This article explores the ways and extents that civil society associations can bring greater public accountability to global governance. The analysis first reviews the growth of civil society engagement of global governance. Second, the article elaborates four general ways that civil society associations have promoted increased accountability in global governance: by increasing the public transparency of global governance operations; by monitoring and reviewing global policies; by seeking redress for mistakes and harms attributable to global regulatory bodies; and by advancing the creation of formal accountability mechanisms for global governance. Third, the article identifies six broad circumstances that have affected (and often limited) the extent of civil society achievements with respect to accountability in global governance.

FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF FASCISM AND THE END OF THE Second World War, right-wing radical movements and parties are part of the political normalcy in many Western democracies. In the face of the twentieth-century experiences of fascism and state socialism, and their failures, this stubborn persistence seems at the same time anachronistic and frightening. While there is no shortage of explanations and interpretations of this phenomenon in an evergrowing body of literature, most studies focus on national trends and derive their criteria from country-specific histories and discourses. Serious comparative scholarship on the radical right is still in its infancy.

This article is a plea for more comparative research on rightwing radicalism at the turn of the century. It begins by highlighting the three central dimensions of the problem. First, one must state that contemporary right-wing radicalism is an international phenomenon. Thus, more than before, comparative studies are needed both to analyse the international quality and to specify the nation-specific characteristics of the radical right in each country. Secondly, it must be borne in mind that contemporary right-wing radicalism is a modern phenomenon. It has undergone a phase of renewal, as a result of social and cultural modernization shifts in post-war Europe. Thus it is only vaguely connected with previous versions. Terms like ‘fascism’ or ‘neo-fascism’ which suggest a historical continuity from Munich to Mölln and Magdeburg in Germany, or from Vichy to Vitrolles in France, become increasingly obsolete. The third factor to bear in mind is that contemporary right-wing radicalism is a complex phenomenon. The ongoing specialization and compartmentalization in the social sciences, such as discourse analysis, party and electoral research, and youth sociology – to name but a few of the approaches applied to the radical right – fail to do justice to the complexity of the subject. Clearly, the many faces of right-wing radicalism require clear analytical distinctions, but ultimately they need to be approached in a truly interdisciplinary way.

We argue that the democratization of global governance will ultimately depend upon the creation of an appropriate public sphere that connects decision-making processes with transnational constituency. The emergence of such a public sphere would require more transparency in international organizations as well as institutional settings in which policy-makers respond to stakeholders’ concerns. Organized civil society plays a key role by exposing global rule-making to public scrutiny and bringing citizens’ concerns onto the agenda. We illustrate the prospects and difficulties of building a transnational public sphere with the example of the WTO.

This Article Considers The Social Responsibility Of Business, why it exists, why governments might be interested in it, and its place in new governance. The discussion is primarily conceptual, informed and stimulated by empirical findings from Australia and the UK, countries which have been associated neither with the extent of business social responsibility long-witnessed in the USA nor with the extent of neo-corporatism characteristic of parts of northern Europe and Scandinavia.

Until recently, Rhodes's ‘Differentiate Polity Model’ (DPM) has been the most analytically-developed model of the British political system, but it is not without its problems. Here, we argue that the DPM over-stresses the diffuse nature of power in Britain and the extent to which the state has been hollowed out. Instead, we contend that the British political system is more closed and elitist than the DPM acknowledges; rather than being hollowed-out, the state has been reconstituted and the core executive still remains the most powerful actor in the policy process. These themes are reflected in our own ‘Asymmetric Power model’.

This article makes the case for a novel democratic subtype, populist democracy, indicating a situation in which both the party in office and at least the major opposition force(s) in a pluralist system are populist. Based on a minimal definition of populism as ‘democratic illiberalism’, and through the comparative analysis of post-authoritarian Greece and post-communist Hungary, the article reveals the particular stages, as well as the causal mechanisms, that may prompt the emergence of populist democracy in contemporary politics. It also points to the tendency of such systems to produce polarized two-party systems, and it calls for further research on the topic.

The main methodological problem in assessing the impact of political institutions on any kind of performance stems from the possibility that institutions may be endogenous. As a result, institutions cannot be matched for the conditions under which they function. Inferences from such non-experimental observations are subject to several biases and, in the end, our conclusions may not be robust. One should not be confident, therefore, that any institutions would function in the same way under conditions different from those from which they are transplanted.

Most studies see demand for populist forces driven by broad sociological factors that make certain issues salient among specific constituencies. However, this argument is not normally tested at the individual level. We propose a theory of populist voting which argues that populist attitudes are themselves important predictors of voting, interacting with ideological positions. We test this theory through a comparison of recent voting in Chile and Greece, two countries where the contexts for activating populist attitudes are very different. We find that despite similar levels of populist attitudes across both countries, these attitudes explain much more of the vote in Greece than they do in Chile, and that in both countries they interact with ideological positions in predictable ways.

That ‘terrorism research’ is mired by epistemological, methodological and political-normative problems is well established. What is usually overlooked is that, beyond the difficulties inherent in ‘terrorism research’, these problems are exacerbated by two further factors: the predominance of what Cox called a ‘problem-solving’ approach, and the dispersed nature of much of the more rigorous, ‘critical’ and conceptually innovative research on ‘terrorism’ in cognate fields that, for ideological, theoretical or practical reasons, are reluctant to engage with ‘terrorism studies’. A ‘critical turn’ is needed to reverse both these trends, but it must be inclusive and seek to be policy relevant.

This paper outlines the elements of a pluralistic system of accountability with regard to one of the most ambitious institutional innovations in global governance: multisectoral public policy networks. These networks bring together the public sector (governments and international organizations), civil society and business around issues ranging from corruption, climate change and fighting malaria to environmental and labour standards. We argue that multisectoral networks should be embedded in a pluralistic system of accountability making use of a combination of accountability mechanisms on a number of dimensions (actors, process, outcomes). The paper discusses some of the key conceptual, empirical and practical challenges of a ‘learning model’ of accountability in networks.

Networks of government officials – police investigators, financial regulators, even judges and legislators – are a key feature of world order in the twenty-first century. Yet, these networks present significant accountability and legitimacy concerns. This article identifies and responds to the potential problems of government networks by suggesting means to increase their accountability and proposing norms to govern the relations of members of government networks with one another. Finally, the article develops the concept of disaggregated sovereignty, arguing that government networks have the capacity to enter into international regulatory regimes of various types and thereby are independently bound by the existing corpus of international law.

The enduring electoral success of populist parties across Europe and the increasing opportunities they have gained to access government in recent years bring once more into relief the question of whether populism and democracy are fully compatible. In this article we show how, despite playing different roles in government within very different political systems, and despite the numerous constraints placed upon them (for instance, EU membership, international law and domestic checks and balances), populist parties consistently pursued policies that clashed with fundamental tenets of liberal democracy. In particular, the idea that the power of the majority must be limited and restrained, the sanctity of individual rights and the principle of the division of powers have all come under threat in contemporary Europe. This has contributed to the continuing erosion of the liberal consensus, which has provided one of the fundamental foundations of the European project from its start.

Denmark, Norway and Sweden are still among the most corporatist democracies in the world. Although corporatism has declined in Scandinavia over the last decades, it still exists, albeit at a lower level. Based on comparative and longitudinal data, we argue that this is a consequence of the disruption of some of the prerequisites to corporatist exchange. Neither governments nor the relevant interest groups in Scandinavia control what their exchange partner desires to the same extent as they did during the heyday of corporatism. Despite the involvement of different factors in the three countries, the main pattern is the same. Consequently, the character of state–interest group relations in Scandinavia is not as distinctive as it used to be.

It has been suggested that political distrust is associated with lower levels of voter turnout and increased votes for challenger or populist parties. We investigate the relationship between political (dis)trust and electoral behaviour using the 2009 Belgian Election Study. Belgium presents an interesting case because compulsory voting (with an accompanying turnout rate of 90.4 per cent) compels distrusting voters to participate in elections. Nevertheless, distrusting voters are significantly more inclined to cast a blank or invalid vote. Second, distrust is positively associated with a preference for extreme right (Vlaams Belang) and populist (Lijst Dedecker) parties. Third, in party systems where there is no supply of viable challengers (i.e. the French-speaking region of Belgium), the effect of political trust on party preference is limited. We conclude that electoral effects of political distrust are determined by the electoral and party system and the supply of electoral protest.

In the wake of the deepest and longest recession the UK has experienced since the 1930s, this article examines the origins, sustenance and puncturing of the growth dynamic the UK economy enjoyed between 1992 and 2007. In so doing it seeks to gauge the interventions made to attempt to shore up the growth model and the prospects for the resumption of growth. It argues that the Anglo-liberal growth model is, indeed, fatally flawed and that, in the absence of a new growth model, it is difficult to see how sustained economic growth can be achieved. Yet it also argues that, at present, no alternative growth model is on offer and that it is wrong to infer the likelihood of a paradigm shift in economic thinking from the ‘inter-paradigm’ borrowing used to shore up the old growth model in the midst of the recession. If crises are judged as much by the transformations to which they give rise as by the accumulation of pathologies out of which they crystallize, then what we have experienced to date is not so much a crisis as a catastrophic equilibrium. Though the symptoms to which it has given rise are pregnant with the possibility of crisis, the crisis itself is yet to come.

This contribution evaluates the theoretical and methodological challenges of researching the gendered dynamics of candidate selection in comparative perspective. It argues that comparative studies should take into account not only the gendered nature of political parties and their wider institutional context, but must also investigate the informal aspects of the selection process and their gendered consequences. The article explores these dynamics by revisiting original in-depth research on the candidate selection process in two different settings – Thailand and Scotland. Using a common analytical framework, the article reflects on this work and points to two key aspects of the interaction between formal and informal rules – the gendered consequences of informal party recruitment and of local influence over candidate selection – which are critically important for understanding the continuity of male political dominance and female under-representation. The article concludes by outlining a research agenda for comparative work on gender, institutions and candidate selection and pointing to future directions for work in this area.

The True Finn Party (PS), which gained virtually 10 per cent of the national vote at the 2009 European Parliament election, lacks a place in the comparative party literature and also defies ready classification. It has been perceived by its supporters as the most left-wing of the non-socialist parties; by Finnish media commentators as a case of right-wing populism; and by researchers as a distinctive centred-based populist party when viewed in a wider European perspective. Based on a careful study of its programmatic output since its inception in 1995, this article seeks to characterize the PS by reference to its core ideological features. It argues that it is in fact a populist radical right party – with national identity or Finnishness as its pivotal concept – albeit without the xenophobic extremism of such continental counterparts as the Danish People's Party or Austrian Freedom Party.

Recent global developments, including the feminization of parliaments and the rise of gender quotas, have transformed the ways in which parties and legislatures operate. This introduction to the special issue ‘Candidate Selection: Parties and Legislatures in a New Era’ puts these recent developments in context, making the case for revisiting the ‘secret garden’ of candidate selection in light of this ‘new era’ in politics. It sets out a critical dialogue between party politics and gender politics scholarship and points to the need for more research on how political parties facilitate or block women’s access to political office. Building on the burgeoning research on gender and political recruitment, it outlines how a gendered and institutional approach allows us to retheorize candidate selection processes and opens up new avenues for empirically examining the pathways prior to election. The article then introduces the papers in this special issue and concludes by evaluating the main implications of gendering analyses of candidate selection and party politics more broadly.

Throughout this century, the Marxist Left in Europe has emphasized an economic interpretation of history, with state ownership of the means of production as the key element in their prescription for society. Political polarization is depicted as a direct reflection of social class conflict, with the working class the natural base of support for the Left. This diagnosis has become increasingly out of touch with reality in recent years, which have seen the decline of orthodox Marxist parties in Western Europe and the diminishing credibility of the ideology on which they are based. For as advanced industrial society emerges, economic determinism provides a progressively less adequate analysis of society, and class-based parties and the policies they advocate become less central to politics. Economic development reduces the impact of economic determinism. Though economic factors tend to play a dominant role in the early stages of industrial society, in advanced industrial society their relative importance diminishes; and self-expression, ‘belonging’ and the quality of the physical and social environment become increasingly important.

For more than 40 years, studies trying to explain macro-level electoral turnout have been one of the pillars of political behavioural research. From January 2004 to December 2013 alone, more than 130 articles were published in peer-reviewed journals using turnout at the national, regional or local level as the dependent variable. This meta-analysis tries to synthesize the results of these studies. I find there is a strong consensus in the literature that turnout is higher under compulsory voting, if the election is important, and if it is held in a small country. I also find that the influence of most other predictor variables, including the type of electoral system, the number of parties, development, income inequalities and electoral closeness is inconclusive at best. These results hint at the fact that the determinants of turnout might be more complex than the current theory suggests and is rather more context dependent.