Democratic backsliding has posed significant challenges to democracies in many countries. Recent calls for a better theorization of pushback against backsliding have triggered renewed scholarly interest in the field of opposition and its role in stopping or reversing creeping authoritarian rule. This study calls for a theoretical and empirical recalibration of the concept of opposition to account for multifaceted ‘non-partisan’ actors and venues of oppositional mobilization. It proposes a new classification of resilient civic opposition. The explanatory typology is based on two factors: (1) the ability of civic opposition to bring multiple grievances together and to balance between on-street and off-street mediums, and (2) the rapport between political opposition parties and civic opposition. Four cases of civic opposition from Hungary and Turkey illustrate the proposed typology empirically.

The digital transition has become a crucial area of ideological contestation, as ongoing debates on digital surveillance and data commodification exemplify. Yet, we know too little about how political parties tap into these confrontations. This article elaborates a critical approach to map the ideological positions that 25 parties in France, Germany, Italy and Spain adopt on platform societies. The empirical analysis classifies parties' positions to uncover how their views on the digital economy and digital politics reshape their core ideologies. While parties are distributed along six ideological positions, most cases populate three types: Platform Neoliberalism, Social Liberalism 4.0 and Platform Socialism. These types represent the tripartite ideological divide on platform societies. Ultimately, this study provides an empirically informed theory of comparative digital politics and the foundation for research agendas on political parties' views on digitalization and the relations between ideologies, public policy and parties' organizational change in the digital age.

Using a unique dataset of legislators' electoral and biographical data in the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the federal parliament, this article analyses the extent to which family dynasties affected the career development of legislators since the mid-18th century. We find that the prevalence of dynasties was higher in provincial legislatures than it was in the federal parliament, that the number of dynasties in the Senate increased until the mid-20th century, and that the proportion of dynastic legislators at the subnational level was similar to the numbers seen in the United Kingdom during the early 19th century. Our results confirm the existence of a clear career benefit in terms of cabinet and senate appointments. In contrast to the American case and in line with the United Kingdom experience, we find no causal relationship between a legislator's tenure length and the presence of a dynasty.

What do modern election campaigns look like? According to the most recent accounts, they are data-driven operations in which extensive data are collected and targeted messages are deployed in efforts to maximize support. Whilst highlighting important new developments, in this article we argue that a focus on novel practices offers a distorted picture of modern campaigns. Presenting a unique analysis of over 22,720 separate items of expenditure made by political parties at the 2019 UK general election, we demonstrate that whilst there is some evidence of a ‘fourth’ era of campaigning, these novel practices do not define campaigns. Taking a more holistic approach that examines how campaign activities are blended and entwined, we offer unprecedented insight into the nature of modern campaigns, revealing variation in parties' campaign strategies. We also introduce a new dataset for those interested in party campaigns and call for others to pursue a more holistic analysis.

Many studies have analysed what could motivate centre-right governments to develop progressive family policies, given their historically traditionalist ideology. Updating classic institutionalist accounts, this article expands the focus beyond centre-right parties formally in charge. It argues that in coalition and minority governments, partisan veto players may act as agenda-setters, design policy reforms and successfully exert pressure to approve them through three mechanisms: agreements for government formation, conditions for government survival and bureaucratic continuity. Drawing on novel empirical data from interviews and document analysis, this article applies deductive process tracing to analyse the German parental allowance reform of 2006 and the Spanish 2017 paternity leave extension. The findings complement existing studies that focus on the agency of centre-right parties as ‘protagonists’ of these reforms, arguing that in some cases they have instead ‘consented’ to reforms proposed and supported by other parties.

This article compares the Secretary General of the Elysée Palace and the US Chief of Staff, central political advisors to the French and US presidents. Our aim is twofold. Firstly, we identify the precise roles of these advisors. By mapping their respective powers, we demonstrate their importance in presidential decision-making. By examining what the French Elysée Secretary General and the US White House Chief of Staff have in common and how they differ, we develop a comparative understanding of the mechanisms of the presidentialization of political executives. We show that the similarities of the two offices are linked to the ongoing presidentialization of the French and American political systems, which, by giving greater power to heads of state, also strengthens their advisors. This commonality does not rule out marked differences between these officials, demonstrating that presidentialization takes distinct forms, reflecting distinct political cultures as well as different balances of power within each institutional system.

This study examines the impact of judicial inconsistency in high-profile corruption cases on citizens' willingness to combat corruption. Based on evidence from an unexpected event during a survey in Brazil, the study demonstrates that contradictory decisions by different judges within a single day erode trust in courts and citizens' inclination to report corruption. Notably, perceptions of corruption and trust in other institutions remain unaffected. The findings support the argument that citizens can be discouraged from engaging in anti-corruption efforts not only by exposure to information about corruption but also by forming negative evaluations of anti-corruption performance. Building on previous research and the perspective of corruption as a collective-action problem, the article proposes that judicial inconsistency is perceived as a sign of insincere commitment to fighting corruption. These findings contribute to understanding the public opinion consequences of anti-corruption initiatives and the politicization of courts.

The purchase of commercial spyware by at least 43 authoritarian states has drawn attention to the links between the international private technology trade and autocrats. This article sits at the intersection of the literatures on the international relations of authoritarian regimes, digital authoritarianism and the political economy of authoritarianism, asking, what impacts, if any, do the foreign technology trade relations of authoritarian regimes have on authoritarian resilience? Building a four-mechanism model to explain the interaction between the private technology trade and digital authoritarianism, the article then tests the model on a case study of Iran. It argues that while global technology companies lack the ideological or geopolitical interests that drive the engagement between authoritarian regimes and foreign states, an intense overlap in interests still exists between profit-hungry private technology companies and technology-hungry regimes. This facilitates the establishment of mutually beneficial relationships that contribute to authoritarian resilience and survival, however inadvertently.

Prime ministers often use vernacularisms in their political rhetoric, but we know little about how they deploy these forms of speech and the consequences for politics and policy. This article extends work on the ‘rhetorical PM’ by focusing on how leaders deploy idiomatic expressions in their oratory. The article presents a thematic analysis of four successive Australian prime ministers' use of the country's distinctive ‘fair go’ expression in speeches and media interviews between 1972 and 1996. Australian PMs increasingly invoked the ‘fair go’ expression throughout this period for multiple rhetorical purposes, including to make national identity claims, engage in partisan competition and justify policy reforms with strong neoliberal elements. While prevailing scholarship sees ‘vernacular politics’ as a tool of grassroots actors opposing discourses of globalization and elite-driven reform, this research shows the vernacular is a versatile rhetorical tool mobilized by elites for multiple purposes, including to justify radical policy change.

How do electoral manipulation and resulting anti-fraud protests influence political trust in non-democratic contexts? I leverage the plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of a series of original surveys fielded on nationally representative samples in Russia to understand the impact of political shocks – particularly allegations of electoral fraud and post-election protests – on the evolution of trust in political institutions and individuals. This study demonstrates that allegations of excessive, blatant electoral fraud decrease trust in the autocrat. However, trust rebounds following attendant post-election protests. Finally, I examine the conditional impacts of fraud and protest on trust, finding that updating occurs primarily among those with weak political affiliation.

This article elaborates the notion of hybrid repression, understanding by this modalities of dissidence suppression that involve state and non-state actors interacting in various ways, from fully autonomous to close cooperation. It does so by proposing a framework to scrutinize repressive configurations on the basis of three analytical dimensions – the perpetrator of repression, the tactics used and the threats perpetrators respond to – and using this framework to perform a systematic qualitative analysis of 160 in-depth interviews with human rights activists in four different countries (Colombia, Egypt, Mexico and Kenya). On this basis, the article analytically distinguishes and empirically elaborates four different patterns of hybrid repression, namely: state rogue, corporate, communitarian and non-state armed repression. Our argument challenges the state-centric approach to political repression that still dominates much of the literature on contentious politics and comparative regime analysis, and it invites further research on how hybrid forms of repression manifest and operate in different types of social and political contexts, and in relation to different areas of activism.

Research on legislative control dynamics has extensively examined how political parties use legislative tools to control portfolios and their respective heads in coalition governments. However, research has focused on partisan-run portfolios and has overlooked how control dynamics are affected when portfolio heads are independent, thus not affiliated with any party. This article addresses this gap by analysing parliamentary questions from 28 German city councils to determine how independent portfolios are controlled relative to partisan portfolios. The results show that all parties control independent portfolios more intensely than partisan portfolios. This is the case for both governing parties and opposition parties. However, while government parties control independent portfolios more than partisan portfolios, they still do so to a lesser extent than opposition parties.

Multilevel polities do not typically facilitate secession, so why did the European Union adopt Article 50? Revisiting formative debates from the 2003 Convention on the Future of Europe, we combine archival research with an original dataset of delegate debates over two levels: the existence and procedural operation of an exit article. This reveals essential new detail on the genealogy of Article 50. We locate this institutional innovation within a Rokkanian–Hirschmanian theoretical framework which treats exit closure as necessary for loyalty and resilience. Further refining this ‘polity’ perspective, we find many participants showed awareness of the potentially disruptive implications of an exit article. Yet, given extant tensions around ‘ever closer union’, a Eurocentric procedural design prevailed as a safety valve, granting EU authorities default control over any exit process. This European logic of ‘controlled opening' offers a potential blueprint for other integrating compound polities and international organizations facing backlashes from member states.

While we know that the far right thrives when migration is salient in public agendas, what happens when this issue is no longer under the spotlight? Building on 25 face-to-face interviews with activists mobilized against migration during COVID-19 in Italy, this article explores far-right framing of migration as a non-salient issue. We find that far-right groups indeed reframe their messages vis-à-vis a less favourable political setting; yet they are also able to seize fresh opportunities to reactivate opposition to migration, notably via prognostic frames delivering ostensibly depoliticized views that hijack solidarity principles and emphasize pragmatic and technocratic approaches to border control and migration management. In uncovering the discursive strategies used by far-right actors to bolster their credibility and appeal when out of their comfort zone, this article contributes to the scholarly understanding of politicization and highlights the mechanisms by which far-right ideas are becoming normalized in the public sphere.

What determines why some protest events last only a single day while others can stretch over multiple days? This study presents the first cross-national quantitative analysis of the factors that shape protest event duration. This study argues that protest event duration is the function of factors that increase momentum (e.g. protest size, location and participants) while also examining whether repression attenuates such momentum. Using the Armed Conflict Location Event Data, this study employs two multilevel statistical methods to examine the factors that matter. First, the study examines the day-by-day factors that shape whether a protest will continue the next day. Second, the study examines the overall duration of events. The analyses find strong support that protests in capitals and urban areas, as well as protests featuring students, labour unions and professional organizations, last longer, while repression does truncate events.

This article examines how the identity of the citizens or ‘the people’ of Russia is constructed in the wartime speeches of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Drawing on a discursive approach to populism using post-foundational discourse analysis (PDA), the article first identifies in Zelensky's eve-of-invasion address an antiwar transnational populist construction of a common antiwar interest of ‘ordinary people’ in Russia and Ukraine against the Russian government's overtures towards war. After the full-scale invasion, this construction initially carried over into Zelensky's appeals to ordinary Russians as being under threat from and capable of resisting their own government, before his messaging shifted towards ascribing collective responsibility for the invasion to Russian citizens, following the revelation of the Bucha war crimes. Ultimately, antiwar transnational populism remained a short-lived and contextually bounded phenomenon, limited to an initial phase until early April and briefly resurfacing in Zelensky's appeal to ‘indigenous peoples’ of the Caucasus and Siberia in late September 2022.

This review article provides a comprehensive overview of the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and populism. We analyse the demand and supply sides of the populist phenomenon during the pandemic. On the demand side, we focus on the interplay between populist attitudes and COVID-19 restrictions by assessing the role of conspiracy theories, social media and alternative news media. On the supply side, we identify similarities and differences in the responses of populist actors globally. Hence, we focus on the main ideational varieties of the contemporary populist phenomenon (right-wing, left-wing and valence populism) while also distinguishing between populists in government and opposition. The analysis reveals that complexity is the defining feature of both the demand and supply sides of populism in times of pandemic.

In this article, we examine party positions on sovereignty issues in European countries based on an analysis of party supply. First, we develop an index of sovereignism reflecting the multidimensional articulation and differentiated emphasis put by parties on sovereignist issues. By applying the index to Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) data, the analysis maps all EU member states. Second, we integrate in the analysis party- and country-level data (including the orientations of domestic public opinion). Through multivariate regression analysis we show how party ideology, contextual factors and public mood favoured the spread of party-based sovereignism in European countries.

Political parties vary in their responses to electoral challenges, including the rise of populist competitors. To address these challenges, they sometimes engage with peripheral issues located outside their ideological comfort zones, and at other times they adhere more closely to their core policies. Although these patterns are well-documented, voters' perceptions thereof remain under-examined. This article argues that voters evaluate parties' claims not just based on the direction of their policy engagement – positive or negative – but also based on the commitment behind these actions, distinguishing ideological commitment from strategic manoeuvres. Employing a pre-registered vignette experiment, the article shows that voters differentiate responses to core versus peripheral issues, regardless of their personal agreement with the policies. Populist attitudes further moderate these perceptions, as voters with such views are typically more sceptical of parties' motives, limiting the impact of party behaviour on perceived commitment primarily to non-populist individuals. This highlights the importance of perceived commitment in elections and the constraints parties face in responding to competition.

This study examines how formal institutions in hybrid regimes, particularly presidentialism, party organization and electoral rules, actively foster and sustain clientelistic networks, leading to particularistic outcomes. While existing literature highlights the weakening of formal institutions and pervasive clientelism as drivers of democratic breakdown, this study uses the concept of neopatrimonialism to analyse how formal institutions themselves consolidate patron–client relationships to maintain power and stability. Focusing on Turkey, the analysis demonstrates that the institutional incentive structure consolidates the president's role as the central ‘patron’, controlling resources and offices, and encourages clientelistic networks to coalesce around the presidency. The discretionary allocation of resources through patron–client relationships sustains neopatrimonial authority as long as clients' loyalty is rewarded. However, this governance increases clients' dependence on the patron, binding them at the expense of representation and responsiveness. The analysis offers insights into how such institutional configurations contribute to authoritarianism and particularistic governance in hybrid regimes.