Who are the supporters of former rebel parties? Drawing on the classical party literature, we argue that the support base of former rebel parties consists predominantly of activists. These supporters are dissatisfied with intra-party politics because the benefits and costs of a rebel-to-party transformation are unequally distributed between them and the leadership. We test our arguments by examining the case of the novel FARC party (Comunes) in Colombia. Based on a unique sample of FARC supporters, we obtained unprecedented insight into the internal affairs of the FARC. Our survey design allowed us to generate an over-time comparison between FARC and other party supporters in the Colombian political system. The empirical analysis shows that in comparison, FARC supporters tend to be more politically active as well as more dissatisfied with internal politics. Furthermore, dissatisfaction with democracy and the peace agreement increased after their first electoral cycle.

The received wisdom on executive–legislative relations in multiparty presidential systems is that the size of the president's majority in Congress is the key factor explaining governance patterns, particularly the president's legislative success. However, in many cases presidents enjoying a nominal majority have been unable to pass legislation and have faced institutional instability. The article departs from a conventional definition of divided government and focuses on the preference incongruence between the governing coalition and the floor of Congress. It argues that the ideological distance between the floor and the coalition is a key factor explaining the president's cost of governing (which includes factors such as the distribution of cabinet portfolios and budgetary transfers to coalition partners). The article provides an empirical test with data from Brazil that find that the greater the ideological incongruence, the higher the cost of governing for the president.

While coalition agreements are significant in structuring government behaviour, their comprehensiveness varies considerably across cabinets. We argue that the average correspondence between parties' priorities and portfolio allocation is important in explaining the comprehensiveness of coalition agreements because coalition parties that have obtained their preferred portfolios have less incentive to negotiate a detailed coalition agreement. We test our argument by combining newly collected data on coalition agreements drafted by 218 cabinets in 24 Western and Eastern European countries from 1945 to 2014 with data on the distribution of ministerial portfolios. We find that the shorter and less comprehensive the agreements, the higher the correspondence between parties' priorities and portfolio allocation. Our results have important implications for our understanding of coalition governments and the relationship between government formation and cabinet governance.

This article tests the claim that government cooperation between mainstream parties and radical right parties can be explained by coalition theory. It does so by analysing three Swedish cases of coalition formation where the radical right Sweden Democrats (SD) have remained excluded despite holding a pivotal position in the parliament. It argues that, with the right analytical tools, this exclusion can be explained by coalition theory: cooperation with the SD has been unattractive in terms of policy, and unnecessary because the mainstream parties have been able to form viable minority governments. This argument requires three things: first, that we consider the two-dimensional nature of Swedish politics; second, that we shift the focus from majority government to viable government; and third, that we acknowledge strategic time horizons that extend well into the future. The findings contribute to our understanding of coalition formation and of how mainstream parties respond strategically to the radical right.

The power-sharing literature lacks a review that synthesizes its findings, despite spanning over 50 years since Arend Lijphart published his seminal 1969 article ‘Consociational Democracy’. This review article contributes to the literature by introducing and analysing an original dataset, the Power Sharing Articles Dataset, which extracts data on 23 variables from 373 academic articles published between 1969 and 2018. The power-sharing literature, our analysis shows, has witnessed a boom in publications in the last two decades, more than the average publication rate in the social sciences. This review offers a synthesis of how power sharing is theorized, operationalized and studied. We demonstrate that power sharing has generally positive effects, regardless of institutional set-up, post-conflict transitional character and world region. Furthermore, we highlight structural factors that are mostly associated with the success of power sharing. Finally, the review develops a research agenda to guide future scholarly work on power sharing.