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The United Kingdom's strategy for negotiating Brexit involved a misapprehension: that the EU-27 would divide and concede to UK demands. In this article, we provide one explanation for this misapprehension: a pervasive 'Merkel myth' widely accepted within the British political class. That myth skewed British understanding of the European Union's power balance and priorities. It privileged an interpretation of Merkel as a decisive influence in Europe, well-disposed to the UK. Alongside this was the belief that Merkel would come under pressure from Germany's manufacturing giants to grant the UK a relatively generous deal. The Merkel myth reinforced a political strategy that, by all accounts, never came close to success. Yet these beliefs affected the approach of three prime ministers. Employing the distinctive analytical lens of 'political myth' to explain the judgements of actors, the article contributes to a growing literature on the role of ideas in political strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People who join political parties are motivated primarily, although not exclusively, by ideological impulses. So, given the often considerable ideological differences between parties, one might presume that very few those who later leave one party would be keen to join another. However, using a comprehensive 2019 survey of British party members, we not only identify several factors associated with switching parties (being especially socially liberal or socially authoritarian; being a Brexiteer; being a campaign activist; working in non-manual occupation; having a university degree; being a man rather than a woman; being older rather than younger; and being a current member of one of the country's smaller political parties), but we also show, first, the flows between parties and, second, that party switching at the grassroots is far more common than many imagine. Even so, and notwithstanding the fact that switching impacts on different parties in different ways, it is not sufficient to support oft-voiced claims of widespread entryism into either of Britain's two main parties – at least on the sort of scale that might account for Labour's shift to the liberal-left or the Conservatives' shift to supporting a hard Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countries with populist radical right governments are the exception rather than the rule. This paper uses the Australian case of Pauline Hanson's One Nation (PHON) and the UK case of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) – and its effective successor, the Brexit Party – to help explain a puzzle: how do populist radical right parties in the absence of any likely route to winning office or even holding legislative influence achieve policy payoffs? Tracing the political factors that have driven policy influence in these two cases reveals that an entrepreneurial leader with agenda-setting influence can have policy impact, despite disadvantageous structural conditions, through the following: leveraging electoral influence over both social democratic and mainstream right parties; gaining credibility through sub-national elections; and achieving (or threatening to achieve) defections from centre-right parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Europe's so-called migration crisis is of fairly recent origin, some of the continent's centre-right parties have been successfully politicising immigration for at least half a century. But that success and that politicisation can come at a heavy price – for the country, for the party, and for those who lead it or want to lead it. With both incumbents and challengers doing their best (and doing a great deal) to determine the party line on the issue, politicisation of immigration for electoral and personal advantage can make for incoherent, even counterproductive public policy. It can also tempt the leaders, both actual and aspirant, of centre-right parties into making promises to restrict immigration which are impossible to keep, thereby raising the salience of the issue and threatening their ownership of it. Attempts to hold on to, or to regain, ownership can, along with intra-party competition, create a vicious cycle, driving policy in an ever more unrealistic direction and creating not only serious internal instability but immense external costs. The Conservative Party's experience is a case in point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While not typically the focus for academic or journalistic analyses, centre right political parties have been, are and will likely remain key actors in migration policy and politics across Europe. This special issue introduction questions and qualifies the extent to which the 2015 migration crisis affected centre-right parties' politics, positioning and policy positions on immigration, problematising the idea that the crisis represented an 'external' challenge to party politics and stressing instead the agency and role of political parties in imbuing crisis-like events with particular meanings. It argues that the crisis refracted and intensified social and value conflicts that were already developing in European party politics. While some policy innovations did occur, they tended to confirm directions that were evident before – sometimes long before – the crisis. The article emphasizes the need to pay attention to significant variation within the centre-right party family on immigration policy, and changes made over time by parties preoccupied with public opinion, with inter-party competition and with challenges posed by real-world events that were often beyond their control, but also with internal power struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes people join a political party is one of the most commonly studied questions in research on party members. Nearly all this research, however, is based on talking to people who have actually joined parties. This article simultaneously analyses surveys of members of political parties in Britain and surveys of non-member supporters of those same parties. This uniquely enables us to model the decision to join parties. The results suggest that most of the elements that constitute the influential ‘General Incentives Model’ are significant. But it also reveals that, while party supporters imagine that selective benefits, social norms and opposing rival parties’ policies are key factors in members’ decisions to join a party, those who actually do so are more likely to say they are motivated by attachments to their party’s values, policies and leaders, as well as by an altruistic desire to support democracy more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the impact of parties on public policy, and on immigration policy in particular, often finds limited evidence of partisan influence. In this paper, we examine immigration policy-making in the UK coalition government. Our case provides evidence that parties in government can have more of an impact on policy than previous studies acknowledge, but this only becomes apparent when we open up the ‘black box’ between election outcomes and policy outputs. By examining how, when and why election pledges are turned into government policies, we show that partisan influence depends not only on dynamics between the coalition partners, but how these dynamics interact with interdepartmental conflicts and lobbying by organised interests. In-depth process tracing allows us to see these complex dynamics, which easily get lost in large-n comparisons of pledges and outputs, let alone outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The CDU can lay claim to being Europe's – if not the world's – most successful Christian Democratic Party. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century that means rather less than it used to. As a way of thinking, Christian Democracy, has arguably become less distinct than once it was from more secular centre-right ideologies. Whether this will save ‘people's parties’ from continuing electoral decline is a moot point, however. Moreover the chances that their numbers will be swelled by sister-parties gaining significant success in new democracies seem small indeed. This article uses a brand-new database of West European parties' positioning and their organisational and electoral performance to analyse the challenges faced by contemporary Christian Democratic parties since 1945 and compares the CDU to its sister-parties. If the CDU is the exception that proves the rule, why might that be and could it provide a beacon to which other like-minded parties can turn for inspiration? If not, just how much trouble is it in? The CDU: the exception that proves the rule or just one more instance of the same sorry tale? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Centre-right parties are commonly inclined towards appeals and policies on immigration that are both restrictive in nature and populist in tone—in part because this is what they believe in, in part because it affords them an electoral advantage over their rivals on the centre-left. One would expect, however, that the extent to which they focus on immigration and asylum will vary according to public opinion, according to who leads them, and according to whether they are in government or in opposition. This would appear to be the case for the British Conservative Party, but the relationship is not an entirely consistent one. Moreover, while the Party has, for half a century, pursued ever more restrictive policies, the extent to which it has couched its approach in populist rhetoric varies considerably over time—and not always in line with the severity of its stance on immigration. The reason for this lies partly in the social and economic liberalism of some of its leaders (and in their related concern to act ‘responsibly’ on race and immigration) but also in their anxiety not to alienate key sections of the middle classes who must be persuaded to support the Party if it is to win elections. These considerations are likely to weigh heavily with other centre-right parties, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the issue of immigration in Europe, focusing specifically on how centre-right parties including Christian democrats, conservatives, and market liberals have determined immigration policy. Public support of immigration is linked to education and political leanings; those with higher education and those on the left support liberal immigration policies, while those on the right and those with education that ended before age 16 are generally against immigration. The article explores the relationship between political party policy and constituency demands.

Because those who study migration do not focus much on parties, while those who study parties tend to focus on migration only insofar as it affects electoral competition and positioning, the role of political parties in immigration control and integration policy is underestimated. Parties on the centre-right, which have enjoyed nowhere near the attention devoted to their more radical counterparts, are particularly important and interesting in this respect. They make up many European governments and therefore help to determine state and EU policy. Maintaining their ownership of the issues involved makes electoral sense but their policies on control and integration are not purely, or at least primarily, a strategic response to the populist radical right; even before the rise of the latter, immigration and integration were matters of genuine ideological and practical concern for Europe's market liberal, conservative and Christian Democratic parties. Too hard a line, however, risks alienating their supporters in business and in civil society. It is a difficult balance, but one that makes a big difference both to the parties involved and the public policies they help to produce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal models of government formation frequently find their predictions confounded in the real world and/or fail to explain empirical observations, leading to calls for new approaches. The formation of New Zealand's 1999 minority coalition government—one which ran counter to the predictions of all conventional coalition theories—illustrates the potential contribution of path dependence to those approaches, particularly when we are trying to explain why pre-electoral pacts are relatively good predictors of government composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise and mainstreaming of Europe's Green parties has not only enlarged the left bloc in many party systems but helped to drive a trend toward bipolar competition. This article argues that the rise and mainstreaming of far right parties has done the same for the other side and reinforced the trend. This change in the political opportunity structure was not simply seized upon but in part engineered by a centre-right willing to rely on former pariahs for legislative majorities. By adopting some of the far right's themes, it legitimised them and increased both their salience and the seats it brought into an expanded right bloc. Once in office, the centre-right has demonstrated its commitment to getting tough on immigration, crime and welfare abuse, not least to distract from a somewhat surprising turn toward market liberalism. The analysis concludes by asking what this means for both bipolar blocs in the longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offers information on the Green Party of Aotearoa in New Zealand. Background on the general elections in which the Green Party participated; Issues concerning the image of the Greens as a party; Factors that have influenced the standing of the Green Party during the general election of 2002.

Examines anti-party sentiment and electoral system change in New Zealand. History of New Zealand politics; Loss of confidence in politicians and parliament; Erosion of partisan affinity.

Discusses whether it is possible to maintain a demarcation between the expressly political and the strictly governmental and still pursue a communications strategy in Great Britain's politics and government. Replacement of personal relationships and civil service media management with a new regime run by press secretary with carte blanche; Information on British political parties; Emphasis on Conservative media managers.

Arguably, there is a set of perennial tasks which all post-war British governments, whatever their ideological complexion, have inevitably had to face. All leaderships who hope to hold on to power need simultaneously to manage their parties, strive to win the battle of ideas and attempt to achieve governing competence: this is the essence of what has been called statecraft. Out of office it is all too easy to lay the blame for governmental transgressions at the door of either the personnel or the philosophy of the party in charge especially if its reign has lasted so long that memories of previous regimes have faded. A good example is provided by the South African arms affair of 1967. Prime Minister Harold Wilson's Labour government was, after the most strenuous efforts lasting three years, forced to devalue the pound in November 1967. As would seem to be the case with all affairs in which questions of morality, money and defense and foreign policy are combined, the episode can, fairly be described as labyrinthine. It is all the more difficult to disentangle because many of the participants in their later accounts have found it inconvenient in published sources to mention their stance on an issue that continued to be of symbolic importance to most progressives in, British politics until the final fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1990's.

Demos is one of the newest, most media‐friendly think tanks in Britain, giving rise to accusations that it is intellectually lightweight or unfocused. Such accusations suggest, however, a failure to appreciate its commitment to both new ideas and new ways of working. Eschewing an overly economic approach, Demos grounds its output on empirical research in a rapidly changing real world rather than on grand theories of questionable contemporary relevance. It aims to break down barriers between private and public, between those who generate and apply ideas and between the left and right. Achieving the last aim, however, has proved difficult ‐ and not just because of its director's partisan past. Demos's interest in communitarianism, in tax reform and in Asian‐Pacific ideas and experience, as well as its emphasis on IT and education, have resonated more with the needs of New Labour and the Liberal Democrats than with those of the Conservatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the process of constitutional reforms in eastern Europe and draws lessons for similar reforms in British politics. It looks, first, at electoral engineering and shows how political actors, pursuing their particular interests, try to turn proportionality back into majoritarianism, and how and why such moves do not necessarily result in their projected outcomes. In a similar vein, it then goes on to analyse parliamentary formal rules, such as standing orders, and demonstrates how attempts to manipulate them can be offset, not just by counter‐manipulation, but by underlying informal rules and cultural norms. Overall, we argue that, because constitutional change is an ongoing and crucially political process, its results are neither wholly predictable nor always welcomed. On the basis of the eastern European experience, we also suggest that constitutional change does not necessarily lead to increased legitimacy of the system, thus undermining one of the major hopes of reformers in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is primarily intended to be theoretically and methodologically suggestive. Its primary aim is to offer up ‘Grid‐Group’ or ‘Cultural Theory’ as a potential tool in legislative studies, and to give an indication of how it might be operationalised in order to study parliamentary party groups. Although the emphasis is on exposition rather than empirical demonstration, it also uses the theory to suggest why the British Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) has traditionally been more ‘factionalised’ than its Conservative counterpart ‐ something which has often been observed, but rarely well explained. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reflects on the two articles of the of the publication which focuses on the electoral system in New Zealand. The author mentions Sir John Wallace, chairman of the Royal Commission from 1985-1986, who was called the father of Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) voting system. He emphasizes that the editors intend to maintain the mix and balance of academics and practitioners in every issue. He added that the publication aims to emphasize the relevance of the journal.

The article discusses the evaluation and ranking made by some publications in the U.S. Concerns were raised by political scientists regarding the truthfulness of the evaluations made. It notes that the publication was accorded an overall ranking of 104, a grade considered to be higher than impact rating received by other publications and several comparisons are made regarding their respective ratings. Some political scientists questioned the validity of some survey conducted in some publications because it found to contain flaws.