This contribution is conceived as a resource on the state of European populist parties before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It reports on cross-national comparative findings generated by data collected from 30 European countries as to the state of populist parties in one calendar year (2019) and provides an extensive qualitative overview of the national cases. The article shows that while populist parties are preponderantly on the right, there is a significant degree of ideological variation among European populism. The data show significant diversity in their electoral performance but also that populist party participation in government is no longer a marginal phenomenon. The article ultimately elaborates on the various types of positions on European integration – from soft/hard Euroscepticism to lack thereof – and discusses the implications of their affiliation in the European Parliament.

The article takes fragility and resilience as distinct policy paradigms, and proposes a structured, focused comparison of how they informed and changed the EU approach to conflict and crisis management in time. The first section provides a cumulative synthesis of the debate on fragility and resilience in the international and European security discourse and practice on the background of which their comparison is built. By analysing the founding documents respectively endorsing fragility and resilience in the European context, namely the 2003 European Security Strategy and the 2016 European Union Global Strategy in addition to the existing literature on these topics, the two paradigms are examined in terms of (1) what understanding of the international system they advance; (2) where they identify the locus of the threat; (3) which role they attribute to the international community (4) and the type of solutions they proposed. In accordance with our results, we conclude that the two paradigms are not in competition, since they emerged from and reflected a contingent shift in global and local environments. Moreover, rather than providing a novel lens to better look at conflict and crisis situation, resilience is found to offer more insights into the EU's perception of its role in these contexts.

Relying on Foucault's concept of pastoral power, the article scrutinizes the role of religious officers who are employed by Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and serve Turkish Muslim communities in Europe. It investigates how state-led diaspora institutions operate at a micro-level and what they reveal about the state's governmentality outside its territory. In order to parse the pastoral actors' empirically visible agency, the work draws on ethnographic observations of the religious officers' activities in the Diyanet's mosques in Austria. It outlines (i) how Diyanet officers' pastoral practices go beyond the mosques and manifest in a wide range of socio-cultural religious services aimed at reaching diaspora communities, (ii) the relation between Diyanet officers' activities and the Turkish state's extraterritorial practices and discourse aimed to promoting obedience to the authorities and love for the motherland, and (iii) how the interaction between Diyanet officers and the flock shape people's perception of themselves as a community while remapping the boundaries of a Turkish and Muslim belonging in essentialist terms.

Sustainable development provisions have become an integral part of the European Union's (EU's) ‘new generation’ trade agreements. Yet, a growing number of empirical works show that their design varies significantly, even in the trade agreements signed with countries at similar (low) levels of development. We contend that this variation can be accounted for by discussing how the growing integration of the EU economy with specific developing countries across global value chains (GVCs) affects the domestic politics of regulatory export in the EU. European firms that operate within GVCs rely on imports of inputs produced in low-labor cost countries. These firms tend to oppose the export of those regulatory burdens that generate an increase in their imports' variable costs. The political mobilization of these actors weakens domestic coalitions supporting regulatory export strategies, which explains why the EU adopts a more lenient approach over the inclusion of sustainable development provisions in Preferential Trade Agreement negotiations with some developing countries.

This paper analyses the military behaviour of Russia from 1992 to 2010. The method used is a combination of the dyad analysis introduced by Stuart Bremer in 1992 and the analysis of unit-level variables, which is distinctive of foreign policy analysis. We empirically test a set of hypotheses about the determinants of Russia's military behaviour in the post-Cold War period by considering the impact of changes of international variables – relative power, the presence of military alliance pacts, the territorial salience of the dispute – and state-level variables – the degree of democracy/autocracy and regime vulnerability. A bivariate and a multivariate analysis are carried out to explain the separate and joint impacts of independent variables.

The main purpose of this paper is to detect the reasons for party leaders' persistence or departure from the office, starting from the moment they are selected or re-selected. More specifically, we try to assess which (if any) characteristics of the leadership race (LR) called to appoint (or re-appoint) the party leader, in combination with other conditions, could favour leadership re-selection in office at the end of the term, rather than a more or less forced early departure. To this end, we have investigated all the LRs promoted by both bigger and smaller parties in four Western European countries over the last three decades. Bridging the literature on leadership selection and leadership survival, we built a theoretical framework that allowed us to turn to an original methodological approach in the field – qualitative comparative analysis – to unravel asymmetrical, equi-final, and conjunctural causation by looking at the combinations of conditions leading to the outcome, namely re-selection or departure from the office. Specifically, we identified five main conditions which are likely to affect the outcome, both alone and in combination with each other: whether there is an outgoing leader running for re-election (incumbency); a broad inclusiveness of the LR called to appoint the party leader; large victory (namely low competitiveness for contested LR or high approval rates for coronation of a single candidate); participation in government during the leadership tenure; and party electoral support (‘big’ mainstream vs. ‘small’ niche/challenger parties).

The European Fiscal Board (EFB) is a supranational fiscal council advising the European Commission on the European Union (EU) fiscal framework. It was created as a response to the EU member states' repeated non-compliance with the EU fiscal rules and the emergence of national fiscal councils. Non-compliance with EU fiscal rules was often left unpunished and required a new expert body to regain some of the lost credibility of the EU's fiscal framework through enhanced fiscal monitoring. This article argues that the European Commission created the EFB in response to the new intergovernmental dynamics. A supranational fiscal watchdog that depends on the Commission for financial resources and access to information would deflect member states from delegating more competences away from the Commission. Thus, the Commission was able to counter a potential threat to its authority in EU fiscal governance by creating a supranational de novo body that it controlled.

Over the last two decades, the formation of grand coalitions has grown in the European Union (EU), even in countries with no previous political experience with them. Alongside a significant rise in both new and radical parties, grand coalitions signal the increasing fragmentation of contemporary European politics. We, therefore, investigate the electoral performance of both mainstream and new parties entering and leaving grand coalitions. We find that mainstream parties do not appear to enter grand coalitions after negative election results. They are, however, punished in the following elections, albeit not as heavily as previous findings have shown. This post-grand coalition electoral penalty is true for both major and minor grand coalition members. These findings contribute to the literature on party competition and provide insights into the choices mainstream parties' have been making in response to recent and rapid changes in the electoral landscape of the EU.