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This research note investigates how mainstream party strategies affect the success of radical right parties (RRPs). It is a widespread view that mainstream party accommodation of radical right core issue positions would reduce the radical right's success. Empirical evidence for this claim, however, remains inconclusive. Using party level data as well as micro-level voter transitions between mainstream and RRPs, we re-evaluate the effectiveness of accommodative strategies and also test whether they work contingent on specific conditions, e.g., the newness of radical right challengers or the existence of a cordon sanitaire. We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right. Our findings have important implications for the study of multi-party competition as they challenge what has become a core assumption of this literature: that accommodative strategies reduce niche party success.

Social Democratic parties, once dominant on the Left across Western Europe, have faced varying fortunes in different countries, ranging from near-total collapse to continued popularity. Most accounts of Social Democratic decline have tended to focus on aspects of their policy programme, either in terms of economic ideology or in terms of “newer” topics such as immigration or social liberalism. Alternative accounts emphasize the role of declining social cleavages. However, one aspect has so far been disregarded, namely the declining ability of Social Democratic parties to appeal to segments of the electorate that are less ideologically oriented and focus more on government outcomes – voters we call ‘responsibility voters’. We argue that one reason for the varying success of Social Democratic parties lies in the fact that part of their support has traditionally come from voters who care about competence, rather than about ideological priorities. These voters prioritize the executive competence of the government and focus on the person that will be the head of government. Such competence-oriented individuals care most about political, economic and social outcomes, so whether their country is moving in the right direction or not. These voters then choose the party they believe to be most likely to govern well and bring about positive outcomes: hence, they evaluate parties based on their perceived competence. Arguing that competence is an important component of voters’ decision calculus is far from new; instead, it has long been a central part of such accounts. It is therefore even more surprising that such assessments have not been examined as a determinant of SD party decline. We argue that there has been a systematic downgrading of SD parties’ ability to garner the vote of competence-oriented voters. This is not because SD parties have been uniquely bad at governing or uniquely unlucky in the context in which they have had to do so, though in single cases this may play a role. Instead, we argue that SD parties are nowadays less unique in being included in consideration sets due to their governing status or experience. Having governed (be it at national, regional or local levels) is likely to be a key heuristic for assessing potential competence. All things being equal, parties with more governing experience should be seen as better equipped to govern (well). Voters who care about competence are thus more likely to include a party in their choice set if it has governing experience. However, the competence bonus for parties with governing experience has implications for patterns of voting behaviour and party competition. This is because the weakening of cleavage voting and the fragmentation of party systems has led to an increase in the number of parties that have gained governing experience. In many countries, for instance, Green parties have joined governments at the local, regional and national level. The implication of this is that the choice set of many voters has been increasing. The survey experiment tests a key prediction of this theoretical framework: voters are more likely to consider voting for a party if the party has governing experience. In the experiment, hypothetical parties vary randomly in their government experience, in addition to other attributes. We test whether that governing experience has a positive effect of choice set inclusion. Our second aim is to examine whether the positive reaction to governing experience is universal. We expect some voters to react more strongly to governing experience, namely those voters who care about competence and efficacy, those who hold centrist political stances, and those who do not hold populist stances.

In this project, we investigate changing attitudes and indicated behavior around the referendum on the introduction of marriage equality in Switzerland. We assess the consequences of an extension of rights for a marginalized group. These potential consequences range from more positive attitudes toward the gay, lesbian and bisexual population to a potential backlash among the opponents of marriage equality. The law and referendum are specifically about increased sociocultural and not economic equality, making it an interesting case to separate backlash to cultural changes from a more economic mechanism. We combine the assessment of longitudinal within-subject change with an experimental design in the second survey wave.

In fighting the spread of COVID-19, the drastic measures undertaken by governments worldwide demonstrate a trade-off between public health and fundamental democratic principles. Yet this behaviour is not consistent across democracies, which motivates this paper to examine why some democracies were willing to constrain individual freedoms and concentrate power more than others during the pandemic’s first wave. Creating two indices to measure the degree to which COVID-19 policies interfere with these democratic principles in 34 European countries, the analyses show that the large variation cannot be solely explained by pandemic-related factors. It is argued that the strong protection of democratic principles already established in ‘normal’ times makes governments more reluctant to opt for restrictive policies. By highlighting how differences in policy responses are attributed to provisions guaranteeing individual liberties, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how democracies handle the democratic dilemma in times of crises.

Radical right parties are strong competitors of the centre-right in many party systems. In this article, we first show that the centre-right’s overall stability in terms of vote share masks clear p...

In this article, we revisit the main claims of Part Four of Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology and especially the changing support coalitions for parties of the left. Piketty's core argument in this part of the book is that the left now represents the highly educated and that, as a result, the redistributive preferences of the working class do not find representation in today's party systems. We address these claims building on existing political science research that has investigated the transformation of politics in advanced capitalist societies. We argue, first, that the educational divide cannot be adequately analyzed by looking at a left and a right bloc, but crucially needs to pay attention to the rise of green/left-libertarian and radical right parties. Second, we contend that the new middle classes that support parties of the left are largely in favor of economic redistribution. Analyzing data from the European Social Survey in 11 West European countries from 2002 to 2018, we show that the effect of education on voting left or right is indeed largely driven by green/left-libertarian and radical right parties, while there is little empirical evidence that social democratic parties represent the educational elite. We also find that redistributive preferences remain at the heart of voting behavior and that, especially for educated voters, these preferences determine whether someone votes for a party of the left rather than the right.

This letter investigates how voter transitions between parties affect parties’ policy positioning. While a growing literature investigates the role of election results as signals for parties’ policy adaption, it has mostly focused on vote changes of individual parties. However, parties do not know only whether they have won or lost in an election; they also have detailed information on which parties they won votes from and which parties they lost votes to. We make two arguments about how voter transitions should affect the strategic policy choices of political parties. First, when a party has lost votes to another party it will adapt its policy positions toward that party. Second, parties that have overall lost more votes become more likely to adapt their positions. Making use of a data set on individual voter transitions and party positions we can demonstrate that voter transitions indeed affect parties’ competitive behavior.

Scholars have paid increasing attention to how questions of multi-level governance have become politicized in the domestic political arena. Issues surrounding democratic government itself have received surprisingly little attention in this debate. In this article, we ask how political parties politicize the principles of liberal democracy within advanced democracies. We expect that challenger parties are most likely to question existing principles. The targets of their criticism, however, should vary according to their ideological origins. Conducting automated quantitative text analysis of Swiss, German and Austrian party press releases between 2006 and 2018 using a multidimensional dictionary of liberal democracy, we confirm that left-libertarian and populist radical right parties are the main challengers of the democratic status quo. The foundation of criticism, however, differs fundamentally. While left-libertarians focus on principles that strengthen individual autonomy in politics, populist radical right parties demand more forms of participation and fewer constraints by liberal elements of democracy.

The dramatic decline in vote shares on the mainstream left in many recent elections has led to a renewed discussion about a crisis of Social Democracy. One popular argument is that Social Democratic decline is the result of these parties' liberal cultural positions and pro-EU stance, with both topics increasingly salient for their traditional voters, particularly among the working class. However, we lack comparative evidence testing this argument. In this paper, we combine CHES data on party positions with ESS survey data to analyze the electoral effects of Social Democratic parties' second dimension and EU positions. In addition, we focus on whether support from different socio-economic groups is sensitive to these positions. In contrast to much public debate, we find that more authoritarian/nationalist and more anti-EU positions are if anything associated with lower rather than greater electoral support for social democratic parties.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. First published: 15 October 2018 This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade-offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue-collar voters. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre-right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.

This article investigates how changes in same-sex rights affect attitudes toward homosexuality. We argue that different same-sex relationship policies vary in their impact. Whereas registered partnership laws construct a distinct target population that receives new benefits, marriage equality sends an unambiguously positive signal and reduces the perceived group difference through inclusion into existing rights. As a consequence, marriage equality should have a positive effect on attitudes toward homosexuality, whereas partnership laws should have much less positive effects and could even lead to backlash among some groups. Combining data from eight waves of the European Social Survey with data on legislation, we analyze the effects of same-sex marriage, registered partnerships, and marriage bans on attitudes toward gays and lesbians. Marriage has a positive effect, bans and registered partnerships have a negative effect. Legalized partnership is especially associated with significantly more negative attitudes among nonreligious and less educated people.