Party Politics, Ahead of Print.
How are ministerial portfolios distributed among coalition parties in Asian-Pacific democracies? Studies of power-sharing in Asia tend to focus on democratization processes rather than executive cabinets, although government coalitions occur regularly in the region. Using an original dataset of governments in 27 Asian-Pacific democracies from 1945 to 2018, I examine the bargaining advantage of the formateur party - the party managing the government formation process - over other parties entering government. We know from existing studies, mainly on Europe, that government parties holding larger shares of legislative seats receive larger shares of cabinet posts. I argue that portfolio allocation also depends on institutional context, and use the substantial institutional variation across countries in my dataset to test implications of this argument. I find that formateur parties have a greater advantage over coalition partners in presidential systems than in parliamentary ones, but that this advantage diminishes as political constraints facing the formateur increase.

Party Politics, Ahead of Print.
This article introduces the concept of bundle as a new powerful tool in the study of party reforms. The intensive and intricate nature of the engineering political parties undertake to preserve the status quo amidst a challenging environment tends to be obscured by the focus on their so-called ‘conservative nature’. Applied to the process tracing of a large sequence of reforms implemented by the Belgian French-Speaking liberal party (MR) between 2019 and 2022, the bundle concept provides the opportunity to go beyond the narrow vision of party reforms only defined and empirically studied so far through their type, size and success. I triangulate a variety of sources to uncover mechanisms through which a handful of key party actors - as powerful steering agents - perceive and translate environmental factors into specific reforms. The bundle analysis brings notably to light a key sequencing mechanism – a snowball effect – explaining how the sequence actually unfolded and fed on itself, challenging our hitherto accepted understanding of party engineering. This study also offers a transferable conceptual framework with valuable insights for wider use in the field, providing an avenue for theory building through causal analysis.

Party Politics, Ahead of Print.
Partisan dealignment in Western Europe has gone hand in hand with the decline of electoral participation and active membership in political parties. Yet political participation and activism are not necessarily a thing of the past, and scholars have for instance observed these characteristics in several contemporary populist radical right parties (PRRPs). Drawing on the analysis of 124 interviews with party representatives from four European PRRPs (the League, the Finns Party, Flemish Interest and the Swiss People’s Party), we ask what motivates PRRP elites to foster the creation of tight communities of activists. Three reasons appear to stand out: campaigning prowess (to gain public support); legitimising the party; and organisational survival. The final section offers reflections on the wider implications of our study and suggests avenues for future research, questioning the assumption that parties are necessarily and uniformly shifting away from activism and societal rootedness.

Party Politics, Ahead of Print.
This study analyses professional policy experts in political parties. While recent studies have described the characteristics of ‘unelected politicians’, the drivers for their emergence and impact on democracy have not yet been fully elaborated. We examine these aspects via Finnish party elite interviews (n=79). We challenge the traditional party professionalization narrative where parties’ increasing publicity management efforts diminish intra-party democracy (IPD) and parties’ political ambitions. We find that in addition to campaign, media, and democratic needs, political parties in Finland are concerned especially by their policymaking capacity that has shifted to experts of public administration and lobbyists, and which parties seek to strengthen with the recruitment of more political employees. This elevates the role of partisan policy professionals within political parties, a perspective that has been downplayed in party organisation literature. We call this the imperative of expertise and conclude that while it likely limits traditional IPD, it can improve representative democracy by enhancing parties’ policy control against the technocratic tendencies of contemporary democracy.

Party Politics, Ahead of Print.
Campaign costs have risen in Africa. I ask: what has driven this cost inflation? Studies of Western parties attribute it to campaign modernization as mediatization. Studies of African parties do not recognize this campaign advancement. They attribute these it to another cause: spiraling clientelism. I argue that there is a third, hitherto overlooked driver of such inflation and adaptation: the hybridization of rallies with capital-intensive practices. This capitalization of rally production amounts to an alternative form of campaign modernization which diverges from those found in the global north. I trace this process in Tanzania, but this theory has wider reach. Many African campaigns are rally-intensive and have fewer authoritarian retardants of party competition than Tanzania. This makes it likely that other countries’ experiences resembled or surpassed Tanzania’s in Africa and beyond. Altogether, I demonstrate that there is ongoing innovation at rallies which is driving significant rises in campaign costs.

Party Politics, Ahead of Print.