New Books in Political Science

Inside Parties: How Party Rules Shape Membership and Responsiveness (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Georgia Kernell examines how party rules determine how parties select candidates, nominate leaders, and set policy goals. Most research on party organisation pays very little attention to what happens within political parties; this book addresses this gap by examining how internal party rules and procedures shape party membership and political responsiveness. Drawing on an original dataset of party statutes covering 65 political parties across 20 parliamentary democracies, the book offers one of the most comprehensive studies of party organisation to date. The book develops a formal model of party membership and tests these hypotheses using cross-national surveys, member studies, experiments, and computer simulations of projected vote shares. The book finds that a party's level of decentralisation - the degree to which it incorporates rank and file members into decision making - determines which voters it best represents. Decentralised parties may attract more members to campaign for the party, but they do so at the cost of adopting more extreme positions that pull them away from moderate voters. The book challenges our understanding of inner-party democracy, it reveals that Parties that are more internally democratic don't necessarily end up being more representative or responsive to the electorate as a whole. This novel and comprehensive research is an indispensable resource not only for party scholars but also for anyone working on comparative politics and multi-method research. And for anyone who wants to sneak a peek into the "secret garden" of party organisation. 

Satyaki Barua is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. His research focuses on party organisation, party institutionalisation, and political mobilisation, particularly examining the interactions between the state, society, and political parties in India and South Asia. Outside of academia, Satyaki enjoys watching and discussing movies, as well as practising Hindustani classical music.
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In A Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management (Cornell UP, 2026), Dr. Monalisa Adhikari shows how rising powers like India and China are reshaping global peace governance. Over recent decades, both countries have deepened engagement with institutions built on liberal principles, including those related to peacebuilding. Their growing role raises critical questions about how their approaches diverge from liberal models and their impact on the domestic politics of conflict-affected states.

Focusing on India and China's involvement in peace processes in Nepal and Myanmar, Dr. Adhikari demonstrates that these powers advance distinctive, state-centered programs that privilege regional stakeholders, stability, development, and pragmatism. Operating under conditions of "negotiated coexistence" with liberal peacebuilders, their initiatives neither fully align with nor openly contest existing actors, limiting cooperation while avoiding confrontation. This pluralized form of international engagement enables domestic elites to resist external pressures, producing hybrid peace orders that incorporate some liberal elements yet remain largely at the status quo—and often illiberal.

Rich with archival and interview evidence, A Post-Liberal Peace sheds light on alternative forms of peacebuilding and their on-the-ground effects in an increasingly multipolar world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Pandemic Politics in Central Asia: Authoritarian Contagion (Routledge, 2026) examines how the authoritarian regimes of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan exploited the Covid-19 pandemic to consolidate their political control over Central Asia. Through restrictive policies and strategic manipulation, these governments reshaped the region's politics and societies during 2020-2022.

This volume offers readers an insight into three key areas where Central Asia's pandemic power grab was most visible: mobility control, whereby restrictive legislation limited freedom of movement and suppressed dissent; authoritarian information flows, whereby COVID-19-related measures aligned media and digital information to government messaging, further curtailing freedom of expression; and the international politics of the pandemic, whereby the regimes capitalised on global instability to strengthen their kleptocratic hold over Central Asia's politics and society. This book provides a detailed analysis of these strategies, offering a compelling exploration of how crises can be used to entrench authoritarianism.

It is ideal for scholars, students, and professionals in political science, international relations, and Central Asian Studies. The book is also valuable to readers interested in understanding the intersection between public health crises and authoritarian governance.

The Open Access version of this book, available here has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Adam Quinn is a Glasgow-based researcher whose work focuses on activism, social movements and state-society relations in the Post-Soviet space.
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How the nuclear guardrails were dismantled. What arms control actually did (risk management, predictability, geography), how it unravelled from the 2000s onward, and why its collapse matters more now as we see a resurgence of strategic instability and armed conflict.
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How do authoritarian regimes silence critics across borders? And what are the repressive tools and strategies that authoritarian regimes use transnationally? In this episode we are joined by Arild Engelsen Ruud, Mubashar Hasan and Karin Zackari to discuss the role of digital surveillance, emotional blackmail, enforced family isolation, psychological harassment, and the imprisonment of relatives on fabricated charges by Asian authoritarian regimes seeking to control populations and narratives across borders.

You can read more about the research discussed in this episode in the book The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism, published by Springer.

Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Oslo.

Mubashar Hasan is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Western Sydney University.

Karin Zackari Associate Senior Researcher at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and the Director of the Centre for South Asian Democracy at the University of Oslo.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
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