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Classic spatial theory expects parties to converge on the same ideological position given certain assumptions. Many of these assumptions fail to hold in most countries, which may account for why this prediction frequently fails to materialise. Due to a unique combination of institutions, Australia presents the best chance for the theory to work: all votes must flow to either of the two major parties, parties approximate unitary actors, and elections see turnout as high as any democracy. If convergence should happen anywhere, it should be in Australia, and many argue that Australian parties indeed fulfil this prediction. However, in contrast to much of the literature, we do not find Australian politics to be unusually centrist. Based on five measures of ideology, we do not find convincing evidence that Australia's party system is any more convergent than any other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politicians compete with each other for votes, political positions and popularity in an attempt to translate their ideological ideas into policy. Due to a lack of face-to-face interactions, voters base their vote mainly on what they see in the media. To measure the influence of media on political success during routine periods, this paper links popularity polls to media coverage of individual politicians. Using automated content analysis on longitudinal newspaper data (2003–2019), the visibility of individual politicians and the used tone was analyzed. We find that media visibility has an impact on popularity. This media effect is especially important for MPs seeing that the function of higher-ranking politicians already affects their popularity without media visibility. A significant effect is also found for tone on popularity scores. We find a negativity bias in which negative news affects the popularity of politicians, whereas positive news does not make a difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organisation of populist radical right parties significantly shapes their long-term electoral success. Within this party family, great organisational variation can be found, with the "Alternative for Germany" (AfD) representing a least-likely case: in terms of candidate selection (CS), it ranks much higher on democracy scales than the other Bundestag parties. This paper explores the reasons for this high level of intra-party democracy (IPD) by focusing on three explanatory dimensions: ideology, institutionalisation, and party unity. Methodologically, we apply multivariate analyses of representative quantitative data collected among AfD members in CS prior to the 2017 federal election. The results show that high political dissatisfaction and low levels of institutionalisation are important drivers of inclusive CS procedures. Overall, the article provides a deeper understanding of the underlying attitudes for the AfD's inclusive IPD, and offers substantial theoretical and empirical implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines party strategies in the short run during election campaigns? In this paper, I highlight a novel aspect of party behavior pertaining to the connection between election programs and actual campaign statements issued by party elites in the media. I argue that party leaders may feel compelled to fine-tune their rhetoric and stances during campaigns and thus deviate from their party's election programs. Nonetheless, their ability to conduct ad-hoc adaptations is limited. The theory I propose posits that two features of party organizations will determine if party leaders can engage in short-term inconsistencies. First, membership-dominated parties will be less likely to be inconsistent because their leaders will fear alienating (the strong) party members and getting punished as a result. Second, parties with strong societal integration—those that maintain strong ties with society and an extensive network of local branches—are more likely to indulge in ideological inconsistency because they establish close bonds with voters based on problem-solving rather than broad ideological principles. I test these dynamics in 14 European democracies between 1972 and 2017 and find strong empirical support. The findings show that intricate party organizations and robust connections with normal citizens influence parties' short-term strategies during election campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, social democratic parties have been confronted with the rise of second dimension issues. These issues often see social democratic parties facing a choice between competing portions of their own electorate. A particularly prominent second dimension issue is that of the EU: should social democratic parties take pro or anti-EU positions? I look at the case of the UK as an instructive example of this debate. I estimate a narrow counterfactual, simulating how the Labour Party's vote share and seat count would have changed as its position on Brexit changes. I call this counterfactual narrow because I only consider the effect of these position changes on vote choice and turnout, and not any broader consequences. I run two simulations to compare the implications of pure proximity and proximity-categorisation models of vote choice. I generate seat predictions from the simulation results by using Uniform National Swing and Uniform Regional Swing. Broadly, I find that being pro-Remain clearly benefited the party in terms of votes, but that results are more mixed in terms of seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent increase of democratic declines around the world – "the third wave of autocratization" – has sparked a new generation of studies on the topic. Scholars tend to agree that the main threat to contemporary democracy arises from democratically elected rulers who gradually erode democratic norms. Is it possible to identify future autocratizers before they win power in elections? Linz (1978) and Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) suggest that a lacking commitment to democratic norms reveals would-be autocratizers before they reach office. This article argues that the concept of anti-pluralism rather than populism or extreme ideology captures this. We use a new expert-coded data set on virtually all relevant political parties worldwide from 1970 to 2019 (V-Party) to create a new Anti-Pluralism Index (API) to provide the first systematic empirical test of this argument. We find substantial evidence validating that the API and Linz's litmus-test indicators signal leaders and parties that will derail democracy if and when they come into power. [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]

Research has suggested that fragmented political systems, incohesive parties, and weak programmatic links between voters and legislators can undermine the effectiveness of ideological legislative representation. Using Brazil's national and state assemblies, we examine the potential for voter-elite congruence in a legislative environment considered weak in programmatic representation and highly fragmented by a decentralized political structure. Focusing on 2005–2014, we use mass and elite survey data from the National Congress and 12 state assemblies to estimate deputies' and respondents' ideal points on a common left-right scale. Despite many potential barriers to ideological representation, we find an aggregate pattern of congruence between voters' and politicians' ideological positions during this period, with stronger voter-deputy correspondence for state deputies on average. These patterns are confirmed by a dyadic analysis of deputy and voter characteristics. However, we also find weaknesses in party-level ideological congruence for the major parties—for voters on the left and party supporters on the right. The findings suggest that, while the party system did not prevent overall ideological representation, it may have hindered important aspects of party representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far-right and populist right-wing political parties have garnered significant scholarly attention in recent years. They have acquired importance also in European political institutions such as the European Parliament (EP). We explore this issue by focusing on the European Conservatives and Reformists' (ECR) group in the EP. We analyse its current and former main national party delegations – the British Conservative Party, the Polish Law and Justice Party, and the Brothers of Italy – and unpack the ideological underpinnings of 'conservative' positions of the ECR group. How is 'conservatism' constructed in the EP? What role does gender play in these constructions? Significantly, we locate gender equality as a key area, crucial to the identity of what it means to be a conservative party in Europe today. We combine the analysis of ECR political programs with interview and ethnographic data. The article contributes to both the study of European Union (EU) politics and to research on national conservative parties. [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]

Despite growing attention to electoral brands, political scientists have largely remained "color blind," neglecting parties' chromatic choices. Moreover, scholars dedicated limited attention to how party organizations converge on the use of similar structures and communication strategies, thereby engaging in a process of institutional isomorphism. We seek to simultaneously fill both gaps by examining the logos of more than 300 parties in 35 democracies during the latest political elections. Our findings show that a strong relationship exists between ideology and the use of certain color hues: left-wing party logos mainly display hues at the red end of the color spectrum, while blue hues prevail among right-wing parties. Likeminded parties' chromatic isomorphism, however, is moderated by country and party-specific factors. Notably, the correlation between color hue and ideology is stronger in Western Europe and among older parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze the importance of party ideologies for foreign policy priorities as revealed in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). In doing so, I contribute to an increasing number of studies on the relevance of the partisan theory of public policy for foreign policy making. On the theoretical side, I expect liberal governments to direct more diplomatic efforts towards global development cooperation, that is, the fight against poverty, disease, environmental degradation, and discrimination. By comparison, I argue that the foreign policy of conservative governments emphasizes immediate conflicts and threats to national sovereignty. On the empirical side, I present the statistical analysis of all plenary speeches held by the representatives of 38 stable democracies before the UNGA between 1993 and 2016. My empirical analysis reveals that liberal, internationalist governments are significantly more engaged in UNGA debates on global development cooperation, whereas conservative governments allocate more speaking time to debates on the international law and institutions, including issues of national sovereignty. These results are confirmed when zooming in to UN General Debates. Importantly, I find that all of these effects are conditional on governing parties commanding substantive majorities in their national parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains party preference? Ideology and values do but these explanations are undertheorized. We offer grid-group cultural theory (CT) to provide a theory of ideology and values to explain party preference. We aim to demonstrate the value of an operationalization of CT that includes rejection of cultural bias (rejection of political values and beliefs) to explain party preference. Our study builds on research that recognizes the importance of negative partisanship and of rejecting cultural biases and other values in party choice. We analyze the influence of cultural biases on party preference in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. We find that respondents' top two cultural biases explain up to a third of the variation in respondents' party support in these Nordic multi-party systems and that rejection of cultural biases is an important determinant of party preference. We discuss how our analysis can be extended to other party systems including those with only two major parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The left–right scale is widely used to measure ideological orientation. Relying on Freeden's approach to political ideology as a 'conceptual morphology', we argue that the meaning of 'left' and 'right' may change, but these changes are more likely for peripheral than core concepts. To test this argument, we analyze open-ended questions on the meaning of 'left' and 'right' included in two waves of surveys of German parliamentary candidates collected before and after the 2015 European migration crisis. The empirical results based on Structural Topic Models show that the candidates' party affiliation colours the connotations of political concepts. In particular, we find that the core concepts ascribed to the meaning of left and right remained stable, while changes occurred with one peripheral concept in particular, namely, 'Racism', which is most often ascribed to the term 'right'. We conclude that morphological analysis can help better understand the concurrency of change and stability in ideological orientations and provides a fruitful linkage between electoral research and political theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within many countries, voters not only have to cast a vote for a political party, but also have the option to select (a) candidate(s) within that party, a so-called preferential vote. Recent studies indicate that several factors influence the success of candidates within this intra-party competition, such as ballot list position, political experience, and socio-demographic characteristics. However, it has not yet been investigated whether ideology also matters for intra-party success. This study investigates the role of the ideological position of candidates within their party on the share of preferential votes they obtain. Can candidates win preferential votes by taking ideological niche positions within the party? To investigate this question, the study uses data from a candidate survey conducted during the 2014 Belgian elections in which candidates were asked to position themselves ideologically. The results of this study indicate that ideology does not play a strong role within the intra-party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research, we examine the role of attachment to an ideological group as a source of stability in a volatile multi-party system. In two studies conducted in Israel (N = 1320), we show that a multi-item Attachment to an Ideological Group (AIG) scale is strongly tied to vote choice and political engagement, and its effects are independent of, and more powerful than, issue-based ideology and partisan identity strength. Compared to individuals with a weak ideological attachment, those who score highly on the AIG scale are more likely to vote for a party from their ideological camp and participate in politics. Moreover, in two survey experiments, respondents high in AIG displayed stronger anger or enthusiasm—known harbingers of political action—in response to threat or reassurance to their ideological group's status, attesting to a link between AIG and political engagement. Our findings underscore the importance of ideological group attachments in a volatile multi-party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Five Star Movement (M5S) emerged as Italy's largest party in the 2018 election. After one year in government with the far-right League, the party formed a new coalition with the center-left Democratic Party (PD). These unconventional alliances and the M5S's ambiguity on substantive issues such as immigration and minority rights raise questions on the value positioning of its voters. Does the M5S represent a socially liberal electorate, or has the party become a new home for voters expressing sentiments of hostility toward immigrants and minorities? I hypothesize that the M5S's ambivalence on social issues enabled the party to attract a significant share of voters with exclusionary attitudes toward foreigners and minorities. I use survey data to measure individuals' dispositions toward outgroups and run binary and multinomial logistic regressions to predict vote choice for the M5S and the other main parties in the 2018 election. The empirical findings suggest that the M5S has become a valid option for voters adhering to exclusionary attitudes, and show that there is no particular elective affinity between the voters of the M5S and the PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical right-wing parties often use the attack on feminism as a central argument in their political discourse. The Spanish political party Vox, born in 2013, is a good example of this phenomenon. This paper analyzes Vox's Instagram posts for the party's two last electoral campaigns previous to the two successive general elections held in Spain in 2019. After the collection, selection and quantification of these data, we carried out a qualitative analysis of the semantic networks created through the utilization of images, videos, texts, interactions, hashtags and emojis. Our findings identify five fundamental arguments: classic gender nationalism, anti-Muslim gender nationalism, delegitimization and ridicule of feminism, discrediting the concept of gender, and the idea that Vox is, in fact, the party that most advocates for women. An outstanding discursive strategy used throughout the sample is that of contrast and association. Signifiers with a strong positive signified and broad social acceptance (euphoric terms) are associated with this party and its political positions. In contrast, negatively charged signifiers and hate-instigating terms (dysphoric) are associated with feminism and the so-called "gender ideology." [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]

It has become almost a truism that parliamentary elections have become more personalized. However, evidence for this proposition among voters is relatively mixed and we lack a quantification of leader inspired voting. Using data from Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project and consistent measures of leader and party popularity across 86 parliamentary elections in 31 polities between 1996 and 2019, we break new ground in the study of behavioral personalization in several respects. First, we provide a consistent and longitudinal test of leader inclined voting, separate from party evaluations, in the form of a vote-leader/party favorite alignment index. Our results show 6% of voters align their vote with their favorite leader solely, and one in five voters align their vote primarily with their favorite leader. While significant, more voters align their vote with their favorite party. Second, we find that leader motivated voting is most prevalent among non-partisans, older voters, and in elections where ideological polarization is low. Third, we demonstrate that voters solely motivated by leaders are most likely to switch their votes between elections. Our results have implications for our understanding of leaders' impact on elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outside the US, the crucial question of how well politicians represent the preferences of voters is usually investigated at the party level. Reversing this perspective, we examine representation in Europe from the point of view of individual candidates running in national parliamentary elections. This is especially insightful in a period that seems characterized by a decline in parties' representational capacities and an increasing personalization of politics. We analyze representation by considering the incongruence between candidates' left–right positions and the average placement of their party voters. By combining candidate survey data with mass survey data on voters, we assess how ideological incongruence varies according to predictors measured at the levels of candidates, parties, and party systems. The results highlight a systematic association between a partisan style of representation and candidates' proximity to voters, as well as the interactions between representational roles and factors such as the anti-establishment nature of parties and ideological polarization in the party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of July 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky's new party, Servant of the People (SN) won a majority of seats in the context of what had been a 'frozen cleavage' dividing party voters along a single geo-cultural dimension: pro-West/anti-Soviet versus anti-West/pro-Russian positions. Analysing a unique set of surveys of public and expert opinion, we find that its unprecedented success stems from the extreme weaknesses of the existing and often discredited parties rather than ideological shifts. Our findings also question whether challenger parties in other contexts, including consolidated democracies, must compete on new issue dimensions in order to succeed electorally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intra-party politics has long been neglected due to lacking data sources. While we have a good understanding of the dynamics of ideological competition between parties, we know less about how individuals or groups inside parties influence policy, leadership selection and coalition bargaining. These questions can only be answered if we can place individual politicians and sub-party groups like factions on the same dimensions as in inter-party competition. This task has been notoriously difficult, as most existing measures either work on the party level, or are in other ways determined by the party agenda. Social media is a new data source that allows analyzing positions of individual politicians in party-centered systems, as it is subject to limited party control. I apply canonical correspondence analysis to account for hierarchical data structures and estimate multidimensional positions of the Twitter accounts of 498 Members of the German Bundestag based on more than 800,000 tweets since 2017. To test the effect of intra-party actors on their relative ideological placement, I coded the faction membership of 247 Twitter users in the Bundestag. I show that Twitter text reproduces party positions and dimensions. Members of factions are more likely to represent their faction's positions, both on the cultural and the economic dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the motivations driving members of the US Congress to introduce bills that require new federal spending, testing a classic "party matters" hypothesis that spending is motivated by partisanship with Democrats spending more on social programs and Republicans more on defense and social order. To test this hypothesis, we introduce a new dataset that codes Congressional Budget Office reports, allowing us to link cost estimates to over 7,000 congressional bills. Overall, we find very little evidence that partisanship or ideology can reliably predict the cost of bills. Bills introduced by Democrats call for similar levels of new spending as those introduced by Republicans, even on policy topics where partisan divisions are thought to be pronounced. These results raise the possibility that when it comes to spending rank-and-file members are less motivated by abstract partisan commitments than traditionally thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the diverging electoral impact of instigating high-hostility militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) on the votes shares of hawkish, right-wing and dovish, left-wing incumbents, respectively. More specifically, I propose that deploying troops electorally harms doves and benefits hawks. I test this hypothesis via two studies. Study-1 presents a macro-level analysis of an incumbent's electoral performance in a dataset covering 389 elections in 27 democratic countries between 1950 and 2010. With the objective of capturing heterogeneity of individual voting behavior at the appropriate level, Study-2 scrutinizes cross-national survey results from Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) covering 19 elections in 6 democracies. Multilevel models across both studies concur that in times of conflict, voters become significantly less supportive of dovish, left-wing incumbents and slightly more so of hawkish, right-wing ones compared to times of peace. The results also suggest that doves lose particularly substantial support from their co-partisans and ideologically left leaners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relationships between political parties and interest groups form structures that enable and constrain political action. Yet there is a lack of consensus on what 'party-group relationships' means. We propose a conceptualization focusing on ties as means for structured interaction, which is different from sharing or transfer of resources and ideological kinship. Our conceptual discussion suggests that organizational ties form a single yet hierarchical scale of strength: groups that have many formal ties with particular parties would also have weaker (ie, less formal) ties with these parties, but not vice versa. To validate our conceptual map, we furthermore check whether the distinction between organizational ties, resource sharing/provision and ideological kinship holds empirically. We explore our expectations by means of novel interest group survey data from seven mature democracies. The results of our scaling analysis provide support for our predictions and have multiple implications for future research on the causes and effects of party-group relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have contrasted the political party systems in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with those in more democratic countries, raising three important points: (1) the religious–secular dimension, rather than the economic or social left–right, explains the underlying political party competition; (2) left-wing politics is relatively weaker than right-wing politics; and (3) parties that are traditionally known as rightist take left-leaning positions on numerous issue dimensions, and vice versa. Even though this particular literature on party politics in the MENA has greatly improved our understanding of political dynamics in the region, these studies have either lacked quantitative evidence to support these points or their evidence was limited to single-country cases. This study aims to address this issue by analyzing original expert survey data of the ideological positions of political parties in the MENA region. Results show that in addition to the religious–secular dimension, the economic left–right divide and the pace of political reforms are highly important dimensions. The study also provides numerous examples showing that the policy stances of leftist and rightist parties are significantly reversed when MENA countries are compared with more developed democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties in government prioritize issues that voters trust them to handle more than other parties. However, scholars disagree about whether this relationship exists because parties strategically prioritize issues that voters trust them to handle or whether voters first observe core party priorities while in government and then trust them to handle those issues. This article disentangles these two explanations, arguing that issue ownership is caused by the core priorities of elites. I evaluate this argument by leveraging the privately financed structure of US party-aligned think tanks, which provide important policy information to US political parties. I introduce new data on the policy content of 15,897 white papers published by the leading party-aligned think tanks in the United States. I find that think tanks aligned with both parties tend to distribute more policy attention to their owned issues, although the process works differently for Republicans and Democrats, and that these patterns are durable. I conclude that these results are strong evidence to support elite prioritization explanations for issue ownership, although they do not rule out other explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populism studies have rapidly burgeoned but systematic global empirical evidence about this phenomenon has lagged behind. How can party values be measured in consistent, valid, and reliable ways, facilitating identification of varieties of populism in countries around the world? To address this issue, part I outlines the conceptual framework. Part II describes the research design. The Global Party Survey (GPS) replicates previous expert surveys, expands coverage worldwide, and incorporates innovative scaled measures of populism. It draws upon estimates from 1861 experts and covers 1043 political parties in 163 countries (see www.GlobalPartySurvey.org). Part III summarizes some key cross-national results. Part IV presents robustness tests which confirm that the new GPS estimates of ideological values and populist parties are consistently correlated with several previous measures. The conclusion in part V summarizes the main findings and considers the potential uses of the data set for understanding populism as a global phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides a new frame of reference for understanding intraparty dynamics by analyzing party members' representativeness with respect to party supporters regarding socioeconomic status and the ideological spectrum in a multiparty system, namely that of Finland. The analysis is based on a unique member-based survey of Finland's six major political parties (N = 12,427), which is combined with supporter data derived from a nationally representative survey (N = 1648). The clearest difference was found between supporters' and members' social status as members were generally in clearly higher social positions. However, there is a wider gap between parties when comparing supporters and members in terms of social status. Findings show that political opinions on income equality are still a key difference between traditional mass parties at the different levels of party strata, while incongruence within parties is relatively low. In contrast to the traditional parties, the newer parties, namely the Finns and the Greens, are ideologically close to their supporters in terms of attitudes concerning immigration and environment. Together, these findings provide an interesting landscape of the last decade's changes in the Finnish political spectrum and contribute to the ongoing discussion on the changing forms of political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties have strong incentives to present a relatively cohesive policy position to the voters across different levels of a political system. However, the adoption of inclusive forms of candidate selection methods like primaries could result in the selection of top candidates for elections on the subnational sphere who are not favoured by the party leadership. This is often seen as a threat to high levels of intra-party programmatic cohesion. Because subnational party organizations depend to a significant degree on the support from their national party, we argue that regional party branches that selected their top candidates by means of a primary adopt a policy position that deviates less strongly from the one of their national party. However, candidates selected by primaries might need to be responsive to the preferences of their regional selectorate, so that the incentives for parties at a regional level to deviate substantially from the position of their national party organization could increase. By analysing the content of 150 regional election manifestos of Spanish parties, we find that if a party's top candidate for a regional election is selected in a primary, then the policy distance between the respective regional and national party decreases. However, this effect is not observable for recently founded parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a well-established empirical finding that governments on average lose votes during their time in office. This exploratory analysis examines whether all members of coalition governments suffer the electoral cost of governing equally. Using electoral data from 20 parliamentary systems from 1961 to 2015, I compare the electoral performance of junior coalition members, the prime minister of a coalition, and single-party governments. Furthermore, I examine the conditioning effects of economic performance, legislative institutions as well as party ideology and size. I find that there are substantial differences in the electoral cost of governing for different types of coalition participation. The evidence suggests that the prime minister in a coalition is partially insulated from the penalties of government and thus should try to attract junior coalition members whenever possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election campaigns are supposed to inform voters about where parties stand on policy issues. Yet campaign promises are not binding, since parties may advocate some policies in the campaign and implement others in office. This article thus analyzes the conditions in which voters believe party platforms. I argue that voters find platforms that can help the party obtain more votes to be less informative about the party's ideology. This hypothesis is tested with both mainstream and niche parties in Western Europe. The analysis also distinguishes between governing and opposition parties. Empirical evidence for parties in opposition fully supports the argument: For mainstream parties, which have vote-seeking incentives to appear ideologically moderate, voters discount centrist manifestos. With respect to niche parties, which tend to lose support if they moderate, voters discount extreme platforms. Regarding governing parties, this article confirms previous work suggesting that voters disregard the platforms of incumbent parties. These findings have implications for democratic representation, party competition, and electoral volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration is often perceived as a political topic that overlaps traditional ideological cleavages. Much research has focused on the positions of the extreme right, and little research has examined mainstream parties and their public stances on immigration. This shortcoming hampers broader understanding of political competition on this issue. Drawing on a political claims analysis of seven countries between 1995 and 2009, we present the salience, position and overall coherence of claims made by mainstream parties on immigration control and immigrant integration. Mainstream left parties adopt a more positive/expansive position on immigration and exhibit higher levels of coherence than centrist and right-wing parties. We also show that the impact of extreme-right parties on the political claims of mainstream left parties seems to be limited. Our conclusions highlight that immigration does not necessarily constitute a cross-cutting cleavage across mainstream left parties: Their ideological preferences remain aligned with their positive/liberal discourse on immigration control and immigrant integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous works conceptualized responsiveness as parties following every movement of median voters (MV) or party supporters. We argue instead that whether a party should follow every movement of MVs/supporters is conditioned, first, by whether the MV (or supporter) moves toward or away from the party position and, second, by whether the party is policy or vote-oriented. We examine these claims based on survey data, which allow locating voter and party positions on a common ideological scale. Our main results nuance previous findings. We show that mainstream parties do adjust their position according to shifts in the position of MVs but only when these shifts are away from their position as predicted by a vote-seeking strategy. Our results also indicate that niche parties do adjust their position but only when their supporters move toward their position as predicted by a policy-oriented strategy. Overall, our results indicate that parties adjust their position with changes in public opinion, but that their responses are contingent on party characteristics and the direction of the change in public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether there is a basic space in a parliament which grew out of a revolution and had no prior history of parliamentarism: the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848/49. We scale all 299 roll call votes to determine the dimensionality of voting as well as the positions of deputies and their party groups. We find two dimensions of disagreement and show that they can be interpreted in line with historical scholarship as conflict over who should govern (the people or the monarch) and conflict over state borders (inclusion or exclusion of Austria). We find that the party groups line up on the first dimension in ways consistent with historical scholarship on their political inclinations, but we also find wide variation in deputies' positions within and across parties. Moreover, deputies' positions turn out to be polarized on the territorial dimension but not on the government dimension. We conclude that ideological constraint was the primary structuring force in parliamentary voting. Our results underscore the pervasiveness of low dimensionality in parliamentary voting even in the absence of strong parties and agenda control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party-councillor ideological congruence reinforces party linkages with local voters and credibility of councillors as future party elites. This contribution examines the role of career motivations and selective incentives, as well as party branch characteristics in forming party-councillor congruence. The empirical analysis draws on the original survey of Croatian local councillors. The results find councillors with progressive ambition and those exposed to intra-branch competition reporting higher levels of ideological congruence with their parties, while no effect was found for holders of upper level party positions. Branch power has the opposite effect from expected. Party grassroots shape ideologically congruent professional politicians, but this function is challenged by shrinking supply of candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political identities are crucial for understanding electoral behavior: individuals who identify with a political party behave as loyal supporters who would hardly vote for competitors old or new. Although this is an obvious observation, it has received little attention in the study of populism—a set of ideas that not only portrays established political parties as corrupt and self-serving entities but also depicts "the people" as a homogenous and virtuous community that should run the government. In this contribution, we develop a novel theory that claims that populism can thrive only when an antiestablishment political identity exists. This identity denotes an emotional and rational repulsion toward all established political parties in a given country. We test our theory by analyzing original survey data from contemporary Chile. The empirical analysis reveals not only that a limited segment of the electorate holds an antiestablishment political identity coalesced by populism but also that there is a large segment of apartisans adverse to populism. These empirical findings have important consequences for the study of populism, particularly when it comes to analyzing its emergence and electoral potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have emphasized the decline of party membership and a decrease in party activism. Yet these general patterns hide a diversity of party members with distinct profiles, attitudes and behavior. Using Portugal as a case study, this article examines the heterogeneity of party members based on the different motivations for joining the party and distinct levels of involvement. The findings support previous typologies that distinguished between more activist versus more passive party members. The results also suggest that different party types present a distinct proportion of the two types of affiliates. In addition, these two types of members display distinct levels of ideological congruence with the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative research on party politics often has to assume that parties are unitary actors with homogeneous policy preferences simply because intra-party heterogeneity is difficult to measure. This article proposes a measure of preference heterogeneity based on surveys of party elites. We draw on Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS) data from 28 elections in 21 developed democracies to quantify intra-party heterogeneity and validate this measure. The usefulness of the measure is demonstrated by studying the effects of intra-party heterogeneity on issue salience. We find support for the hypothesis that heterogeneity regarding a policy issue tends to be negatively associated with the emphasis a party places on that issue by regressing measures of issue salience from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the Manifesto Project on our CCS measure of heterogeneity. Problems of elite surveys notwithstanding, drawing on this data source seems a promising way to overcome the unitary party assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central contention of this article is that coalition bargaining is permeated by the competing imperatives of unity and distinctiveness, and that rhetoric is key to managing these. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's 'new rhetoric', the article distinguishes three forms of identification and division – ideological, instrumental and interpersonal – at work within coalition bargaining. This framework is applied to the negotiations on electoral reform that preceded the formation of the UK coalition government in 2010. The analysis reveals that, through the rhetoric of identification, senior Conservatives and Liberal Democrats discovered ideological common ground on the equalization of constituency boundaries, together with a shared interest in promising to hold a referendum on AV, and thus succeeded in reaching a mutually acceptable agreement on this contentious issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on political attitudes has emphasized that coalition preferences determine electoral choices, prompting scholars to investigate the sources of coalition preferences. While it is not surprising that coalition preferences are strongly informed by spatial considerations, several studies have drawn attention to additional nonideological factors. Relying on this insight, the present study aims to systematically investigate the nonideological or valence component of coalition preferences. In order to decompose attitudes into their principal ideological and nonideological components, we apply a Bayesian unfolding model to coalition sympathy ratings. We find that coalitions differ strongly with regard to their valence component. This surplus cannot be reconstructed as a linear combination of the coalitions’ constituent party valences and is predominantly structured by campaign valence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is still relatively little research on what factors explain the share of women in cabinets across countries and time. Focusing on party ideology, we advance this budding research. First, we examine if heads of government from left-leaning and/or liberal parties tend to select a larger proportion female cabinet members than those from conservative parties. Second, we evaluate whether a switch toward a left-leaning or liberal government benefits women’s cabinet presence. We test both propositions empirically with a data set covering mainly Western and industrialized countries after 1968. Our statistical analysis only find lukewarm support for the first proposition, that is, left-wing parties are no longer more likely to nominate women to cabinet posts than other party families, particularly liberal parties. Rather, what we do find is that a change in government, regardless of whether the new formateur is left-wing, liberal, or conservative, benefits the nomination of women to cabinet posts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown that niche parties are both increasing in importance in European party systems and behave differently than their more mainstream counterparts. Indeed, there is growing evidence that the dynamic between green parties and social democratic parties is especially nuanced. Regionalist parties differ from other niche parties in that they can be found on the left, right, and center of the ideological spectrum. We find that regionalist parties benefit from increasing the ideological distance between themselves and the mainstream party that most often wins at the national level. However, regionalist parties’ relationship with the mainstream party that most often wins in their home region is more nuanced. Regionalist parties must be distinct enough from the mainstream rival in their home region to be an alternative but close enough to serious compete for the same voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideology is one of the most relevant variables in explaining the level of women's representation attained by political parties. While left-wing parties are typically the best performers, extant research has tended to overlook the diversity of the left block and predominantly focused on mainstream left-wing political parties, namely the Social Democrats. Yet, the Left also includes both Green parties and radical left parties. This article analyzes the differences that exist within this largely heterogeneous group of parties across Western Europe. In particular, it explores how the diverse ideological background of radical left and Green parties leads to varied ways of engaging with feminism, diverse forms of organizing women within their ranks as well as dissimilar positions toward gender quotas. These shape different levels of women's numerical representation in public office and in party decision-making positions. Generally, we find that ideology is a greater determinant of representation than geographical region. Our findings also show a significant convergence among distinct party subgroups in terms of their share of elected women in both party and public office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonplace to see references to parties’ manifestos as their written issue “profiles,” and changes in such documents as constituting changes in the parties’ “images” or “identities,” with the latter terms often used interchangeably to capture the role of platforms. This article argues, however, that projection of a party’s “image” and its “identity” are two different functions for a manifesto, not just one, and that it is important for the building and testing of theory that this distinction be maintained. Parties are, after all, addressing two audiences simultaneously with one document, and the two dimensions provide two alternative objects of change which can be used strategically to please both audiences at once.The article employs existing manifesto-based measures of parties’ relative issue emphases and their positions on a range of issues as indicators of image and identity, respectively, and finds that the two are indeed empirically distinct. Then, an earlier test of the electoral performance hypothesis as applied to emphasis change is replicated with data designed to capture change in issue positions. The test provides evidence for the prudence of maintaining the distinction between emphasis and position as two different dimensions of party profile change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party cohesion is a crucial aspect of parliamentary systems, and it varies across time, parties and systems. To explain these variations, scholars have set forth the influence of macro-level and individual-level factors. Although party-level factors have also been considered, the role of party family has been overlooked. This research seeks to fill this gap. To this end, I focus on one dimension of cohesion: the extent to which legislators have internalized the norm of party loyalty. The concept of party family permits to investigate the effect of party origin and party ideology beyond a policy-based approach and left-right dimension. Using attitudinal data of 829 parliamentarians elected in 14 European national assemblies, the analysis uncovers a party family effect, particularly in the green and radical right parties. The results suggest that a greater attention should be directed towards party family as a determinant factor of legislative cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]