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As some of the most experienced political actors, party leaders usually have extensive careers spanning multiple decades, competencies, and institutions. The literature on party leaders, however, has not yet incorporated the wealth of information that these careers have. Therefore, this article introduces career capital as a new continuous measure of political experience and hypothesizes that more career capital leads to longer tenure. In contrast to findings from previous studies, I show that career capital does contribute to party leaders' survival in office in several analyses of party leader duration in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland in the postwar period (1945–2023). In addition, because career capital is accumulated in three separate institutions, I examine the differences between these descriptively and show in the analysis that especially previous experience in legislative office is conducive for party leaders to remain longer in office. Lastly, the results indicate that the relationship between career capital and party leader duration is non-linear and subject to the effect of attrition, signifying that political experience acquired shortly before entering party leader office is more important for political survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Procedures of party leadership selection have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years, but voting motives of party members in leadership elections have not been fully studied yet. This paper presents a new model of voting in party leadership elections that is inspired by previous models that were mostly tailored to more exclusive selectorates (such as the parliamentary party). We adopt an inductive research strategy that is based on an open question in member surveys that were held on the occasion of three Belgian party leadership elections. As a result, we obtain a comprehensive model with eight different vote motivations: policy positions, electability, competence, perceptions of personality traits, socio-demographic characteristics, personal relationships, party-organisational reasons and negative voting. Our findings also show that the kinds of motivations that are put forward by members are dependent upon the number of contenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Politische Vierteljahresschrift is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article we describe how Portuguese political party leaders use Twitter as a communication tool, in a longitudinal perspective, in several moments of the political calendar, including the precampaign and election campaign periods of the 2022 parliamentary elections. The main goal is to understand how intense the use of Twitter is and identify communication patterns of use of this tool. The data is made up from a sample of 1571 tweets, published by Portuguese political party leaders of PS and PSD (traditional parties that have run the government) and BE and Chega (more recent parties, on the left and right, of the party landscape), collected in specific periods throughout 2021 and 2022. The tweets were subsequently submitted to the content analysis method and worked informatically through the MAXQDA program. The results reveal that Twitter is part of the communicative strategies of the Portuguese political party leaders throughout the year but in the pre-campaign and electoral campaign periods. They show that Twitter is used for the dissemination of the party leaders' daily agendas, becoming a self-referential communication mechanism. For the opposition party leaders, Twitter is a new arena for political confrontation and is used to criticize or respond to political opponents. With few exceptions, Twitter is not used to present dimensions of the personal life of party leaders. The structure of the tweets tends to be complex, aggregating text and images or video, which shows a care in the way party leaders communicate through Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars commonly observe that lawmaking in Congress has transitioned from the textbook system of "regular order" in which power was decentralized in committees and lawmaking followed a formal process to one of "unorthodox lawmaking" characterized by the centralization of power in party leaders and a lack of formal process. It is debated whether this change marks a decline in Congress's lawmaking capacity, or is a procedural adaptation that has allowed Congress to remain productive despite high levels of partisanship. In this article, we maintain that lawmaking in Congress varies along two dimensions: formality of process and centralization of power. We analyze non-spending bills added to omnibus appropriations packages to demonstrate that lawmaking on these bills is informal and decentralized. Rank-and-file members retain a capacity to place matters on the legislative agenda and authorizing committees retain gatekeeping and policymaking authority. The process through which add-ons are approved is also bipartisan. Our findings demonstrate that this style of lawmaking is a procedural adaptation used by members to pass legislation important to their districts and in which committees continue to play an important deliberative role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study brings a fresh perspective to elite polarization by examining how policymakers and party leaders interpret and respond to it. Polarization is examined through the language and lived experience of those most familiar with it—policymakers themselves. Face-to-face interviews posed qualitative and quantitative questions to 212 legislators and 13 key informants from two states that varied in polarization. Most legislators describe polarization in negative terms. Consistent with "Community Dissonance Theory," analyses reveal differences in a legislature's institutional culture with policymakers in the more polarized state reporting more fraying of the social fabric and fracturing of decision-making processes. Specifically, legislators report more limited opportunities to build relationships with colleagues across party lines and for the minority party to make meaningful contributions. Corroborating the "Theory of Pernicious Polarization," polarization appears to function as a relationship-based process that leaders can use for instrumental political ends. Polarization depends on whether party leaders react to rifts in tribal, non-compromising ways and how the minority responds. Consistent with "Conditional Party Governance" theory, party leaders can contribute to dysfunctional polarization by encouraging homogeneity in their own party and polarity from the opposing party. Drawing on policymakers' own words, states vary in whether elite polarization is dysfunctional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party leaders are the most visible exponents of the party, and their competence is associated with leadership effectiveness, strategic vision, understanding of the political game and performance. This article aims to explain the factors that determine the behavior of party leaders in Romania. In this regard, the article analyzes the competence of leaders between 2004-2021. The analysis clarifies the extent to which there is a link between political experience, seniority in office, the level of internal competition and the competence of leaders. The study provides an in-depth perspective on understanding leaders’ behavior through a large number of selected politicians and the multiple variables. The article analyzes 16 terms as party president, from four parliamentary parties. The results illustrate that several factors can have a positive or negative influence on the competent behavior of party leaders.

Copyright of Politiikka is the property of Finnish Political Science Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article is the first attempt at describing and comparing leaders of four most important populist groupings in Poland: Samoobrona, PiS, LPR, Kukiz’15. It makes three primary contributions to the literature of the subject. In its theoretical aspect, it shows that the literature concerning the analysed issue is still at the stage of being developed. When it comes to the analysis of data, it was found that populist party leaders played an important political role in Poland. In the case of Samoobrona, PiS and Kukiz’15 they played a key role in the process of origination of their parties, while in PiS they still hold a very strong intra-party position.

Despite the abundant literature on consecutive reelection, few works examine how party leaders’ preferences over incumbent traits can affect the future positions of sitting legislators. This paper examines how consecutive reelection and strong party leader control over candidate selection combine to promote certain types of politicians for renominations for reelection, while others are consigned to candidacies for lower posts or left out of the selection process. We use Mexico’s first experience with consecutive reelection since 1932 to better understand how incumbents’ interests and the demands of party leaders shape candidacy outcomes by examining whether the incumbents from the 2018-2021 term were able to win a renomination bid or were sent to a higher or lower post. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is the first attempt at describing and comparing leaders of four most important populist groupings in Poland: Samoobrona, PiS, LPR, Kukiz’15. It makes three primary contributions to the literature of the subject. In its theoretical aspect, it shows that the literature concerning the analysed issue is still at the stage of being developed. When it comes to the analysis of data, it was found that populist party leaders played an important political role in Poland. In the case of Samoobrona, PiS and Kukiz’15 they played a key role in the process of origination of their parties, while in PiS they still hold a very strong intra-party position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this report, we analyse subnational electoral dynamics, reviewing some temporal patterns of both municipal and departmental elections in Colombia; however, we focus particularly on the most recent elections in 2019. Local and regional electoral dynamics are significantly decoupled from national politics and, despite the existence of the same party labels across all levels of government, we show that political parties are secondary actors in subnational elections whose central purpose is to satisfy legal requirements for candidate nomination. Leaders of political machines and other regional or local political organizations are the centre of subnational electoral politics. Therefore, parties are not the appropriate units of analysis to understand electoral (or post-electoral) subnational politics. In contrast, coalitions of variable composition that transcend parties shape processes of political cooperation and competition in local and regional electoral politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We combine the recent literature on issue competition with work on intra‐party heterogeneity to advance a novel theoretical argument. Starting from the premise that party leaders and non‐leaders have different motivations and incentives, we conjecture that issue strategies should vary across the party hierarchy. We, therefore, expect systematic intra‐party differences in the use of riding the wave and issue ownership strategies. We test this claim by linking public opinion data to manually coded information on over 3600 press releases issued by over 500 party actors across five election campaigns in Austria between 2006 and 2019. We account for self‐selection into leadership roles by exploiting transitions into and out of leadership status over time. The results show that party leaders are more likely than non‐leaders to respond to the public's issue priorities, but not more or less likely to pursue issue‐ownership strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia y Politica: Ideas, Procesos y Movimientos Sociales is the property of Departamento De Historia del Pensamiento y de los Moviemientos Sociales y Politicos (Madrid) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to the success of populist actors around the world. However, to a lesser extent, the focus has been directed towards the way in which populist political communication is used by other parties and how populist political communication has developed over time. Hence, this article takes a longitudinal approach to examine how Finnish party leaders have used populist communication during four parliamentary elections and if populist communication is contagious. This study argues that populism is best understood as a discursive frame, combined with the necessary element of people centrism with antielitism and/or exclusion of 'dangerous others'. Manual content analysis has been used to measure the usage of populism in Finnish party leader interviews during the parliamentary elections between 2007 and 2019. The analysis reveals that several party leaders used populist political communication and that an increase in its overall usage occurred during the 2011 parliamentary election. Most commonly, populism was used by the Finns Party's leaders and by leaders of other niche parties in the opposition. However, in the 2011 parliamentary election, certain mainstream parties also used populist political communication. The article critically examines the idea of a populist Zeitgeist and the contagious effect of populist political communication as an explanation for the significant increase in populist political communication. The article suggests that populist communication spreads to certain parties, but to speak of a full‐blown populist Zeitgeist seems exaggerated in a consensus‐seeking multiparty democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What little research exists on why party members quit has tended to find that exit is driven primarily by political and ideological concerns. This research note builds on this, framing this finding theoretically and arguing that such theory should allow for the role of negative triggers – events that cause people to quit. We focus on the example of changes of leadership. Using data from four Party Members Project surveys, we find that British party members seem to leave parties mainly for political and ideological reasons, and because of disillusionment or disagreement with their leaders. This disillusionment, in turn, is often based on perceived ideological differences. We illustrate this with tweets by Labour members cancelling (or considering cancelling) their membership in the immediate wake of the election of Keir Starmer as party leader in April 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is an analysis of the methods Italian parties used to select their leaders from 1946 to 2020. Using an extended database originally based on the Comparative Study of Party Leaders (Cospal) project and collected through a content analysis of the statutes, the study deals with three topics. First, the individual requirements for candidacy are examined; second, the different types of selectorates are reported; third, a cursory test of the conformity between statutes' provisions and actual leader selections is proposed. The analyses show that both candidacy requirements and selectorates have become more inclusive through time; that the diffusion of inclusive - and cumbersome - selectorates has been followed by the adoption of alternative faster methods of selection based on some type of party council to be used under pressure; and that there is a large overlapping between formal and actual selectorates. A result of this work is a quantification so far unavailable of intraparty democracy in Italy on a long period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces the thematic issue and considers what the articles tell us about new approaches to studying political leadership and populism. The editorial surveys the set of eleven articles by referring to their geographic concentration (North America and Europe), along with methodological and thematic similarities. In conclusion, the set of articles displays the diverse theoretical and methodological approaches currently employed in cutting-edge research on populism and political leadership.

In American politics, few argue with the idea that leaders matter: in the 2020 American election, the media closely tracked the performance and activities of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, for example, suggesting to us that who they are matters. Voters indicate on their ballot which presidential candidate they prefer, marking an x next to the person’s name, giving further credence to the idea that the individual matters in the process. Contemporary Anglo-Westminster-style democracies have many things in common with the United States, but operate with completely different political systems, and without a direct vote for a specific party leader. What is the relationship between voters and party leaders in these contexts? Do party leaders matter the same way in these countries? Has this relationship changed over time? Are we really seeing the personalization of parliamentary elections, as some scholars have suggested? The personalization literature provides us with mixed evidence of the increasing importance of leaders, and part of the reason for that maybe linked to the lack of comparable data. This paper assesses the role of leaders in the United States as well as four parliamentary democracies (Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) over time. Combining data from the election studies of these five countries from the 1960 s to the present, the analyses presented here suggest that leaders are not increasingly important to voters over time, but that leaders have always been important to election outcomes. What has changed over time, however, is the way partisans see the leaders of other parties. Partisans are increasingly polarized in their views of opposing party leaders, and this has the potential to change the impact of leaders in the electoral process.

Changes in electoral markets in the late 20th century have forced political parties to adapt. Having lost much support and facing growing disaffection, parties often resorted to organizational structure reforms as means to reengage with a dealigned electorate. This article explores the impact of two changes in party organization—democratization of leadership selection procedures and increasing leadership power—on the extent to which leaders have an effect on voting behavior. In doing so, it analyzes the understudied interconnection between the electoral and the party faces of the presidentialization of politics thesis. The results provide mixed evidence regarding the relationship between both dimensions of presidentialization: more leadership power boosts leader effects, but only non-divisive direct leadership elections favor leader effects. This is a comparative study on Western democracies, combining individual-level data from the Comparative of Study of Electoral Systems with contextual data from the Political Party Database Project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliamentary party leaders have an electoral incentive to protect the informational value of their party's label by promoting unity, but recent research has shown that parties can also benefit electorally from appealing broadly through a wide distribution of candidate positions on political issues. This article suggests that party leaders with formal candidate nomination powers balance these incentives by nominating new candidates who are more congruent with the party when the distribution of issue positions among the senior candidates is wide, and, conversely, by nominating new candidates who are more divergent from the party when the senior candidate position distribution is narrow. These possibilities are tested with candidate survey data from six parliamentary democracies, and the results show that new party leader nominations are indeed conditional on the senior candidate distribution, but only on issues that are salient to the party's electoral brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing cooperation between Russia and Turkey date back to the 1990s, and go beyond the preferences of a specific political party or leader. A number of geopolitical interests pitted Russia and Turkey against one another in neighboring regions. The escalation of PKK attacks in Turkey starting in July 2015 and the failed coup attempt of the Gulenists in July 2016 motivated Turkey to seek closer relations with Russia as the United States became an increasingly unreliable actor in the context of Turkey's fight against the PKK-PYD and the Gulenists. Likewise, Russia's dependence on the Turkish Straits as its main supply route to its bases in Syria, Turkey's role as a key customer of Russian natural gas and grain, the goal of breaching Western economic sanctions, as well as consolidating Russia's internal security, all motivate Russia to seek closer relations with Turkey., Introduction The foundations of increasing cooperation between Russia and Turkey in the 2010s date back to the 1990s, and hence transcend the idiosyncratic choices or contingent preferences of a specific [...]

Nobody loves a good government scandal more than journalists and opposition party members, except perhaps policy pundits, pollsters, and Internet trolls. And that, in a nutshell, is why the political [...]

The Russian Civil War saw an influx of bundists, including many party leaders, into the Russian Communist Party. This article will follow the career of one leading bundist from his first days in the Bund through his death in 1937, with particular emphasis on 1918-19, when he pivoted away from the anti-Communist faction of the Bund that he led to become a major figure in the Soviet Union. Using newspapers, memoirs, and archival documents, this article examines various motivations for his volte-face, including the German Revolution, antisemitic violence committed by the military of the Ukrainian Directorate, and the seeming success of the Communist project, to shed light on the relationship between Jews, radicalism, and the Soviet Union. Key words: Bund, Ukraine, pogroms, Communism, Most histories of the Russian Revolution in 1917 emphasize the Bolshevik conquest of Russia. As important, but not nearly as well understood, was the success of Lenin's Bolshevik Party and [...]

Partisan dealignment has been frequently advanced as a pivotal driver of the personalization of voting behavior. As voters' long-term attachments with parties have eroded, it is argued that partisanship has lost importance relative to short-term factors, like voters' evaluations of party leaders. Such theoretical reasoning has been applied recurrently in research dedicated to explaining vote choice. However, we hypothesize that dealignment can downplay partisanship's impact vis-à-vis leaders in the same way regarding turnout decisions. This article aims at demonstrating the importance of voters' evaluations of party leaders in their probability to turn out in parliamentary elections through a novel data set pooling 52 national election surveys from 13 Western European parliamentary democracies between 1974 and 2016. The results confirm the increasing relevance of leaders in explaining turnout decisions and a decline of partisanship's mobilizing ability. These trends are further accentuated among individuals with a television-dominated media diet, demonstrating the role of media change in driving this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational choice theories of political behaviour start from the premise that parties seek policy, office, and votes. In accordance with this premise, previous research has shown that electoral performance and office achievement independently affect party leader survival. However, we know little about how goal attainment interacts across these two domains. This paper proposes a novel hypothesis stating that intrinsic goals (office) dominate over purely instrumental ones (votes). As a result, the impact of electoral performance on party leader survival should be conditional on office achievement. Using data on over 500 party leaders in 14 parliamentary democracies between 1965 and 2012, we show that electoral performance and office achievement strongly affect leadership turnover. However, we also demonstrate that the electoral performance effect disappears when parties enter or exit office at the same time. These results constitute the best direct evidence to date that parties prioritise office achievement over electoral success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The external image of party leaders has often been analysed through their behaviour or reflection in the media. However, we know little about how party leaders are seen internally. This article addresses this gap in the literature and seeks to explain what determines the variation in party members' perceptions of leadership styles. It builds on the transactional–transformational continuum and uses original survey data from a modified version of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. The analysis includes 12 political parties with parliamentary representation from Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania between 2004 and 2018. The findings of the mixed-effects linear regression illustrate that in general older and active party members are more likely to see their leaders as transformational. The determinants of leadership style assessment differ greatly across political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces the thematic issue and considers what the articles tell us about new approaches to studying political leadership and populism. The editorial surveys the set of eleven articles by referring to their geographic concentration (North America and Europe), along with methodological and thematic similarities. In conclusion, the set of articles displays the diverse theoretical and methodological approaches currently employed in cutting-edge research on populism and political leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau took office in 2015 as Canada's prime minister, a top priority was to establish Canada as a global leader on climate change. At the [...]

As political parties expand opportunities for intraparty participation, understanding the effects of participatory events on party actors becomes ever more important. In this study, we investigate the consequences of an intraparty referendum in a state branch of Germany's Christian Democratic Union on beliefs and attitudes of party members. We use longitudinal survey data bracketing a nonbinding issue referendum on the party's stance on same-sex marriage. Our analysis shows that the referendum had secondary effects that went beyond the referendum's primary goal of delivering an informal opinion poll to the party leadership. The experience of having a say in an important policy decision fostered members' sense of party-specific efficacy. Furthermore, the referendum provided party members with information on elite positions and stimulated leadership evaluation based on issue congruency. Altogether, involvement in intraparty decision-making promotes beliefs and behaviours among the rank and file that are relevant to uphold a vivid and empowering party life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties in the Baltic states remain largely understudied, especially when it comes to the populist radical right (PRR). Currently, two of the three Baltic countries have PRR parties represented in their national parliaments, Nacionā lā apvienī ba (the National Alliance, henceforth the NA) in Latvia and Eesti Konservatiivne Rahvaerakond (the Conservative People's Party of Estonia, henceforth EKRE) in Estonia. Both parties have charismatic leaders and are led in a top-down manner, keeping in line with the literature on this party family. Many political actors in numerous countries make ample use of Twitter and other social media, and the PRR in particular has proved very successful at using social media to their advantage. My article provides a comparison between the leadership of the two aforementioned parties, using a paired comparison method, highlighting the position of the party leader; how each leader is selected; the political activity of party leaders; the electoral activity of each leader; and, fi nally, an analysis of how each party leader uses the social media microblogging site, Twitter. The NA and EKRE are similar in that they are both parties which can be categorized in the PRR party family and are nationalist parties in countries which experienced Soviet occupation as well as the policy of Russification. Further, until quite recently1, both have directed nativist policies around language issues and the Russian-speaking population (Auers and Kasekamp 2013, Wierenga 2017). Th erefore, the NA and EKRE make for an ideal comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyse the role and importance of leaders in the Czech populist parties and movements, as well as determining significant factors which condition their institutionalisation. The main focus will be placed on the role of leaders in establishing their respective parties, their formal position and intraparty selection processes in VV, ANO, SPD and ÚPD. Examples of actions taken by the leaders of ANO and SPD show that building populist parties on the foundation of the strong, formal and official position of the leader in their party as well as becoming open to more members prove effective when it comes to the discussed issues... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rarely do twins play active and significant roles in politics. Yet in 2006 President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, designated his twin brother Jarosław to be prime minister. The aim of the current publication is to analyse the political activity of Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński in the context of the founding of PiS and its functioning. Th eir position inside the party is undisputed. Moreover, as there is no opposition inside the party and Jarosław Kaczyński achieves spectacular electoral results, his legitimisation as autonomous leader of the party is strengthened even further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several scholars of populism have pointed out that populist parties rely very oft en on so-called charismatic leadership (Canovan, 1981; McDonnell, 2015). While the rise of populist parties in Europe in the last decade is quite evident and well-studied, what remains understudied is how this phenomenon interacts with other transformations that are currently shaping parties and party systems in European democracies. In particular, what is the interplay between the rise of populism, political leadership and personalization of politics? Th is link between populism and leadership could be understood in the light of the change occurring within party organizations, and internal party democratization in particular (Musella, 2015; Pogunkte and Webb, 2007; Karvonen, 2010; Scarrow et al. 2017). Following these studies underlining a close relationship between pop ulism, leadership and inclusive leadership selection methods, in this paper we aim at empirically exploring how the personalization and democratization of organizational patterns affect the role of the leader in populist parties. To what extent does the use of inclusive selection methods of party leaders within populist parties affect the scope of their organizational power and strengthens the party's personalization patterns? To explore this research question, we focus on a case study, the Lega Nord (LN) in Italy as an empirical illustration and we rely on original survey data, on aggregated electoral data as well as on primary and secondary data on party organizational rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its right-wing populist character, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) shows no signs of a strong party leadership. We ascribe this state of the party leadership to the AfD's institutionalization as a new party and show how organizational features interact with the skill set and goals of the party leaders. At the party level, we, fi rstly, outline the organizational change at the top of the party and the party leader selection rules. Secondly, we depict leadership turnover and competitiveness. At the leader level, we investigate the failure of Bernd Lucke, the key founder and one of the initial party leaders, as a manifestation of the leadership-structure dilemma of new parties. Embedded in a leadership team and faced with a growing extra-parliamentary party structure, Lucke tried to secure his initial autonomy and position of power by an attempt to become the sole party leader. His subsequent exit from the AfD laid bare the fact that he was not able to manage the challenges of the organizational consolidation phase, in which a new party needs a coordinator and consensus-builder. The AfD itself has proven its organizational autonomy from its initial leaders and its distaste for a strong and centralized party leadership. The barriers for the latter remain in place while, at the same time, the party institutionalization is still on-going, especially regarding its place in the German party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]