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When and why do parliamentary majorities in Europe suppress parliamentary minority rights? This article argues that such reforms are driven by substantive policy conflict in interaction with existing minority rights. Government parties curb minority rights if they fear minority obstruction due to increased policy conflict and a minority‐friendly institutional status quo. Empirical support is found for this claim using comparative data on all reforms in 13 Western European parliaments since 1945. A curbing of minority rights is significantly more likely under conditions of heightened policy conflict and these effects are stronger the more the institutional status quo favours opposition parties. Contrary to frequent claims of consensual rule changes from single‐country studies in Europe, these findings demonstrate the importance of competitive strategies in explaining institutional reform in European parliaments. The conditional impact of the status quo provides interesting theoretical links to historical institutionalist arguments on path dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, European governments have faced persistent pressures to manage the effects of mass immigration on their societies. As a result, citizenship policies have received increasing amounts of attention from both policymakers and scholars alike. However, to date, it remains unclear how these policies regulating political membership have changed over time, and whether these policies have converged or diverged in their requirements for membership. To answer these questions, this article advances a new theoretical and empirical expansion of existing scholarship on citizenship. With data collected from national citizenship policies across 16 Western European countries from 1970 to 2017, I construct a two-dimensional framework of citizenship acquisition requirements in order to test a number of extant hypotheses regarding citizenship policy trends over the last five decades. Through an examination of aggregated country-year scores and correlation analysis, I find that concurrent trends of both convergence and divergence are occurring in Western Europe over time and that most states have largely abandoned their traditional approaches to citizenship and immigrant incorporation as they adapt more open yet more regulated strategies to address the contemporary realities of immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at how protest politics has developed in Western Europe since the 1970s and how these developments are related to changes in electoral politics. We take up arguments on the two-fold restructuration of political conflict and its different impact on protest and electoral politics. Most importantly, we highlight that the second wave of political change sweeping across Western Europe since the 1990s with increasing conflicts over immigration and European integration left different marks on protest politics as compared to electoral politics. We argue that this difference reflects the driving forces of change and their preferences for specific political arenas, as the momentum shifted from the libertarian left to the populist radical right. More specifically, the results indicate that challengers from the left and challengers from the right follow different logics when it comes to the interplay of protest and electoral mobilization. Empirically, we rely on two large-scale protest event datasets as well as on data on electoral results and campaigns from the 1970s to 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent are incumbent governments affected by the state of the economy when it comes to premature dissolution? This article investigates this research question using a data set on parties and governments for 18 West European countries for the period 1945–2013. In addition to investigating the general effect of the state of the economy on government termination, we hypothesize that macroeconomic conditions affect cabinet termination in different ways depending on the type of government that is in power. Using Cox proportional hazards models to estimate how different government types are impacted by the same changes in the economy, our results indicate that economic changes do matter, but that they mainly affect coalition governments. Our results also indicate that there is a difference between minority and majority governments when it comes to the type of termination. Minority coalition governments resolve to early elections, not replacements, presumably because a minority government does not survive defection. Majority coalition governments, in contrast, show sensitivity towards both types of terminations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the rise of populism in Western Europe over the past three decades has received a great deal of attention in the academic and popular literature, less attention has been paid to the rise of its opposite-- anti-populism. This short article examines the discursive and stylistic dimensions of the construction and maintenance of the populism/anti-populism divide in Western Europe, paying particular attention to how anti-populists seek to discredit populist leaders, parties and followers. It argues that this divide is increasingly antagonistic, with both sides of the divide putting forward extremely different conceptions of how democracy should operate in the Western European political landscape: one radical and popular, the other liberal. It closes by suggesting that what is subsumed and feared under the label of the "populist threat" to democracy in Western Europe today is less about populism than nationalism and nativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing social pact literature claims that governing parties offer social pact proposals because they anticipate they will receive an electoral benefit from social pact agreements. Yet the available data on social pacts inform us that in a substantial minority of cases social pact proposals fail to become social pact agreements. In an effort to better determine the political calculations made by governments before they propose a social pact, this article examines the effect of implementing reform legislation unilaterally, social pact proposals, social pact proposal failures and social pact agreements on the vote share of government parties in 15 Western European countries between 1981 and 2006. It is found that social pact proposals do not have any electoral consequences for governing parties, unilateral legislation and social pact proposal failures reduce the vote share of governing parties, and social pact agreements provide an electoral benefit to parties in minority governments only. These findings suggest that governing parties propose social pacts in a good faith effort to complete a social pact agreement; and that such an agreement is not a way for these parties to gain votes, but to avoid the electoral punishment associated with enacting unpopular reforms unilaterally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a vast theoretical literature argues that we live in populist times, the success of populism beyond its electoral dimension is rarely investigated empirically. This paper analyses the development of populism in five Western European countries (Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) from the 1970s to the 2010s. First, it measures whether political parties articulate populist discourses more and more often in their election manifestos. Second, the paper tests whether the presence of populism has increased over time in newspaper articles. The results show that populism is not a new phenomenon and that there is no linear increase over the decades. Moreover, while election manifestos are significantly more populist in the 2010s than in previous decades, populism in newspaper articles remains rather stable at a low level, suggesting that the media curb rather than foster populist discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic voting theory assumes that on an individual level voters react to economic indicators to hold incumbents responsible for the performance of the economy. On an aggregate level, this would imply that there is an association between economic indicators and levels of volatility since voters have to switch parties if they want to punish or reward political actors. Based on a time-series cross-section analysis of the Pedersen Index for Western European countries in the period 1950-2013, we do indeed observe an association between economic indicators and levels of volatility. This effect furthermore grows stronger over time, and it is assumed that this is rendered possible by processes of partisan dealignment. The analysis suggests that European electorates are significantly more likely to shift parties in response to economic downturn now than they were a few decades ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tries to explain regional level variation in the far right-wing vote across more than 160 regions in 17 Western European countries from 1990 to 2013. With the help of a panel Tobit model, I first examine the impact of nine regional-level structural indicators on the dependent variable, the percentage of the far right-wing vote. I find that the far right performs better in territorial units with a high percentage of university-educated individuals, in rural regions and in areas that have a high percentage of foreigners. Second, I use a dynamic specification in first differences to evaluate how changes in the independent variables trigger changes in the dependent variable. The results of this second specification highlight that increases in unemployment rates and in the number of college-educated citizens trigger a better performance of the far right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first and foremost task of all governments is to make decisions. Consequently, studies on governments should deal above all with their ability to produce legislation. To this respect, this article analyses the legislative productivity of 112 parliamentary governments in 12 Western European democracies (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom) from 1990 to 2013. My independent variable is an index offering an immediate picture of the decision-making potential of parliamentary governments, while the dependent variable is the 'detailed' legislative production of those governments. If we are able to differentiate between governments who decide, and governments who do not, we could answer a considerable number of interesting questions: which Western European parliamentary democracies tend to produce more (detailed) laws and which - on the contrary - are used to facing greater difficulties for achieving that goal? What are the reasons behind these opposing trends? The empirical results largely confirms that the more a parliamentary government has got decision-making potential (in terms of the proposed index), the more likely it will pass 'detailed' legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most accounts of electoral system change tend to consider it as being driven by purely partisan interests. Political parties are expected to change the electoral rules as a way to maximise gains or minimise losses. However, little work has been done on the question of why electoral reforms are so scarce in spite of these potential benefits. In this study, a wide range of both factors that may foster ('catalysts') and ones that may hinder ('barriers') the change of electoral institutions are investigated. A statistical analysis is performed of 16 West European countries from 1975 to 2005, covering 23 reforms of the proportionality of their electoral systems. It is found that procedural barriers are more effective for explaining the likelihood of electoral reforms than (most of) the catalysts. Additionally, there are indications that courts may play a more active role in triggering reform than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that political parties are in decline. While they used to be responsible for connecting citizens to the state by translating their preferences into policies, they have increasingly become part of the state, acting as governors instead. While this perspective emphasises parties' representative function, it is less clear what their role is in a more direct democratic context. Parties may gain support due to such context, but they may also be seen increasingly redundant in a situation where citizens can co-decide directly. Focusing on party membership, this study tests these rival expectations on a panel of 16 West European democracies over the period 1980-2008 and finds that parties tend to have higher levels of party membership in a direct democratic context. The usage of referendums, however, does not contribute to this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When people say that they trust local authorities, is it simply because they have generalized trust in national government? Or is trust in local government rooted in distinctive considerations, connected to the character of local communities and the balance of power across levels of government? We explore how trust in local and national government differs across individuals and across countries in western Europe. We find that people trust local government for different reasons than those that drive trust in national government. Cross-national differences in levels of trust in government reflect the character of national institutions. While both proportional representation systems and federal systems are power-sharing designs, each has distinctive consequences for trust. When opportunities for voice in local government are high, as in decentralized systems, people report greater trust in local government. When opportunities for voice in national government are limited, as in majoritarian systems, people report lower trust for national government and higher trust in local government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing two theories of morality policy, Policy Types and the "Two Worlds" of religious/secular party systems, we describe and attempt to explain the empirical patterns for five morality policy issues (abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, assisted reproductive technology/stem cell research, and same-sex marriage) across 24 Western democracies since World War II. What is the content of policy adoption? Are some countries consistently more permissive or restrictive on morality issues? How long do these issues stay on the political agenda? These issues have been on the agendas of all of the countries for varying time periods, with some being older in vintage (death penalty, abortion, euthanasia) than others (ART/stem cells and same-sex marriage). The general tendency has been toward greater permissiveness, but there still remains considerable policy diversity. While there has been substantial change on morality policies in Western democracies since World War II, the change is more thorough in some jurisdictions and in some regions more than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protest politics is often linked to political dissatisfaction. However, much of the literature on political protest overlooks the fact that dissatisfaction originates within the political system, and therefore may depend on it. In this article, we argue that citizens who are dissatisfied with the political system are more likely to join protest actions because they have a greater incentive to change the current political situation. Moreover, we argue that the likelihood of joining protest actions also depends on the characteristics of the existing party systems. We believe that, in contexts where parties cannot serve as linkages between civil society and political institutions, dissatisfaction may be a further motivational mechanism for joining political protests. Using multilevel models and the European Value Study, we find that citizens participating in political protest activities show, on average, higher levels of political dissatisfaction, that their participation in political protests depends on the characteristics of the party systems and that, overall, the association between dissatisfaction and protest varies according to the characteristics of the party systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyse the impact of intra-party procedures of candidate selection for national elections on the representativeness of parties towards their voters. With regard to candidate selection we distinguish between two dimensions: inclusion and centralization. While the first identifies the type of selectorate for candidate nominations (members, delegates or committees), the second captures the territorial unit in which the nomination is decided (local, regional or national). Based on data for 53 parties in 9 Western European countries for the period 1970 to 1990, the analysis points to the relevance of the inclusion dimension. Parties in which party elites decide the nomination of candidates show slightly higher degrees of representation than parties with more inclusive selectorates. We conduct our analysis separately for two frequently used but theoretically different concepts of representation: cross-sectional representation (at one point in time) and dynamic representation (over time). Our analysis shows that candidate-selection procedures only matter for the first concept. The empirically inconsistent results between the two concepts are due to deficiencies in the way dynamic representation is currently operationalized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article assesses the impact of populist radical right parties on national party systems in Western Europe. Has the emergence of this new party family changed the interaction of party competition within Western European countries? First, I look at party system change with regard to numerical and numerical–ideological terms. Second, I evaluate the effect populist radical right parties have had on the different dimensions of party systems. Third, I assess the claim that the rise of populist radical right parties has created bipolarizing party system. Fourth, I look at the effect the rise of the populist radical right has had on the logic of coalition formation. The primary conclusion is that, irrespective of conceptualization and operationalization, populist radical right parties have not fundamentally changed party systems in Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars of women’s parliamentary presence have suggested that the proportion of women parliamentarians rests on the interaction between intra-party and party external conditions, and that these can be discussed in terms of necessity and sufficiency. Still, the field lacks systematic cross-case assessments of such relationships. This research takes an explorative approach to necessity, sufficiency and interaction in the field of gender and party. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to study 57 individual West European parties, it demonstrates that party behaviour is a function of intra-party and party-external conditions. Furthermore, it shows that when the external factors are not present, parties are themselves able to achieve gender-balanced parliamentary delegations. The article reveals that there are several paths to gender balance, and that the absence of conditions sufficient for balance does not explain why parties do not become gender balanced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Various explanations have been advanced for the adoption of increasingly restrictive tobacco control policies in Western democracies, usually based on an examination of individual instruments. Some of the more popular explanations are socioeconomic modernization, interest group politics, political institutions, government ideology and vertical diffusion from the European Union (EU). This paper uses statistical models to test explanations of tobacco control policy across 15 EU member states adopting instruments of Comprehensive Tobacco Control Policy (CPTC) over two decades. Socioeconomic modernization, economic interest groups and domestic political factors all play a role in policy. Although there is declining influence of pro-tobacco domestic constituencies, adoption of CPTC is still inhibited by corporatist practices in member states. Vertical policy diffusion through the EU has aided domestic sources of policy adoption, making tobacco control policy one of multi-level governance and enhancing its comprehensiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature on Western European parliaments has long pointed to an increase in non-legislative activities, including questions to the minister and interpellations; however, it has struggled to explain this development. This paper argues that the explanation ought to be sought in the increased importance of issue competition among political parties in Western Europe. Political parties are increasingly competing over which issues should dominate politics. In issue competition, non-legislative activities are attractive for opposition parties, because governments must respond to the issues the opposition wants to focus on. The paper thus argues that the key to understanding the development of activities in Western European parliaments is to bring parties and theories of party competition into the study of these activities. The argument is tested and supported by showing that the growth in non-legislative activities in Western Europe is universal as well as by demonstrating how the content of questions to the minister in Denmark reveals a clear issue competition pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions do governments, employers, and unions enter formal policy agreements on incomes, employment, and social security? Such agreements, widely known as social pacts, became particularly prominent during the 1990s when European economies underwent major adjustment. This article seeks to explain national variation in adjustment strategies and specifically why concerted agreements were struck in some countries but not in others. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 14 European countries is employed to assess main arguments about the emergence of pacts. The analysis yields two key findings. First, although prevailing arguments emphasize Economic and Monetary Union-related pressures, or alternatively unemployment, these factors were neither necessary nor in themselves sufficient for pacts to materialize. Rather, a high economic "problem load" appears to be causally relevant only when combined with particular political and institutional conditions, namely, the prevalence of electorally weak governments and/or an intermediate level of union centralization. Second, the analysis refines existing multicausal explanations of pacts by demonstrating three distinct, theoretically and empirically relevant causal pathways to concerted agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of party system change may be unsatisfactory if insufficient attention is given to the defining properties of a system. A number of dimensions have to be considered, but - as with 'social cleavages' - there can be disagreement as to whether a truly constitutive element is involved. In addition, it is necessary to distinguish the various degrees of change that are possible, and in this respect a study of the process of change is essential. Party system typologies are of little help, so that an alternative in the form of 'working models' can be employed. The emphasis in this approach is on the identification of the 'core components' of the particular system against which the degree of change can be assessed. An examination of representative West European party systems reveals that these core components show a strong persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wave of electoral volatility which swept across most of the West European polities in the late 1960s and 1970s has led many scholars to suggest that the European party systems are now experiencing a major transformation. Given such an emphasis in the contemporary literature, this article attempts to identify some of the key problems in defining what is meant by party system change. Four such problems are identified. First, that of distinguishing party change, on the one hand, and party system change, on the other. Second, the problem of treating measures of electoral volatility as indicators of cleavage decline, and the extent to which evidence of electoral change can be seen as a valid challenge to the Lipset-Rokkan 'freezing' hypothesis. Third, the problem of determining the level of electoral volatility which actually 'matters' in discussions of party system change. Fourth, the problem of the electoral bias itself, which often leads researchers to neglect other, non-electoral, dimensions of change which, in turn, may well prove to have been both more fundamental and more enduring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political competition, and especially inter-party competition, is a key concept in liberal democratic thought. This article develops three conceptions (or dimensions) of inter-party competition: (1) Contestability, (2) Conflict of Interest and (3) Performance Sensitivity. Each dimension is operationalized, and comparative time series data are presented for 15 advanced democracies, 1950-87. Inter-party competition is shown to vary mostly between countries, but also inter-temporally. The second part of the article investigates socio-demographic, economic and organizational explanations of cross-national differences in inter-party competition. A causal model based on these theories is specified and estimated. The model yields stronger results for contestability and performance sensitivity than for conflict of interest. Finally, possible consequences of inter-party competition for individuals, organizations and political systems are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]