This article investigates the dimension and evolution of the financing of political parties. It focuses on 28 parties in the five major European countries (Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain), analysing the parties’ budgets from 2002 to 2016. The article's assessment shows that the availability of funds increased until the beginning of the Great Recession (2008), and then decreased, mainly due to a decline in public support for parties. Diminished state generosity has led parties to look for different sources of financing: the article shows the proportion of self-funding resources in terms of membership fees and private donations that has sustained the parties’ finances. Finally the article presents a model that helps to explain the shrinking of parties’ income by including parties’ ideological alignment, electoral outcome, presence in government and share of public financing, and countries’ public spending and GDP level, to investigate the plausible causes of the reduction of parties’ income.

Recent discussions of accountability in contexts of expert knowledge raise questions about the limits of transparency. Against this background, we discuss the nexus between expert knowledge and meaningful accountability – that is, context-sensitive accountability based on a genuine understanding of a situation. We argue that the concentration of expertise in certain institutions makes it difficult to hold those institutions accountable. In particular, three components challenge meaningful accountability: specialization, inaccessibility and potential biases or conflict of interest. We emphasize the role of ‘epistemic communities’ and their impact on the tension between expert knowledge and independence. Drawing on the deliberative systems literature, we discuss how expert knowledge might be communicated to outsiders to enable meaningful accountability. To illustrate our argument, we draw on the European Central Bank, a case study in which states have chosen a delegation design characterized by a high degree of independence and trust in expert knowledge, to the detriment of accountability. We sketch possible avenues for creating the conditions for meaningful accountability even in the case of institutions with highly concentrated expertise.

What happens after primary elections? Strategies of loyalty or defection in general elections have been addressed by US literature mainly by means of aggregate data. However, we lack similar studies in non-US contexts. This article investigates the strategies followed after primary elections by taking the case of the Italian Partito Democratico as an illustration. We addressed the individual drivers of loyalty or defection strategies by considering three different dimensions: (1) the outcome of the primary election, having backed a winning or losing candidate; (2) the strength of partisanship, meant as ideological congruence with the party and partisan involvement; and (3) the leader effect. We relied on four surveys (exit polls) administered during party leadership selections held in 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2019. The results suggest that all three dimensions have an influence on post-primary strategies, but what counts the most is partisan involvement.

Studies have suggested that people voting for Brexit were motivated by anti-globalization, anti-multiculturalism and anti-elite sentiments. However, little is known about how these factors are related and whether citizens in other member states share similar reasons for wanting to exit the EU. Methodologically, this question is addressed by utilizing path models on data from the European Social Survey, with respondents in 17 countries. Empirically, this article reveals considerable cross-country variation, which implies that motivations for voting Leave should be assessed on a country-by-country basis. Yet, two main pathways are identified. First, lower education is related to more negative attitudes towards multiculturalism, which increases the probability of voting Leave. Second, lower income decreases the level of trust in the political establishment, which again increases the probability of voting Leave. Theoretically, this implies that the anti-globalization model is subsumed by the anti-multiculturalism and anti-elite models, giving rise to two new mechanisms.

In this article, we introduce a unique data set containing all written communication published by the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2017. Increasing numbers of scholars make use of protocols of parliamentary speeches, parliamentary questions or the texts of legislative drafts in various fields of comparative politics including representation, responsiveness, professionalization and political careers or parliamentary agenda studies. Since preparing parliamentary documents is rather resource intensive, these studies remain limited to single points in time, types of documents and/or policy areas. The long time horizon and various types of documents covered by our new comprehensive data set will enable scholars interested in parliaments, parties and representatives to answer various innovative research questions related to legislative studies.

How do ethnically divided countries create inclusive and stable democratic institutions? Why do some kinds of federalism fail while others evolve? Scholars looking for answers to these kinds of questions have tended to focus on the West. Yet there are important lessons arising from the substantial democratic and federal reforms that have taken place in Asia over the last few decades. These reforms signal a new model of federal democracy in Asia, comprising multilevel ethnoterritorial federalism, mixed-majoritarianism and a party system that includes both ethnic and multi-ethnic parties. This model has emerged as a response to ethnic conflict and secession risks and reflects the high diversity of clustered communities and cross-cutting cleavages. Despite its overarching majoritarianism, the federal model has led to highly fragmented party systems and coalition governments, with positive implications for democratic stability. Together, these features go some way towards blending otherwise conflicting consociational and centripetal paradigms.

It can be challenging for a democratic government to effectively make policies that address crucial national problems. While a bulk of literature reports that many democracies have overcome this challenge through centralization of legislative organization, few studies have explained why legislative decentralization that allegedly impairs policymaking performance would take place. Drawing on Taiwan's experience and over 13,000 legislative bills proposed in Taiwan's parliament between 1993 and 2012, this article demonstrates that the legislative decentralization during the onset of Taiwan's democratization slightly revived the policymaking performance of a near-paralysed parliament. Like drinking poison to quench the thirst, myopic politicians may opt for legislative decentralization as an instant remedy to ease severe legislative obstruction, despite the unfavourable consequences that the resulting decentralized legislative organization may eventually bring about. These findings shed new light on the evolution of legislative organization and account for the difficulties in policymaking facing developing democracies.

The article sheds light on tutelary regimes, which have so far been left out in the discussion of contemporary authoritarian regimes. It uses a configurative approach to conceptualize tutelary regimes according to the three dimensions of tutelary interference, electoral competitiveness and civil liberties. Tutelary interference is conceived of as a spectrum of possible and not mutually exclusive roles which tutelary powers perform – depending on their position in the political system. Empirically, the article uses a case study of Myanmar's tutelary regime to illustrate how the armed forces’ institutionalized powers and prerogatives have helped the country evade substantial democracy. The results show a high degree of regime heterogeneity, with a functioning electoral regime in place but substantial weaknesses in civil liberties. Both are (partly) rooted in the tutelary interference of the military, which is pervasive. The military's position straitjackets the government; the military vetoes certain policies and structural reforms and guards the political system and its prerogatives from a position of strength. Politicians have so far not come up with successful strategies to bring the military under civil control.

This article engages with Meg Russell and Ruxandra Serban's (2021) argument that the Westminster model is ‘a concept stretched beyond repair’ that deserves ‘to be retired’. We examine the logic, theory and methods that led to such a powerful, potent and provocative argument. We suggest their approach may have inadvertently ‘muddied’ an already muddled concept. We assess the implications of ‘muddying’ for their conclusion that the Westminster model is, in essence, a dead concept in need of a decent funeral. We suggest the concept is ‘stretched but not snapped’ by developing a simple four-perspective broadening of the analytical lens. This approach aids understanding about what the concept covers, how it is operationalized and why it remains useful in comparative research.

The term ‘Westminster model’ is frequently used by political scientists and practitioners. But our recent examination (Russell and Serban 2021), published in this journal, uncovered wide variation in how it is defined – demonstrating that it is more ‘muddle’ than ‘model’. This sparked a response article from Flinders et al. (2021), which we in turn respond to in this piece. We briefly revisit our initial research questions, methodology and findings, before reflecting on their analysis. We emphasize that, notwithstanding the critics’ negative tone, we and they agree on certain fundamentals. In particular on our original central point, that the ‘Westminster model’ is an ill-defined term with a long history, which mostly makes it unsuited to positivist comparative political science research. While the ‘Westminster model’ may have some valid vestigial uses, within the UK political system, or as an object of study for interpretivist political science, it does not provide a rigorous basis for case selection and comparative political science analysis.