This article provides a review of the economic, demographic and welfare effects of immigration in contemporary Europe. It argues that the economic benefits of migration are small but positive, its welfare effects minimal if not non-existent, and its demographic effects modest but real. It then provides a series of recommendations for governing migration policy in Europe: keeping the borders open but controlled; keeping employment high and income support low, and keeping speech free but fair. The most important policy recommendation centres on work: immigration policy will only work when immigrants work.

Was there really a debt-fuelled ‘liberal growth model’ that preceded the 2008 financial crisis? The accepted narrative about the pre-crisis boom is that some liberal countries relied on domestic consumption to fuel economic growth, and on household debt to fuel this consumption. In this, they contrasted with coordinated economies. While eventually unsustainable, the growth strategy was politically necessary to maintain middle-class living standards in the context of increasing income inequality. In this article, I take these contentions to the data. Economic evidence from 1995–2007 and political data from the Comparative Manifesto Project Database undermine this received wisdom: while household debt increased in the liberal countries, it does not differentiate this particular growth model. Further, there is no evidence that politicians in liberal countries advocate different economic policies, including those concerning borrowing, to claim credit and stay in power. Differences in the importance of finance between countries, however, suggest a more elite-driven divergence.

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.

This article takes a comparative look at two historically and geographically interconnected waves of large-scale unrest: the colour revolutions of the post-communist region during the 2000s and the Arab uprisings of 2011. From this vantage point, it considers the power of alternative approaches in explaining the resilience or breakdown of autocratic regimes in the face of exogenously inspired protests. These explanations centre on the destabilizing impact of sudden economic downturns, the varied resilience of authoritarian subtypes, linkages to the outside world, the advantages of resource wealth and the threats posed by leadership successions. Drawing a deliberate comparison between these two waves of contention reveals several findings: first, structural factors such as resource wealth, monarchical political organization and weak political links to the outside made autocrats more resilient in the face of regional protest waves. Second, regimes temporarily undergoing leadership transitions were more vulnerable amidst regional waves.

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.

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century Iceland was ranked as the least corrupt country in the world by Transparency International and enjoyed top positions in most comparative indices of governance and development. In 2008 the banking system collapsed and the country found itself in a serious financial crisis, a crisis which some observers believe was caused by clientelism and other forms of behaviour related to corruption. This article sets out to analyse how the crisis affected general political support and, in particular, the importance of perceptions of corruption in that process. Using survey data we show that political support plummeted after the crisis and that public evaluations of the extent of corruption became the most important determinant of support. The results have implications for how we ought to approach the issue of corruption, even in so-called ‘least corrupt’ settings. The findings also call into question the validity and reliability of frequently used measures of corruption and governance.

Northern Ireland’s consociational institutions were reviewed by a committee of its Assembly in 2012–13. The arguments of both critics and exponents of the arrangements are of general interest to scholars of comparative politics, power-sharing and constitutional design. The authors of this article review the debates and evidence on the d’Hondt rule of executive formation, political designation, the likely impact of changing district magnitudes for assembly elections, and existing patterns of opposition and accountability. They evaluate the scholarly, political and legal literature before commending the merits of maintaining the existing system, including the rules under which the system might be modified in future.

An egalitarian approach to the fair representation of voters specifies three main institutional requirements: proportional representation, legislative majority rule and a parliamentary system of government. This approach faces two challenges: the under-determination of the resulting democratic process and the idea of a trade-off between equal voter representation and government accountability. Linking conceptual with comparative analysis, the article argues that we can distinguish three ideal-typical varieties of the egalitarian vision of democracy, based on the stages at which majorities are formed. These varieties do not put different relative normative weight onto equality and accountability, but have different conceptions of both values and their reconciliation. The view that accountability is necessarily linked to ‘clarity of responsibility’, widespread in the comparative literature, is questioned – as is the idea of a general trade-off between representation and accountability. Depending on the vision of democracy, the two values need not be in conflict.

Although the clichéd status of the phrase ‘the party’s over’ makes it almost redundant, the esteem in which parties are held has never been lower. One facet of party decline is the renewed interest in independents. Previously confined to transition states and non-democracies, they have begun to make some political headway in more established states. This is a worrying development for both political parties and those who profess their normative value. This article examines the source of the re-emergent independent presence via a case study of Ireland, a party democracy where they have had the greatest impact. Using constituency-level data, the influences of political, cultural and institutional factors are examined. It is found that independents are a product of both a small political system and declining party attachment. They are a protest option for those not drawn to ideological anti-establishment parties, while there is mixed evidence concerning the influence of a centre–periphery socioeconomic divide.

Quota laws have been widely adopted in Latin America, with significant increases in the number of women elected to parliament in some countries. However, it is far from clear whether the laws have produced the modifications in the gender regimes which inform internal party power structures and dynamics that would allow women to participate – as aspirants or selectors – on an equal footing with their male counterparts in the processes of candidate selection. This article seeks to identify critical nodes where the interplay between the different institutions – systemic, normative and practical – of candidate selection intersects with gendered power relations to facilitate or hinder not only women’s access to elective posts, but the terms of their access. Employing a feminist institutionalist analytical framework, this article presents the findings from qualitative case study research on candidate selection in Uruguay in 2009 and 2014 and situates them within the existing – albeit small – body of studies of gender and candidate selection in the Latin American region.

The interest in procedures for political decision-making has grown tremendously during recent decades. Given the intense scholarly debate and the implementation of greater opportunities for citizen participation in many democracies, there has been surprisingly little interest in citizens’ conceptions of democracy understood as their preferences concerning the processes by which the political system works. Some recent attempts do, however, suggest that it is important to expand the study of public opinion from policy output to decision-making processes, and that there are coherent patterns in citizens’ expectations of the way in which political decisions come about. What is not clear, though, is whether citizens’ different conceptions of democracy have repercussions for how they engage in politics. Using the Finnish National Election Study of 2011 (Borg and Grönlund 2011), this article explores the relationship between citizens’ conceptions of democracy and patterns of political participation. Results demonstrate a distinct association between citizens’ ideals and the actions they take.

This article demonstrates how party leaders (frontbenchers) and backbenchers use their access to UK Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) to represent the policy agenda. Building on comparative research on parliamentary questions and agenda-setting as well as taking account of the particular context of PMQs, we argue that party leaders and followers draw attention to different kinds of policy topics with the express purpose of influencing the government. Based on a content analysis of over 9,000 questions between 1997 and 2008, we demonstrate how the posing of questions affects subsequent agenda, varying according to whether questions come from the front or backbench, from government and opposition and from different parties. The findings demonstrate that PMQs helps both the opposition and backbenchers draw attention to issues that the government and opposition party leadership does not always wish to attend to.

This paper examines the impact of constitutional rules on parliamentary dissolution, government termination and duration with a particular focus on the likely effects of UK’s Fixed-term Parliament’s Act (2011). In the UK debate, expectations about the Act diverge. This article evaluates the plausibility of these contrasting views by combining evidence from a comparative analysis of European cabinets with a counterfactual analysis of the Act’s effect on the strategies of UK politicians. The evidence from both analyses indicates that fixing the term of parliament is likely to render parliaments more stable, but may also have the unanticipated effect of making governments more vulnerable to failure and replacement.

This article provides a critical examination of the contribution that statecraft theory, which has been subject to recent revision and development, makes to the literature on institutional change. It articulates an emergent neo-statecraft approach that offers an agent-led form of historical institutionalism. This overcomes the common criticism that historical institutionalists underplay the creative role of actors. The article also argues that the approach brings back into focus the imperatives of electoral politics as a source of institutional change and provides a macro theory of change which is also commonly missing from historical institutionalist work. It can therefore identify previously unnoticed sources of stability and change, especially in states with strong executives and top-down political cultures.

About two decades after the introduction of party quotas, in the mid-2000s both Portugal and Spain enacted legislative gender quotas. The simultaneous implementation of party and legislative quotas raises questions about the potential interactions between two types of candidate quotas sharing the same goal – granting gender equality in political representation. Following a feminist institutionalist approach, this article aims at disentangling under what circumstances compliance with legislative quotas is greater. By looking at the different party institutional contexts in which candidates are selected, a double comparative framework is set. Firstly, we examine within country how legislative quotas affect political parties with dissimilar strategies to pursue equal gender representation. Secondly, we analyse across countries how they impact on political parties with differently institutionalized voluntary quotas. The article shows that legislative quotas are nested in political parties’ candidate selection process and that existing gendered practices and norms limit the effective compliance with such measures.

The economic crisis has meant that radical left parties in Europe have been faced with changing socioeconomic environments. In this study we examine how European radical left parties have responded to the crisis in terms of their societal mobilization strategies and seek to explain their responses. Discussions in the relevant literature advocate that party-specific characteristics matter greatly in how parties mobilize in society and establish relations with social groups in times of stability. But do they continue to be as important at times of dramatic change, when new realities emerge in society? We look at the cases of the Greek (Greek Communist Party and Coalition of the Radical Left), Irish (Sinn Féin), Portuguese (Portuguese Communist Party and Bloco) and Spanish (Spanish Communist Party/United Left) radical left parties, which are alike at the country level but exhibit differences at the party level. Utilizing data from an original expert survey, we show that both ideology and organizational legacy throw considerable light on the observed variation among the six radical left parties’ societal responses to the crisis. In this way, they ensure continuity rather than change.

This article demonstrates the utility of comparative historical approaches and tools for temporal analysis in comparative regional integration. Over three decades Australian and New Zealand policymakers constructed a Trans-Tasman Single Economic Market that, like the Single European Market, creates supra-national authority and removes administrative barriers to free movement of goods, services capital and people. Like the Single European Market, the Trans-Tasman Single Economic Market regulates internal movements of people liberally. In Europe, some argue, liberal regulation of people movements has led to politicization of integration. In Australia and New Zealand integration has no mass political salience. This article compares European and trans-Tasman integration to explain these divergent outcomes. It shows how differing sequences of events can explain varying levels of mass mobilization around integration in the two cases. In Europe ‘economic integration’ preceded the liberalization of people movements. Trans-Tasman integration reversed this sequence.

Quotas for women and ethnic minorities are implemented to increase diversity in political institutions, but, as they usually target only one group at a time, they may end up increasing the inclusion of one under-represented group at the cost of another. Recent work has emphasized the institutional underpinnings of the variation in such outcomes. In this article I show how the intersectional effects of quotas may also vary within the same institutional context, as changes in the pressure to include excluded groups interact with the informal opportunity structures within political parties. Looking at the nomination of female candidates across India over time, I show that, as the efforts to include more women in politics intensified, much of the increase in female candidates occurred in constituencies reserved for ethnic minorities. This pattern may in part be the result of parties resisting changes to existing power hierarchies by nominating women at the cost of the least powerful male politicians, but can also be seen as evidence that minority quotas have created a political space that is more accessible to women.

Governments’ decisions to delegate policy decisions to non-majoritarian agencies have been both criticized as attempts at blame avoidance or depoliticization and defended as enhancing the rationality and credibility of decisions. This article focuses not on the decision to delegate, but on the decisions of how and to whom to delegate. We argue that strategic motives are relevant not only in the decision to delegate, but equally, and perhaps more importantly, in the selection of the institutional properties of these non-majoritarian agencies. We present two case studies of health care priority-setting, in England and Germany, to illustrate how governments proceed strategically in institutional design choices and how their decisions affect outcomes.

Populism is usually studied by looking at the electoral and rhetorical strategies of parties considered to be populist. In contrast, this article attempts to measure the support for the core propositions of populism among voters and explain the social differences in that support. On the basis of a survey of the Dutch-speaking population of Belgium (N: 2,330) we find that this support for populism turns out not to be directly influenced by a weak or uncertain economic position, by dissatisfaction with personal life or feelings of anomie. Support for populism appears foremost as a consequence of a very negative view of the evolution of society – declinism – and of the feeling of belonging to a group of people that is unfairly treated by society.