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Why do politicians intervene in some chieftaincy succession disputes but not others? The key actors and their motivations in these processes remain understudied. In this article I leverage a comparative analysis of two similar chieftaincy disputes in Ghana's Upper West Region, and develop inductively a theory of local aspirants – political actors with dual memberships in chieftaincy and politics. I find that local aspirants from disputing factions that seek to change the status quo of the dispute have particular interests in politicising the chieftaincy disputes. These findings contribute to our knowledge about how chieftaincy disputes become politicised, by emphasising the roles played by politicians embedded in chieftaincy.

This book develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. Different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Thus democracy is preferred by the majority of citizens, but opposed by elites. Dictatorship nevertheless is not stable when citizens can threaten social disorder and revolution. In response, when the costs of repression are sufficiently high and promises of concessions are not credible, elites may be forced to create democracy. By democratizing, elites credibly transfer political power to the citizens, ensuring social stability. Democracy consolidates when elites do not have strong incentive to overthrow it. These processes depend on (1) the strength of civil society, (2) the structure of political institutions, (3) the nature of political and economic crises, (4) the level of economic inequality, (5) the structure of the economy, and (6) the form and extent of globalization.

Do rebel elites who gain access to political power through power-sharing reward their own ethnic constituencies after war? The authors argue that power-sharing governments serve as instruments for rebel elites to access state resources. This access allows elites to allocate state resources disproportionately to their regional power bases, particularly the settlement areas of rebel groups' ethnic constituencies. To test this proposition, the authors link information on rebel groups in power-sharing governments in post-conflict countries in Africa to information about ethnic support for rebel organizations. They combine this information with sub-national data on ethnic groups' settlement areas and data on night light emissions to proxy for sub-national variation in resource investments. Implementing a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, the authors show that regions with ethnic groups represented through rebels in the power-sharing government exhibit higher levels of night light emissions than regions without such representation. These findings help to reconceptualize post-conflict power-sharing arrangements as rent-generating and redistributive institutions.

This article examines the organisation of VOX, a new radical right party in Spain. It shows that the party has taken early and uneven steps to build a mass organisation and initially opted for open membership recruitment with participatory organisational elements. Also, the party’s rapid growth and quick entrance into political institutions at different state levels led the party leadership to establish more centralised control and limit members’ prerogatives, though recruitment continued. Centralisation in part responds to organisational needs given the party’s quickly acquired political relevance, but also to the desire of the central party leadership to forestall the articulation of territorial interests, or prevent them from escaping their control. Today, VOX exhibits elements of mass party organisation and highly centralised decision-making in the hands of national party leaders.

This article provides a comparative conclusion to the thematic issue on the organisational characteristics of 12 right-wing populist parties (RWPPs) across Europe. We observe that many RWPPs—at least partially—adopt features of the mass party model. This finding illustrates the ideological aspects behind organisational choices: For populist parties, in particular, it is important to signal societal rootedness and “closeness to the people.” It furthermore challenges the idea that there is a one-way teleological movement towards more lean, electoral-professional kinds of party organisation. At the same time, the case studies clearly illustrate that RWPP leaders and executives continue to exercise great power over their members, who are essentially offered “participation without power.”

The Lega Nord (LN) has undergone a profound process of transformation since 2013, by replacing its historical regionalist populism with a new state-wide populist radical right outlook. However, very little is known about how such transformation impacted its organizational model, particularly the mass-party features that characterized it under its founding leader, Umberto Bossi. This article explores the organizational evolution of the party under Matteo Salvini by means of a qualitative in-depth analysis of 41 semi-structured interviews with representatives of the LN from four regions (Calabria, Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and Veneto) and primary documents. It underlines that the LN was turned into a disempowered and politically inactive “bad company,” charged with the task of paying the debts of the old party, while its structure, resources, and personnel were poured into a new state-wide organization called Lega per Salvini Premier (LSP). The LSP has not simply maintained the key features of the mass-party in the LN’s historical strongholds, but also pioneered a modern form of this organizational model grounded on the continuous interaction between digital and physical activism, i.e., “phygital activism,” which boosts the party’s ability to reach out to the electorate by delivering the image that the League is constantly on the ground. The LSP has sought to export this modern interpretation of the mass-party in the South; however, in that area its organizational development remains at an embryonic stage, and the party’s nationalization strategy has so far produced a “quasi-colonial” structure dominated by, and dependent on, the Northern elite.

This introduction to our special issue on Revisiting Regional Powers examines ways in which the study of regional powers can enhance our ability to understand the dynamic nature of the international system today. The article, first, summarizes and highlights how the study of regional powers remains relevant to the broader discipline of international relations but also indicates that there remains much to improve and investigate, for instance by more systematically including less traditional issue areas for regional power engagement, including the environment or public diplomacy, by integrating disciplines beyond IR, including sociological and linguistic approaches. In today’s shifting global order, researching regional powerhood is needed for a better understanding of the emergence of order(s); by highlighting, for example, less-than-global forms of cooperation and conflict, and their often-complex simultaneities. We highlight the need to investigate forms of power beyond increases in military and economic power, but also to expand the types of actors beyond the state that we consider taking on functions of regional powerhood.

In the last decade, Fidesz has dominated the Hungarian political landscape, becoming the most extensive Hungarian party organisation in terms of party members, structuration, resources, and influence. The party’s organisational development has been determined by a constant strategic adaptation to new circumstances of political reality and new demands of the electorate. The article argues that in three phases of its development, Fidesz adopted different party organisation guidelines. As a result, a hybrid party architecture was formed involving various characteristics and strategies of mass parties (e.g., relatively large membership and ideological communication), movement parties (i.e., top-down generation of mass rallies and protest activities), personal parties (i.e., personalisation, centralisation of party leadership), and cartel parties (i.e., use of state resources, control over party competition). Instead of switching from one strategy to another, the party often used these strategies simultaneously. This flexible party organisation can balance among the different needs of effective governance, constant mobilisation, and popular sovereignty. The article aims to dissect these building blocks of Fidesz to gain insight into the emergence of the hybrid party model.

Throughout its 40-year history, the Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish Interest) has established itself as an important player within the Belgian party system, albeit with significant electoral fluctuations. In 2019, it became the second largest party in Flanders. The party developed and maintained a mass-party organisation by investing significantly in local party branches and in a rigid vertically articulated structure. It relies heavily on social media, particularly Facebook, to communicate to supporters beyond the more limited group of party members. Using both modern and traditional tools, VB representatives aim to create communities of supporters bonded to the party, facilitating dissemination of the party’s messages. Despite this investment in a grassroots organisation, the VB’s decision-making remains highly centralised. Social media and local branches allow informal consideration of members’ views, but the party has not created significant mechanisms for internal democracy. While it is often claimed that political parties have moved away from the “mass-party” model, this article demonstrates that the VB still maintains characteristics of the mass party, albeit with a modern twist. New social media tools facilitate attempts to foster communities and disseminate party messages among a wider group of supporters, both formal members and more informal sympathisers.

The article analyses the organisation of the Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [PiS]) in Poland. The case of PiS does not only allow us to explore the organisational features of a strongly institutionalized, incumbent party which uses populist radical right (PRR) politics. PiS, we argue, is also an ideal case to contrast what such parties might rhetorically declare and substantively do about their organisational features. Using party documents, press reports, quantitative data, and insights from the secondary literature based on interviews with activists, we evaluate the extent to which PiS has developed a mass-party-related organisation, and centralized its intra-party decision-making procedures. We find that while PiS made overtures to some aspects of mass-party-like organisation for electoral mobilization, the party remained reluctant to actively expand its membership numbers and put little effort into fostering the integration and social rootedness of its members through everyday intra-party activities. Furthermore, despite attempts to enact organisational reinvigoration, in practice PiS continued to revolve around strongly centralized structures and, in particular, the absolutist leadership style of the party’s long-time Chair Jarosław Kaczyński. The analysis contributes to assessing the variety and functions of organisational features and appeals within the comparative study of PRR parties. Most particularly, it invites further research into the still relatively under-researched interactions between PRR party organisation and active party communication.