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This article revisits the concept of semi-consociational democracy and distinguishes it from full consociationalism. Semi-consociationalism features just two of the characteristics of full consociationalism, proportionality and segmental autonomy, and exists without strong grand coalitions and veto powers. The case studies of prewar Lebanon and post-invasion Iraq demonstrate this new category of power sharing, which relies on three conditions: concentration of executive powers in the presidential office (prewar Lebanon) or premiership (post-invasion Iraq), communal hegemony in the system, and communal control over the armed forces. Full consociationalism then is mistakenly blamed for democratic failure in these two case studies.

Ethnic power-sharing has been accused of decreasing ethnic inequality in unequal ways: while benefitting larger ethnic minorities, it often tends to overlook the smallest groups. Paradoxically, ethnic micro-minorities may thus find themselves in even more marginalised positions in power-sharing regimes than under institutional settings lacking any mandated inclusion. This article tests for the existence of this exclusion-amid-inclusion dilemma using a new group-based dataset that distinguishes between different types of power-sharing. The findings indicate that this dilemma indeed exists for ethnically based, but not for more liberal types of power-sharing, which increase all minorities' political status in an equal, albeit less strong, manner. The article concludes that adopting one form of power-sharing or the other means not only prioritising one form of equality over another, but also making a decision with severe political ramifications for the numerically most vulnerable ethnic minority communities.

In this article I analyze, on the basis of my personal experience, the discontents of contemporary Turkish politics; more specifically, neoliberal conservative hegemony, and its three manifestations: stability of instability; a religio-conservative gender regime; and anti-intellectualism. I illustrate how these manifestations are intertwined in the process of identity construction: how an individual's identity as a citizen, as a woman, as an academic is being constantly constructed/de-constructed/reconstructed in a manner integral to the social and political context. The contribution of this article is threefold: it shows how personal experiences are a legitimate source of knowledge; it enables an understanding of how political identities are in a constant state of making; it challenges dominant conceptions of politics and the political through challenging binaries such as individual/social, personal/political, and emotional/rational.

Have the Arab uprisings influenced the desire for democracy in the Middle East and North Africa? This study presents a systematic explanation of the different impact the uprisings had on people's desire for democracy across the region. It applies the relatively new consequence-based theory of democratic attitudes, and integrates the notion of deprivation into it. The expectations derived from this framework are tested empirically by examining data from 45 public opinion surveys in 11 Middle East and North Africa countries (2001–2014) and combining them with a systematic country-level case comparison. The study shows that the desire for democracy drops mainly in countries of major protest and initial political liberalization, but no substantial democratization (e.g. Egypt, Morocco) indeed, and that a lack of major protest or initial reform (e.g. Algeria, Yemen) 'prevents' disillusionment. The seemingly exceptional Lebanese and Tunisian cases also show the mechanism holds for specific groups in society: Lebanese Sunnis and the poorest Tunisians.

This article reports on deliberation between citizens and politicians in a citizens' forum about closing small schools and building a school center in a Finnish municipality. This real-world policy issue was highly contested at the time of the deliberation. The purpose of the study was to analyze both the magnitude of opinion changes and potential opinion convergence between citizens and politicians. The citizens' forum used an experimental design whereby half of the groups engaged in discussion under the guidance of a facilitator with discussion rules, and the other half of the groups had no facilitation or rules. The analyses test how potential opinion changes are mediated by how deliberators experience discussion quality and moderated by the type of participant (citizen or politician). The findings show that opinion changes, both regarding magnitude and convergence, are not uniform for politicians and citizens. Moreover, this study shows how different layers of opinions may be affected differently by deliberation.

How do we measure the activity of legislators? I argue that, in addition to using measures such as how many bills they pass, we must also consider activities such as parliamentary questions, early day motions, motions for the agenda and one-minute speeches. One means for doing so is Akirav's activity scale developed in Israel. I use this scale to measure legislators' activity in two additional political systems – the United States and the United Kingdom. I also identify the characteristics shared by the most active legislators and the least active. The findings indicate that opposition, junior and committee chair legislators are more active than other representatives. While previous studies have investigated the cost–benefit analysis in which legislators engage regarding where and how to invest their time in their legislative work, this study is the first to conduct such an analysis about both their legislative and non-legislative activities. This more complete picture reveals their incentives for engaging fully in parliamentary work.

To what extent does conventional survey measurement capture the political interest of men and women equally well? We aim to answer this question by relying on unique data from a national online survey in Spain, where we used various questions unpacking the standard indicator of political interest. The findings show that men and women nominate different personal political interests. We also find that the gender gap in political interest vanishes once these specific interests are taken into account. This suggests that at least part of the documented gender gap in general political interest might be due to the fact that, when prompted to think about politics, women disregard their own specific political interests and instead focus on the dominant, male-oriented understanding of politics.

Since the birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Europeans and the Americans have disagreed about who should share how much of the collective security burden. The input side of alliance burden sharing – that is, how many troops a member state contributes to the alliance – has been the privileged variable, both at the political as well as the academic levels. Other output variables (e.g. numbers of troops deployed to a particular mission) are highly contested. This article offers an analytically eclecticist framework for studying Atlantic burden sharing that allows combining variables on the input and output sides of the alliance burden sharing debate with those that consider it a social practice.

Are comparative political scientists divided over the goals, methods, and results of their field? This article attempts to answer this question, drawing on an original survey of US-based political scientists. The main conclusion is that there is relative consensus on the goals of research—comparativists favor broad generalizations and causal inference—but there is also acceptance of a variety of methodological approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, in pursuing this goal. Comparativists, however, show less agreement on substantive findings in the areas of democracy and democratic politics, economy and society, and political institutions. Interestingly, generational differences are relatively infrequent, but gender differences on issues such as rational choice and causal inference are more prominent, possibly contributing to gendered citation bias. The findings suggest that comparative politics may not have accumulated a large amount of agreed-upon knowledge, but that there is substantial agreement on the path forward.

The media can play an important role in the relationship between citizens and their government by acting as a watchdog and providing timely information about malfeasance and corruption. We examine whether citizens' perceptions of government corruption are closer to country experts' assessments in countries where there are higher levels of press freedom. Using data on citizens' perceptions of government corruption and country expert evaluations of levels of political corruption for over 100 countries, we present evidence that the relationship between expert measures of corruption and citizens' perceptions is heightened as the level of press freedom increases across our sample. These findings suggest that a free press can play an important role in bringing corruption to light, educating citizens, and potentially allowing them to better hold their elected officials accountable.

Why do voters re-elect the same party for prolonged periods of time even when there are reasonable alternatives available? When and why do they stop doing so? Based on a quantitative analysis of elections between 1972 and 2014, we test the significance of 'economic governance' for the continuance and fall of one-party dominance. With data from India we show that, under a command economy paradigm, a national incumbent party sustains its dominance by playing politics of patronage, but in a marketized economy, state governments gain considerable scope in managing their economic affairs. This enables different state parties to create a stable pattern of support in states. As state-level effects cease to aggregate at the national level, the party system fragments. However, such an aggregation can re-emerge if a single party consistently delivers in the states which it governs.

As the USA initiated strategies of democracy promotion to support the spread of democracy, a key element involved democracy assistance. However, some states receive substantial commitments of US democracy aid while other states receive little or none, and the mix of democracy assistance varies in allocation between civil society and institutional channels. This study examines democracy aid allocation, focusing on the role of regime conditions on the targeting and composition of the aid. We disaggregate regime type to differentiate among non-democratic governments and argue that such differences affect both the amount of democracy aid and whether aid packages target government institutions or civil society channels. We theorize how these regime conditions shape allocations, controlling for donor interests and recipient features, and test our argument against US democracy aid allocations by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) from 1975 to 2010. We conclude with discussion of the implications of these findings.

Do elections improve a country's prospects for democratization? The theory of democratization by elections proposes that reiterated multiparty elections foster gradual institutional changes leading to progress toward democracy. Edgell et al. provide the most systematic evidence for this theory, but substantial disagreements remain among scholars studying the effects of authoritarian elections on democratization. In this study, I reassess the relationship between elections and democratization. In doing so, I account for the temporal structure of democratic qualities that are highly persistent. When I control for the dynamics of democratic qualities by adding a lag (or lags) of the dependent variable, the democratizing effects of repeated elections disappear; indeed, most evidence indicates a negative relationship between elections and democratization. This finding calls into question the causal role of elections in the process of democratization and demonstrates the importance of modeling the persistent nature of democracy in exploring the effect of a variable on democratization.

The recall referendum – a referendum triggered by citizens seeking to remove elected officials by means of a binding vote – used to be a rare institution, but since the 1990s has spread in different areas of the world. The frequency of its activation has been explained by three sets of sometimes interconnected variables: growing citizen dissatisfaction, institutional design (i.e. ease of activation), and the activity of political parties using the mechanism against their opponents, specially in contexts of low party-system institutionalization. This article proposes an additional variable: the role of electoral management bodies (EMBs) in allowing or preventing recall attempts. The empirical analysis focuses on the Ecuadorian experience, where legal provisions governing recall were introduced in 1998, modified in 2008, and amended in 2011, with a dramatic variation in the frequency of recall activations after each change.