters hold opposition parties responsible for the state of affairs in the country. The results show that voters are most concerned with opposition parties' competence in scrutinizing the government and providing constructive criticism, and dislike unconstructive and overly negative opposition. Furthermore, voters hold opposition parties accountable for the state of affairs in their country, albeit to a lesser extent than incumbent parties.

This article investigates the relationship between levels of party institutionalization and individual-level partisan mobilization. Levels of party institutionalization have been linked to macro-level outcomes such as party system stability, but little is known about the micro-level underpinnings of such patterns. This article investigates one set of mechanisms through which party institutionalization might affect electoral outcomes. Specifically, we ask how routinization and value infusion – two central dimensions of party institutionalization – shape partisans’ political mobilization. We investigate these relationships by matching data on individual-level behaviour (taken from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) 2014 wave) with data on party attributes commonly associated with levels of institutionalization (taken from the Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project – DALP). We find that while value infusion encourages relatively greater participation from non-member supporters, party routinization depresses non-member participation but may mobilize otherwise inactive members. These findings suggest that to understand the effects of party institutionalization on a macro-level phenomenon such as electoral volatility, it may be necessary to study how parties institutionalize, rather than just asking how much they institutionalize.

This article analyses the distribution of staff resources between party offices. While earlier studies have compared central and parliamentary offices, this study also includes ministerial offices. To capture fully the differences in staffing, I examine both the quantity (staff size) and quality (education, experience, tasks) of their staffs. The empirical section is based on a cross-sectional analysis of original survey data collected among political staffers in Belgium and the Netherlands (N = 1,009). While the Belgian cabinet system includes extensive ministerial offices, ministerial staff is limited in the Dutch non-cabinet system. The results show how this institutional difference shapes parties' internal distribution of resources. While the party in parliament does not have a clear staffing advantage over the party in central office in Belgium, they are both eclipsed by the large, highly qualified party in the executive. In the Netherlands, the impact of ministerial offices is negligible and the staff of the party in parliament is both larger and more qualified than the staff of the party in central office.

The storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021 was a presidential attempt at a self-coup. To make the case, this article reviews elements of the Capitol assault and the events leading up to it, in light of the key conceptual components of a self-coup, and how those compare to attributes of other kinds of attacks on governments. The Trump self-coup will then be compared and contrasted empirically to other self-coups perpetrated by leaders. It is found that what separates successful self-coups from those that fail is whether the military backs the undertaking. Thus, a section is included on US military behaviour in response to Trump's attempts to gain military adherence for his political actions.

While India's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has become recognized as a populist radical right (PRR) party under the leadership of Narendra Modi, we do not know whether this PRR supply is matched yet by PRR attitudes among its supporters. Using an original survey, we therefore investigate: Do BJP supporters display PRR attitudes? We find that those who feel close to the BJP have stronger populist and nativist attitudes than other Indian citizens. However, authoritarianism is not a distinguishing feature of BJP supporters. We argue that the similarities between the drivers of support for European PRR parties and for the BJP reinforce the idea that radical right populism is a coherent global phenomenon both in terms of supply and demand. Finally, we discuss how our study shows that party support in India is more ideologically rooted than has previously been thought.

Who are the supporters of former rebel parties? Drawing on the classical party literature, we argue that the support base of former rebel parties consists predominantly of activists. These supporters are dissatisfied with intra-party politics because the benefits and costs of a rebel-to-party transformation are unequally distributed between them and the leadership. We test our arguments by examining the case of the novel FARC party (Comunes) in Colombia. Based on a unique sample of FARC supporters, we obtained unprecedented insight into the internal affairs of the FARC. Our survey design allowed us to generate an over-time comparison between FARC and other party supporters in the Colombian political system. The empirical analysis shows that in comparison, FARC supporters tend to be more politically active as well as more dissatisfied with internal politics. Furthermore, dissatisfaction with democracy and the peace agreement increased after their first electoral cycle.

The received wisdom on executive–legislative relations in multiparty presidential systems is that the size of the president's majority in Congress is the key factor explaining governance patterns, particularly the president's legislative success. However, in many cases presidents enjoying a nominal majority have been unable to pass legislation and have faced institutional instability. The article departs from a conventional definition of divided government and focuses on the preference incongruence between the governing coalition and the floor of Congress. It argues that the ideological distance between the floor and the coalition is a key factor explaining the president's cost of governing (which includes factors such as the distribution of cabinet portfolios and budgetary transfers to coalition partners). The article provides an empirical test with data from Brazil that find that the greater the ideological incongruence, the higher the cost of governing for the president.

While coalition agreements are significant in structuring government behaviour, their comprehensiveness varies considerably across cabinets. We argue that the average correspondence between parties' priorities and portfolio allocation is important in explaining the comprehensiveness of coalition agreements because coalition parties that have obtained their preferred portfolios have less incentive to negotiate a detailed coalition agreement. We test our argument by combining newly collected data on coalition agreements drafted by 218 cabinets in 24 Western and Eastern European countries from 1945 to 2014 with data on the distribution of ministerial portfolios. We find that the shorter and less comprehensive the agreements, the higher the correspondence between parties' priorities and portfolio allocation. Our results have important implications for our understanding of coalition governments and the relationship between government formation and cabinet governance.

This article tests the claim that government cooperation between mainstream parties and radical right parties can be explained by coalition theory. It does so by analysing three Swedish cases of coalition formation where the radical right Sweden Democrats (SD) have remained excluded despite holding a pivotal position in the parliament. It argues that, with the right analytical tools, this exclusion can be explained by coalition theory: cooperation with the SD has been unattractive in terms of policy, and unnecessary because the mainstream parties have been able to form viable minority governments. This argument requires three things: first, that we consider the two-dimensional nature of Swedish politics; second, that we shift the focus from majority government to viable government; and third, that we acknowledge strategic time horizons that extend well into the future. The findings contribute to our understanding of coalition formation and of how mainstream parties respond strategically to the radical right.

The power-sharing literature lacks a review that synthesizes its findings, despite spanning over 50 years since Arend Lijphart published his seminal 1969 article ‘Consociational Democracy’. This review article contributes to the literature by introducing and analysing an original dataset, the Power Sharing Articles Dataset, which extracts data on 23 variables from 373 academic articles published between 1969 and 2018. The power-sharing literature, our analysis shows, has witnessed a boom in publications in the last two decades, more than the average publication rate in the social sciences. This review offers a synthesis of how power sharing is theorized, operationalized and studied. We demonstrate that power sharing has generally positive effects, regardless of institutional set-up, post-conflict transitional character and world region. Furthermore, we highlight structural factors that are mostly associated with the success of power sharing. Finally, the review develops a research agenda to guide future scholarly work on power sharing.