Why are women underrepresented in civil service management across rich democracies? We argue that government ideology matters for this question, and that women bureaucrats’ careers stagnate under right-wing governments, since they do not suppress gender-inequality-reinforcing promotion patterns. We examine this using administrative occupation data on all Danish central government employees, observed quarterly from 1998 to 2019. The evidence is consistent with our argument: Under left-wing governments, men and women in the civil service progress similarly, while women progress more slowly than men under right-wing governments. The gender gap in career progression widens at the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, where political attention is greater, and this gap is not reduced by the presence of women ministers.

As European democracies struggle with a ‘crisis of representation’, populist parties appear to be instrumental in channeling popular discontent with governments across the continent, including through protests. While contemporary theories propose a strong connection between populism and protest mobilization, this has seldom been tested in a comparative perspective. At the same time, research has found that radical parties are more likely to mobilize for protests, and those parties are often also populist. We empirically disentangle these relationships with a comprehensive dataset of 4.2 million Facebook posts by all active sitting MPs in the EU27 national parliaments, excluding Croatia, plus the UK between 2018 and 2021, using large language models to identify protest-related posts and those that announce protest events. Findings show that it is particularly radical parties mobilizing their followers, with populism itself having little additional explanatory power. This is the first cross-national, longitudinal evaluation of a much-touted theoretical connection between populist parties and protest mobilization, finding that it appears smaller and more conditional than prior research proposed.

This article empirically tests Kaare Strøm’s strategic approach to role theory, assessing whether MPs’ role choices correlate with their subsequent career outcomes. Strøm defines a parliamentary role as a “consistent pattern of political behavior” that functions as “an endogenous prescription” for how parliamentarians “may operate to maximize the likelihood of whatever political career outcomes they favor.” From this perspective, deputies strategically adopt roles as “game plans” to optimize their chances of re-candidacy, re-election, or advancement to party or legislative office. Using cluster analysis of deputies’ activities in the Italian Chamber of Deputies during the 17th legislature (2013–2018), this article identifies three role types: Constituency Members, Specialists, and Show Horses. It then estimates multinomial logit models to assess whether these roles predict re-election, legislative office, or governmental office in the subsequent legislature. Contrary to Strøm’s expectations, the results show no statistically significant relationship between role type and subsequent career advancement. By contrast, role adoption is more closely related to seniority, local political experience, and prior office-holding. These findings suggest that, at least in the Italian case, parliamentary roles are shaped less by forward-looking career calculation than by accumulated political experience.

In “On Policy Responsiveness,” Wlezien provides a realist account of policy responsiveness. While recognizing it as a democratic good, he identifies the many obstacles that must be overcome and conditions that must be met to achieve it. Wlezien suggests that “it may be surprising that we observe any representation at all,” considering the many conditions that must be met to achieve it. This raises an important and challenging question, which we expand upon here: what is an appropriate level of responsiveness to expect from democratic systems and what level of observed policy congruence might we deem surprising and/or sufficient? The question of an appropriate counterfactual, apart from being crucial to guide research and hypothesis testing, also creates this fruitful opportunity for collaboration and discussion between a normative political theorist (Scudder) and an empirical political scientist (Grillos). Here, we identify two sources of counterfactual thinking, one normative and one empirical, to provide a benchmark against which we can judge observed levels of policy responsiveness.

The increase in the mobilization power of public sector unions is one of the most puzzling features of twenty-first-century labor politics in both advanced and emerging market democracies. We posit that public labor mobilization is driven by economic, institutional, and political factors. Mobilization decreases during the expansionary phase of the economic cycle, when incumbents can placate public unions with state resources; when collective bargaining is mandatory; and when governments share a common partisan identity with a unified labor leadership, facilitating a “political exchange” in which union moderation is traded for wage and non-wage concessions. Based on a qualitative, subnational comparative case-study approach, we trace union organizational dynamics and coalition building process in Argentina’s education sector, and seek to identify their effects on teacher union militancy or moderation across the country’s provinces between 2006 and 2019. We illuminate the causal mechanisms and temporal sequences of union mobilization/moderation by examining both “typical” and “deviant” cases of our general theory

In this article we argue that relational work between the state and civil society is crucial for social change, focusing on the relational work between activist bureaucrats and citizen representatives in the development of Bogotá’s gender and care policies. While existing literature shows that social movement embeddedness within the state helps explain why some governments achieve more egalitarian outcomes, this structural concept lacks micro-level foundations. Highlighting the role of relational work fills this gap. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research—including 54 semi-structured interviews and over 300 hours of observation—we show that the intense relational practices of citizen representatives and activist bureaucrats (materialized in open and effective participation, joint and coordinated advocacy, and translation of bureaucratic jargon to common language) was crucial to advance feminist agendas. This study contributes to an understanding of how everyday relational practices between state actors and citizens can generate policy change.

Governance principles reflect procedural values that govern the means of implementing public policies. Using survey data from Italy and the United Kingdom, we explore the public’s orientations towards those principles. We model them as instrumental values in belief systems, and as components of a network of attitudes. We find that governance principles largely occupy their own community; their interdependence with each other is far greater than their dependence on any other values or attitudes. Public employment experience neither alters the internal integration of governance principles nor changes their relationship with the larger belief system. We observe low levels of dynamic constraint among governance value orientations and show evidence that higher-order values account for the greatest influence over them. They remain strikingly invariant to simulated shifts in other attitudes, though modestly more constrained in Italy than in the UK. Our results suggest that orientations towards transparency can be most strongly influenced by other beliefs.

It has been suggested that the higher the political constraints, the greater the regulation of political finance. This is because, when parties operate in highly constrained contexts with numerous veto opportunities, there is more pressure to reach a consensus on reform. While public funding tends to be a positive-sum game conducive to the inclusive policymaking of constrained systems, political finance regulation tends to be a zero-sum game that can be stymied by veto players. We test these ideas using Lieberman’s nested analysis design. First, we run a series of logistic and OLS regression models on a global dataset, using IDEA’s indicator of public party funding and the Regulation of Political Finance Indicator (RoPFI) as dependent variables, and the index of political constraints (POLCON) as the independent variable. We find a strong association between public funding and political constraints, but no association between constraints and political finance regulation more generally. These findings are resistant to numerous robustness tests. We use the regression models to inform case selection for two plausibility probes of our main arguments. Our readings of the Netherlands and Botswana support the large-N analysis and are consistent with the different role political constraints play in public funding versus political finance regulation more generally. Our research has concrete implications for reformers and those advising them, and we make numerous contributions to political finance, party systems, and veto points literature.

This study examines the complexity of public opinion on abortion in Argentina following the landmark 2020 legalization. Moving beyond binary “pro-life” versus “pro-choice” classifications, we analyze attitudes through the lens of value conflict and ambivalence within a contentious policy domain. Drawing on original survey data (N = 1,021) from May–June 2022, we utilize a heteroscedastic probit model to estimate both the direction and variance of responses across seven scenarios, ranging from historically established grounds to voluntary interruption. Findings reveal that while consensus is high for historical grounds, ambivalence peaks in voluntary scenarios, driven significantly by the interaction between conflicting core values: the sanctity of life and bodily autonomy. Crucially, this value conflict generates measurable response instability even among citizens with firm opinions, challenging the narrative of a rigidly polarized society. Results demonstrate that legislative resolution does not erase moral tension, suggesting democratic discourse must account for citizens’ cognitive complexity rather than reducing public opinion to absolute alignments.

Spatial inequalities in human capital are reshaping the politics of high-income democracies. However, comparative research on the political consequences of spatial inequality is constrained by a lack of data that is geographically detailed and cross-nationally comparable. This letter introduces the Regional Human Capital Database (RHCD), an open-access dataset covering 60,000 units in twenty wealthy democracies from the 1980s onward. The RHCD offers disaggregated data on educational attainment, demographics, urban structure, and voting, enabling analysis of within-region variation with unprecedented precision. We explain the construction of the dataset, including extensive checks to ensure reliability and validity. Our analysis demonstrates its value by showing growing urban–rural divides in educational attainment across countries with differing institutions and links between human capital and populist-right voting even within economically dynamic cities. The RHCD advances comparative research on the spatial dimensions of political change, offering a vital resource for scholars across political science and beyond.

This study investigates expenditure of European parties in referendum campaigns. Previous work exploring why parties initiate referendums hints at the importance of subsequent campaigns to parties, but theoretical insights regarding party behavior in campaigning contexts are fragmented and limited. We argue that party expenditure indicates the extent of their engagement, and identifying explanatory factors can offer insights into underlying strategic goals driving parties in their behavior. Drawing on referendum instrumentalization literature and existing empirical studies, we propose a framework with three strategic factors and corresponding hypotheses. These are tested using official expenditure data for 47 parties campaigning in 24 referendums in eight European countries through bivariate and multivariate analysis. Our findings mainly suggest that parties see referendum campaigns as avenues for image building, spending more on average when they initiate them and when referendums are publicly salient. Additionally, parties seemingly prioritize elections, while spending limits are ineffective in curbing expenditure.

This study examines how citizens and politicians evaluate different types of political conflict. Conflicts can be substantive in nature, involving disagreements over policy measures or clashes over core ideological values, or less substantive, concerning strategic relationships between parties. While conflict is inherent to politics, we know little about how different types of conflict are perceived by the public and how this differs from the perceptions of political elites. Whether citizens and their elected representatives share a common understanding of the role of conflict in politics is crucial, as misalignment may hamper political representation and effective governance. Empirically, our study relies on a survey experiment conducted among citizens (N = 8264) and politicians (N = 331) in four countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland) to investigate whether different types of conflict lead to different evaluations. Our results show that politicians are more likely to endorse ideological conflicts (over goals or core values) and substantive conflicts (over policy measures), yet citizens are more likely to approve of personal conflicts than politicians. Furthermore, politicians judge citizens’ perceptions of substantive and ideological conflicts more positively than citizens themselves and overestimate the concern citizens have with personal conflicts. These results may have important implications. If politicians fail to recognize that citizens are less accepting of political conflicts, this might be detrimental for trust in political parties and democracy at large – thus undermining the legitimacy of the political system.