This article offers a new perspective on autocracy. We analyze how the autocrat is compelled to confront time - and ultimately mortality - as a political problem. As a regime type, autocracy revisits one of the oldest questions in political life: the question of what makes the polity persist and stay identical with itself over time, in spite of inevitable changes in its makeup with the passing of time. Since autocracy entails a blurring of the distinction between the natural person of the ruler and the legal-political person of the state, the autocrat faces the challenge of embodying both continuity and change in political life directly, physically, in a way reminiscent of the European Middle Ages and early modernity. Considering the case of Vladimir Putin, we discuss the implications that follow for our understanding of autocracy. Most notably, this aspect of autocracy makes the mere prospect of the death of the ruler seem not only personally but also politically unacceptable. Autocracy, we argue, should therefore be understood as an essentially unfinished regime type, indefinitely suspended between the ruler's claim to personally embody the body politic and the eventual, inevitable, demonstration of the unsustainability of that claim. We conclude by discussing what it would take to actually bring autocracy to completion, which is nothing less than the immortality of the ruler.

This article is a critique of the notion of post-truth. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the epistemological crisis suggested by the notion of post-truth is epiphenomenal to a more general crisis of authority, a crisis that is poorly understood in the literature. I also argue that revisiting Arendt's account of authority can help us elucidate the vexed dynamics of authority in modern society, as well as the dynamics behind its current crisis. The post-truth situation is a loss of authority that is political before it presents as epistemological. Effectively addressing this situation, I conclude, is a much more challenging and complex proposition than what is suggested in the literature on post-truth.

The problem of social order is the question of what holds complex and diverse societies together. Today, this question has become increasingly urgent in the world. Yet our ability to ask and answer the question in a helpful way is constrained by the intellectual legacy through which the question has been handed down to us. In this impressive, erudite study, Henrik Enroth describes and analyzes how the problem of social order has shaped concept formation, theory, and normative arguments in political science. The book covers a broad range of influential thinkers and theories throughout the history of political science, from the early twentieth century onwards. Social order has long been a presupposition for inquiry in political science; now we face the challenge of turning it into an object of inquiry.

As the gravity of anthropogenic climate change is dawning on humanity, essential political aspects of the climatic situation remain unexplored. This article argues that our entering the Anthropocene amounts to a constitutive moment: a moment in which new principles of coexistence are being declared. Drawing on, as well as critically engaging with, the work of Bruno Latour and Hannah Arendt, I introduce and explicate the metaphor declarations of dependence to make sense of what scientists, activists, academics and journalists are doing, in political terms, when they announce the Anthropocene. Theoretically as well as practically, this metaphor opens for a more helpful understanding of the fraught relationship between science and the public on the issue of anthropogenic climate change. I end by considering the possibility that this metaphor, literally construed, can help us make today the first day in the rest of our lives in the Anthropocene.

This article revisits the vexed relationship between populism and democracy. The article identifies and analyzes a persistent split in the discourse of democracy between the politically fit and unfit, and argues that populism is best seen as effecting a reversal of this ancient binary. Using analytical tools from the strong program in cultural sociology, this binary is theorized as a symbolic code organizing our sense of and sensibilities for the sacred and the profane in democracy, a symbolic code that political science research on populism tends to reproduce rather than explicate. Pursuing this, the article outlines a cultural explanation of populism as well as of shortcomings and blind spots in the latest wave of research on the subject. It argues by example the need to cross over between political, social, and cultural theory in order to better understand populism and democracy and their contentious interrelationship.

It is often suggested that political parties are becoming increasingly alike, and that party politics has turned into an elite affair where political professionals collude to further their self-interest rather than work to represent the interests of their constituents. In recent decades this diagnosis has been famously associated with Richard Katz and Peter Mair’s cartel party theory. Yet so far this controversial thesis has not been subjected to systematic empirical scrutiny, nor has its conceptual and normative underpinnings been properly considered. In this volume a group of political scientists with different specialisations take on this task, focusing empirically on the Swedish party system, which the originators of the cartel party theory have suggested is especially conducive to the formation of party cartels. Collecting new and unique qualitative and quantitative data, the volume casts serious doubt on the validity of the cartel party theory as an explanation for party system change.

The aim of this volume is to assess the cartel party theory based on a study of the Swedish party system, specifically, the party groups in the unicameral Swedish Parliament (the Riksdag). Attending to a range of factors, we ask whether or not the party groups in the Riksdag have increasingly come to resemble one another in the period from the late twentieth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century. In this chapter of introduction, we present the Swedish case as well as six empirical studies of the Swedish case highlight various factors that the cartel party theory takes to be conducive to cartelisa­tion, and discuss countervailing forces as well. We explore whether party elites are becoming increasingly alike and increasingly removed from grassroots and constituents due to processes of professionali­zation; whether opposition to government is waning in the wake of globali­sation and Europeanisation; and whether parties are becoming more alike by adapting to general processes of mediatisation in politics. In two chapters, we investigate key factors not yet sufficiently acknowledged either by authors or critics of the cartel party theory: gender representation and party culture; we ask whether these factors act as countervailing forces to cartelisation. In a concluding chapter we discuss how the empirical results presented here might lead us to rethink accepted ideas about cartelisation, convergence and increasing similarities among parliamentary parties.