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Populist radical right parties are on the rise all over Europe. Recent literature investigates their effects on environmental policy, however, often applying an overly broad perspective on the policy area and neglecting causal mechanisms. This article addresses both gaps in an in‐depth case study of partisan effects on Swedish environmental policy in the wake of increasing populist radical right influence. A novel data approach deriving party positions and policy output from the hard figures of budget proposals between 2001 and 2023, allows a nuanced analysis of environmental policy and its subsectors (e.g., nature conservation and climate mitigation). In summary, a traditional partisan effect is confirmed as a major explaining factor for environmental policy change, while the effect unfolds through altered coalition formation strategies leading to the exclusion of “green voices.” This brings to the fore interactive environmental policy effects of the populist radical right and center‐right parties in the context of changing party competition constellations more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst there are significant electoral advantages for political parties to target women's votes, scholarship on recent electoral appeals questions the quality of gendered policy promises to address deep structural gender inequalities existing within the British state. This article examines British Election Study data to identify women voters' concerns and explores how the two largest Westminster parties developed appeals to women voters in the build up to the 2024 UK general election through an analysis of leadership speeches to the 2023 party conferences. We find a disconnect between women's electoral demands to address class-based gender inequalities and party attempts to 'weaponize' the woman question around status issues. We conclude by pointing to the enduring nature of gendered inequalities despite the election of a Labour government, which targeted appeals more closely to the class-based concerns of women voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research demonstrates that mainstream parties often take up the issues and positions of emerging Eurosceptic and anti-immigration parties. Yet, these accommodative strategies generally do not pay off. Why do mainstream parties nevertheless accommodate these niche actors? I argue that mainstream-niche competition is governed by intra-party dynamics. The pressure exerted by niche parties alone does not suffice to drive internally united mainstream parties to accommodate. However, when mainstream parties face substantial intra-party divisions on the niche party’s issue, they may yield under internal pressure. I find empirical support for my theoretical claims on the issue of European integration using expert survey data on 78 mainstream parties in 14 Western European democracies between 1999 and 2019. The findings contribute to our understanding of the conditions under which niche parties are contagious and illustrate how intra-party divisions can steer parties away from vote-seeking strategies with consequences for voter representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions can challenger parties disrupt mainstream party dominance in democratic institutions? While extant work describes the cultural and economic developments that benefit challengers and parties’ programmatic responses to these, I demonstrate when and how challengers exploit these conditions in their political communication. Theoretically, I posit that challenger parties have relatively stronger vote-seeking incentives than mainstream parties. These collective incentives affect individual parliamentarians’ cost–benefit calculations. Challenger parliamentarians will engage in anti-establishment rhetoric and issue-entrepreneurship when these signals are more likely to reach the voting public and pay-off electorally. I test this theory by analysing parliamentary debates from the European Parliament (1999–2016) through a novel combination of word embeddings and bespoke dictionaries. I find that challenger parties indeed pursue different communication strategies than mainstream parties. Challenger parliamentarians engage in anti-establishment rhetoric in the run-up to elections and issue-entrepreneurship during crises. This is because these factors make speeches more likely to be transmitted to voters. These results demonstrate that challengers adjust their political communication in opportune moments giving them a competitive advantage over less flexible mainstream parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, extreme parties have gained increasing electoral success in European party systems. While this party polarization is often associated with its negative consequences, recent studies have suggested its potential benefit for remobilizing the electorate by offering clear political alternatives. However, it remains unclear which groups of citizens may be mobilized by broader supply and whether this positive effect is generalizable to multiparty systems. This article contributes to this debate arguing that the system multidimensionality matters when assessing the relationship between polarization and voter turnout. Through a multilevel analysis and two studies at the aggregate and individual levels, this article provides evidence that party polarization is associated with increased turnout only when parties polarize on the cultural dimension of party competition. This effect is moderated by the party system unidimensionality and mobilizes voters at large, regardless of their level of extremism, political awareness or partisanship. These findings support previous research suggesting a ‘realignment’ of party systems, meaning that the main line of political conflict for parties and voters is shifting towards the cultural dimension of party competition across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A blooming research agenda has begun examining the influence of party competition dynamics on politician social media behaviour. Most studies focus on the US context, generally finding little evidence that party competition dynamics influence which policy issues politicians attend to on these platforms. Instead, I turn to the Danish context and show how party competition dynamics exert a substantial influence on politicians' attention to issues in their tweets. First, I map the level of politician issue attention on Twitter across several years outside election campaigns. Second, I show that party issue ownership and the status of a party as a government or opposition party strongly influence politicians' attention to issues on the platform. Third, I provide novel insights into how the interplay between party issue ownership and internal party organisation influences politician issue attention on Twitter. The findings indicate that the tweets posted by politicians are an integral aspect of contemporary party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the 2024 European Parliament elections in Spain as an element of national and European political pro-cess. The purpose of the study is to reveal key factors that in-fluenced voting outcome in Spain, as well as its possible im-plications for national political development and country’s role in the European Union. The research is based on the of-ficial data on the election results in Spain and the European Union, Spanish national statistics, Russian and Spanish think tanks’ and news agencies’ publications. The factors that shaped the campaign course and election results include spe-cific features of Spain's administrative territorial structure; na-tional rules for the European Parliament elections; character-istics of the Spanish party system and national political pro-cess dynamics. The voting results were also influenced by the growing political appeal of national-conservative ideas and candidates’ reliance on unconventional methods of campaign-ing. The political and ideological balance among Spanish members of the newly-elected European Parliament reflects stronger presence of the right-wing, including far-right politi-cal forces, which is in line with general European trends. However, the traditional political competitors, the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and the center-right People’s Party, which consistently take a pro-European stance, have retained their leading positions. This draws a conclusion about the probable continuity of Spain's course in the new European legislature and its further pursuit of greater integration.

How does public opinion affect political discourse on issues that parties struggle to deal with? Although scholars tend to analyse party–voter linkages in terms of policy positions, parties can respond to public opinion by changing both the positions and the salience of their policy agenda. Based on original time‐series data of party discourse and voter preferences in France, Italy and the United Kingdom (1992–2016), this paper analyses how mainstream parties have changed their political discourse on European integration in response to an increasingly Eurosceptic public. Results show that mainstream parties have adapted their positions to changes in public opinion and have at the same time deemphasized European Union issues in their discourse as the public grew Eurosceptic. Parties did not talk more about Europe even when they followed the tides of public opinion. These findings challenge our current understanding of party responsiveness, have implications for theories of party competition, and contribute to debates on the legitimacy of the European project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how political parties used the federal structure of government for discursive blame attribution strategies in parliamentary debates during the Covid-19 crisis. The analysis focuses on the German case which is considered an embodiment of cooperative federalism. Largely intertwined responsibilities and joint decision making provide incentives for self-serving blame attribution strategies. The empirical investigation includes a qualitative content analysis of 212 parliamentary debates in the Bundestag and the 16 state parliaments. Overall, 2067 statements were manually coded and integrated into a novel dataset. The data reveal a more diverse discursive toolkit of blame attribution strategies than commonly conceptualised. The study demonstrates that parties, especially when they are involved in intergovernmental bodies and coalition governments, resort to 'softer' forms of blaming. The vertical integration of the party system also creates an effective blame barrier, containing self-serving strategies even during the prolonged crisis and several election campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional research on political parties pays little attention to the temporal focus of communication. It usually concentrates on promises, issue attention, and policy positions. This lack of scholarly attention is surprising, given that voters respond to nostalgic rhetoric and may even adjust issue positions when policy is framed in nostalgic terms. This article presents a novel dataset, PolNos, which contains six text-based measures of nostalgic rhetoric in 1,648 party manifestos across 24 European democracies from 1946 to 2018. The measures combine dictionaries, word embeddings, sentiment approaches, and supervised machine learning. Our analysis yields a consistent result: nostalgia is most prevalent in manifestos of culturally conservative parties, notably Christian democratic, nationalist, and radical right parties. However, substantial variation remains regarding regional differences and whether nostalgia concerns the economy or culture. We discuss the implications and use of our dataset for studying political parties, party competition, and elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do political parties in the European Union (EU) react to disintegration bids from a member state? This question is important, as scholars have argued that framing by elites (particularly Eurosceptic entrepreneurs) is crucial in shaping whether disintegration is seen as an example to follow or one to avoid. This article investigates how parties outside the UK reacted to Brexit, and argues that Eurosceptic challenger parties and mainstream pro-European parties altered their stances after the referendum vote in June 2016. I use a combination of automated and hand-coded methods to identify and analyse 2223 Brexit statements in the parliaments of five member states between 2013 and 2018. I show how after the referendum vote, challenger parties avoid Brexit and significantly moderate the Euroscepticism in their Brexit statements. By contrast mainstream parties emphasise Brexit and significantly increase the pro-Europeanism in their Brexit statements. Results show that in the short term at least, there is little evidence of Eurosceptic entrepreneurs framing Brexit as a positive precedent or example to follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the dynamics of ideological party competition within the context of the 2023 Turkish elections. Focusing on the role and appeal of ideology, it provides insights into the changing landscape of ideological competition during this pivotal electoral period. The study examines whether ideology operates as a guiding principle for Turkish voters grappling with intricate economic and social issues. Despite acknowledging that economic concerns may not singularly determine ideological positions, the paper highlights the enduring significance of ideology in shaping perceptions. The transformative nature of the 2023 elections, marked by the emergence of new parties and electoral alliances, further underscores the relevance of ideology. Additionally, the article assesses the appeal of ideological competition by investigating voters who cannot position parties or themselves on the ideology scale. This analysis reveals that factors such as media consumption, education, gender, and political efficacy significantly influence the ideological appeal in the 2023 elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains the survival of the AKP in Turkey's late stage of autocratization (2017-present) through its strategy of shifting the primary drivers of competition from individual parties to pre-electoral alliances. Confronted with a decline in popular support in 2015 June elections, the article argues that the AKP created uneven patterns of competition via the system of pre-electoral alliances so that it could institutionalize a 'Rikerian offense' on the salient Turkish-Kurdish cleavage and establish an authoritarian power-sharing mechanism with its former challenger, the Turkish nationalist MHP. To illustrate the shift toward uneven patterns of electoral competition via such incumbent strategies, the article conducts a two-part analysis: It first examines the landscape of competition among parties (2002-2015) and second, evaluates competition among both parties and alliances (2018-2023) at the national and district levels in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive research applies counterfactual simulation methodology to study parties’ optimal policy positions in multiparty elections. In recent years, this methodology has been extended to the study of variation in issue salience. We employ this method to estimate the electoral effects of changes in the salience of specific positional issue dimensions on parties’ success. Applied to British Election Study survey data from 2017 and 2019, we find that plausible issue salience changes could have shifted the parties’ projected vote shares by several percentage points. Our approach implies that the governing Conservative Party had electoral incentives to downplay positional issues, to magnify the relative effects of its non-policy advantage due to perceived competence and performance, among other factors. Labour would also have benefitted from reduced salience of Left-Right ideology. By contrast, the Liberal Democrats had strong electoral incentives to emphasize their moderate Left-Right position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crises of core state power integration have produced two ideal-typical ideas of the EU polity. The regulatory polity encourages national self-reliance and regards EU institutions as rule enforcers. The redistributive polity builds on transnational solidarity and the creation of EU-level capacities used for burden-sharing. We study the politics of this development on mainstream parties in Germany, a least-likely case for EU polarization and support for the redistributive polity. We analyse 1,594 policy positions taken in the Bundestag between 2002 and 2019. Employing logistic regression, we show that German mainstream parties' integrationist consensus is perforated by disagreements about the nature of the EU. Whereas mainstream left parties embrace solidarity, mainstream right parties cling to self-reliance even in crises. Our paper demonstrates that mainstream parties' socio-economic positions remain relevant for their substantive EU support and that this rift provides voters with a meaningful choice between different normative conceptions of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare chauvinism and welfare populism as characteristic features of radical right parties' welfare stances have become challenges to the welfare state. However, in order to understand how these claims may indeed affect welfare politics, it is essential to study whether welfare chauvinism and welfare populism attract voters beyond the radical right, especially among the mainstream right or even parts of the left. Results based on original public opinion data in eight Western European countries show that, contrary to widespread assumptions, welfare chauvinism and welfare populism divide the right more than the left. Electorates of not only green, but also most social democratic and radical left parties are consistently most opposed to discriminating welfare rights between natives and immigrants, although this opposition is weaker among left working-class voters than among left middle-class voters. Even voters of most mainstream right parties show only moderate support for welfare populism and welfare chauvinism, leaving the fervent support of radical right voters for welfare chauvinism and populism unmatched by any other electorate. These findings have important implications for the strategic situation of left parties and for understanding how welfare chauvinism and welfare populism may challenge welfare states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As global warming intensifies, ballot boxes become more heated, with various parties potentially targeting the green electoral market. In this article, we analyse how, in Italy, the political supply side aligns with the electorate’s environmental demand. To this end, we introduce the Propensity for Green Voting (PGV) measure, representing an individual’s likelihood of voting for a party with environmental protection at the core of its agenda. Using survey data, we detect the area of potential green voting in the Italian electoral market, exploring its overlaps with the potential electorate of the major political parties. Our analysis revolves around three hypotheses concerning the nature of green issue representation in Italian politics: monopolistic, fragmented, or absent. Our findings reveal no single-party monopoly over environmental issues in Italy. Instead, a spectrum of parties within the divided centre-left opposition shows varying degrees of success in appealing to pro-environmental voters, indicating a fragmented green demand as well as a potential unifying theme in the environment for the centre-left camp. Additionally, a segment of the green-oriented electorate remains politically unrepresented in the existing party system, potentially increasing non-voter ranks. A final investigation projects the impact on the current electoral space of a hypothetical new Green party.

A well-studied hypothesis in the political economy literature is that economic globalisation leads to the convergence of economic policies because of increasing international constraints. However, little is known about how parties adapt their policy positions during economic crises. This paper investigates parties’ policy shifts in economically harsh times. It highlights the important distinction between long-term trends (e.g., economic integration) and relatively short-term economic fluctuations when studying party competition. During economic downturns parties have an incentive to intensify the debate on economic policies and emphasise their distinct policy positions. In other words, parties strategically position themselves on salient issues. The empirical analysis combines party manifesto data with macro-economic indicators and survey data from 28 European countries between 1980 and 2021. The findings show that party polarisation increases when the economy is in decline, and positions converge during economic recovery. Further analyses explore the mechanism and reveal an indirect effect: parties adjust their policy positions in reaction to changing voter priorities and grievances in times of economic distress. Overall, the article contributes to a larger literature on party competition and political responsiveness by showing that external shocks, such as economic crises, influence the diversity of political offers among established parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party competition sometimes resembles an auction, where parties seek to ‘buy’ elections through promises of economic largesse. In this article, I argue that whether parties engage in this practice will depend on political circumstances, such as the level of ideological competition. Incentives to promise more to voters will also vary depending on a party's electoral prospects: for parties that expect a significant level of government responsibility, promising too much is a risky strategy. I test these arguments by focusing on the spending commitments in party manifestos from 20 countries over the period 1945–2017. In line with expectations, parties tend to make more expansionary election pledges when ideological competition is more muted. In addition, left‐wing parties’ spending commitments are found to be influenced by their projected seat shares (based on opinion polls from before the start of the election campaign) relative to their competitors. Specifically, the stronger a left‐wing party's electoral prospects, the more fiscally conservative it tends to be, and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large literatures focus on voter reactions to parties' policy strategies, agency, or legislative performance. While many inquiries make explicit assumptions about the direction and magnitude of voter flows between parties, comparative empirical analyses of vote switching remain rare. In this article, we overcome three challenges that have previously impeded the comparative study of dynamic party competition based on voter flows: we present a novel conceptual framework for studying voter retention, defection, and attraction in multiparty systems, showcase a newly compiled data infrastructure that marries comparative vote switching data with information on party behavior and party systems in over 250 electoral contexts, and introduce a statistical model that renders our conceptual framework operable. These innovations enable first-time inquiries into the polyadic vote switching patterns underlying multiparty competition and unlock major research potentials on party competition and party system change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain's mainstream right parties immediately cooperated with the radical right Vox as a support party for minority governments when it first entered regional parliaments in 2018 and 2019. We ask why the mainstream right opted to engage the radical right to govern and why the latter agreed. Only when we consider parties' regional and national goals can we explain why the parties allied in Spain, and then only when we consider electoral as well as policy and office goals. We argue that centrifugal two bloc competition in the party system and electoral competition among the mainstream right parties on territorial and national identity issues encouraged engagement. Further, we show how the right bloc developed and solidified and how Vox constrained mainstream party choices by pushing for public recognition. It demonstrates the value of examining subnational politics, not only as another arena, but also as integral to party strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A large and growing body of research draws attention to the rising salience of socio‐cultural and identitarian issues and, potentially, the emergence of a new political cleavage that divides voters on those issues. However, the micro‐foundations of this transformation are less well understood. Here we take a voter‐perspective to evaluate how party competition has been restructured in the eyes of the voter. We leverage measures of citizens' self‐reported probabilities to vote for alternative political parties in the European Election Study voter surveys between 1999 and 2019 in order to map electoral affinity and opposition among party families. We estimate to what extent spatial location on the economic left–right dimension and the GAL‐TAN dimension explain the patterns that emerge, and how this has changed over time. Our results provide evidence of a substantial shift in voter assessment from party competition structured along the economic left–right dimension to competition structured along the GAL‐TAN dimension. We also find great separation of TAN parties from other parties, with the deepest antipathy between the TAN parties and greens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research analyses the demand-side of politics in Southern European countries, investigating how three relevant voting determinants have changed throughout time. The focus is on Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and the examined variables are the European Union, immigration and state intervention in the economy. The period of analysis is 2009–2019 and we identify the structure of political conflicts from the point of view of voters. We find that the electoral support of parties has been increasingly influenced by party positions on immigration (with the partial exception of Portugal), but not on the European Union. Moreover, the issue of 'state control and regulation of the economy' is boosting its explanatory power in all the countries investigated in this study. Thus, new issue determinants have gradually reshaped the system of voting preferences across Southern Europe, with voter demands becoming more likely to match party supply on immigration and economic interventionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite receiving much attention in the literature, existing analyses on the impact of Covid-19 on European societies and politics do not investigate the consequences for party competition over the European Union (EU) dimension. To this end, this article asks whether the pandemic affected the salience of the EU issue and the related party positions in Italy during the 'first wave' of the crisis. The analysis relies on an original CrowdTangle dataset comprising around 24000 posts from parties' official Facebook pages, which are thematically coded and subsequently employed in time-series cross-section regression models. The findings show that the pandemic caused a significant increase in salience and polarisation of the EU issue in the Italian party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Second World War, the Labour Party has alternated between periods in which it has been positioned further to the left and others when it has been further to the right. The standard explanation for those oscillations is electoral–ideological. Labour moves to the right (towards the political centre) when it prioritises electoral considerations, usually after a period in opposition. It moves to the left when it prioritises ideology, usually after periods in government. Against this we propose a political economy–policy explanation. Labour moves to the right and a redistributive economic strategy when the economy is performing reasonably well. It moves to the left and adopts a structural economic reform programme when the economy is perceived to be in crisis. We argue that the political economy–policy explanation offers a more satisfactory account of when and why Labour has changed its spatial policy positioning in this period. By acknowledging the role of what we term 'policy reasoning' in the processes by which political parties (and the public) adopt and change spatial policy positions, our approach provides an alternative to the mechanistic models deriving from Downsian rational choice theory. It suggests that, contrary to general expectation, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer does not need to react to its 2019 election defeat by shifting significantly to the right. [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]

While the diversity of populism has received considerable attention, surprisingly little is known about populist parties that defy clear-cut left-right categorization. We show that valence populist parties are non-positional and substantially different from both left-wing and right-wing populist parties. First, we demonstrate that valence populist parties deliberately take blurry positions on both the economic and socio-cultural dimensions of competition. Second, we show that such an ambiguity is counterbalanced by a disproportionate emphasis on anti-corruption appeals, the most paradigmatic example of a non-positional dimension. Our results have important implications for our understanding of varieties of populism, in particular, and the positional and non-positional competition strategies of political parties, in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliamentary elections in 2020 brought new political parties in Croatia, but this now encompassed the whole political spectrum. Using survey data, the article aims to identify sources of electoral support for new parties and how they relate to traditional political cleavages. The article finds that voters of the new parties differ from voters of the old parties primarily in how they perceive politics, and are also younger. At the same time, voters of the new parties on the left and the right are very similar to voters of the old left and right parties, respectively, pointing to still dominant role of the cleavages based on relation to history, religion and tradition. In the second step, the analysis also includes non-voters and finds that voters of the new parties and abstainers are similar in how they see politics, but abstainers feel much less confident about their ability to influence political events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many works have analysed EU issue voting, showing that European integration affects electoral preferences. This article posits that EU issues have increasingly influenced party preferences, boosting their effects and, in particular, on Europhile parties. Several punctuation points – authority transfer towards the EU, party politicisation efforts and a multiple set of crises – have occurred, with EU issues cumulating effects on voting preferences. Europhile parties may have strategically responded on this issue dimension, seizing on more favourable public orientations and, thus, prompting an electoral mobilisation of their constituents. By exploring the EU issue voting patterns in 25 Western and Central‐Eastern European countries between 2014 and 2019, the article presents two core findings, corroborating its expectations. It demonstrates that EU issues have increasingly affected electoral preferences, as well as enhancing their effects amongst the Europhile party voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic support for EU enlargement across existing member states is understood to have shifted significantly since 2004. But, how? Here, we explore how enlargement has been framed discursively in the national parliaments of eight member states. Our dataset comprises over 18,000 statements from 1989 to 2019. We link our exploration to alternative explanations for change: IR‐based shifts in how applicant states are perceived and, from comparative politics, the 'politicisation' of EU membership in domestic party systems. We analyse changes in salience, sentiment and thematic foci. Our results confirm shifts in the perceptions of individual applicant states over time and an increased concern with issues of 'identity' in relation to enlargement. We find that whilst salience has declined, sentiment has turned negative and explore the distinctive discourses of 'challenger parties' in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communicative responsiveness of politicians to public opinion signals has become increasingly important for politicians' electoral fate and citizens' sense of feeling represented. Although politicians can communicate directly with the public via social media, little is known about the extent, conditions, and favorability of politicians' responsiveness on social media to public opinion cues. This paper scrutinizes politicians' responsiveness to one particular public opinion signal: street protest. Do politicians respond to street protest on social media? And if so, when, and how do they react? We address these questions by means of two datasets: (1) a protest event dataset of all protests staged in Brussels (Belgium) between July 2017 and June 2019 (N = 124); and (2) a social media dataset containing all Facebook messages (N = 36.323) and tweets (N = 142.596) by Belgian politicians (N = 236) in the days surrounding each protest. Results show that politicians do respond to protest and its issue; the lion's share of social media messages supporting protesters. Protest that is large, (inter)nationally coordinated, and organized on socio-cultural issues is more frequently discussed by politicians; left-wing, opposition, and issue-owning politicians are more responsive as well. Whereas especially left-wing politicians endorse protests, right-wing politicians are more prone to discredit it. Responsiveness is thus asymmetric across the political spectrum. Our findings have implications for democratic representation and its challenges in hybrid media systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we develop and apply a typology of formal and substantive party responses to the radical right in three arenas: parliament, party competition, and the media. We argue that these provide distinct environments for parties' scope of action, which is why responses must always be understood in the light of their respective context. Empirically, we focus on the case of the Federal Republic of Germany and illustrate the usefulness of our model by analyzing the responses of the largest conservative and social democratic mainstream parties in the Bundestag (CDU/CSU and SPD) to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) between 2017 and 2022. Although both coalition partners have primarily excluded the AfD at the formal and substantive level, we find crucial differences in their response patterns between the arenas and highlight future research perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issue competition theories posit that political parties have little incentive to emphasize the same issues, because they mostly benefit from emphasizing issues where they are viewed as more competent. In contrast, a number of empirical studies find considerable overlap in parties' issues emphasis. Aiming to bridge this peculiar gap, this paper suggests that the development of exogenous problems is one factor that constrains parties' incentives to talk past each other. Using comprehensive data on party attention to ten issues across six West European countries from approximately 1980 and onwards, the analysis shows that problems moderate the relationship between parties' issue reputations and their issue emphases. When problems are moderate, parties selectively focus on different issues, but when problems become severe, parties across the board attend to an issue. That even includes parties that do not own the issue. These results have reassuring implications for parties' responsiveness to societal problems that negatively affect the welfare of citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, Italy became the last of the E.U. member states to introduce a minimum income policy. Our work helps explain why Italy was a laggard in this field by investigating the role the Italian left played, historically, in the evolution of policies to combat poverty. This is a surprisingly neglected topic. We argue that until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Italian left focused on labour-market insiders – that is, full-time core workers – and appeared largely unconcerned about the most vulnerable individuals, the outsiders, thus accepting the lack of policies to combat poverty. The policy status quo, however, dovetailed with a lively debate among left-wing intellectuals and politicians. This debate paved the way for several attempts by left-wing governments in the 1990s to implement a national pilot scheme (called the Reddito Minimo di Inserimento [R.M.I.]) along with local minimum income policies. The electoral success in 2013 of a new populist movement, the Five-star Movement (M.5.s.), campaigning on the flagship project of the Reddito di Cittadinanza (R.d.C.), fuelled the political debate on anti-poverty policies. This electoral 'threat' finally convinced the centre-left government under Paolo Gentiloni to establish in 2018 the Reddito di Inclusione, the first minimum income scheme in Italy. Our work demonstrates the importance of political variables, such as the structure and dynamics of party competition, in the fight against poverty. It also highlights the role of the Italian left as a political innovator in this field. [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]

Social democratic parties have experienced considerable electoral decline recently, which has often been attributed to their rightward policy movement. This paper advances this literature by examining who benefits from this moderation strategy and who is abandoning the social democrats. It does so by analyzing aggregate-level election results and individual-level Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data, on a sample of 21 advanced democracies, over 327 elections, from 1965 to 2019. I find little support for the assertion that social democrats are defecting to one party. However, in agreement with the spatial theory of party competition, results reveal that the radical left increasingly and significantly benefit from social democratic economic rightward positions, which is magnified when combined with rightward sociocultural positions. This predominantly occurs because left-leaning voters migrate to the radical left. The findings provide notable ramifications for party strategy and contribute to explanations for the rise of challenger parties, at the expense of mainstream parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on external voting overlooks why some political parties campaign abroad while others remain focused on the national territory. This article investigates the determinants of the strategic entry of political parties in overseas districts through analysing legislative elections in Ecuador (2007–2017). Based on a study of the incentives and constraints of political party presence abroad, we find that parties are more likely to compete for elections in overseas districts displaying a weaker party competition as well as when they account for previous electoral experience in these districts. [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]

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]

In the first wave of the far-right's influence in party politics between 1980 and 2000, exreme right-wing parties essentially challenged mainstream parties of the moderate left and right. The current wave has seen new far-right parties challenge the more established far-right players, notably in Italy and France, which raises questions about party competition in this segment of the party system. This paper aims to shed some light on these questions by analyzing the competition between Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour in the 2022 French elections. Based on a qualitative case study analysis, it identifies areas of convergence and dissimilarity between the two candidates. By scrutinizing the positions, issue salience, and agency of their respective campaigns, the paper shows how far-right parties in the same party system compete with one another, thus contributing to the broader literature on contemporary far-right politics. The concluding section discusses these findings in relation to voters' concerns in the first round of the 2022 French presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy signals are often conceived of as positions on an ideological scale. However, apart from the position – considered here as the policy objective – the policy instrument and the concreteness of the instrument must also be taken into consideration. In the article, a new conceptualisation of policy signals is developed, which integrates policy objectives, policy instruments and how concrete these are. Drawing on issue competition research, a set of expectations is advanced about the importance of actors' control over outcomes for positional concreteness. Then, policy signals are looked at in the unmediated context of Danish parties' Facebook posts ahead of the 2019 national election. Based on all textual and audio-visual posts in the year before the election, it is found that the levels of positional concreteness are generally high. Yet – in line with expectations – positional concreteness depends on parties' incumbency status and the policy field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the role of ideology in the dynamics of Honduran party competition from 1994 to the present. For this purpose, we carried out an analysis of the structure of the ideological competition in Honduras’ party system. We used survey data on ideological self-placement of this country’s legislators and their perception of the parties’ positions on the left-right dimension. The analysis shows a transformation of a party system where, for decades, electoral competition was characterized by its low level of ideological polarization towards a more polarized system. These results allow us to verify the important changes produced in the structure of the Honduran party system since the 2013 general elections. Afterwards, the competitiveness and fragmentation of the party system increased significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, political contestation on climate change has increased considerably. Not least, world-wide protests by the Fridays for Future movement have brought the issue to the fore of the policy-agenda. However, following classic ideas of partisan theory, the movement depends on political parties to translate their demands into political action. Based on multiple data sources (i.e. social media and parliamentary debates), we, therefore, investigate reactions of 19 parties to the movement in three European countries (Austria, Germany and Sweden) and analyse reasons for their varying responses in a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Overall, parties stay true to their general ideological position and party competition only exerts a mild impact on party reactions to the movement while their traditional left-right positioning or environmental preferences explain their responses. Thus, despite Fridays for Future's moderate demands and its measured appearance it was not able to generate general support from centre-right parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: While some argue that parties reduce voter uncertainty to attract more votes, others claim that parties increase vote shares when beclouding their policy positions. To address the puzzle, I argue that as the degree of consensual characteristics increases, strategic uncertainty is electorally more helpful because parties in consensus models should consider the governing coalition and facilitate cooperation with other parties due to multiparty systems. Methods: Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I employ multilevel modeling to analyze 335 parties in 32 countries including both advanced and postcommunist democracies. Results: I find empirical evidence that as the political institutions have more consensus models, it is more beneficial (or less costly at least) for parties to pursue voter uncertainty with broad appealing strategies primarily in advanced democracies. Conclusion: The findings suggest that democratic institutional settings shape the incentives for parties to adopt either broad or narrow appeals in the context of party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the populist radical right has underlined the party family's influence on a variety of issues, such as immigration, welfare, and the EU. However, scholars have hardly studied its influence in the field of democracy reform, even though populist radical right parties strongly criticize how democratic systems currently function. In an exploratory and qualitative study of four cases, we analyze the adaptation (or lack thereof) of mainstream parties to populist radical right parties' challenge in the field of democracy reform in Austria, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, focusing on direct democracy. In contrast to other policy issues, we find limited adaptation of mainstream parties in the field of democracy reform: Instead of being a driver on democracy reform, the populist radical right is merely a fellow passenger. Where it has an effect, that effect is mostly negative, turning mainstream parties away from direct democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses how parties strategically vary their populist positions in party competition. The useful conceptualization of populism as a matter of degree has been established by previous studies. However, we know little about the conditions that drive parties to alter their degree of populism and, importantly, whether this varies between mainstream and populist parties. This paper analyzes the impact of vote and office loss on parties' populist position-taking. It draws upon German and Austrian parliamentary debate speeches from the 1990s until 2018. Populism is measured using a dictionary method, an automated text analysis approach. The results show that parties react to contextual incentives by altering their degree of populism. Mainstream and populist parties are more populist when in opposition. Electoral losses affect mainstream and populist parties less clearly. The contribution of this paper is to integrate research on populism with a theoretical framework on party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]