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While the electoral decline of Social democracy has received considerable attention in the literature, much less is known about how the structural changes experienced by advanced capitalist societies in the past decades have affected support for the mainstream right. In order to fill this gap, this article examines the relationship between secularisation, educational expansion and support for Conservative and Christian democratic parties in 18 West European democracies since the 1960s. The analysis reveals that secularisation is negatively associated with support for the mainstream right, but the effect is only significant for Christian democratic parties. Moreover, the findings support the expectation that social conservatism tends to damage the electoral prospects of mainstream right parties in highly educated societies. This suggests that, although engaging in cultural wars might sometimes seem like a winning strategy in the short term, it is unlikely to produce long-term positive electoral returns for the centre-right in post-industrial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the extent to which Finnish and Swedish conservative parties adopted neoliberal ideas from the 1970s onwards. It does so by comparing their published programmes and contextualizing them politically and economically. Neoliberalism is understood as an intellectual tradition centred around the objective of increasing the role of the market mechanism in society. Concrete neoliberal programmatic ideas include critiques of the public sector and taxes, especially progressive taxation, and promoting the marketization of the public sector and liberalization of other sectors of society, such as finance and labour markets. The article shows that Swedish conservatives adopted neoliberal ideas considerably earlier than their Finnish counterparts and were more ideological in pursuing them. Both parties have traditionally called for tax cuts, but only Swedish conservatives called for a deregulation of financial markets and marketization of public services already in the late 1970s. The neoliberal 'breakthrough' only took place among Finnish conservatives in the 1990s, though they justified most reforms as pragmatic necessities rather than desirable from an ideological standpoint. These differences are explained especially by Finland's different geopolitical position during the Cold War and its tradition of shifting coalition governments, which led to milder ideological contestation than in Swedish bloc politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests two contrasting hypotheses about changes in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism–progressiveness, which pertains to attitudes toward matters of procreation, sexuality, and family and gender roles. While the "cultural turn" literature expects the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism to increase over time alongside that of all other cultural issues, studies inspired by secularization theory rather predict a decrease in its relevance—due to religious decline. Analyzing the data from the European Values Study (1981–2017) for 20 West European countries, we find empirical evidence for a decrease and no indication of an increase in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism. Religious decline weakened the effect of moral traditionalism on religious and conservative voting over time due to the most traditionalist voters shifting away from these parties. Our findings, therefore, highlight the need to differentiate between different types of cultural motives behind voting choice in Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on women’s political inclusion in conservative parties often examine the role of ideology. This article seeks to demonstrate that the role of ideology is best understood by considering its uses by and against female politicians. It does so by looking at multiple layers of conservative ideology: considering first conservatism as a discourse, the paper shows that women adhere to the AKP’s conservative gender ideology in order to ensure their political survival. Looking then at conservative ideology as a practice, the paper concludes that locally-sensitive analysis is necessary in order to identify how the constraining intra-party processes play out in women’s political exclusion. Depending on the constituency, exclusionary party mechanisms can be reinforced or undermined. Finally, the paper identifies the uses of conservative ideology by female politicians. While this aspect is often disregarded, women manage to make use of the party ideology and to navigate the narrow social and political space through a series of adaptation practices. The paper uses qualitative data (ethnographic and interview material) collected within Turkey’s conservative-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) between 2014 and 2019.

What motivated right-wing and conservative parties to endorse a policy of land expropriation and redistribution in Brazil? I argue that urban-dominated right-wing parties endorsed agrarian reform in order to: (i) reduce crime in wealthier metropolises by reversing rural–urban migration; and (ii) gain competitive advantage against left-wing challengers. To test this argument I conduct process tracing, analysing over 500 elite statements about agrarian reform, drawn from archival, interview and survey data. In addition, I model land expropriations at the municipal level and show how right-wing administrations disproportionately expropriated land in the states of origin of migrants and, within those, in localities where the Left was more competitive. My results portray how two externalities of inequality – crime and competition with the Left – motivated conservative support for agrarian reform in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Golden Age of the Welfare State ended, the male‐breadwinner family model traditionally supported by conservative parties has been put under pressure. Familialism appears to be no longer attractive to a changing, more volatile constituency. By comparing four different European countries – namely, Denmark, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom – this work investigates the evolution of the conservative parties' family policy positions in the post‐Fordist era (1990s–2010s). The article has two goals. First, relying on a multidimensional theoretical framework where both social consumption and social investment policy instruments are at stake, it probes whether conservatives have switched their positions by backing de‐familialism and thus the dual‐earner family model. Second, it explains policy position change or stability over time and cross‐country differences through a multicausal analytical framework. The content analysis of party manifestos shows that, in the post‐Fordist era, the conservative parties have supported 'optional familialism', thus upholding both familiarizing and de‐familiarizing measures. However, such positions are not static. In the 1990s, support for familialism was higher while, since the 2000s, there has been a constant, increasing backing of de‐familialism. While the shift is evident for all the parties, cross‐country differences remain. The comparative historical analysis has pointed out that the specific 'optional familialism' positions taken by the conservative parties over time result from the interaction of constituency‐oriented, institutional, contextual and political factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the widespread secularisation of West European societies, research has only found mixed evidence of a decline in the influence of religion on people's electoral preferences. A relatively recent line of inquiry has adopted a 'top‐down' approach to this problem, arguing that the impact of religion not only depends on structural social changes, but also on parties' convergence on moral issues. Drawing upon this 'top‐down' approach and the 'impressionable years' model, this article argues that parties' political strategies aimed at (de‐)mobilising social cleavages have a lasting effect on voters' party preferences. Using nine rounds of the European Social Survey for 19 West European countries, I find the impact of religiosity on voting for the centre‐right (Conservative and Christian Democratic parties) to be significantly smaller for voters who were exposed during emerging adulthood (aged 15–25) to a centre‐right party that adopted similar positions on moral issues to those of its main competitors. These findings have important implications because they highlight the role of generational replacement in bringing about electoral change, even when this is prompted by parties' strategic choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? The authors address this question by examining the consequences of the deadliest pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347–1351). They claim that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if the loss of life is high enough to increase the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor-repressive regimes, such as serfdom, become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. The authors test their theory by tracing the consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. They find that areas hit hardest by that pandemic were more likely to adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns, to exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics, and to have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler's National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic's fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine how labour market policy interventions, notably short-time work (STW), affect voting behaviour in times of electoral downturn. We use the 2009 German general elections as an example. This is a particularly interesting case because the grand coalition of Christian democrats (CDU/CSU) and social democrats (SPD) was up for re-election against the backdrop of a major recession following the 2007/08 financial crisis and extensively used STW policies to counteract rising unemployment. Interestingly, STW policy and unemployment vary considerably between regions. We exploit this variance to create a unique dataset that combines regional information on STW policy and unemployment in 299 German electoral constituencies with individual data from the post-election survey. Our results show that especially the SPD profited from high STW rates at constituency level on election day, but this policy was insufficient to preclude the major losses social democrats suffered during the election. More generally, our results indicate that classic labour market policy can generate electoral support for social democratic parties, even as a "junior partner" in a grand coalition. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether such support is sufficient for electoral victories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideology of conservative right-wing radical parties in modern Ukraine is analyzed. It is noted that the consideration of program work has witnessed the fact that the projects of reorganization of public relations contained in conservative right-radical doctrines have become obsolete. It is stated that the absence of a scientifically substantiated political program that takes into account objective circumstances in society, the advocacy of the priority of the principles of indeterminism and voluntarism, ignoring the causal links of social development, naturally leads to the fact that these ideological doctrines turn into eclectic complex of metaphorical slogans, declarations and aphorisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the effect of local economic conditions on voting behavior by focusing on the export-oriented agricultural areas of Argentina during the commodities boom. It assesses the marginal effect of export wealth on electoral outcomes by studying the impact of soybean production, the main Argentine export product during this period. The combination of rising agricultural prices and a salient national tax on exports allows us to evaluate how wealth and tax policy shape local electoral behavior. This study relies on a spatial econometric analysis of the vote across Argentine departments for the 2007-15 period, along with qualitative evidence from interviews and a descriptive analysis of government appointments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for the consolidation of party organisations? The specialised literature has stressed the importance of institutions in shaping the ways in which political parties organise. However, little attention has been paid to the role of federalism. We argue that in federal settings, party territorial organisational strategies condition their capacity to become consolidated parties. We illustrate our theory with an analysis of the development of conservative parties in Argentina and Mexico to explain their different levels of consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrant integration has been on the political agenda in France since at leastthe late 1980s, yet starting in the early 2000s this issue became bound up withconcerns about the oppression of minority women. This article examines theevolution of the issue over two decades, pinpointing when and why debatesover integration took on a gendered cast. The article's explanation centres on twofactors – the growing threat of the Front National coupled with the legitimationof gender-based claims in French politics. These claims were embraced byconservative politicians seeking to adopt a harder line toward immigration andled to the refashioning of core Republican concepts such as égalité and laïcité asbeing about gender equality. The use of similar themes by the Front National as ithas sought to move in from the political fringe reveals how gendered claims canbe deployed in an effort to keep anti-immigrant policies within the boundariesof liberal values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O presente artigo propõe uma tipologia de nacionalismos que distingue entre os nacionalistas extrovertidos, que vêm positivamente as relações das nações com outras nações, e os nacionalistas introvertidos, i.e., aqueles que assumem que as relações com as outras nações são inerentemente conflituosas. O artigo enumera, também, as semelhanças e as diferenças entre as tipologias introvertida/extrovertida e as que distinguem entre nacionalismo cívico e étnico. Para ilustrar a relevância desta tipologia o artigo analisa os discursos de dois partidos conservadores, o Partido Popular espanhol (PP) e o Lei e Justiça polaco (PiS). Em ambos os países os processos de adesão à União Europeia e a devolução de poderes para regiões sub-estatais levaram à transferência de poderes soberanos no interior e para além do Estado, forçando os partidos conservadores a reformar as narrativas introvertidas sobre a nação.This article proposes a typology of nationalism that distinguishes between extroverted nationalists, who view positively the nation’s relations with other nations, and introverted nationalists, i.e., nationalists who assume that relations with other nations are inherently ridden with conflicts. The article also points to the commonalities and differences between the introverted/extroverted typology and the distinction between civic/modernist and ethnic/perennial nationalism. To illustrate the relevance of the typology, the article analyzes the discourses of two conservative parties, the Popular Party (PP) in Spain and the Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland. In both countries the parallel processes of European accession and the devolution of powers to sub-state regions forced the transfers of sovereign powers within and beyond the state, forcing conservative parties to reform nationalism along the extroverted/introverted axis.

A wave of leftist governments has swept Latin America in recent years, attracting a great deal of scholarly attention. Yet a number of new conservative parties have attained considerable electoral success, as well. This paper argues that a conservative party can succeed electorally and consolidate organizationally when it is supported by two strong groups in society: the business community and the neoliberal technocrats. To assess the argument, I explore the successful trajectory of the rightist Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) in El Salvador. I then evaluate the generalizability of the argument by comparing ARENA’s trajectory with another conservative party in the region, Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI) in Chile. In addition to proposing a new theory for conservative party success in Latin America, the paper calls for the revival of socioeconomic explanations in political science. Recientemente, América Latina ha vivido un auge de gobiernos de izquierda que han atraído la atención de académicos y especialistas. Sin embargo, algunos partidos de derecha han logrado considerable éxito también. Este artículo sugiere que este último tipo de partidos pueden ser electoralmente exitosos y consolidar su organización cuando los apoyan dos fuertes grupos de la sociedad: los empresarios y los tecnócratas neoliberales. Para desarrollar dicho argumento, este ensayo examina el partido salvadoreño “Alianza Republicana Nacionalista” (ARENA) y lo compara con el, también exitoso, “Unión Demócrata Independiente” (UDI) de Chile. Así, además de proponer una teoría nueva sobre el éxito de partidos de derecha en America Latina, este artículo llama la atención sobre la utilidad de las explicaciones socioeconómicas en la Ciencia Política.

This article focuses on women's participation within conservative political parties in Portugal and Spain. It deals with the factors that may explain their increased participation since the 1990s, as well as the consequences thereof. Although women's political representation in both countries has increased, the differences between the Partido Popular Democrático-Partido Social-Democrata (PPD-PSD) and the Alianza Popular-Partido Popular (AP-PP) are still considerable. This study points out the factors that may have influenced the greater participation of women within the AP-PP, in comparison with the PPD-PSD, making use of interviews with leaders, both women and men, from those parties.Este artigo analisa a participação das mulheres nos partidos políticos conservadores em Portugal e Espanha. Explora os factores que podem justificar o aumento da sua participação nestes partidos desde a década de 90 e as consequências que daí advieram. Apesar de a representação política das mulheres ter aumentado em ambos os países, as diferenças entre o Partido Popular Democrático-Partido Social-Democrata(PPD-PSD) e a Alianza Popular-Partido Popular(AP-PP) são consideráveis. Este estudo realça as condições que poderão ter influenciado a maior participação das mulheres no AP-PP em comparação com o PPD-PSD, recorrendo aos depoimentos de líderes de ambos os sexos dos referidos partidos.

This article aims to contribute to the growing literature on the substantive representation of women in conservative parties by evaluating MPs’ claims to ‘act for women’ during parliamentary debates on reproductive health and same-sex marriage in the UK and Australia. It argues that the actions of centre-right MPs who made claims about the situation of women in their speeches can be understood as the substantive representation of women, but the nature of this representation is problematised. While some legislators’ actions can be understood as a ‘feminist’ substantive representation of women, the action of MPs who supported liberalising reforms can be broadly understood as a different kind of ‘conservative’ substantive representation of women, which aims to address women’s status in a more traditional way. This can be differentiated from the actions of a group of conservative MPs who claimed to ‘act for women’ but did not seek to address women’s position (even in a traditional way), which is considered conversely as the representation of conservative interests. This article argues that to fully understand MPs’ legislative behaviour in Westminster democracies, consideration of an MP’s ideological view must be central to any explanation of the substantive representation of women on ‘morality politics’ issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-national comparisons of proposed policies of individual parties are an underdeveloped part of the literature on environmental politics in general and climate politics in particular. Although conservative parties are portrayed as skeptical toward adopting climate measures or even supposed to ignore climate change, this study of nine conservative electoral manifestoes nevertheless finds that most of them support climate measures, even in the form of state interventions in the market economy. Market measures are not as dominating as could be expected, but a clear finding is that available fossil reserves seem to have an influence on conservative climate politics. The U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change. Conservative parties as such are not in opposition to climate policies, but the pro-business position is evident in that conservative parties do not challenge coal or petroleum in countries with large reserves of these resources. Related Articles [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent elections in Sweden and Finland are of note for contemporary politics. They confirm that the rightward shift in Nordic politics is not confined to Norway and Denmark but forms a more general trend. This includes increased appeal of both mainstream conservatives and populist radical right forces. This article contextualises this phenomenon within broader European developments. In accounting for the shift in question, the article stresses the cumulative effects of choices made by erstwhile centre-left hegemonic agents, most notably the consequences of the so-called Third Way. This perspective has the merit of providing a way for holding politicians accountable, and it avoids the fatalism entailed in invoking ‘inevitable’ structural developments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article proposes a typology of nationalism that distinguishes between extroverted nationalists, who view positively the nation's relations with other nations, and introverted nationalists, i.e., nationalists who assume that relations with other nations are inherently ridden with conflicts. The article also points to the commonalities and differences between the introverted/extroverted typology and the distinction between civic/modernist and ethnic/perennial nationalism. To illustrate the relevance of the typology, the article analyzes the discourses of two conservative parties, the Popular Party (PP) in Spain and the Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland. In both countries the parallel processes of European accession and the devolution of powers to sub-state regions forced the transfers of sovereign powers within and beyond the state, forcing conservative parties to reform nationalism along the extroverted/introverted axis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analysing the socially segmented party-voter linkages deployed by the Unión Demócrata Independiente (Independent Democratic Union, UDI), a Chilean conservative party, this article demonstrates the usefulness of combining Kitschelt's party-voter linkage framework with Gibson's conceptual approach to conservative party electoral coalition-making. In Latin America, parties take advantage of social fragmentation and the availability of non-state campaign financing to combine multiple linkage types and thus attract socially diverse constituencies. Although it is an opposition party, UDI's historical trajectory and organisation have enabled it to receive private funds from its traditional and party-identified core constituency (business and conservative sectors), whose programmatic preferences and interests it represents, and then use these resources in a 'charismatic ' mobilisation approach and particularistic exchanges with a non-core constituency (low-income, nontraditional voters of the radical right), in a segmented, but nationally integrated, electoral strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article focuses on women's participation within conservative political parties in Portugal and Spain. It deals with the factors that may explain their increased participation since the 1990s, as well as the consequences thereof. Although women's political representation in both countries has increased, the differences between the Partido Popular Democrático-Partido Social-Democrata (PPD-PSD) and the Alianza Popular-Partido Popular (AP-PP) are still considerable. This study points Out the factors that may have influenced the greater participation of women within the AP- -PP, in comparison with the PPD-PSD, making use of interviews with leaders, both women and men, from those parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]