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Liberal parties are among the oldest European political party groups. They have played a major role in the emergence of many modern democracies, the consolidation of political institutions, and the building of the European Union. This shared legacy conceals the considerable heterogeneity among liberal parties. This paper explores the positions of liberal parties in Europe ahead of the 2024 elections. Based on insights from an international group of scholars, this paper analyses three dimensions of liberal parties in Europe: their policy orientations, stressing commonalities and lines of fracture; their electoral performances and relationships to power and government, emphasising their pivotal roles in national party systems; and their collaboration at the European level. The paper by looking at what lies ahead as the 2024 European elections approach., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This research note presents the RepResent Belgian Panel (RBP). The RBP is a voter panel survey consisting of four waves fielded to a sample of voters in Belgium around the May 2019 federal, regional, and European elections in Belgium. It provides unique data on about 250 variables for a quota sample of the same respondents, pre-2019 elections (N = 7351), post-2019 elections (N = 3909), one year after the elections (N = 1996), and 2 years after the elections (N = 1119). The RBP panel dataset was designed to analyse voters’ political attitudes and behaviours, notably on different dimensions of democratic representation, and with a specific focus on democratic resentment (e.g. citizens’ attitudes towards democracy such as distrust and alienation, but also behaviours such as abstention, protest, or voting for anti-establishment parties). Its longitudinal structure allows to explore the political dynamics at play in Belgium throughout the lengthy government formation process. Finally, the last two waves of the RBP were fielded during the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing to explore public opinion before and during this global crisis. The RBP should be of interest to scholars of public opinion and electoral studies., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This Special Issue contributes to the growing literature on parties abroad. Expansive citizenship has transformed and reinforced the civic and political links between emigrants and their home country. Political parties face the dilemma of engaging or not in this new arena for electoral politics and must consider how. However, until recently the literature on transnationalism and on party politics has surprisingly largely overlooked this issue. This introduction identifies the existing gaps in the literature, and stresses two main questions that remains largely unanswered, namely (1) why and how parties decide to campaign abroad, and (2) how voters abroad are receptive to these campaigns and operate their party choice in this specific context. The five articles offer a mix of case studies and comparative perspective, and quantitative and qualitative analyses. This case selection allows to explore the diversity of strategies adopted by political parties abroad in different settings, with different tools. The results illustrate the impact of local party branches and entrepreneurs’ outreach and local campaigns on mobilisation, turnout, and the result of elections, but also show that emigrants’ vote choice is influenced both by the context of their country of origin and of their country of residence., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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This research note investigates the scope of regional variations in levels of affective polarization across Europe and contrasts it to national scores to highlight the theoretical and empirical interest of a disaggregated approach. Using all waves of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) dataset, we compute an affective polarization score for 143,857 individuals and aggregate these scores in 190 regions nested in 30 countries, across a period ranging from 1996 to 2019, covering 105 elections. We map variations in affective polarization across regions, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Our results reveal that the range of scores is larger across regions than between countries, and that approximately half of the variation in affective polarization scores can be attributed to within-country heterogeneity. Second, we find that some countries display rather homogeneous regional patterns, while others display heterogeneous scores. Third, we show how the increase in the affective polarization scores over time at the national level can be driven by sharp changes in some regions only, other regions remaining stable. Overall, these results point to the added value of adopting a regional approach to the study of affective polarization., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Using the RepResent Voter Panel Survey conducted in Belgium since the 2019 Federal elections, we investigate the relationship between affective polarization and voters' coalition preferences, in the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results confirm a strict negative link between affective polarization and preferences for coalitions in general. Such result is robust to different types of coalitions, in terms of number and size of parties, as well as the ideological position of voters. However, we also show how the negative effect of affective polarization can be moderated if the coalition includes the voter's in-party. Overall, our results help better understanding the political consequences of affective polarization in a multiparty setting., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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Politicians perceive their representative role in a variety of ways: as a delegate of their party, a delegate of voters, or a trustee who exercises their mandate independent of any external principal. Existing research finds that the tendency to adopt a specific style of representation depends on system-level institutions and individuals’ political experience and profile. The influence of the party organisational context remains little-understood. This study contributes to filling this gap by examining the effects of parties’ resources and intra-party distribution of power on the prevalence of party-delegates among their candidates. Drawing on data from the Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS) and the Political Party Database (PPDB) we find that party organisation shapes representation in a way that has not previously been demonstrated: parties with more resources and parties in which members have the final say in candidate selection have a higher proportion of party-delegates among their candidates. This demonstrates the centrality of party organisation to representation., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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Un manuel qui met l'accent sur les méthodes et méthodologies propres à la science politique, avec des conseils pratiques pour mener à bien un travail de recherche.Une initiation à la recherche en science politique à travers :une présentation pédagogique des méthodes de collecte et d’analyse des donnéesdes conseils pratiques pour mener à bien un travail de recherchedes exemples concrets extraits de la littérature récentedes tableaux de synthèse, des mises en situation et des définitions des termes clésPour apprendre à :réaliser un travail scientifiqueélaborer une stratégie de recherchechoisir et collecter les données pertinentesanalyser et interpréter les résultatsidentifier les forces et les faiblesses de chaque méthodeAvec exercices interactifs en fin de chapitres pour intégrer et réviser la matière, info:eu-repo/semantics/published, 2

This paper explores how party-specific contextual factors explain variations in membership levels. Based on a subset of MAPP data that includes 2,898 yearly membership data points for 262 parties in 24 countries over a period from 1990 to 2014, it examines three sets of explanations: the lifecycle model (party age), the bandwagon model (electoral performances and governemental participation), and the competition model (effective number of parties). Our results confirm that membership ratios present an overall decreasing trend across parties over time. At the same time, we show that this trend is flattening and that there are important variations at the party level. Fluctuations of membership are part of a party’s lifecycle. Our results also point toward a bandwagon effect whereby party membership levels increase or decrease according to electoral performances, and to a patronage boost linked to governmental participation. Finally, we show that party system fragmentation decreases individual parties’ membership ratios. Overall, our findings complement the story on party membership decline and calls for further investigations of party-level explanations., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

As representative democracy is increasingly criticized, a new institution is becoming popular among academics and practitioners: deliberative citizens’ assemblies. To evaluate whether these assemblies can deliver their promise of re-engaging the dissatisfied of representative politics, we explore who supports them and why. We build on a unique survey conducted with representative samples of 15 Western European countries and find, first, that the most supportive are those who are less educated, have a low sense of political competence and an anti-elite sentiment. Thus, support does come from the dissatisfied. Second, we find that this support is for a part ‘outcome contingent’, in the sense that it changes with respondents’ expectations regarding the policy outcome from deliberative citizens’ assemblies. This second finding nuances the first one and suggests that while deliberative citizens’ assemblies convey some hope to re-engage disengaged citizens, this is conditioned to the expectation of a favourable outcome., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

As early as March 2020, the President of the European Parliament decided to shut down the assembly’s facilities in Brussels and to cancel the plenary sessions in Strasbourg .Impor­tant decisions were made to abandon in-person meetings, introduce teleworking for all staff, and implement remote deliberation and voting both in committees and in the plena­ry .The Rules of Procedure were adapted to formalize these organisational changes and make them ready for future crises .All in all, the European Parliament proved to be resilient and adaptive: it continued to discuss and adopt many legislative, budgetary, and non-legis­lative texts in the plenary .However, remote-work did have an impact on the political dynamics within Parliament .It was characterised by a very high level of consensus, as the result of a higher level of agreement between the two main party groups, the European People’s Party and the Socialists & Democrats .Those main groups also became much more cohesive ., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This paper explores external (country-level) and internal (party-level) drivers of membership variations across parties. Relying on the Political Party Database combined with other datasets, we provide original, cross-sectional analyses of membership variation across 223 parties in 38 countries, innovatively covering third-wave democracies, post-communist countries, and advanced democracies. It allows for a unique analysis of recruitment patterns of parties under quite different contexts. Departing from the dominant view that parties are the powerless victims of external trends, we show that, while context matters, parties’ choices regarding affiliation rules and organization structure also matter. They are more powerful determinants of membership ratios than country-level variables. Especially, the representation of sub-groups in the party structure is a key driver of membership recruitment. We also show how party origins, and the foundational environment in which they emerged, are important to understand how membership varies across parties today. Overall, this study strongly advocates for a broad comparative, multilevel approach to party membership., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Many West-European parties have responded to a changing and challenging environment by adopting multiple party reforms. In this article, we propose a comparative framework to study party reforms based on an adaptation of Harmel and Janda’s (1994) Integrated Theory of Party Goals and Party Change and its application to three diferent features of party action. We argue that the causes leading to reforms are multiple and difer according to the nature of these diferent features (i.e. programmatic-, personnel- and organization feature). FsQCA analyses show that the three types of reforms implemented by the six mainstream Belgian parties between 1987 and 2014 are all explained by fundamentally diferent complex causal pathways and that not a single causal condition considered was sufcient in itself to predict party reforms. Hence, we argue that the literature should now extend in two complementary directions. First, we suggest moving away from considering party reforms as only explained by separate conditions, since those are always the result of a combination of causal conditions. Second, we highlighted that it is not possible to commonly explain diferent types of reforms without stressing that only a diversity of (combinations of) causes allows to do so. Future research should better link the nature of the reforms undertaken to the diferent causes that may push parties to adopt them., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This study applies process-tracing methods to understand the 2019 leadership selection process in the Belgian French-speaking liberal party, MR, which is the oldest and second largest party in French-speaking Belgium. We triangulate a variety of sources to assemble a rich qualitative material that is used to contrast the formal rules and outcome of the race to the actual process. We show that the gatekeepers were not the ones ascribed in the statutes, that formal rules were bent to fit the profile of the race, and that the very nature of the race was much closer to a coronation than the results may suggest. We also uncover mechanisms through which party actors, especially the incumbent leader as steering agent, informally influence the process to the desired outcome, with the race being played prior to the validation of the candidacies. This analysis puts focuses on when and how key actors use their informal influence to weigh the process and influence the outcome of leadership races., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This contribution sheds light on the link between affect and protest behaviors. Using data from a voter survey conducted around the 2019 elections in Belgium, we examine two dimensions of affect: a vertical one, i.e. negative and positive emotions towards politics in general, and a horizontal one, i.e. affective polarization towards fellow citizens. Our findings make three important contributions. First, we identify five distinct classes of respondents depending on their emotions towards politics (apathetic, angry, hopeful, highly emotional, and average). Second, we demonstrate that the combination of both anger and hope is more strongly associated with protest action than anger alone. By contrast, apathy, characterized by an absence of emotions towards politics, is negatively related to protest behavior. Third, we show that affective polarization is a key driver of protest behavior per se. We also show that the two dimensions of affect have distinctive effects. Yet they interact: Affective polarization towards political opponents compensates for the absence of emotions towards politics in general., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Alors que le concept de totalitarisme est omniprésent dans l’espace médiatique, il est largement considéré comme dépassé dans les sciences sociales. La thèse s’inscrit en porte à faux contre la marginalisation du concept de totalitarisme en réévaluant les apports de Claude Lefort à la théorie du totalitarisme. L’architecture conceptuelle hybride du fantasme de l’Un lui permet de mieux résister aux critiques du concept de totalitarisme que les travaux classiques de Hannah Arendt ou de Carl Friedrich. Son approche permet également de proposer une solution originale aux problèmes de la théorie politique du totalitarisme (idéologie, organisation, terreur). Les travaux de Lefort permettent finalement d’envisager trois chantiers contemporains dans la mise à jour des typologies des régimes politiques contemporains, l’analyse du discours néolibéral et propose une compréhension neuve des dernières évolutions politiques de la Chine contemporaine., While the concept of totalitarianism is ubiquitous in the media, it is often considered obsolete in social science. The thesis argues the concept was wrongly marginalized by reassessing the contribution of Claude Lefort to totalitarianism theories. The hybrid conceptual architecture of the People-As-one fantasy allows the theory to overcome critiques better than the classical works of Hannah Arendt and Carl Friedrich. His approach also brings forth original solutions to the problems of political theories of totalitarianism (ideology, organisation, terror). Last but not least, Lefort’s research allows to update contemporary political regimes typologies, put forward a new analysis of neoliberal discourses and brings out a fresh understanding of the recent political developments of contemporary China., Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

From Bucharest to Skopje, anti-government protests have been sweeping Southeast Europe(SEE) since 2011. Considering that the region had been regarded to have a weak civil societybefore the protests, the mobilisations came as a surprise to academics and practitioners alike.Yet, these protests were not only noteworthy for happening in a region, seemingly endowedwith a weak civil society, but also for the fact that they remained largely peaceful. Even untilthe mid-1990s, in contrast, the Romanian government had violently dispersed protests usingmilitant miners, and protests in Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia had a similar outcome.Tracking the frequency with which governments have used lethal or non-lethal violence duringprotests, it can be shown that governments in SEE appear to have become more tolerant of thistype of extra-parliamentary political participation. Data collected from protest events showsthat at least since the early 2000s there has been a period of government restraint. This came atthe same time as the EU opened accession pathways for most countries in the region. Thus, thethesis discusses the reasons for the decline in repression. It explores whether the temporalcorrelation between increased EU engagement and the decline of physical repression in theregion was coincidental or can be linked. In this context, the thesis focuses on the role of EUaccession conditionality, since it has been assumed that EU conditionality could have ademocratizing and, therefore, potentially constraining effect on governments. Even though thethesis concludes that EU-accession conditionality impacted repression, the nature of thatimpact is complex. It shows that to understand how EU-accession conditionality impactedrepression, we cannot treat repression as a monolithic concept. Although EU conditionalityreduced visible forms of repression, such as lethal and non-lethal violence, it had little effecton opaque, institutional forms of repression. Studying how media outlets thr, Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This paper investigates divergences in levels of affective polarization across Belgian regions around the 2019 elections. Elaborating on the relative deprivation theory, we analyse the role of current and long- term socio-economic regional inequalities and of geographical distance separating regions. Empirically, we aggregate individual-level measures of affective polarization at the Belgian NUTS-3 level and use a gravity approach to explore the determinants of regional divergences. Our results show that regional variations in affective polarization are best explained by a current rural–urban divide and by how regions have performed economically in the last years. We also show that geographical proximity matters and reinforces the effects of economic deprivation., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

For decades now, West European politics has witnessed radical changes. Mainstream parties, once oligarchs in remarkably stable political systems, are experiencing a profound challenge to their legitimacy so that the question of their decline, or even their death, has often been raised hand in hand with the question of the crisis of representative democracy. Political commentators and scholars generally assume that party changes such as those made by many mainstream parties are simply to be seen within the context of structural changes in political demand. However, the literature overlooks an essential part of the story by taking the profound structural changes in the environment in which political parties operate as the main argument to explain their evolution over time. This dissertation argues that it is possible to better understand the when, why and how mainstream parties evolved over time through the use of the concept of (bundle of) party reform(s) and by bringing together lessons drawn from the literatures on party change, institutional reform and political marketing.This dissertation proposes a research strategy based on a mix of innovative methods. Three empirical steps were followed in order to provide ground for the new theoretical approach I propose to party reform as well as to help explain party engineering in mainstream parties. The structure of this dissertation builds in particular on the opposition between the rational-institutionalist approach to party change and its constructivist variant. I decided to focus this study on the six mainstream Belgian parties because of the distinctive context Belgium offers for comparatively examining the resilience of political parties that are particularly rooted at the core of a political system but which consistently face strong challenges. The first empirical part of the dissertation consist in building a descriptive inventory of all the reforms implemented by the Belgian mainstream parties on their political, Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Since the Lisbon Treaty, EU national Parliaments have been recognized as relevant and legitimate players at the supranational level and given tools to be involved beyond the scrutiny of their national government. However, the last decade brought new challenges to the Europeanisation of national Parliaments, with several crises boosting intergovernmentalism. This study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the AFCO Committee, examines how EU national Parliaments have adapted to all these challenges and assesses their involvement in EU affairs over the past decade., info:eu-repo/semantics/published