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Most studies of technocratic populism have focused on democracies under stress (e.g., Italy, Czech Republic). This article builds on and extends these studies by analyzing a hybrid regime—post-Soviet Georgia—and argues that technocratic populism in this context is utilized as a façade to cover authoritarian and oligarchic tendencies, while suspending (or reversing) democratization efforts. The state apparatus is weaponized against current and potential political opponents. Ideology is irrelevant, loyalty is key, and passivity is encouraged. The government aims to chip away at institutional checks and balances, and to demobilize the public by undermining confidence in the country’s representative institutions while increasing dependence on experienced personalities, the ‘can do experts.’ The result is most often a stable partial-reform equilibrium. We illustrate this argument with evidence from Georgia, where Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in the country, came to power in 2012 and, despite not holding any official position in the government since 2013, has run the state as a firm.

There has been a rise and fall in interest in federalism in the context of European integration. This article assesses the federal nature of the EU. It draws in particular on the work of Michael Burgess who has been one of the key thinkers on this issue. Because there are many types of ‘federalisms’ available across the globe, it is helpful to make a comparison with another political system to offer a base line. In this article I explore to what extent the EU already has federal features. With the help of the work of Burgess I seek to look beyond the specific characteristics of the EU and reflect on how a comparison with this other polity can offer us insights into what is going on within the EU political system. Drawing on the comparison with Canada, I seek to identify the characteristics of the EU that are already those of a federation. Therefore, the guiding question of this article is: compared to Canada, what particular features does the EU have that reminds us of a federation and what features is it still lacking? It finds that the EU has a considerable amount of federal features (federation), but that a federal tradition, a federal ideology and advocacy to a federal goal (federalism) are mostly absent. (author's abstract)

The tenure of Japanese prime ministers is famously short. Between 2006 and 2012 Japan changed prime minister once a year. What factors can explain Japan’s revolving-door premiership? To explore this puzzle, this article applies the Leadership Capital Index (LCI) developed by Bennister, ’t Hart and Worthy (2015) to case studies of the nine Japanese prime ministers holding office between 2000 and 2015. Leadership capital is the aggregate of leaders’ political resources: skills, relations and reputation. The LCI thus allows analysis of the interplay between individual capacities and contextual conditions in determining leaders’ ability to gain, maintain and deploy power. The LCI is applied to answer two questions. Firstly, what accounts for the short tenure of many Japanese premiers? In which of the LCI’s three leadership dimensions do Japanese leaders lack capital? Secondly, what forms of capital allow some prime ministers to retain office for longer than average (>2 years)? In particular, the article analyses the leadership of Junichiro Koizumi (2001–2006) Japan’s longest serving prime minister since the 1970s, and incumbent Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has held office for three years since December 2012. As well as utilising the LCI to comparatively analyse the tenure of Japan’s prime ministers, this article tests the applicability of the Index beyond Western parliamentary democracies.

This contribution argues that although the latest EU treaties formalized the Commission presidency to substantial degree, it remains a constitutionally weak office for the provision of political leadership. The capacity to lead thus still strongly depends on the individual incumbent. As a first step, the article examines the legal-procedural structure of the office before and after the Lisbon Treaty came into force. Secondly, it analyzes the political leadership performance of the Commission president José Barroso in comparison with his predecessor Jacques Delors. In bridging formal institutional rules with concrete performances this article contributes to the understanding of the relationship between structure and agency in international institutions as well as to the growing literature on political leadership in the European Union. (author's abstract)

Devolution in the United Kingdom is deeply connected to United Kingdom membership of the European Union, which provides an external support system for the internal settlement. Exit from the European Union destabilizes the internal settlement and raises a series of major constitutional issues.

This issue brings together papers that focus on the question of whether and in which ways the 2014 European Parliament elections were different from previous ones. This is important from the point of view of emerging scholarship on changes in the EU and from the point of view of the self-proclaimed ‘This time it’s different!’ slogan from the Parliament. The papers centre around three themes: 1) the role of the Spitzenkandidaten, 2) media and voters, and 3) electoral behaviour.

Attempts to respond to “democratic deficits” in modern constitutional republics must contend with the broad scholarly trend of electoral skepticism. While generally casting doubt on periodic competitive elections’ suitability as vehicles of accountability, electoral skepticism does not necessarily entail an absolute devaluation of elections. Some normative and empirical research responds to this trend by refocusing attention on values other than popular power, such as civil peace, which might be served by periodic competitive elections. Another response short of abandoning the value of popular power, however, is to draw out possibilities for institutional design from the restricted conditions under which previous study has found electoral accountability to be plausible or likely. This second task requires an empirically informed exercise in political theory. Pursuing it in a programmatic and policy-relevant way requires descending from the grand, systemic level of constitutional structures and electoral formulae to intermediate (or middle-range) institutional conditions of accountability, such as rules about parties, campaigns, and election administration. My analysis reinterprets principal-agent models to develop four general types of crucial condition for electoral accountability, and then ramifies this scheme by reference to recent empirical research. The result is a “top ten” list of specific institutional factors that could be theoretically decisive in helping or hindering electoral accountability. These ten conditions could guide future research designs and reform proposals alike.

Classifying political regimes has never been more difficult. Most contemporary regimes hold de-jure multiparty elections with universal suffrage. In some countries, elections ensure that political rulers are—at least somewhat—accountable to the electorate whereas in others they are a mere window dressing exercise for authoritarian politics. Hence, regime types need to be distinguished based on the de-facto implementation of democratic institutions and processes. Using V-Dem data, we propose with Regimes of the World (RoW) such an operationalization of four important regime types—closed and electoral autocracies; electoral and liberal democracies—with vast coverage (almost all countries from 1900 to 2016). We also contribute a solution to a fundamental weakness of extant typologies: The unknown extent of misclassification due to uncertainty from measurement error. V-Dem’s measures of uncertainty (Bayesian highest posterior densities) allow us to be the first to provide a regime typology that distinguishes cases classified with a high degree of certainty from those with “upper” and “lower” bounds in each category. Finally, a comparison of disagreements with extant datasets (7%–12% of the country-years), demonstrates that the RoW classification is more conservative, classifying regimes with electoral manipulation and infringements of the political freedoms more frequently as electoral autocracies, suggesting that it better captures the opaqueness of contemporary autocracies.