Political Studies

The outcome of the 2016 referendum on European Union membership took many by surprise and has continued to define the political discourse in Britain. Despite there being a growing body of research focused on explaining how voters cast their ballot, we still know little about what motivated our politicians to do the same. In this article, we draw on individual-level survey data from the British Representation Study to explore support for Brexit among parliamentary candidates who stood at the 2017 general election. We find that candidates’ political views on immigration and democracy were key determinants of their decision to vote Leave. In addition, more optimistic views of how Brexit was expected to impact British economy and democracy are associated with greater likelihood of voting Leave. These findings highlight that, while politicians were less likely than voters to support Brexit overall, their motivations for doing so were quite similar. Interestingly, however, we also find that candidates contesting constituencies with higher Leave support were no more likely to vote for Brexit themselves. Taken together, these findings have important implications for elite representation of voters’ policy preferences on the issue of Brexit.

The 2016 European Union referendum campaign has been depicted as a battle between ‘heads’ and ‘hearts’, reason and emotion. Voters’ propensity to trust their feelings over expert knowledge has sparked debate about the future of democratic politics in what is increasingly believed to be an ‘age of emotion’. In this article, we argue that we can learn from the ways that historians have approached the study of emotions and everyday politics to help us make sense of this present moment. Drawing on William Reddy’s concept of ‘emotional regimes’, we analyse the position of emotion in qualitative, ‘everyday narratives’ about the 2016 European Union referendum. Using new evidence from the Mass Observation Archive, we argue that while reason and emotion are inextricable facets of political decision-making, citizens themselves understand the two processes as distinct and competing.

The current debate on populism is mainly concerned with populist parties and movements. Less is written about populist leadership. Yet, political scientists need to pay more attention to populist leadership, especially in order to understand how populism functions in the absence of a populist party. In situations in which a political leader adopts a populist way of exercising political power without the backing of what is considered a populist party, populism is often reduced to a particular style of acting and speaking of that particular politician. By formulating a theory-based concept of political leadership based on the literature of celebrity politicians—the superhero—I show that populist leadership is not limited to a particular style, but also allows to explain particular policy choices. The concept of the superhero goes beyond that of charismatic leadership, because it explains how the leader’s exceptionality is performed and how this performance can be analyzed.

The call for more direct democracy, and referenda in particular, is often heard and met with support from large numbers of citizens in many countries. This article explores the motives for supporting referenda: Do citizens support them for intrinsic reasons, because referenda allow them to exercise their democratic rights more directly? Or are preferences for referenda predominantly based on the expectation that they will produce desired policy outcomes and thus instrumentally motivated? Our survey experiment explores such instrumental preferences by assessing how substantial policy preferences affect individuals’ choice of referenda over alternative decision-making procedures. We show that congruence between a respondent’s own opinion and the expected majority opinion is associated with support for a referendum on a given matter, and thus arrive at the conclusion that calls for referenda should be reassessed in light of the partly instrumental character of procedural preferences.

The Brexit vote has sparked renewed criticism of the United Kingdom’s ad hoc constitutional arrangements, particularly in relation to the status of popular sovereignty. While the people is politically recognised as ‘sovereign’ through the apparent unassailability of its referendum verdict, this sovereignty has no legal foundation or form – thus giving it an elusive, indefinite character. In turn, legal commentators have argued that the lack of a clear conceptual framework for constitutional referendums aggravated the political crisis that followed the vote and that the uncertain nature and authority of referendums represents a distinct source of constitutional crisis in its own right. In this article, I consider how this ‘constitutionalist critique’ of the Brexit referendum, and its ad hoc constitutional framework, reflects a particular conception of liberal constitutionalism as a bulwark against the hazards and vicissitudes of unstructured popular sovereignty. I will argue that this perspective overestimates the capacity of constitutional law to regulate expressions of popular sovereignty via referendums, that it misconceives the character and claim of popular sovereignty more generally, and that it reflects certain characteristics of liberal legalism in its stance towards politics and political contingency.

How is political violence gendered? We connect the traditional political violence literature’s emphasis on categorizing attacks to the gender and politics literature’s analysis of the barriers to women’s political participation. Our framework separates gendered political violence into three elements. Gendered motives appear when perpetrators use violence to preserve hegemonic men’s control of politics. Gendered forms emphasize how gender roles and tropes differentially shape men’s and women’s experiences of violence. Gendered impacts capture the subjective meaning-making processes that occur as different audiences react to political violence. This approach offers researchers and policymakers greater analytic precision regarding how political violence is gendered.

This article examines the case for distributive fairness among states in the context of humanitarian intervention. I start by arguing that distributive fairness among interveners is important for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons. I then discuss the worry that due to the nature of humanitarian intervention, fair burden sharing is difficult to achieve without compromising the operational effectiveness of interventions. I examine three responses that while they reduce the severity of this objection do not fully override it. Finally, in light of the objection I explore options for practical changes and institutional reform that could contribute to reconciling fair burden sharing with effective intervention. I conclude that fairness and effectiveness can be reconciled in the longer term by fully institutionalising humanitarian intervention and in the short term by distinguishing between the duty to undertake intervention and the duty to pay for it.

Social egalitarians have charged distributive egalitarianism with abandoning the victims of option luck, disrespecting victims of brute luck and misunderstanding the aim of egalitarian justice. Social egalitarians have tended to favour a conception of equality that is concerned with ending oppression and expressing equal respect for everyone. In this article, I argue that what has so far been missing from this debate is the fundamental connection that exists between distributive egalitarianism and a conception of exploitation. Once this connection is understood, we can see that social egalitarians are unfair in their criticisms. Importantly, the connection to exploitation reveals that social egalitarianism and distributive egalitarianism are not rival positions. When it comes to exploitation, the two positions are able to coordinate and identify two core wrong-making features that form part of an exploitative interaction.

Social scientists have recently observed a ‘resurgence’ of traditional political institutions on the constitutional level in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, the scope and causes of the resurgence remain unclear. We base our analysis on original data on the degree of constitutional integration of traditional institutions and on their constitutional resurgence since 1990 in 45 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. We test six theoretical explanations for constitutionalization: former colonial rule, democratization, state capacity, economic development, foreign aid and settlement patterns. First, we verify the broad resurgence of traditional political institutions on a constitutional level. Second, our analysis suggests that, particularly in former British colonies, traditional leaders were able to translate the arrangements of British colonial rule as well as the advantages of a country’s deconcentrated settlement pattern into greater constitutional status. Third, settlement patterns proved important for traditional leaders to gain or increase constitutional status – leading to a constitutional resurgence of traditional institutions.

Independent offices for future generations are rare among institutional designs that aim to ameliorate short-termism in democracies. Drawing on the experience of offices for future generations in Israel, Hungary, and Wales, the article argues that such institutions face at least three challenges to their legitimacy: first, the capacity of an unelected agency to constrain government and law-making; second, the ability of a single office to adequately represent the plurality of interests within and across future generations; and third, their political fragility and vulnerability. The article develops the counterintuitive argument that offices for future generations can enhance their democratic legitimacy through embedding systematic public participation in their activities, in particular through the institutionalization of deliberative mini-publics.

Was Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff victim of a coup or removed through a legal process of impeachment? The heated debate on the 2016 ousting of Brazil’s president testifies to the growing controversy around the definition of coups. Focusing on Latin America, we show that the use of coups with adjectives have become more frequent in public and scholarly debates. Occurring at a time when coups are becoming rarer, we argue that this development is linked to prevalence-induced concept change, meaning that when instances of a concept become less prevalent, the understanding of the concept expands. The meaning of coups has expanded through a proliferation of adjectives. Coups with adjectives are not new, but recent usage changes the concept from a classic to a family resemblance structure. Although this strategy can avoid stretching and increase differentiation, we urge caution and warn against harmful consequences, whether conceptual, theoretical, or practical.

When do personal ties matter? Studies of political elite’s rise to power stress the importance of personal ties, but do not consider the possibility of differential effects depending on who one is connected to in elite struggles. We examine how ties formed among Chinese party-state officials influence their career. Our research design provides a strong proxy to account for personal ties: attendance of an exclusive and intensive training program for officials. We take advantage of the exogenous assignment to cohorts in this program to establish a causal link between informal connections and promotions. We find that the effect of personal ties depends on whether the official is connected to the leader who dominates the promotion process or to the one who only influences it through information control. Connections to the latter decrease the promotion probability, likely because these officials are closely monitored by their superiors and more powerful rivals.

Two prominent relational egalitarians, Elizabeth Anderson and Niko Kolodny, object to giving people in a democratic community differential voting weights on the grounds that doing so would lead to unequal relations between them. Their claim is that deviating from a “one-person, one-vote” scheme is incompatible with realizing relational egalitarian justice. In this article, I argue that they are wrong. I do so by showing that people can relate as moral, epistemic, social, and empirical equals in a scheme with differential voting weights. I end the article by showing that from the perspective of relational egalitarianism, it is sometimes true that differential voting weights are more just than equal voting weights.