In electorally contested regimes, the incumbent party often uses clientelist exchanges to stay in power long after its underlying electoral support has evaporated. Existing studies failed to examine how the role of clientelism changes with the increasing tenure of the incumbent party. Combining data from the Afrobarometer project and information about partisan turnover, this article shows that the longer a party has remained in power, the more clientelist exchanges in the form of club goods and patronage will serve to bolster popular support for the ruling party. This is mainly because lengthy party duration facilitates the politicization of bureaucracy and other state resources essential for clientelist exchanges. Understanding the evolving role of clientelism under electoral contestation has profound implications for the study of phenomena such as dominant-party rule and democratic erosion.

Motivated by a previous finding that single-party cues have no effect in Japan and by the increasing ‘presidentialization’ of Japanese politics, the present study examined whether the use of prime minister cues in place of single-party cues helps Japanese voters form policy preferences. In addition, to probe the effect of party cues that are unique to multiparty systems, the effect of multiple-party cues, which indicate that a policy is supported by multiple rather than single ideologically distinct parties, was investigated. The results of a survey experiment showed that while prime minister cues are not utilized by the supporters of incumbent parties, the supporters of opposition parties demonstrated significantly reduced approval of a policy when there was an indication that the prime minister supported it. The effect of prime minister cues on opposition supporters was stronger than that of Liberal Democratic Party cues, suggesting that leader cues are effective in Japan. Furthermore, a cue indicating that ideologically distinct parties support a policy enhances approval for that policy among the public, which suggests that multiple-party rather than single-party cues are informative in multiparty systems. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Studies on welfare reform in advanced European countries have identified two established paths to welfare retrenchment: government unilateralism and corporatist bargaining. This study explores a more complicated path to welfare reform, wherein governments pursue ‘non-corporatist’ bargaining by actively combining features of unilateralism and negotiation. Such a hybrid case is explained by employing an ‘insider-outsider’ framework for public policy reform. The key argument is that the presence of exclusive insiders complicates the reform process, disqualifying both unilateralism and corporatist bargaining as feasible options for benefit cuts. The author demonstrates the validity of this claim by examining three cases of public sector pension retrenchment in the UK and Ireland during the 2000s and 2010s. Defying the common expectation that benefit cuts in residual welfare states would be promoted with government unilateralism, the public sector pension reforms in the UK and Ireland exhibited more complicated features which combined governments' unilateral initiatives and ad hoc negotiations with public sector unions. Future studies may build on this finding to examine hybrid reform cases in a general European context.