Although there is a lively academic debate about contemporary populism in Europe and Latin America, almost no cross-regional research exists on this topic. This article aims to fill this gap by showing that a minimal and ideological definition of populism permits us to analyse current expressions of populism in both regions. Moreover, based on a comparison of four prototypical cases (FN/Le Pen and FPÖ/Haider in Europe and PSUV/Chávez and MAS/Morales in Latin America), we show that it is possible to identify two regional subtypes of populism: exclusionary populism in Europe and inclusionary populism in Latin America.

This article is a contribution to an emerging scholarship on the role of rhetoric, persona and celebrity, and the effects of performance on the political process. We analyse party leader Ed Miliband at the UK Labour Party Conference in Manchester in 2012. Our analysis identifies how, through performance of ‘himself’ and the beginnings of the deployment of an alternative party narrative centred on ‘One Nation’, Ed Miliband began to revise his ‘received persona’. By using a range of rhetorical and other techniques, Miliband began to adapt the Labour narrative to the ‘personalized political’. The article sets out the theoretical framework for the analysis and returns to the implications for the theory of leadership performance in its conclusion.

Unity and peace in Europe, freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe: Government and Opposition's founding editor Ghiţă Ionescu – the centenary of whose birth this special issue commemorates – might have been contented to see that two of his main ideals have now by and large been realized. At the same time, in contemporary Europe we can observe a huge variety of forms of opposition to the conventional holders of power, who appear to have been unable to respond successfully to new and pressing societal and economic challenges. The old convictions that once characterized politics in the European liberal democracies are gradually eroding, while the volatile and fragmented polities of the new post-communist democracies in the East are only adding to the increased uncertainties. The ongoing financial and economic crises have exacerbated many of the existing tensions, between new and old generations, between groups with levels of educational attainment, and between the domestic and supra-national levels. European democracies in the twenty-first century are thus having to contend with various challenges that are aimed, directly or indirectly, at the core of the political system, including the populist disregard for some of the fundamental values of liberal democracy and the rule of law, the variety of anti-establishment parties and movements challenging the democratic legitimacy of a discredited financial and political class, and the unclear outcomes of further European integration. Taken together, the contributions to this special issue suggest, these developments may cast a different light on our empirical and normative understanding of the European models of liberal democracy and the welfare state

This article examines the consequences of increased party system fragmentation for oppositions, their respective governments and representation more generally, focusing on 18 established democracies. Two of the findings presented here suggest that there is reason to be concerned about the future of parliamentary representation in established democracies. Firstly, an increasing proportion of votes now go to parties that do not receive a proportionate share of legislative representation, implying that a growing degree of organized opposition is extra-parliamentary. Secondly, the findings show that parliamentary oppositions have generally become more fragmented than their respective governments. This suggests that the composition of governments may not be keeping up with current trends in electoral preferences and, in some cases, that governmental majorities have become smaller and more tenuous. Thus, the overall picture is one of a growing and increasingly fragmented opposition, against a smaller and relatively cohesive government.

Recent work has noted an increase in the number of parties at the national level in both proportional and majoritarian electoral systems. While the conventional wisdom maintains that the incentives provided by the electoral system will prevent the number of parties at the district level from exceeding two in majoritarian systems, the evidence presented here demonstrates otherwise. I argue that this has occurred because the number of cleavages articulated by parties has increased as several third parties have begun articulating cleavages that are not well represented by the two larger parties.

This article critically assesses the argument that oppositional coordination creates democratization by elections. It argues that the previously acknowledged democratizing effect of pre-electoral coalitions is better described as an alternation effect, by which coordinated oppositional parties are more likely to win elections. The positive effect of oppositional coalitions is, however, short lived and intimately connected with cases where the election is won by the opposition. Evidence of potential endogeneity is presented, which shows that coalitions are more likely when there is a realistic chance of oppositional victories. These results were derived by utilizing an original dataset of 251 authoritarian elections in 86 countries from 1973 to 2004.

This article assesses the electoral performance of populist parties in three European countries: the Netherlands, Poland and the United Kingdom. In explaining the electoral performance of the populist parties in the three countries, the article considers the agency of political parties in particular. More specifically, it examines the responsiveness of established parties and the credibility of the populist parties. Whereas the agency of populist parties, or other radical outsiders, has often been overlooked in previous comparative studies, this article argues that the credibility of the populist parties themselves plays a crucial role in understanding their electoral success and failure.

The enduring electoral success of populist parties across Europe and the increasing opportunities they have gained to access government in recent years bring once more into relief the question of whether populism and democracy are fully compatible. In this article we show how, despite playing different roles in government within very different political systems, and despite the numerous constraints placed upon them (for instance, EU membership, international law and domestic checks and balances), populist parties consistently pursued policies that clashed with fundamental tenets of liberal democracy. In particular, the idea that the power of the majority must be limited and restrained, the sanctity of individual rights and the principle of the division of powers have all come under threat in contemporary Europe. This has contributed to the continuing erosion of the liberal consensus, which has provided one of the fundamental foundations of the European project from its start.

This article investigates whether two different measures of democracy generate the same empirical results. The Freedom House and Polity IV measures are used as the dependent variables. The result shows that statistical significance and explanatory power for different independent variables differ greatly, depending on which democracy index is used as the dependent variable. The results also indicate that Freedom House and Polity IV rate many countries’ levels of democracy differently. It is worrying and problematic for comparative studies of democracy that empirical results differ so much according to which measure of democracy is used.

This article sheds light on the Greek trigger of the eurozone's fiscal crisis. Using Ostrom's institutional theory of collective action it argues that Europe's predicament is rooted in the failings of political leadership and institutional design at both the European Union and Greek levels. The findings have implications for Ostrom's framework, Europeanization and the future of European integration.

This article is made up of two main parts. The first part points out two different definitions of cabinet – that is, functional and legal definitions. It also highlights the strong points and the shortcomings of both, proposing at the same time a new definition more suitable for a comparative analysis. In doing this, it puts forward some useful criteria with a view to establishing what a minister actually is, what a cabinet is and how it is made up. The second part provides an overview of the structures of governments in 38 countries, from core to junior ministers, on this basis.

Notwithstanding the democratization processes that have taken place since the 1980s, clientelism continues to be an important political practice throughout contemporary Latin America. By offering an analysis of the changing patterns of patron–client exchanges in Mexico City, this article demonstrates how the repercussions of the local democratization process expanded clientelist practices to the realm of public security provision. This expansion, it is argued, is related to efforts of the local government to regain previous levels of political control over the local police forces that had been undermined by the fragmentation of long-standing national patron–client structures under authoritarian rule. Additionally, it is demonstrated that in an increasingly insecure urban environment, local politicians and brokers realized the political gains to be derived from expanding clientelist exchanges to the realm of security provision.

In the Turkish national elections of 12 June 2011 the ruling Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP, Justice and Development Party) registered an exceptional success in Turkish democracy. For the first time, an incumbent party had managed to increase its votes for three elections in a row and established its predominance. This article argues that the AKP, like the Christian Democrats in Italy, Liberal Democrats in Japan or Social Democrats in Sweden, has established a cycle of dominance that includes initial mobilization, expansion of core support through material benefits, delegitimization of the opposition and selective use of ideological rigidity and flexibility. It is through this cycle that the AKP consolidated its position as a right-wing party, unifying centre-right and Islamic constituencies and thereby accomplishing what the other right-wing parties in Turkey had failed to do in the past.

The role of social structure as a determinant of electoral behaviour has been debated across Western countries, with one side in the debate arguing that the rise of the electoral conflict between authoritarian–libertarian values reflects the diminishing importance of socio-structural factors. In contrast, this article shows, using a unique representative sample from Denmark, how this conflict has its roots in an opposition between high- and low-education groups that divide over authoritarian–libertarian values, have developed education-based identities and group consciousness, and are influenced by these factors to vote for parties, each mobilizing their side in the conflict – that is, that the authoritarian–libertarian conflict is based on an education cleavage. Documenting for the first time the influence of education-based identity and group consciousness on voting, these findings demonstrate that socio-structural factors – partly through the voters’ social identities and consciousness – continue to play an important role for electoral behaviour in Western countries. Likewise, the findings suggest that the conflict over authoritarian–libertarian values will have lasting importance for politics in these countries. The logical next step, therefore, will be to extend the analyses to the comparative level.

While new institutionalism with its path-dependence theory has proved to be an especially powerful device for explaining the stability and inertia of public policies, its focus on the stickiness of institutions has contributed to conceptual deficits in grasping and explaining actually occurring policy change which have attracted much criticism. With reference to the critical case of German labour market reforms, policy learning is identified as a key mechanism in the paradigmatic transformation of social policy. Pursuing the argument that learning does not happen in a vacuum and is institutionally embedded, policy learning is conceptually enriched with insights from new institutionalism to develop an institutional account of learning. Such an approach to policy learning and a stronger emphasis on ideas address the stability bias in new institutionalism and its path-dependence theory by accounting for knowledge-based institutional change.

Hamas, the most influential Islamist party in the occupied Palestinian territories, replaced its strategy of electoral boycott in 1996 with participation in 2006 – a change that is not explained in the literature. Assisted by theories of party change, the article seeks to fill this gap. The article demonstrates that the move from boycott to participation can largely be attributed to a change of dominant coalition. In line with the theoretical assumptions, environmental challenges and shocks altered the power–balance within Hamas, robbing the coalition dominating at the time of the boycott of its power and allowing a new faction to obtain dominance. This new dominant faction saw political participation as a legitimate avenue to pursue Hamas's cause, and its rise to power secured the change of strategy and participation in the 2006 elections.

One of the most glaring differences between traditional and emerging middle powers relates to their projection of societal values abroad. Since most emerging powers are essentially fragmented multiclass states, class compromise often emerges to intermediate contradictory demands emanating from fragile political coalitions. Against the backdrop of vast income inequalities, and facing some domestic constituencies favouring liberalization on the one hand against pro-redistributive groups on the other, adopting a middle power role, in the cases of South Africa and Brazil, emerges in order to ameliorate these conflicting demands. Two dimensions are examined very briefly, namely recent mediation efforts in Iran and Libya and attempts to effect redistribution by reforming processes of global governance.

This article has three aims. First, it aims to explain how media framing forms a central soft power tool utilized by states for the political control of social groups antagonistic to the states' dominant ideology. For that purpose it addresses Israeli state efforts to penetrate the native Arab community that remained within its borders after the 1948 war, seeking to create submissive ‘quiet Arab’ citizens. Second, it examines the role of Jewish-Arab (Mizrahi) professional opinion-makers in creating and maintaining this framing. Third, it demonstrates that efforts made by states to influence ‘captive audiences’ by media outlets in the global age can be successful only if they meet the needs of the target community.

Adopting Ionescu's qualitative approach to political science, and building on Sartori's definition of party system, this article examines the degree to which European (both East and West) party systems have developed since the collapse of communism in 1990 in all three major areas of partisan competition: parliamentary, governmental and electoral. In this context, this article constitutes, paraphrasing Sartori (1969), an attempt to go ‘from political sociology to the sociology of politics and back’. The main conclusion is that, although two decades have passed, East European party politics continues to be generally characterized by instability and unpredictability at all levels.