How does rising access to the Internet shape elections in low-income democracies? In a controversial, overturned election in Malawi, I show how online exposure can reduce incumbency advantages and improve election administration. Leveraging geocoded polling station returns and the expansion of 3G coverage in a difference-in-differences setting, I show that ruling party vote share and election irregularities decline in areas newly exposed to the Internet. This is robust to a series of specifications, including matching on pre-treatment characteristics and adjusting for polling station complexity. To examine mechanisms, I turn to interviews and focus group discussions with voters, party figures and election officials. These reveal that opposition groups used social media to campaign and organise, online platforms expanded the reach of civic education efforts, and election staff used WhatsApp to coordinate on polling day. The paper contributes to the literature on information technology, party strategy, and election administration in low-income settings.

As an outcome of the ongoing re-democratization movement in South Korea, the recent success of the Candlelight Revolution provides valuable perspective for those grappling with the crisis of democracy in the U.S. Tracing an unexpected material link to the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines, this article also seeks to explain the relationship between the 2014 Sewol Ferry Disaster and the Candlelight Movement, a connection readily taken for granted among most South Koreans but often perplexing to those outside of Korea.

Revision of the Japanese Constitution is a heated topic, associated with nationalistic sentiment. Conservatives insist the constitution was imposed by the US occupation and call for an “autonomous constitution” created without foreign interference. This article critiques this discourse within the historical context of modern democracy. I emphasize the need to distinguish two questions: whether a constitution was established democratically and whether it has contributed to enhancing democracy. I highlight the importance of the second question. The Constitution of Japan may not have democratic origins, but it has enhanced democracy. The article provides a historically rooted and theoretically solid framework for constructive discussions of constitutional revision as the Abe administration prepares to submit its proposal for revision.

This article explains why the Abe administration's emergency powers proposal will likely be the cutting edge of its attempt to amend the Japanese Constitution, and assesses the consequences of such an amendment for Japan's democracy.

This article addresses the return of popular protests in Hong Kong in 2020, after the government's adoption of emergency measures to address the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong and following calls by the Chinese Communist Party for the government to take a much more repressive stance against protests. The pandemic has also accelerated the downturn in U.S.-China relations. The article reviews the parallel, and at times intersecting, evolution of popular protests and pandemic control measures in Hong Kong. It also outlines the ways in which the 2019 protests were departures from previous protest cycles.

One of the most important global political developments is the current wave of autocratization. Most research identifies this as an executive-led process, while others highlight the role opposition actors play in resisting it. We combine this work into a common framework asking, how (anti-)democratic are party systems? Party-system literature emphasises and measures policy differences, while we conceptualise party systems’ democratic positions highlighting to what extent divergent regime preferences are prevalent across parties. To estimate this dimension, we introduce the Party-System Democracy Index (PSDI), capable of tracking regime preferences across party systems from 1970 to 2019 across 178 countries and 3,151 country-years. We implement well-established content, convergent, and construct validity tests to confirm the PSDI’s reliability. Finally, we also show that the PSDI is an important predictor for regime changes in either direction and that changes in the PSDI can signal a looming regime change. This work provides a new framework for studying regime changes and contributes to the renewal of the party-systems literature.

In contradistinction to totalitarianism, Claude Lefort theorised a democratic form of society as one primarily characterised by indeterminacy, absence of ground, and by extension openness to the event. In maintaining this form of society, Lefort reserved a key role for human rights. The aims of this paper are twofold: first, I argue that, despite the fact that Lefort never developed a theory of constitutions, an important role can nonetheless be ascribed to them. I hypothesise constitutions to be key in democratic society’s symbolic representation of itself to itself. Second, I then examine what the repercussions are for this idea when Martin Loughlin’s account of constitutionalism is taken into account. Loughlin’s argument suggests that, while constitutions may have been important safeguards against totalitarianism, constitutions today threaten to become total themselves. I conclude by indicating the populist response as a point of convergence between Lefort’s and Loughlin’s analyses.

This article analyses the political speeches of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán between 2014 and 2023 by applying the ‘ideational approach’. Questioning the description of Orbán as a politician whose career represents nothing but opportunism and kleptocracy, the article argues that his politics are driven and underpinned by an illiberal political ideology. Examining how Orbán conceptualizes illiberalism in the realms of (1) Hungarian domestic politics; (2) foreign and global politics; and (3) cultural politics (understood in the Gramscian sense as a battle for fundamental values), this article offers a systematic analysis of Hungarian illiberalism and of the interrelations of its main ideological components. The article also examines how and why Orbán portrays himself not only as the authentic voice of the Hungarian people, but also simultaneously as the genuine representative of original Europeanness.

All regimes require supporters to govern and survive. We discuss the concept of a ‘regime support group’ and present and validate measures from an extensive dataset recording different features of such groups. This Regime Support and Opposition Groups (ReSOG) dataset covers approximately 2,000 political regimes from almost 200 countries, across 1789–2020. Drawing on the knowledge of about 1,000 country experts, we estimate the size and main geographical location of regime support coalitions and key opposition actors. We also map the social basis of regime support coalitions and opponents, using a 14-category scheme covering various social groups. These data provide a unique quantitative history of the social underpinnings of regimes in the modern era. Using them, we show and discuss the broadening of support coalitions over time, especially in autocracies, the rise of major urban groups, and the relative decline of rural elites in politics, globally.

The article examines the patterns of turnover of Latin American legislators. It contributes (1) by introducing a large original dataset of turnover rates in 204 elections between 1985 and 2023 based on manually coded lists of all Latin American legislators elected since 1985, (2) by describing the cross-national and temporal patterns of turnover in Latin America, and (3) by examining empirically the relationship between turnover rates and temporal institutional arrangements designed to regulate the time horizons of legislators. The data reveals that turnover rates in Latin America are extremely high on average (around 70%) compared to democracies in other regions, although with significant variation. Institutional determinants governing time horizons of politicians are associated with turnover, with term limits, the presence of staggered elections and term length being positively associated with elevated turnover rates.

Political parties vary in their responses to electoral challenges, including the rise of populist competitors. To address these challenges, they sometimes engage with peripheral issues located outside their ideological comfort zones, and at other times they adhere more closely to their core policies. Although these patterns are well-documented, voters' perceptions thereof remain under-examined. This article argues that voters evaluate parties' claims not just based on the direction of their policy engagement – positive or negative – but also based on the commitment behind these actions, distinguishing ideological commitment from strategic manoeuvres. Employing a pre-registered vignette experiment, the article shows that voters differentiate responses to core versus peripheral issues, regardless of their personal agreement with the policies. Populist attitudes further moderate these perceptions, as voters with such views are typically more sceptical of parties' motives, limiting the impact of party behaviour on perceived commitment primarily to non-populist individuals. This highlights the importance of perceived commitment in elections and the constraints parties face in responding to competition.

The January 6th insurrection and its aftermath of obfuscation and denial were ostensibly racialized events. Under the guise of election fraud, white supremacists, white nationalists, and paramilitary groups attempted to overthrow established democratic procedures to retain a president who stoked racial antagonisms and racial divisions. African Americans, like many American citizens, watched in fear, anxiety, and foreboding as the groups most committed to their repression violently attacked and ransacked the Capitol.

We examine the extent to which the January 6th insurrection and its aftermath of denial and obfuscation influence African Americans’ racial resentment. Our results show how the racialized January 6th events were connected to heightened African American racial resentment. The most compelling result confirms that African Americans’ racial resentment stems from beliefs about justice and fairness.

Proponents of epistocracy claim that amplifying the political power of politically knowledgeable citizens can mitigate some of the harmful effects of widespread political ignorance, since being politically knowledgeable improves one’s ability to make sound political decisions. But many critics of epistocracy suggest that we have no reason to expect it to make better decisions than democracy, for those who are politically knowledgeable can also possess other attributes that compromise their ability to make sound political decisions. This is one version of the Demographic Objection to epistocracy, and in this paper I argue that the reasoning which underlies it generalizes in such a way that it applies not only to epistocracy but also to democracy. Thus, there are demographic objections to both epistocracy and democracy. I argue that such demographic objections to democracy have important and overlooked implications. Among other things, they imply that we should be skeptical about the arguments of epistemic democrats; they count against proposals to democratize extant epistocratic practices and institutions; and they even count against certain democratic reforms taking place within a wholly democratic framework.

Neoliberalism provides a compelling explanation for how city governments satisfy private capital interests by slashing social welfare spending and criminalizing the racialized poverty it unleashes. However, neoliberalism cannot account for why the politics of law and order also often find support from within overpoliced communities. This article claims that underlying broken windows policing is a neoconservative theory of democracy aimed not so much at directly reducing crime or enforcing disorder but at empowering organic community authorities. Specifically, I show how neoconservatives developed this theory of democracy in response to the urban crisis, which they argued was a crisis of authority and not of material deprivation, as welfare liberals believed. This article thus suggests that we understand the project of neoconservatism as aimed at making modern conservatism appealing within an increasingly diverse democracy by cultivating (authoritarian) political attachments between traditional authorities in the community and the police.