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Most parliamentary democracies have seen a rise of populist radical parties during the past decades. Many countries have also experienced severely delayed government formation processes, with caretaker governments in office for extended periods of time. Are these delays related to the rise of radical parties? We argue that the rise of populist radical parties may prolong the bargaining process, due to the fact that these parties are often treated as pariahs by other parties during election campaigns, which creates a complex bargaining situation after the election. We evaluate this claim by studying 121 government formation processes in the German States from 1990 until 2021, using original data which includes statements made by parties during election campaigns. The findings show that a higher share of seats allocated to parties from the radical right and radical left results in an increasing amount of days until a new government is voted into office. We also find that when a party that has been characterized as being 'non-coalitionable' during the election campaign ends up among the negotiating parties, the government formation process is severely delayed. These findings suggest that the rise of populist radical parties may create severe challenges for parliamentary democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What positions do ethnic parties adopt on issues related to migration and immigration? We argue that, first, the specific characteristics of the party system – that is, if there are further ethnic parties that compete for votes, in particular among the same ethnic group – matter for the policy profile of ethnic parties on immigration policy. Secondly, we expect that the ideological position of an ethnic party should matter for their immigration policy position: ethnic parties with a more right-wing ideological profile should adopt more negative positions on immigration, in particular, if they face competition from another ethnic party. We use regression analysis and a manually coded sample of ethnic parties based on the Comparative Manifesto Project to test these assumptions. The empirical analysis provides support for our expectations: ethnic parties take more negative immigration positions if they compete with other parties among the same group of ethnic voters and the more the ethnic parties belong to the right wing of the ideological spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey plunges headlong into democratic backsliding under Erdoğan's presidency. The country was a forerunner in the decline of democratic standards in a decade from 2010 to 2020. In the first part of the article, we investigate how this democratic erosion suspends Turkey's long-standing traditional party cleavage between religious conservatism and secularism. By tracing individuals who follow the members of the Turkish parliament on Twitter, we attach the deputies to their followers with the help of correspondence analysis. We illustrate that, as the ethnic identity divide remains significant, democracy-authoritarianism cleavage becomes the main party split that brings the supporters of an ideologically diverse group of opposition parties closer. In the second part, we conceptualize the democracy-authoritarianism divide as the main cleavage in Turkish party politics after 2017 to shed light on how the AKP's different tactics of capturing traditional media generated a partisan media landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has suggested that fragmented political systems, incohesive parties, and weak programmatic links between voters and legislators can undermine the effectiveness of ideological legislative representation. Using Brazil's national and state assemblies, we examine the potential for voter-elite congruence in a legislative environment considered weak in programmatic representation and highly fragmented by a decentralized political structure. Focusing on 2005–2014, we use mass and elite survey data from the National Congress and 12 state assemblies to estimate deputies' and respondents' ideal points on a common left-right scale. Despite many potential barriers to ideological representation, we find an aggregate pattern of congruence between voters' and politicians' ideological positions during this period, with stronger voter-deputy correspondence for state deputies on average. These patterns are confirmed by a dyadic analysis of deputy and voter characteristics. However, we also find weaknesses in party-level ideological congruence for the major parties—for voters on the left and party supporters on the right. The findings suggest that, while the party system did not prevent overall ideological representation, it may have hindered important aspects of party representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effort to achieve a more party-orientated set of House Rules in Hungary's newly democratized National Assembly provides evidence about the behavior and development of political parties in a transitional setting. Using data drawn from in-depth interviews, records of MP activities and minutes of plenary discussions, this paper chiefly finds that the distribution of mandates in Hungary's hybrid electoral system determined the relative cohesiveness of the emerging parties and that, as the system has settled down, new information on the electoral value of party cohesion has caused parties to adapt their behavior and rule preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some authors have argued that the change in the method of Conservative party leadership selection introduced in 1965 was modest in impact. This paper argues that the change in procedures transformed both the process and its outcomes. The effects of the procedural change are demonstrated by examining all leadership selections since 1945, comparing those conducted by informal consultation with those decided by ballots of MPs. The transformation is evident in the timing and form of selection contests, the candidates considered for selection, and the leaders who are chosen. Fragmentary evidence from past selections suggests that the inclusion of party members in selection will again reshape both the process and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explain the appeal direct democratic instruments hold for contemporary right-populist parties by drawing on recent experience in Canada. Our thesis is that a particular approach to direct democracy - which we label 'plebiscitarianism' - complements right-populist parties' broader ideological commitment to a scaling back of the welfare state, and of public life more generally. Starting with a theoretical approximation of plebiscitarianism, we trace this complementarity with reference to the democratic ideas and practices of right-populists in Canada, both historically and in the present context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I test two hypotheses about the origin of opinion of partisan activists. The first is a rational-choice thesis that states that due to electoral considerations, activists will adopt positions on issues that correspond to where they believe voters to stand on those issues. The competing hypothesis is based on the influence of contenders for the parties' presidential nomination. This hypothesis predicts that just as candidates play a role in activating segments of the party to participate in the nomination process, they also influence the views held by those activists. Using data from the 1988 and 1992 Convention Delegate Studies, I conduct tests of these hypotheses. The results point toward a candidate-motivation explanation for the origin of opinion of party activists. The implications of these findings are that the information about politics that flows to the mass citizenry is influenced by the candidates who choose to seek the party's nomination and, in the process, activate segments of the party that will then serve as the opinion leaders in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic models of voting proved very successful at predicting party choice in Great Britain during the 1980s and early 1990s, providing strong support for a reward/punish hypothesis of electoral behaviour: government parties were rewarded by support from those who felt well off and were optimistic, but were punished with removal of support by those feeling worse off and economically pessimistic. This paper extends those analyses, using a pioneering longitudinal study of British adults over the period 1991-4, during which the government party (Conservative) became increasingly unpopular, despite an improving economic record. Analyses show that although the party was rewarded by continuing support from its voters who were prospering and lost support among those who were not, it failed to win support from those who initially favoured the opposition parties and yet were feeling well off. This suggests that the reward/punishment model was operating in an asymmetric way. Attempts to fit similar models to the strength, and changing strength, of party identification were largely unsuccessful, however. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of electoral stability or volatility in Latin America calls attention to profound differences between most Latin American party systems, which are quite volatile, and West European party systems, which remain comparatively stable notwithstanding a trend toward greater volatility in recent decades. The examination of Latin American party systems poses interesting questions about why they differ so markedly from West European systems along this important dimension and what the consequences are for democracy. This paper focuses on volatility in one country, Brazil, in order to examine these issues. I make four arguments: that the Brazilian party system was moderately volatile during Brazil's first democracy (1946-64); that the party system has been highly volatile since 1982; that Brazil's volatility is much higher than that in the advanced industrial democracies; and finally, that the high volatility of the post-1985 period was caused by a combination of structural and institutional factors inimical to strong ties between citizens, political elites and parties, and further boosted by the dismal economic results of 1987-94. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The national party system of India has undergone a major transformation since the 1989 elections. The predominant party system that had been in place since 1952 gave way to a pattern of genuine multi-party competition. While the party system has become extremely fragmented, the stable presence of three competing poles lends it an aura of orderliness. This paper analyzes the nature of the new Indian party system with reference to Sartori's theoretical framework. It seems that the Indian party system hinges somewhere on the borderline between polarized and moderate pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly work on the party-policy link has produced fundamentally different interpretations. The main theoretical division within this field is drawn between the view centred on the role of a party as vote maximizer and the view based on the role of a party as representative of social interests. This paper provides a step towards relaxing the standard dichotomy between these two separate schools of thought, apparently unable to communicate with each other. By drawing upon recent theoretical developments in the literature on party goals, party competition and party organization, this article places limitations upon the role of partisan and electoral politics in the making of party policies. Advances in the theory of party politics suggest that conceiving of parties as miniature political systems provides an altogether richer and more suggestive account of the party-policy link. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1993 election brought to an end the 39-year rule of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The major issue in that election campaign was the ‘political reform’ that the government had twice promised and twice failed to deliver. Using data aggregated at the candidate level, the paper examines the question of whether the electorate were attracted to those candidates who participated in the reform movement. Candidates running for political parties standing for reform and leaders of reform groups were handsomely rewarded. LDP candidates who voted for or abstained from voting against the no-confidence motion that forced the election also gained votes. Candidates tainted with scandal and LDP incumbents lost votes. Yet the rank and file of the reform movement were treated no differently than other candidates. Though Japanese voters could not make fine distinctions among candidates, they proved perfectly capable of rewarding those clearly identified with reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of the opposition in the fifth parliament in Bangladesh (1991—5). It identifies two distinct but interrelated aspects of the role of the opposition, referred to here as proactive and reactive. The evidence presented in the article shows that the opposition MPs fared better than their ruling party counterparts in both respects. The level of activism of the opposition MPs in the fifth parliament was much higher than it was in the earlier parliaments. The government, despite its suspicion of the opposition's motive, was nevertheless more tolerant of its role, at least compared with the past. The article argues that the potential of the parliament, however, could not be harnessed in full because of lack of preparedness of the opposition and the government to acknowledge each other's legitimacy and to abide by the ‘rules of the game’. Both these factors discouraged the growth of a stable pattern of parliamentary politics in Bangladesh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controversy has surrounded the explanation of one of the most striking features of recent British General Elections: the rapidly changing regional geography of the vote. While some analysts have seen this as evidence of the impact of local electoral contexts on voting decisions, others have claimed that apparent regional effects are merely a consequence of poorly specified models. In this paper, new data from the 1992 British Election Study are employed to demonstrate the independent impact of regional economic context upon the vote-switching behaviour of individual British electors between the 1987 and 1992 General Elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the conditions under which significant changes can occur in the structure and composition of a party system in a contemporary mature democracy. The empirical focus is Canada. Although one of the oldline Canadian parties, the Liberals, won a parliamentary majority in the most recent (1993) national election, two others, the governing Progressive Conservatives (PC) and the social democratic opposition New Democratic Party (NDP), suffered disastrous defeats. Two new parties with regionally concentrated bases of support, Reform and the Bloc Québécois, enjoyed marked success. Analyses of national survey data reveal that although economic issues generated by a serious, protracted recession were the principal proximate forces eroding PC and NDP support, dissatisfaction with all oldline parties was widespread. This disaffection, the virtual devastation of two of these parties, and the continuing strength of the two new parties in their regional bases, suggest that 1993 was a type of 'critical election' that significantly altered Canada's national party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘bosses’ are an occupational category of Russian administrative and economic managers who, in addition to their already prominent positions in the country's power structure, engage themselves in public politics and enjoy a significant degree of electoral success without being affiliated to any political party. The data provided by analysing the results of the 1994 provincial elections in Western Siberia confirm the prominence of the ‘bosses’ in the electoral arena of the Russian periphery. Viewing this phenomenon as an important functional equivalent to political parties, the paper explains its salience with reference to its origins in the nomenkiatura system, and to the strategic choices made by the Russian leadership in late 1991. It is suggested that the recent attempts to create a regular political organization on the basis of the ‘bosses’ have failed to facilitate the process of party system formation in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fin de siècle political parties are claimed to have moved far from civil society, especially in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. Through the example of the Hungarian Christian Democratic People's Party the paper analyses a different pattern of development: a party that is deeply embedded in the subcultural network of organizations. Tracing the roots of the Catholic organizational bloc back to the end of the last century, the article establishes the factors that have effected the bloc's coherence and autonomy. Mapping the links between the Catholic-Christian organizations and analysing the party's inner life, the role of the party elite in rebuilding the subculture is assessed. The 'subcultural party' is presented as one of the possible party types that might emerge in Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A main aim of public party funding was to present parties with opportunities to participate on equal terms in public debate and to finance their ability to represent the general public. However, its impact on party communication and on party-voter contacts is a neglected aspect of research in the field. This paper suggests a disparity between intentions and consequences, mirroring that observed in the effects of public party funding on party expenditure, inter-party competition and party structure. This is illustrated by a case study of campaign finances and party communication in Israel since the inception of public party funding, with special attention to the 1992 elections, in which it spurred a shift to a 'top-bottom' model of campaigning and to a concentration on the system management and ritualistic dimensions of electoral communications. It came at the expense of messages geared to enlist support for alternative prospective policies. The ensuing party-voter rifts and the effort to bridge them by reforming public party funding may throw light on the problematics of public party funding in western democracies and on the progress towards what have recently been termed cartel parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on post-communist party systems must deal with (1) the extent to which party systems crystallize around programmatic cleavages or are based on clientelistic or charismatic parties and (2) if programmatic competition is high, the content of the major divisions that are represented by the parties. The extent to which programmatic structuring takes place in post-communism depends on countries' democratic experience and the nature of their democratic institutions fostering more personalized or more depersonalized power relations. These institutions, in turn, are influenced by the pathways of transition from communism to democracy, the type of communist rule and earlier traditions of democratization and industrialization in the inter-war era. With regard to the content of cleavage divisions, the paper identifies several configurations of party systems. Determinants are derived from voters' economic interests, the varying salience of socio-cultural conflicts in post-communist countries and the relations among ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the emergence of New Politics issues, there has been considerable debate about their potential for creating party system realignment. However, this debate has largely ignored the role of political elites in responding to changes in mass electorates. In this paper, we develop a model of realignment based on values and ideology which takes party elites into account. The model is tested using data that are based on national voter and parliamentary candidate surveys collected in Australia during the 1990 federal election. A realignment hypothesis predicts that the contemporary Australian party system is being replaced by a system reflecting New Politics/Old Politics conflict. An adaptation hypothesis predicts that the existing parties are adapting to New Politics concerns. The results show more support for the adaptation hypothesis and although a potential for realignment exists, postmaterial values and environmental ideologies have as yet insufficiently penetrated both elites and masses to bring this about. The results have major implications for the development of party alignments in other advanced societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political folklore holds that political parties often try to change their images following a disastrous election defeat. This paper inquires into the truth of this common assumption through a systematic analysis of manifestos promulgated by eight parties in Britain, Germany and the USA prior to national elections in the 1950s through 1980s. Each election was classified as triumphal, gratifying, tolerable, disappointing or calamitous from the standpoint of each party. The change in party images for adjacent elections was assessed by correlating the percentages of sentences devoted to standard political themes in the pair of manifestos. We tested the hypothesis that parties were most likely to change their policy images following disappointing or calamitous elections. Our findings suggest that poor electoral performance was not a sufficient condition to produce a major overhaul of party images, but poor performance in the prior election was virtually necessary to produce major change in policy packaging at the next election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terms 'left' and 'right' are widely used to organize party competition and to shape connections between citizens and political parties. Recent and dramatic changes in the world, however, raise important questions about the meaning and importance of left-right ideology. Most notably, the collapse of communism has led to the development of a host of new democracies. And in advanced industrial societies, conflict has emerged over issues like the environment and immigration. This paper draws on a survey of political experts in 42 societies to address three questions raised by these changes. First, is the language of left and right still widely used, even in recently democratized countries? Second, do there exist secondary dimensions of political conflict that are orthogonal to the left-right dimension? Third, and most importantly, what substantive issues define the meaning of left-right ideology? In addition to addressing these questions, we present data on the left-right locations of political parties in each of the 42 countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses a survey conducted in late 1992 to examine popular support for and attitudes towards Russia's postcommunist political parties. The findings confirm that support for democratic reform is at best conditional, and negative mentions of political parties vastly outnumber positive ones. Although popular knowledge about currently active political parties is limited, five main parties attract majority support. A factor analysis of opinions of the main parties indicates three underlying dimensions: a centre/reformist dimension (subdivided into those who are partially aligned with the communists and those who oppose them); a right/nationalist dimension; and a left/communist dimension. The democratic reformist dimension attracts the largest popular support, followed by the communist dimension; the nationalist dimension attracts a negligible following. None of the three dimensions has any secure socio-economic basis within the electorate, however, and the differences that exist are mainly ideological. It is argued that the reformist and communist dimensions, perhaps under different labels, will form the basis for the more stable party system that is likely to emerge in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of nativist parties in Europe has been accompanied by an increase in religious rhetoric. There is no reason to suggest that voters for nativist parties are motivated by religion; to the contrary, more Christian voters tend to vote for Christian Democratic parties. This article argues that religious rhetoric allows nativist parties to pursue ethno-centric agendas in an acceptable way and differently from Christian Democratic parties. Through the compilation of an original dataset of religious appeals from Austrian, German, and Swiss nativist and Christian Democratic party platforms between 1990–2021, this article demonstrates that changes in the distribution of the religious demographics of Muslims rather than Christians provide a catalyst for religious rhetoric but not an explanation for type of appeal. Instead, the historical role religious identities played in the development of nationalities explains how nativist parties deploy religious rhetoric in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars are divided on whether increased group size helps or hurts political minorities. We test the concept of "critical mass" using a different kind of long-time minority: pre-realignment Republicans in the American South. In Arkansas, after a century of token status, the minority party doubled its numbers in the late 1990s, held steady through the 2000s, then surged to a super majority. This stair-stepped transformation opened a unique window to address a question thus far examined only cross-sectionally: is an outgroup's influence enhanced by an increase in numbers or does success become less likely as the majority reacts to a growing threat? We find support for the latter. As the minority expands, the likelihood their bills will be adopted, relative to majority bills, decreases markedly. The widened deficit is not, however, the consequence of diminished Republican success, but rather of a Democratic surge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens' ability to influence public decisions is the hallmark of democracy, and central to this are candidate selection mechanisms. Despite the increasing popularity of primaries across the globe, scholars disagree on how incumbency status shapes primary election contests. To address this question, I exploit an electoral reform in Argentina that forces parties and coalitions to participate in primaries, but allows these to be contested or uncontested. Employing an original data set on federal legislative nominations between 2011 and 2017, I show that internal divisions encourage contested primaries within the opposition, to which district-level rivals strategically respond in kind by fielding multiple internal lists to counter any potential electoral "bonus" others may enjoy from contesting primaries. Combined with the influence of presidents and governors over selection procedures, these patterns mean that primary races are closely fought within the opposition but are trouble-free under incumbency status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses a mechanism to explain how internal mobility in the dominant party enhances economic performance. We argue that authoritarian leaders incentivize their political agents to advance economic development by using age-based promotion and retirement rules. We empirically examine our theoretical claim using China's cadre rejuvenation policy, which rewards younger leaders with more opportunities for career advancement. Drawing on panel data for prefectural party secretaries who were in office at some point between 2000 and 2012, we show that the principle of youthful rejuvenation leads the Communist Party of China to grant more promotions to party leaders who enter office at a younger age than to their older counterparts. Under such an incentive scheme, the regions served by younger entrants into the officialdom have better economic performance than those served by older entrants, holding ability and other regional characteristics constant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often claimed that parties on the left and right have different preferences for scholarly knowledge. However, little research has addressed whether partisanship actually matters for science advice preferences, particularly in the European setting. Drawing on original data on governmental appointments of academic scholars to more than 1400 public advisory commissions in Norway between 1969 and 2020, this article examines whether the left–right divide matters for cabinets' consultation of economists and social scientists. The findings reveal that left-wing governments in Norway have consulted scholars of social science—such as sociologists and political scientists—more frequently than right-wing governments. In contrast, partisanship seem to matter less for the consultation of economic scholars, as economists have been extensively used as advisors by both blocs in the period studied. Overall, the article contributes theoretical and empirical knowledge to the politics of science advice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common limitation of most analyses of electoral agenda-building dynamics is that they tend to operate under the assumption that the underlying dynamics between the political actors' and the media's agendas are more or less stable across time. Drawing upon recent work on media storms, I theorize that political parties have considerably less influence in periods that are characterized by sudden and explosive increases in media coverage of a particular issue. Using an automated content analysis built around a custom-made dictionary, I examine how parties' electoral agenda-building efficiency was affected by media storms during the 2015 Canadian federal election. My results support the idea that storm periods diminish parties' influence on the following day's media agenda, as the impact of parties' daily issue attention tend to be weaker. These findings demonstrate the non-linearity of electoral agenda-building dynamics and imply that some electoral contexts are less conducive to political actors' influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does two-party competition in the United States lead to improved human welfare spending? The debate over the merits of competition has gained traction yet again in the study of American politics. Gerald Gamm and Thad Kousser suggest that from 1880 to 1980 two-party competition led to desirable outcomes like increased education, transportation, and health spending. The modern panel data presented here suggest the spending effects do not persist beyond 1980 through 2020, and also, there is a negative effect on economic growth stemming from state-level partisan competition. The reversal of the historical trend is justified by predictions from existing formal models: at particularly high levels of baseline political competition, the effect of additional competition on growth is ambiguous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does co-partisanship with mayors influence citizen trust in local governance institutions in new democracies? I answer this question through conducting a case study in Tunisia. I evaluate Arab Barometer (2018) survey data on trust in local governance institutions, and interview data with mayors, council members and civil society organizations (CSOs). The results indicate that Tunisians who support the same political party as their mayors tend to develop greater levels of trust in local governance institutions. Both quantitative evidence through a mediation model and qualitative evidence link a substantive portion of this relationship to the perceptions of institutional performance, such as their degrees of corruption, clientelism, inclusivity and efficiency. The findings identify the role and mechanism of co-partisanship in shaping trust in local governance institutions among the emerging democracies. This contributes to understanding the influence of parties in new democracies despite their weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little attention has been paid to the process of members leaving parties in order to support other parties. Party developments in the UK in the 2010s provide an opportunity to analyse the determinants of members giving up their current party and joining a rival. We examine this issue using an original panel survey of 2,679 members of the Green Party of England and Wales. Our results show that members who joined the Greens motivated by concern about social justice are more likely to leave and support Labour after Jeremy Corbyn's election as party leader. Members who joined to protect the environment are less likely to leave. Niche parties can attract members predominantly motivated by issues traditionally represented by a mainstream party but these members are more likely to leave the party again following a position change by the mainstream party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While electoral reforms clearly affect how seats are (re)distributed among parties immediately after their adoption, they do not significantly change the (re)distribution of votes among parties. As political knowledge is positively related to turnout, we argue that the effect of majoritarian electoral reforms on the number of parties is contingent upon the turnout in the last election prior to the reform. Specifically, the lower the turnout level in the previous election, the more effective the majoritarian reform will be. However, the psychological effect of proportional reforms relies on the interplay between elites and voters and is highly uncertain. The argument is tested using aggregated data from 43 major electoral reforms worldwide from 1945 to 2020 and individual data from the first election held in New Zealand after the 1993 electoral reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far-right and populist right-wing political parties have garnered significant scholarly attention in recent years. They have acquired importance also in European political institutions such as the European Parliament (EP). We explore this issue by focusing on the European Conservatives and Reformists' (ECR) group in the EP. We analyse its current and former main national party delegations – the British Conservative Party, the Polish Law and Justice Party, and the Brothers of Italy – and unpack the ideological underpinnings of 'conservative' positions of the ECR group. How is 'conservatism' constructed in the EP? What role does gender play in these constructions? Significantly, we locate gender equality as a key area, crucial to the identity of what it means to be a conservative party in Europe today. We combine the analysis of ECR political programs with interview and ethnographic data. The article contributes to both the study of European Union (EU) politics and to research on national conservative parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, pessimism about plebiscitary intra-party democracy has been challenged by assembly-based models of intra-party democracy. However, research has yet to explore the emergence of new power dynamics in parties originating from the implementation of deliberative practices in their intra-party democracy. We investigate how deliberative democratization reshuffles power relations within political parties through a case study of Agora, an internally deliberative movement party in Belgium. Employing a process-tracing approach using original interview and participant observation data, we argue that while plebiscitary intra-party democracy shifts power towards passive members prone to elite domination, our case suggests that deliberative intra-party democracy shifts power towards active members that are more likely to be critical of elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the new Party Ethics Self-Regulation database, covering 21 indicators on ethics self-regulation organised into three categories (norms, oversight and enforcement) across 200 political parties of 25 countries available in 2020. Internal self-regulatory efforts developed by political parties have been insufficiently addressed in the literature and remain a blind spot in existing databases on political parties. Our analyses indicate that Radical Right Parties have a lower probability of adopting codes of conduct/ethics when compared to any other party family. It also reveals the strongest effect of country-level factors, with party system institutionalization, political corruption or level of democracy shaping the adoption of at least one form of ethics regulation/body. These findings are relevant because they open the debate about the possibility of incrementing ethics self-regulation within political parties through ethics-targeted public funding and raise the need for further research on the effects of such measures on the parties' ethical climate and public legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research suggests that government participation is crucial for how voters evaluate party performance and how they cast their votes. However, in real life the distinction between government and opposition is not as straight-forward as one would think. Minority governments often enjoy the legislative support of external support parties, which play an ambiguous role in politics: while they are formally part of the opposition, they are simultaneously committed to keeping the government in office and passing its bills. How do voters evaluate parties that support a minority government? Will they respond to different frames about the significance of the commitment that support parties have made to government policy and survival? In a survey experiment, I test whether framing a written agreement as effective will cause voters to attribute more or less responsibility to the support parties and find that they respond to different frames by altering their perceptions of the importance of the agreement, but not their responsibility attribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical right parties and their nativist ideas have gained considerable momentum, compelling non-radical parties to "engage" with this nativist "Zeitgeist." Yet, aside from general trends such as tougher stances on migration, we know little about the strategic choices of parties when balancing their commitment to core policy goals and the need to be "timely," that is, to respond to changing environments. Theoretically, parties may either adapt their ideological "core" to signal commitment or merely attribute nativist ideas to secondary issue areas to signal general responsiveness. Drawing on Austrian, German, and Swiss manifestos for over two decades and establishing a novel dictionary to assess parties' use of nativism, we find that while previous studies showing right-wing parties compete with RRPs using nativism in the same domains are correct, the strategic choices around this competition are more complex. How much commitment to nativist ideas parties show depends on whether radical right parties use the same domains to construct their nativist claims. For research on party competition, this means that more attention should be paid to how rather than if parties "engage" with their rivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the arrival in power, for the first time, of a left-wing majority in Kosovo. Nowhere in the Western Balkans and Europe was the impact of the pandemic on politics so salient and extensive. The power shift created an unlikely opportunity for progressive social policy change. However, as shown by policy responses during the first year of the pandemic, substantial policy change is still uncertain. Although political parties have begun to matter more in policy choices, expansive change is constrained by the broader unfavourable conjuncture involving, among others, the existing neo-liberal welfare regime, its feedback on policy learning, mobile right-wing actors with influence in state institutions and global organisations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and European Union – all of which may rather favour the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do legislators engage in geographic representation in party-centred electoral systems, where they face weak re-election incentives to cultivate a personal vote? Existing research offers cross-pressuring incentive structures and intrinsic localism motivations as individual-level factors to explain this puzzle. In this article, we propose an alternative argument based on the principle of collective action within party-internal structures of labour division. We argue that legislators elected in the same multi-member district and under the same party label (party delegations) share collective vote-seeking incentives to collaborate with each other in order to strike a balance between the collective benefits and individual costs of constituency-oriented activities. Results from a comparative study of written parliamentary questions in Germany and Spain support our argument. Specifically, the study suggests that individual localism attributes interact with the team composition of party delegations to shape constituency-orientated behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show how to extend the Laakso-Taagepera measure of the effective number of parties so as to incorporate both party and ethnicity in a way that allows both ethnic-specific, party-specific, and composite measures that we refer to as extended L-T indices. While the aim of this article is methodological, we also illustrate our approach with U.S. two-party data from presidential elections, using two-group, three-group, and five-group categorizations of ethnicities to show how party ethnicization in that country has grown since 1952. For comparison, and to show the generality of our approach to situations with more than two parties, we present data from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine), where we have three ethnic groups but also more than two parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are many traditional governing parties of advanced democracies in decline? One explanation relates to public perceptions about mainstream party convergence. Voters think that the centre-left and -right are increasingly similar and this both reduces mainstream partisan loyalties and makes room for more radical challengers. Replicating and extending earlier studies, we provide evidence supporting this view. First, observational analysis of large cross-national surveys shows that people who place major parties closer together ideologically are less likely to be mainstream partisans, even when holding constant their own ideological proximity to their party. Second, a survey experiment in Germany suggests that this relationship is causal: exposure to information about policy convergence makes mainstream partisan attachments weaker. Importantly, we advance previous discussions of the convergence theory by showing that, in both our studies, ideological depolarisation is most detrimental to mainstream centre-left partisan attachments. We suggest that this is due to differing party histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over 40 years now, the debate on the hierarchical opinion structure within political parties has been colored by May’s laws of General and Special curvilinear disparity. Their essence is that, compared to non-leaders and top leaders, the mid-level of sub-leaders of parties consists of radicals as regards their ideological, substantive positions. Persistent as this vision is, however, there have been few comprehensive empirical tests. In this paper such a test is employed for Dutch parties, consisting of: a) a comparison of average positions on issues and in terms of left and right of voters, members and MPs; b) a comparison of the full opinion distributions on particular political issues for these groups; and c) an exploration of perceptions among top leaders and sub-leaders of the opinion structure within their party. We conclude that there is not enough support to uphold May’s laws any longer. His laws should be dismissed, but May’s legacy should consist of a more open study of the opinion structures of parties, which are still crucial actors in Western representative democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do parties adapt their programmatic strategies in times of heightened economic globalization? Are these changes captured by right-left positional changes or do parties go beyond policy shifts and enact more comprehensive programmatic overhauls? Furthermore, are such changes linked to traditional party family classifications and, if so, do different party types re-program their manifestos differently? Finally, what role does radical right competition play in the changing programmatic strategies of mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties? This paper addresses these questions by developing a theoretical framework that accounts for economic globalization, cleavage change, and programmatic supply. Using Giebler et al.’s (2015) measure of programmatic clarity, the analysis reveals clear differences in party responses to economic globalization. Additionally, the results show that parties go beyond right-left positional changes and adapt their programmatic supply on a more general level. For social democratic parties, however, such adaptation hinges on whether a radical right competitor is present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to longstanding arguments that equate parties with durable, information-rich brand names, the relabeling of parties is not rare, and in many countries it is not even very unusual. This paper provides the first effort to document this neglected phenomenon. It finds that across European democracies roughly a third of all parties have relabeled themselves at least once since 1945, and a similar proportion of elections include at least one party running under a new name. It then presents analyses of why parties change names more frequently in some circumstances, finding support for three explanations derived from the existing literature: parties with longer-standing brands are less likely to shed them, but relabeling is more likely for parties that suffer electoral setbacks and for parties in weaker party systems. Finally, it presents evidence that the end of Soviet communism made left parties more likely to rename themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation of rebel groups into political parties has captured the attention of scholars of both conflict studies and of party transformation. In this paper we examine the question of rebel party image change by investigating the causes of name changes adopted by a rebel organization as it transforms into a political party after the end of a civil conflict. We develop an analytical framework based upon the extensive literature on party identity change in the West, and apply it to the name changes of rebel parties. Using an original data set of 54 former rebel organizations, we find that factors internal to the organization (such as the degree of inclusivity and the origins of the rebel organization) explain name change more than factors related to the post conflict environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature that explores the relationship between decentralisation and the structure of the party system has barely explored an important dimension of party integration, namely the degree of ideological cohesiveness among parliamentary elites. This paper purports to fill the literature gap by analysing heterogeneity in attitudes towards devolution among representatives from Spanish state-wide parties (the People’s Party (PP) and the Socialist Party (PSOE)). Drawing from a sample of 460 parliamentary elites, results show that within-party variation in preferences towards regional self-rule are accounted by the territorial cleavage (historical regions vs ordinary ones) as well as by an institutional cleavage, defined by the type of assembly – regional or national – in which representatives are elected. However, parties’ political and organisational trajectories moderate the impact of those cleavages: territory prevails in accounting for internal variation within the PSOE, whereas the institutional cleavage is more important to explain internal cohesiveness among PP’s party elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings theoretical and empirical contributions to the scholarship on dimensions of politics in Europe. On the theoretical side it emphasizes the differences between Western and Eastern countries; we argue that while in Western Europe the main dimension of political conflict is the economic left-right, in Eastern Europe the main dimension is more likely to encompass cultural issues associated primarily with what in the Western literature is known as the secondary, social left-right. We trace the origin of the difference to the 1990s when parties in Eastern Europe chose to emphasize cultural issues to appeal to an electorate unfamiliar with capitalist economics and dissatisfied with the economic left associated with Communism and the economic right associated with painful reforms. To test this assertion we apply the Optimal Classification vote scaling method to an original dataset of over 24,000 votes from 22 European parliaments; the statistical tests support the hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper disentangles the relationship between election outcomes and satisfaction with democracy. As the first comparative study to employ a measure of satisfaction immediately before and after elections, we can be unusually confident that any changes we observe are attributable to election outcomes. Following previous work, we affirm that voting for parties that win more votes, more legislative seats, and more cabinet seats boosts satisfaction with democracy. In addition, we demonstrate for the first time that voters are sensitive to deficits in representation; satisfaction with democracy decreases when one’s party’s seat share falls short of its vote share. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]