International Political Science Review

This article argues that the concept of ‘state feminism’ no longer adequately captures the complexity of emerging feminist engagements with new forms of governance. It suggests that ‘market feminism’ offers a new conceptual framework from which feminist engagements with the state can be analysed and evaluated, and the changes within state feminism can be understood. The article documents the growing feminist embrace of the logic of the market, which manifests itself in changed practices and priorities. The article gives examples of ‘market feminism’ and argues that the move from state feminism to market feminism impacts on both the political practices and policy priorities of women’s policy agencies.

Mixed compensatory systems have risen in popularity in recent years. Under such systems, single-seat districts elect only the leader of the local suffrage, but the systems nevertheless produce (nearly) proportional outcomes overall, via compensatory mandates. Elections in Albania, Italy, Lesotho, and Venezuela, however, demonstrate a particular loophole for such systems: strategic voting, organized by political parties. Large parties can achieve over-representation by encouraging their voters to split their votes. In this way, they outsmart the compensatory mechanism designed to lead to proportional results. These disproportional results are particularly controversial, since they are deliberate and strategic. This article takes the 2005 Albanian elections as its main case study, and uses simulations to illustrate its political consequences.

Does constitutional review in emerging democracies tend to enhance horizontal accountability or to preserve state-elite hegemony? The results of a quantitative analysis of abstract constitutional review in Turkey during the 1984–2007 period show: (1) that the Constitutional Court was no more likely to accept unconstitutionality claims by state-elite parties than by non-state-elite parties; and (2) that the Constitutional Court was more likely to accept unconstitutionality claims of executive transgressions than those of state-principles violations. In sum, the findings largely point to the Constitutional Court’s preference for horizontal accountability over hegemonic preservation.

The extreme optimism that shaped the nascent democracy promotion community in the 1980s and early 1990s has been strongly tempered by an increasing number of setbacks to the global expansion of democracy. Zakaria’s influential ‘illiberal democracies’ argument was an early example of this trend towards a more uncertain outlook about democracy’s prospects. His argument was useful in focusing attention on the conceptual underpinnings of these practices. Despite the promising starting point, Zakaria reached limited and conservative conclusions, essentially calling for the revival of a Whig approach: liberalism first, democracy later. Furthermore, his conceptual analysis was overly restricted: democracies are liberal or they are illiberal. This article challenges, revises, and extends Zakaria’s arguments, by examining alternative models of democracy that lie both within and beyond liberalism. It is argued that in contrast to Zakaria’s suggestion that democracy promotion may need to be delayed or deferred, considering different democratic models offers a more optimistic prognosis, as the way forward is not through abandoning the support of democracy, but, instead, potentially through advancing a different form of democracy, one more suitable to a precise local context.

China has been held up as a modern-day exemplar of ‘market-preserving federalism.’ This article challenges this popular belief by showing that its local governments face soft budget constraints. Fiscal indiscipline among subnational governments, which risks national indebtedness and macroeconomic instability, can pose serious dangers to federations. A large body of literature which proposes solutions to fiscal indiscipline through electoral incentives and political party structure cannot be applied to China. The Chinese Communist Party’s cadre-evaluation and dual accountability systems make it an imperative for local officials to augment fiscal revenue and allow them to tap resources at local credit institutions. This has resulted in mounting local government debt, the lion’s share of which is unrepaid loans owed to local credit institutions. To harden budget constraints, political institutions need to be reconfigured to allow the central government more effectively to hold local authorities accountable for resources deployed in achieving their job-performance targets.

Can a conditional commitment by a major actor (for example, the European Union) induce other major actors (such as the USA, China, India, or Japan) to do more to mitigate global climate change? We analyse this question by first estimating the impact of emission reductions by one of these actors on the mitigation costs of the others and, second, by exploring how domestic politics influence the willingness of the European Union and the USA to contribute. We find that an emission cut by any actor will reduce mitigation costs for all the others and thereby expand the settlement range. These cost reductions seem, however, insufficient to induce significant unilateral policy change. Emissions trading can cut aggregate costs further, but also redistribute wealth. Domestic politics tend to add weight to the concerns of powerful actors that stand to lose from more ambitious mitigation policies.