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This chapter is the third of four on the question of legitimacy in the EU, and deals with the political institutions of the EU and its policy processes. The first section elaborates on these aspects of legitimacy or regime support, and presents a conceptual framework. The second examines cross‐national variations and variations over time in regime support, including public satisfaction with the basic principles, decision‐making processes, and institutional arrangements of the EU. The third section analyses alternative explanations for these variations in regime support, including the role of (political) cultural legacies, social background, and policy performance‐ and leadership‐based factors. The conclusion considers the implications of this analysis for understanding the future of the EU.

This chapter explores mutualities in the relationship between rights and movements. The closely symbiotic relationship between social movement activity and citizenship rights suggests that, in the contemporary context, citizenship describes a process of putting the prescribed content into its ubiquitous legal and political forms. In this perspective social movement struggles aspire to close the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of citizenship, between rights-in-principle and rights-in-practice, by pressing political regimes to conform more closely to state laws and constitutions.

This chapter asks what light the economic crisis throws on the state of democracy in the region. It is concerned with the impact of the political regime on the crisis and of the crisis on the democratic process. In the longer term, democracy may be associated with economic growth. If it is the case that networks allocate resources less efficiently than markets, then a society based on expressive network ties will be less rich than one based on dispassionate economic calculation. This chapter asks whether the development of democracy has reduced the power of the patronage networks. It then gives examples to provide some answers to this question. First, it looks at Taiwan which provides a paradigm case of transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Second, it turns to Korea, an example of a military regime turned democratic, then Malaysia, which has been called ‘semi-authoritarian’ or ‘authoritarian populist.’ The crisis showed Indonesia as the paradigm case of ‘crony capitalism’ as the Suharto regime's business interests became clear. The Philippines has a history of democratic elections since the end of martial law in 1986.

American political history has featured a series of successive governing regimes in which political parties compete. During each regime one of the parties tends to dominate politics practically and ideologically. The regime rises and falls. We are at the end of the Reagan regime, which began in the 1980s. Stephen Skowronek’s model of presidential leadership in political time suggests that Donald Trump is probably a disjunctive president who brings the Reagan regime to a close. Politics during the last years of a regime are often confusing and dysfunctional, and this period is no exception. Trump may avoid disjunction and give the Reagan regime a second wind, like William McKinley did in 1896. Although this possibility is very real, it runs counter to long-term demographic trends. The next regime is more likely to feature the Democrats as the dominant party.

This chapter reflects on the existence or not of a new wave of democratisation in the wake of the Arab Spring. It is true that simultaneity, contagion, diffusion and emulation do feature in the political dynamics of change following the Arab Spring. However, rather than a democratic tsunami, there were ebbs and flows of a ‘wave of political change’ that has involved differing transformative processes in each country. Secondly, the author offers a typology of political regimes as well as a classification of MENA regimes prior to the Arab Spring, in order to identify the starting point of political change. Thirdly, different types of political change processes are defined and categorised: two general processes of political change (democratisation and autocratisation); and, five specific processes of political change affecting democracies (democratic regression, democratic deepening and consolidation of democracy) or authoritarianisms (political liberalisation and authoritarian progression). And finally, the author presents the methodological framework used in this book to study political change in the MENA countries. This change is analysed with reference to three dimensions: pluralism and political competition (party/representation systems and electoral integrity); government (constitutional reforms, government and state powers, and good governance; and public rights and liberties (political rights, civil rights, rule of law, and civil society).

Technocracy is discussed as a distinct type of regime and form of statecraft. The chapter clears up the considerable confusion surrounding the relationship between technocracy, bureaucracy and democracy, which provides the foundation for the empirical analysis of the anti-bureaucratic and pro-democratic nature of contemporary technocracy. The relationship of technocracy to political ideology is discussed, leading to the suggestion that technocracy consistently pursues a position ‘beyond ideology’ while also remaining fully capable of working in lockstep with socialism, liberalism and anything in between. Finally, the chapter moves from the regime level and provides an overall model of the constitutive and intersecting policy paradigms of the New Technocracy: connective governance, risk management and performance management.

This lecture presents the text of the speech about the architectural politics in Renaissance Venice delivered by the author at the 2007 Italian Lecture held at the British Academy. It explores the role of architecture in the self-definition of a political regime and the extent to which state ideologies are communicated in public space. The lecture discusses the role of architecture in controlling the ideological meaning of public iconography.

The rise and fall of regimes shapes partisan attitudes about judicial review. How people feel about judicial activism and judicial restraint depends on where they are in political time, and which party tends to control the federal courts. The parties’ positions are mirror images. Over the course of a regime the dominant party increasingly relies on judicial review to achieve its goals, while the opposition party becomes increasingly skeptical of judicial review and advocates judicial restraint—although neither party ever fully abandons using judicial review to advance its policies. As the cycle moves from the beginning of a regime to its final days, the parties—and the legal intellectuals allied with them—gradually switch positions. The party of judicial restraint becomes the party of judicial engagement, and vice-versa. The effect, however, is generational; older people may stick with their hard-won lessons about the courts, while younger generations, who have very different experiences, take contrary positions.

This chapter examines the impact of stasis, or civil war, on the different types of political regime in ancient Greece as well as the strategic dynamics of oligarchic breakdown. Stasis posed a major problem for the Greek poleis, especially during the Classical period. Although some scholars describe the polis as a place of unity and strong civic identity, the ancient evidence shows that sedition, treason, factional infighting, and all-out social conflict were common in ancient Greece. Furthermore, stasis was not confined to a particular kind of polis (large or small, rich or poor), but seems to have affected most of them. The chapter first considers examples of oligarchic overthrow that occurred in public space, along with their internal logic, before discussing the dynamics of breakdown within the ruling elite.

This chapter analyses the change (or continuity) of MENA regimes in a post-Arab Spring context, focusing on governments and power relationships. This chapter firstly analyses the place governments occupy in their respective political systems; how they are perceived by their populations; and the extent to which are they capable of managing violence and imposing their authority across the whole of their national territory. Governments are responsible for the policies carried out in their countries. Thus, many of the social protests - predominantly focused on the high levels of corruption - were directed against governments. However, while governments are perceived to be the institutions responsible for meeting citizens’ welfare needs, there are other non-elected institutions (formal or informal) with significant decision-making powers that are non-accountable, such as the presidents of the republic, the monarchs, and other national (the armed forces in the case of Egypt; armed groups in the cases of Libya, Syria and Yemen) or international actors (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran). On the other hand, this chapter studies changes in the power structure. The author finds evidence of greater power concentration, with the exception of the new democratic regime of Tunisia.

Coalitions for and against particular accountability ideologies emerge in a dynamic political economy context. Towards identifying the main characteristics of such contexts, this chapter draws out the political regime significance of historical legacies – especially of the Cold War – and of contemporary capitalist and market relationships. Included here is discussion of the highly fragmented or underdeveloped nature of civil society in Southeast Asia and its implications for political coalitions. The blunting of powerful independent labour movements and social democratic political parties and movements linking civil and political society are highlighted. Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam are all analysed in these terms. The core argument of this chapter is that the social foundations of contemporary capitalism in Southeast Asia are favourable for moral ideologies of accountability exerting a pervasive influence.

This chapter examines the implications of the Putin administration’s unyielding commitment to financial openness as a coda to the three-episode drama that played out between 1991 and 2009. Given the decreased clout of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs after Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, the chapter emphasizes that the oligarchs’ need to keep one foot out the door has been understandable. But the benefits of the Local Control and Global Access (LCGA) model go beyond the interests of the private oligarchs. The chapter then outlines the relationship between LCGA and regime stability in Russia in terms of two competing approaches to the study of political regimes. It shows that financial internationalization became hardwired into the Russian political economy because it mitigated conflict among the state, the stoligarchs, and the private oligarchs. This is why the LCGA system has remained a central feature of the economy, even during a volatile time when it continued to carry enormous negative externalities for Russia’s economy and national security.

This chapter presents a comparative contextual analysis of parliamentary and presidential elections held in the MENA countries between 2011 and 2015, in order to clarify the relation between electoral integrity, electoral context and political regime. With this aim in mind, the analysis pursues: (1) identifying the evolution path of these three variables; (2) testing the existence or absence of correlation between them; and 3) classifying the countries in view of their last electoral, contextual and regime model records. The results suggest three evidences. The first one refers to the heterogeneous behaviour of the variables, including progress, regression, fluctuation and stagnation patterns. The second is that positive correlation between them exists just in three cases, where progress (Tunisia), fluctuation (Egypt) and stagnation (Kuwait) are respectively the common trend. The third is that countries may be classified within two categories, considering if (i) the current level of electoral integrity corresponds with the general level of freedoms, rights and governance that contextualises the holding of elections, and (ii) the level of electoral integrity is either higher or lower than might be expected in relation to the defining characteristics of the electoral context and the regime.

This chapter examines the longue durée reproduction of the material agrarian structure and the violently and radically changing political regimes. It operates at two levels. First, on the large scale of time and space, the chapter shows how the political contexts over time have supported and undermined various land claims at different junctures — from the first Dutch land acquisition in the 1860s in North Sumatra through Japanese occupation, social revolution, “guided democracy,” the “New Order,” and reformasi. It also demonstrates how the patterns of claims and counterclaims, acquisitions and evictions, occupations and retreats, have emerged. Second, the chapter provides a detailed analysis of a single, emblematic, enduring conflict. The local case shows how legalization, in connection with the other nine-tenths of the law, allowed plantation agriculture to hold off smallholder challenges for decades. Some claims in this land struggle challenged the status quo, but proved to be ephemeral and short-lived. Other claims, however, reproduced effectively. They hardened and institutionalized, propped up by statutory law, regulation, force, and other practices.

American politics features very long cycles of polarization and depolarization between the political parties. Politics polarized around the Civil War and remained polarized until the end of the Gilded Age. Then began a long period of depolarization. Polarization started increasing once again in the middle of the twentieth century, and we are now at the peak of the current cycle. Polarization is a characteristic feature of the Reagan regime. Although Republican politicians used strategies of polarization to gain power, polarization made it increasingly difficult for them to govern, and will eventually lead to the regime’s undoing.