Why is the exercise of political power highly concentrated in some polities and widely dispersed in others? We argue that one important causal factor is demographic. Populous polities are characterized by less concentrated structures of authority. To explain this relationship, we invoke two mechanisms: heterogeneity and trust. The theory is demonstrated with a wide variety of empirical measures in cross-country analyses including most sovereign states and extending back to the 19th century. The result suggests the possibility of a ubiquitous ‘law’ of politics.

The personalization of politics has become a central concern in political science. This is also true for parliamentary governments, where the Prime Minister has allegedly acquired an increasing relevance. Nonetheless, a key question remains unanswered: How can we estimate the Prime Minister Policy Autonomy (PMPA) in parliamentary governments? Moreover, what are the determinants of this autonomy? This article aims to answer these questions by proposing a novel and easily replicable index of PMPA, based on data from an analysis of Prime Ministers’ and members of Parliament’s parliamentary speeches, and specifically from cosine similarity analysis. In this article, we explore PMPA by focussing on two most different cases of coalition governments, Italy and Germany between 1994 and 2014. A multilevel regression analysis shows that coalition-related factors strongly influence PMPA, party-related factors are somewhat relevant, and the Prime Minister-related factor (its selectorate) does not have a significant impact on such autonomy.

This paper contributes to current debates on the politicization of international politics by examining party-political contestation of peace and security missions. It is guided by two inter-related questions, (a) to what extent deployment decisions are contested amongst political parties and (b) what drives such contestation. We examine data from a new data set on parliamentary votes on deployment decisions in France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom and from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. Against conventional wisdom and in an effort to address the often-overlooked role of political parties, we find that military deployments have been systematically contested amongst political parties across Europe. Further, we find that contestation is driven by the left/right axis, as opposed to newer cleavages captured here by the so-called gal/tan axis. We also find evidence that patterns of contestation depend on parties’ positions in government or opposition, a factor we relate to bureaucratic and international pressures on the parties in office, and to political opportunities for opposition parties.

If transparency in political finance is part and parcel of democracy, why do some countries adopt internationally agreed standards to regulate political finance in a more transparent way, while others do not? This paper (a) suggests a theoretical framework to address this question, taking into account international obligations, existing party finance regulation, and demands for greater legitimacy of political institutions; (b) introduces a unique data set of 46 member-countries of the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) project operated by the Council of Europe; and (c) concludes that unwillingness to pay the high domestic costs of changing national regulation is the prime impediment to compliance with transparency regulation proposed by GRECO. Right-of-centre cabinets are, on average, associated with a poorer level of compliance. Interestingly, compliance with recommendations which reduce the privileges of parliamentary parties does not deviate from the overall pattern.

The article investigates the dynamics of budgeting and its explanatory factors in Hungary based on a new database. Previous work for the period between 1991 and 2013 demonstrated that year-on-year changes in budgetary allocations by policy topics show a leptokurtic distribution. This distribution of policy changes is generally associated with the notion of punctuated equilibrium. We extend this analysis to cover over 155 years of Hungarian budgetary history. Our investigation of a database of 2580 spending category observations (covering the period between 1868 and 2013) lends support for the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We also analysed the impact of political regimes on budgetary dynamics. Here we provided empirical evidence for the validity of the informational advantage hypothesis which states that democracies will show lower level of kurtosis than other political regimes. This finding is also in line with the results of available comparative studies.

Does public policy in Europe reflect women’s preferences equally well as men’s? This study compares the opinions of women and men with concrete policy on a set of 20 issues across a diverse range of policy areas in 31 European countries. It shows that the majorities of men and women frequently prefer the same policy. However, when they disagree, men’s preferences are more likely to be represented. Neither the proportion of women in parliament nor the left–right orientation of the government explains variation in women’s policy representation. Instead, a higher number of parliamentary parties increase the likelihood that policy reflects women’s views. This effect does not seem to be driven by left-libertarian politics or Green parties, even though women’s stronger support for ‘new politics’ issues is an important source of disagreement between men and women.

This article contributes to a burgeoning literature on parliamentary war powers by investigating the case of the US Congress drawing on both International Relations (IR) research and traditional war powers studies. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and case study method, we examine the conditions shaping congressional assertiveness. The article shows that the lack of national security interests and divided government are important conditions for members of Congress to criticize presidential intervention policies. While previous US war powers studies focused on the influence of partisanship, this article holds that domestic as well as international factors influence congressional behavior. A short comparative case study of two US military interventions (Libya 2011, ISIS 2014–15) during the Obama presidency serves to illustrate the findings.