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This study analyses the influence of the party reforms of 2012 and the ‘counter-reforms’ of 2013-2014 on the Russian party system, and the structure of political and electoral cleavages in Russian regions. The emergence of new political parties in 2012-2013 led to a temporary increase in electoral competition, an augmentation of the political space, and a rise in the number of electoral cleavages, but these developments did not weaken the domination of United Russia. The trend towards an ever greater tightening up of entry requirements for contestation in the elections led to a lowering of the number of political and, consequently, electoral cleavages, in addition to a reconfiguration of the political space. The study shows that there was an unbalancing of the political cleavage structure in 2012-2015: the socioeconomic political cleavage, whose primary place is a key determinant of equilibrium, ceded the top position to the authoritarian-democratic cleavage in 2012-2013, and to the ‘Ukrainian’ (systemic) cleavage in 2014-2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Present-day Flanders is characterized by the contrast between the impressive electoral successes of the pro-independence Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA), and the very lukewarm attitude of its population towards independence. This success should be seen as one of the consequences of the regionalization of political identities in Belgium and the promotion of a Flemish identity by the Flemish regional government. Rather than a vote for independence, however, support for the N-VA corresponds with a rejection of interregional solidarity and more in general a preference for a more right-wing style of governance based on the principles of self-help and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the federal election campaign in Canada in 2011 with regard to the Conservative Party of Canada's (CPC) campaign strategies and their apologies for the 1914 Komagata Maru incident and Chinese Canadian exclusion. Topics include the elements of CPC's apology discourse, the role of the Asian Conservative Members of Parliament in CPC's campaigns, and the party's investment in ethnic media campaigns.

Parties try to shape media coverage in ways that are favorable to them, but what determines whether media outlets pick up and report on party messages? Based on content analyses of 1,496 party press releases and 6,512 media reports from the 2013 Austrian parliamentary election campaign, we show that media coverage of individual party messages is influenced not just by news factors, but also by partisan bias. The media are therefore more likely to report on messages from parties their readers favor. Importantly, this effect is greater rather than weaker when these messages have high news value. These findings have important implications for understanding the media’s role in elections and representative democracies in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the first time in 30 years, a single national party has won a majority on its own in the Indian parliament, and does not depend on the support of regional party allies for a parliamentary majority. Yet it is too soon to pronounce the decline or marginalisation of regional parties in India's national political life. The aggregate performance of regional parties remained resilient in the 2014 elections, even marginally improving over 2009. This article considers whether the 2014 elections mark a critical break in the position of regional parties at the national level. The principal argument is that the 2014 elections do not reflect a fundamental alteration in the dynamics of political regionalisation. Rather they suggest a new phase in the impact of regionalisation on the party system at the national level. In a landscape of continually increasing voter choice, electoral outcomes at the national level have begun to narrow to favour a smaller range of parties since 2004. The number of parties able to achieve influence via participation in cabinet governance or coalition has begun to decline. Political fragmentation has not gone away, but its consequences for election outcomes have changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critical 2010 federal elections left the Flemish nationalists (N-VA) the dominant political party in the north and the francophone Socialists (PS) in the south of the country, unable to find common ground on the issue of devolution. It took no fewer than 541 days – a world record – to form a government rallying Christian Democrats (CD&V and cdH), Liberals (Open VLD and MR), and Socialists (sp.a and PS). The 2014 federal elections marked a change in tone, being fought on socio-economic terms, but confirmed the stalemate nonetheless. The N-VA made further inroads, winning 29.8 per cent of the vote in the Dutch-speaking community. The governing parties held firm, however; the PS in particular remained the largest political formation in the south, winning 31.0 per cent of the vote in the French-speaking community. Moreover, on 25 May 2014 federal elections, regional elections in Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels (and the German-speaking community), and European elections were held simultaneously, further raising the stakes in the complex, interconnected, government formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Finnish electoral system has recently been changed to slightly increase proportionality, but nothing has been done to make cabinet alternatives more ‘identifiable’ before the election. This outcome poses a major puzzle for one important theoretical approach to electoral system change. This approach sees normatively ‘unbalanced’ systems as vulnerable to reform and would have expected a significant increase in the pre-electoral identifiability of competing cabinet options. The article explains the Finnish case by embedding it in a comparative model of normative tradeoffs in democratic design. Based on Finnish case evidence and a statistical analysis of 100 elections in 32 democracies (from 2001 to 2011), the article argues that the type of democracy exemplified by Finland is not normatively unbalanced. In particular, the lack of pre-electoral identifiability is compensated for by an unconstrained multidimensionality of partisan preferences. While it may be true that normatively balanced designs are more stable, there is more than one way to be balanced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the 2008 economic crisis, there has been upheaval across Europe. In Ireland, the collapse of the banking, construction and property sectors, and the 2010 EU/International Monetary Fund loan and attached austerity conditions resulted in a dramatic election in 2011 that saw the removal of the dominant political party from power. Ireland provides an important case study to examine political legitimacy given the perceived culpability of political authorities in the recession and the effects of austerity on the population's welfare. In this article, we examine data from the European Social Survey over a ten-year period (2002–2012) to ascertain the impact of the crisis on political legitimacy. We measure change in trust in political institutions, satisfaction with government and the link between social trust and political legitimacy. The analysis is repeated separating ‘winners’ (those who voted for the parties in power) from ‘losers’ (those who did not vote for the parties in power). We find that trust in political institutions and satisfaction with government has declined since 2008. However, while satisfaction with government is increasing since the 2011 election, trust in government continues to decline. Social trust is only declining for those who did not vote for the parties in power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many proportional representation systems are characterised by a legal electoral threshold. Such a threshold reserves the allocation of seats for those parties that reach a minimum share of the votes. In order to fight fragmentation, a 5 per cent threshold has been introduced for both federal and regional elections in Belgium. This article seeks to explore the mechanical and psychological effects of this legal threshold after five elections. It is shown that the threshold has had limited mechanical and psychological effects on voters but some psychological effects on party elites. Moreover, while in the short term the average number of lists dropped and several pre-electoral coalitions formed, in the longer term the legal threshold has not prevented further fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While much has been written about the formation and termination of coalitions, comparatively little attention has been paid to the policy output of multiparty governments. The present study attempts to narrow this research gap by analysing policy-making in three Austrian coalition governments between 1999 and 2008. Drawing on the party mandate literature, a manually coded textual analysis of election manifestos is conducted that yields a dataset containing over 1,100 pledges. The fulfilment of these pledges is taken as the dependent variable in a multivariate analysis. The results indicate that institutional determinants (adoption in the coalition agreement, ministerial control, and policy status quo) significantly influence the chances of pledge fulfilment and thus present a powerful predictor of coalition policy output. By contrast, factors related to parties’ preferences (consensus between parties, policy distance, pledge saliency, and majority support in parliament) do not have an impact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Parliamentary systems are characterised by strong links between the executive and the legislature. While the importance of executive–legislative relationships is well-known, the extent to which executive dominance affects parliamentary behaviour is hard to grasp. This study uses the recent institutional crises in Belgium to study parliamentary behaviour in the absence of a government with full powers. Cabinet formation in Belgium has proved to be protracted in recent years, leading to long periods of government formation in both 2007–2008 and 2010–2011. Such circumstances provide a unique comparison between normal situations of parliament in the presence of government, and exceptional situations of prolonged periods of caretaker government. In particular the article looks at three aspects of parliamentary behaviour that are usually linked to executive–legislative relations: legislative initiatives, voting behaviour and party unity. The general hypothesis is that prolonged periods of government formation gave parliamentarians more opportunities to influence the legislative process and more (ideological) freedom. The results show a nuanced picture: parliament became more pro-active, the salience of the government–opposition divide declined, while party unity remained as strong as ever. It is concluded that government formation processes did not lead to drastic changes in the legislative–executive relationship, but rather permitted a modest correction to the extremely weak position of parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For centuries, the capacity of British ministers to appoint individuals to positions on the boards of agencies, boards and commissions was viewed as little more than one element of the ‘spoils of war’ in a highly majoritarian polity. This article examines how the politics of patronage has evolved in recent decades and argues that it is possible to identify a silent revolution that has gradually but consistently constrained the reach and discretion enjoyed by ministers in deploying their patronage powers. What is particularly distinctive about British political history since 2007 is the introduction of a far-reaching ladder of legislative scrutiny that ranges from informal pre-appointment hearings, at one end of the ladder, to a statutory veto over the minister's preferred candidate, at the other. However, this ‘outlawing of the spoils’ has evolved in a typically British way with reforms being implemented on an ad hoc and incremental basis, that is, frequently without any advance consultation or planning but rather dependent on non-formal, informal and discretionary elements to counter problems as they arise. The result is a complex and frequently overlapping mixture of regulatory and scrutiny processes that arguably offer little in terms of principled underpinning or constitutional logic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the empowerment of the European Parliament over the years is due to its special role in providing a bridge connecting the public’s policy preferences on the one hand, and the legislative behaviour of elected officials on the other. As the only popularly elected EU institution, successive treaty reforms increased the EP’s political power. These reforms were accompanied by an explicit desire to see citizens’ involvement in EU politics increase and, in turn, provide support and legitimacy to the European integration project. This paper models MEPs’ track records on various political issues, and assesses the extent to which their output is in line with the positions their party campaigned on and the policy preferences expressed in public opinion. The findings suggest that there are discrete patterns of representation, where some parties are more inclined toward greater congruence with their selectorate and manifesto than others. Furthermore, the degree of congruence varies across policy issues and is shaped, to a large extent, by institutional arrangements and political context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers recent attempts to reform German federalism, the failed 2004 reform, and the reforms agreed in 2006 and 2009. It compares partisan, ideological and territorial factors which contribute to an understanding of reform, finding that all three have a role in explaining actors’ views of reform proposals. Two other claims are developed: that in some aspects of the reforms, a division between ‘generalist’ and ‘subject specialist’ politicians became apparent; and that a decisive change between 2004 and 2006 was the formation of a grand coalition at a federal level, which paved the way for agreement upon reform proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abyei was one of the most contested areas of Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of January 2005. Drawing on direct experience, the article examines the agreement and the experience of trying to support its implementation. It analyses the relationship between this and the overall problems of the CPA, and of peacekeeping in the newly independent South Sudan. Drawing on relevant literature, it examines the wider issues for the negotiation of peace agreements; for UN mandates, including the protection of civilians; for the limitations of peacekeeping; and for the importance of continuing political engagement. It argues that in some situations smaller missions without a heavy military component might in fact achieve more. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reflects on the dynamics associated with state building in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) with a particular focus on the role of external agency. The debate over constitutional reform has featured prominently in BiH since the early 2000s. The objective of this reform was to transform Dayton into a functional institutional framework that prepared the country for both international withdrawal and EU integration. Based on a detailed analysis of two international initiatives launched in 2005 and 2009 this article analyses the reasons why constitutional engineering in post-Dayton BiH failed. More specifically, the article argues that this reform failed as a result of various shortcomings including international divisions; a democratic deficit inherent in the process; and the neglect of local conditions (including conflicting notions of the future form of the state by both local and external actors). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]