At the level of regime typologies, the uncertain status and inherent weakness of the opposition mark defining features of regimes beyond liberal democracy. However, even the performance and evolution of the latter tend to be shaped by oppositions and the regime’s approach to dealing with them. This article offers a bird’s-eye view of political oppositions in contemporary electoral democracies and competitive autocracies. It focuses on patterns of strategic choices and behavior by both governments and oppositions. That endeavor forms part of a larger joint venture seeking to give center stage to those actors living in the shadows of increasingly unscrupulous power-holders.

How did Vladimir Putin manage to turn the vociferous political opposition of the 1990s in Russia into a mere statist? I argue that among the wide array of instruments mastered by Putin’s regime, the control over the organisational environment stands apart. By regulating the formation and maintenance of the political organisations, the regime was able to divide the opposition into its ‘systemic’ and ‘non-systemic’ components. The restrictions on the organisational development set limits to the societal outreach of the opposition. Finally, by manipulating the rules of access to the institutional arenas and resource flows, the regime fostered differential stimuli for the opposition groups that made the coordination among them unlikely. This article suggests that not less than being informational or coercive, the autocracies like Russia under Vladimir Putin have to control the organisational environment in order to keep the opposition at bay.

This article offers an institutionalist assessment of the more recent chapters of political opposition in Erdoğan’s Turkey. There is good reason to suppose that the institutional features of a given regime can explain the performance of opposition parties to a significant extent. That said, the case of Turkey provides impressive evidence that there are striking limits to institutionalizing political predominance, to undermining political oppositions by institutional means, and to explaining the performance of opposition parties with the prevailing institutional resources and constraints. Specifically, attempts at institutionalizing a predominant power status carry particular risks of generating inverse effects, including increased political vulnerability. However, there are no automatic effects. Rather, as the Turkish experience suggests, reasonably vigorous actors to become politically relevant must seize the particular (if usually limited) opportunities arising from advanced institutional autocratization.

Hungary and Poland are often placed in the same analytical framework from the period of their ‘negotiated revolutions’ to their autocratic turn. This article aims to look behind this apparent similarity focusing on opposition behaviour. The analysis demonstrates that the executive–parliament power structure, the vigour of the extra-parliamentary actors, and the opposition party frame have the strongest influence on opposition behaviour, and they provide the sources of difference between the two country cases: in Hungary an enforced power game and in Poland a political game constrain opposition opportunities and opposition strategic behaviour.

This article investigates opposition to the competitive authoritarian regimes in Montenegro (1997–2020), North Macedonia (2006–2017), and Serbia (2012–). In each of the three countries, opposition parties face or have faced the challenge of competing on an electoral playing field that is structurally skewed in favour of the incumbent. The articles explore the question in which circumstances opposition parties have been able to contest the dominant parties. In doing so, it focuses on three dimensions, namely the relationship between spatial party competition, different levels of opposition cohesion or fragmentation, as well as extra-institutional strategies of contestation. The country comparison illustrates that party systems with cross-cutting cleavages tend to produce divided patterns of contestation (Montenegro and Serbia), whereas reinforcing cleavages facilitate the coordination among different types of opposition actors (North Macedonia). Finally, large protests, rather than boycotts, prior to elections have been important factors in facilitating opposition cohesion and signalling broad support (Montenegro and North Macedonia).

Given that sharing a democratic regime or culture increases the likelihood of bilateral trade flows between country dyads, this article investigates whether individuals are more likely to support preferential trade liberalization with other democracies and countries they perceive as culturally similar to the home country. Adopting experimental manipulation of the regime type and the cultural identity of the partner country on nationally representative survey data from two emerging market countries, Turkey and Greece, I demonstrate that while cultural affiliation does not condition individual attitudes, respondents in both samples display a highly significant preference for trade liberalization with a democratic country over an authoritarian one. Assessments based on respondents’ endorsement of postmaterialist values, international trade attitudes, and interpersonal trust reveal that while the democracy preference of Turkish respondents are likely affected by functional reasons, both functional and normative dynamics condition Greek attitudes.

This paper examines the contribution of German subnational constitutional courts to the judicialization of politics in the German states, known as Länder. This research goal entails three dimensions. First, I have to define and measure judicialization. To accomplish this task, I use an index recently developed by an international group of scholars of comparative politics. Second, based on major theoretical approaches, I identify possible causes that might give reasons for judicialization, namely institutional preconditions and preferences of justices. In a third step, I use a linear regression in order to test the theory empirically and find links between causes and effects of judicial decision-making in subnational constitutional courts. The findings confirm institutionalist approaches that contribute to explaining decision-making in German subnational constitutional courts.

By comparing and analysing four cross-national measures of democracy, this article provides novel information regarding the statistical properties, convergence, and interchangeability of some of the most frequently used measures of democracy. The author points out limitations related to the statistical properties of these measures and finds that even if measures of democracy are highly convergent, their interchangeability is weak. This means that the choice of the measure of democracy has considerable consequences for the conclusions of a given study. Especially so in studies covering the last few decades, because the author finds that in general the interchangeability of democracy measures has decreased since the 1980s. In choosing one measure over another, scholars should be aware of the limitations identified in this article. To overcome problems related to weak interchangeability, if a single measure cannot be credibly chosen on theoretical grounds, the author recommends users of the measures to validate their findings with multiple measures of democracy.

Political theory, with its abstract reasoning and unfamiliar vocabulary, is a subject that students are often apprehensive about. Whilst popular culture has been employed extensively in the teaching of other areas of political science, such as international relations, I seek to draw attention to its comparative under-use in political theory and argue that it is a highly effective teaching tool for this subject. I use the autoethnographic method to make my case, drawing on my years-long experience in the university classroom, and take this position for three key reasons: the familiar nature of popular culture allows students to more easily acclimate to the political theory classroom, it renders abstract political theory concrete, and provides a useful arena in which to better test the logic of political theory arguments, enhancing student criticality.

Future horizons, shaped by unpredictable ecosystems and exponential automation, require discipline-specific as well as transdisciplinary skills to navigate. In the context of political science education, negotiation simulations, for example in the form of board games, can aid in developing both. As a plausibility probe for wider investigations, we set out to research whether an International Relations course concept utilizing the classical board game Diplomacy with pedagogically altered rules and gaming conditions enhances students’ (n = 23) understanding of discipline-specific knowledge and future skills. We utilized a conceptual pre-post measure as well as free-form learning diaries to investigate development in participants’ conceptual understanding and future skills along the course. The results tentatively suggest quantifiable and qualitatively observable changes in the discipline-specific conceptual, as well as more broad-based competence level. The gamified learning environment provided students with an activating and engaging learning environment that better acquainted them not only with discipline-specific theory, but more importantly, also with skills regarded important for their future.