Since the turn of the century, much comparative politics scholarship has examined whether and how income inequality affects the prospects of democratization and, to a lesser extent, whether democracy reduces inequality. What is lacking, however, is a close examination of the extent of income inequality in authoritarian regimes. This article examines the variation in inequality across authoritarian regimes and argues that electoral competition – in conjunction with party ideology and the extent of party institutionalization – helps explain the pattern of inequality under authoritarian rule. I find that electoral authoritarian (EA) regimes – regimes in which multiple parties legally compete in elections – have lower levels of inequality compared to non-EA regimes. I further find that inequality is lower in EA regimes with left-leaning ruling parties and more institutionalized party systems. This analysis highlights the value of exploring the dynamics and contingent effects of electoral competition in authoritarian regimes.

This article argues that post-conflict consociational arrangements in ethnically divided societies incentivize moderation by political parties, but not policy differentiation outside the main conflict. This results in little policy-driven voting. Analysing party manifestos and voter survey data, we examine the evolution of party policy and cleavage voting under power-sharing in Northern Ireland 1998–2016. We find a reduction in ethno-national policy differences between parties and that ethno-nationalism has become less important in predicting vote choice for Protestants, but not Catholics. We also find little party differentiation in other policy areas and show that vote choices are largely independent of people's policy stances on economic or social issues. Our findings are thus largely consistent with a ‘top-down’ interpretation of political dynamics.

The former rebel party Revolutionary United Front Party (RUFP) in Sierra Leone has struggled with a discredited wartime reputation and electoral defeats throughout the post-war period. In spite of this, the party has remained loyal to its wartime revolutionary ideas, symbols and political rhetoric. Why is this the case? In this article, I argue that the answer lies in the premises of party politics in war-torn states and new democracies on the African continent. In a political landscape where brokerage is power, retaining wartime identities can sometimes serve as a valuable source of (potential) patronage. With few other options for access to resources and opportunities, the core of the party membership has clung to its past as a means to both rally electoral support among the marginalized ex-combatant community and to get access to the long-awaited funds that were promised to them in the peace negotiations.

Despite their alleged anti-systemness and ‘non-coalitionability’, radical right and radical left parties have, since the early 1990s, both supported and entered coalition governments in a number of European liberal democracies. Using the classical ‘size and ideology’ framework, this study sets out to examine how – or, put differently, under what circumstances – radical right and radical left parties are able to overcome the obstacles associated with governing and enter coalition governments. Inspired by previous observations regarding the complex and multicausal nature of radical government participation, the study relies on a configurational method. By means of a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 37 radical parties at 207 coalition formation instances in 22 (Western and Central and Eastern) European countries, the article sheds light on different paths that lead to government inclusion (and exclusion) of radical actors. The empirical evidence indicates that electoral success in combination with a fairly similar policy position to a weak prime minister party is sufficient for government inclusion. The paths to government exclusion, by contrast, underline the importance of ideological distance in combination with size-related factors.

How do parties that have long been confined to opposition behave once they take the decision to support government? This article analyses the case of the three Portuguese radical left parties that took such a move in the wake of the post-bailout 2015 election. Leveraging the concept of contract parliamentarism and the analysis of different data sources through different methods, we show that the three parties adopted a similar strategy after agreeing deals with the centre-left socialists. Specifically, while keeping close scrutiny on the executive action, the parties have voted consensually on most of the legislation proposed by the government. In exchange, the majority of policy pledges agreed with the socialists were implemented by the beginning of the legislature. Based on these findings, the article underlines the importance for supporting parties of conducting a thorough negotiation of policy goals and the timing of their implementation before joining the government, and of pursuing an autonomous discursive agenda.

During the eurozone crisis, technocratic governments were appointed in several eurozone countries, becoming in the eyes of many the embodiment of the EU's democratic deficit. In spite of the central place that these technocratic governments occupy in the scholarly debate, however, we have remarkably little evidence on Europeans’ attitudes towards technocracy, and technocratic governments are under-studied from an empirical standpoint. We contribute to the very limited empirical literature on this topic by using a novel natural experiment design, in the context of the 2011 Italian crisis that led to the appointment of the Monti technocratic cabinet. We hypothesize that the effect of technocratic appointments on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is a priori uncertain, and it depends on the balance of a trade-off between reduced input participation and increased output effectiveness. Overall, the results point to citizens’ attitudes towards technocracy being more complex than often assumed in the debate.

While there is widespread agreement in the ministerial promotion and resignation literature that experience matters, experience has typically been defined as the length of time a legislator has worked in politics or served in a legislature. This approach fails to account for the different kinds of experience legislators accumulate as they progress through their political careers prior to appointment to cabinet. We demonstrate how researchers can use sequence and cluster analysis to obtain a more complete understanding of ministerial appointment. We identify four data-driven archetypes of political careers in Canada for the period 1968–2015. We find that MPs with diverse political careers are more likely to be appointed to cabinet, while MPs with opposition experience are more successful than MPs with government experience. We also find that parliamentary secretary is not necessarily a stepping stone to a full cabinet position, calling into question traditional conceptions of parliamentary politics as a ‘ladder’.

Some of the world's most notable economic miracles were accompanied by corruption, rent-seeking and clientelism, which is puzzling given the wide agreement on the importance of good institutions for growth. This article builds on the experiences of the US, Japan, Italy, South Korea and China to argue that these institutional maladies can be the natural outcomes of governance structures that facilitate growth. The theoretical argument revolves around the nature and strategies of dominant political organizations. Party machines can sometimes broker compensatory transfers that allow entrenched interests to profit from economic change, rather than be hurt by it, by the logic of the political Coase theorem. Transfers which are inefficient in most settings can therefore, if properly rationed and targeted, alleviate some of the key strategic impediments to growth identified by the political economy literature.

Michael Moran's intellectual journey is a remarkable one. Starting from quite a narrow focus on industrial relations in the 1970s, he switched his main research interest to the politics of banking and to changes in financial regulation during the 1980s. In the 1990s he extended this interest in regulation to write about the emergence of the British regulatory state, which culminated in his major publication, The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation (Moran 2003). After 2008 he turned his attention to the nature of contemporary capitalism and how it might be reformed. A subsidiary but important second theme was his broad interest in British politics, which led through various publications to a major single-authored textbook, Politics and Governance in the UK (Moran 2011), as well as the very successful co-authored text Politics UK (Jones et al. 1990) and what turned out to be his valedictory work, The End of British Politics? (Moran 2017).