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This paper explores the process of Europeanisation of party politics by examining the regulation of political parties by supranational European organisations. Despite the increased relevance of the regulation of the activity, behaviour, organisation and finances of political parties in European democracies, the supranational dimensions of this phenomenon have hitherto received relatively little systematic scholarly attention. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, combining approaches from the Europeanisation literature with legal theory and party scholarship. For the purpose of this paper, the rulings and regulations of the European Union, the various organs of the Council of Europe, and the European Court of Human Rights are analysed. The paper highlights the horizontal and vertical patterns of norm creation and diffusion and demonstrates that, despite a certain convergence of European standards, conceptions of democracy and corresponding regulatory paradigms have not become so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable from one another. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the empowerment of the European Parliament over the years is due to its special role in providing a bridge connecting the public’s policy preferences on the one hand, and the legislative behaviour of elected officials on the other. As the only popularly elected EU institution, successive treaty reforms increased the EP’s political power. These reforms were accompanied by an explicit desire to see citizens’ involvement in EU politics increase and, in turn, provide support and legitimacy to the European integration project. This paper models MEPs’ track records on various political issues, and assesses the extent to which their output is in line with the positions their party campaigned on and the policy preferences expressed in public opinion. The findings suggest that there are discrete patterns of representation, where some parties are more inclined toward greater congruence with their selectorate and manifesto than others. Furthermore, the degree of congruence varies across policy issues and is shaped, to a large extent, by institutional arrangements and political context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Do parties with different ideological origins adjust their policies in response to the binding commitments that derive from the European integration process? This paper examines whether party platforms have adapted to the ideological content of EU treaty provisions – based on ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘regulated capitalism’ – across a range of policy areas The analysis builds on existing research which has examined how party families respond to the challenges and opportunities of the integration process. This is the first study that focuses on long-term party policy adjustment across different policy areas by examining whether there has been a shift away from core ideological goals towards the direction of EU policy. The main finding is that there has generally been a shift towards the direction of EU policy across all party families in both member and non-member states. The findings have implications for the quality of representation and functioning of democracy in the member states since the deepening of the European integration process reduces ideologically distinct policy alternatives across party families and can hinder policy innovation [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper models the correlates of parties’ positions on the issue of European integration, asking why some parties are in favour of European integration, while others are less favourable or even opposed to it. The paper builds on existing work which has identified three sets of explanatory factors predicting parties’ positions on integration: the electorate, parties and party system characteristics. By employing multilevel modelling using data on over 220 parties in 14 Western EU member states for the years 1984 to 2006, the effects of party- and context-level predictors of parties’ positions on EU integration are assessed. The findings demonstrate that parties’ positions are primarily influenced by EU preferences of the general electorate, parties’ left–right ideological extremes and incumbency status. The results also show that the impact of party characteristics is moderated by the electoral context in which parties operate. Moreover, the interaction between both levels offers further insights as to the nature of these associations. Specifically, party size is a robust predictor of integration position only when accounting for the levels of party system's fractionalisation and polarisation. Additionally, parties oriented towards the centre of the ideological spectrum are even more likely to favour European integration within highly polarised systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper identifies possible micro-mechanisms for the operation of Lipset and Rokkan's freezing hypothesis and suggests that their effects do not disappear altogether with the decline of cleavage politics but are sustained by any persistent social or attitudinal divide between the electorates of different parties. A multi-level analysis of survey data from the 2004 European Election Study supports the expectation that political involvement should be consistently higher and volatility lower than otherwise expected among citizens who are predisposed to support particular parties because of their enduring attitudinal and social characteristics. This paper argues that this fact powerfully biases the choices of established parties towards appealing to those citizens who vote in a way that maintains existing political divides among groups in the electorate. This provides a new explanation of why the mobilisation of enduring social and attitudinal divides in the electorate makes party systems reflect past divides even when the conflicts that gave rise to them have lost some or all political relevance, for instance, because of a shift from the national to the European electoral arena. The analysis also provides additional insights into why European elections fail to produce a European party system and why sources of political participation and interest vary across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This framing paper introduces the symposium on gender and the radical right. Withthe exception of a few recent studies, gender issues have received little attention inresearch on the European radical right. The purpose of this symposium is to addressthat and examine (1) whether radical right parties are still ‘men's parties' – partiesled and supported primarily by men and (2) to what extent and how women andwomen's concerns have been included by these parties. It argues that radical rightparties have changed their appeal since their origins in the 1980s. There is nowevidence of the fact that radical right parties, at least in some countries, exhibitan active political involvement of women and engage in some representation ofwomen's concerns. This puts them in a more ‘standardised' political position vis-à-vis other parties. Given the current lack of focus on this topic, and given the recentgendered changes in radical right parties, this symposium stresses the academicand political importance of studying gender relations in radical right politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political initiatives promoting a far-right agenda have gained significant political influence in Western European democracies. This has occurred despite apparent broad-based public rejection of Europe's Nazi past. This is a puzzle, since there are affinities between the old and the new far right. This article addresses that puzzle. Theoretically, the article distinguishes between broad and narrow interpretations of what it means to reject Europe's Nazi past. Empirically, it shows how a well-established survey experimental template reveals substantive variations in public political tolerance of the far right. For citizens in five key Western European democracies, rejecting the Nazi past only means rejecting initiatives explicitly identified as neo-Nazi. For other far-right initiatives, political tolerance is more common and increases in accordance with these initiatives' institutionalisation in the party system. For far-right parties fully institutionalised in the party system, public political tolerance is at the same level as for other political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliamentarians and their party groups can employ many different instruments to communicate policy statements to their electorate (debates in plenary, presentations of committee reports, oral questions, written questions, and interpellations). Therefore, the design of these instruments should be analysed in one common framework. This paper seeks to provide a first step towards this goal by mapping and explaining the centralisation of parliamentary policy statements in all western European countries with a parliamentary system. It is argued that, on a theoretical level, there are two different causes for a stronger or weaker centralisation of the instruments of parliamentary policy statements: the electoral connection and efficiency. Empirically, it is shown that there are striking differences in centralisation both within and between countries which are worth exploring further. Moreover, the results of the statistical models suggest that the electoral connection is the driving factor behind the centralisation of the instruments of parliamentary policy statements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature on the partisan foundations of education policies leads to ambiguous expectations with regard to the predominant cleavage structures in party competition on this topic. There is disagreement as to whether leftist or rightist parties are responsible for increasing spending on education, while others claim that educational expansion has become a consensual topic. This paper analyses the cleavage structure of party competition over the topic of educational expansion, relying on data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. It identifies political parties as ‘issue-owners’ and ‘issue-ignorers’, respectively, and finds considerable variation with regard to cleavage structures of party competition between countries and across time. One tentative conclusion from the analysis is that policy legacies play an important role in shaping cleavage structures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Issue Yield model predicts that parties will choose specific issues to emphasise, based on the joint assessment of electoral risks (how divisive is an issue within the party support base) and electoral opportunities (how widely supported is the same issue outside the party). According to this model, issues with high yield are those that combine a high affinity with the existing party base, together with a high potential to reach new voters. In previous work, the model showed a remarkable ability to explain aggregate issue importance as reported by party supporters, as well as issue emphasis in party manifestos. This paper tests the implications at the individual level by comparing a conventional model where issue salience is determined from manifesto data with a revised model where issue salience is determined by issue yield. The empirical findings show that issue yield is a more effective criterion than manifesto emphasis for identifying the issues most closely associated with party support in the minds of voters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theories of electoral institutions and representation suggest that majoritarian and proportional systems will produce distinct patterns of party–voter congruence, with the centripetal incentives of the former pulling parties to the ideological centre and reducing, by comparison with the latter, congruence with voters to the right and left. Recent scholarship, however, has found little contemporary empirical evidence for this pattern but no satisfactory explanation has been advanced to account for these non-findings. This paper develops a new theoretical account of the impact of electoral institutions on congruence that takes into account the increasingly dealigned character of voters. The central argument is that the impact of institutions is conditional on the balance between partisans and independents in the electorate. It is this conditional nature of the influence that seems to account for the absence of the anticipated relationship of institutions to congruence nowadays. This theory is tested using a unique data set of party positions in 24 European states and its consequences are drawn out for the relative representational effectiveness of electoral systems in contemporary conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous studies suggest, and common wisdom holds, that government participation is detrimental for new parties. This paper argues that the opposite is true. Drawing on a large-N analysis (111 parties in 16 countries) in combination with two case studies, it demonstrates that new parties generally benefit organisationally from supporting or entering a government coalition. Compared to established parties, new parties have the advantage that their leadership is more able to allocate effectively the spoils of office, and can change still malleable rudimentary party structures so as to respond to intra-organisational demands, as well as the functional demands of holding office. The authors conclude by setting their finding in wider perspective and elaborate on its implications for contemporary West European politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies on the European Parliament have largely overlooked the impact of the inter-institutional context on its internal organisation. This paper argues that the stronger legislative powers of the Parliament vis-a-vis the Council of Ministers under the co-decision than under the consultation procedure affect the intra-parliamentary allocation of different types of legislative report. The analysis of the period 2004-07 shows that legislators from the centre-right party group coalition and loyal party group members are privileged in the allocation of co-decision reports. In contrast, legislators with outlying special interests and experts are given systematic access to drafting only consultation reports. The higher competition for co-decision versus consultation reports left unchecked by the formal EP rules has thus been exploited by party group leaders to promote group cohesion and coalition-building, producing clear winners and losers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the European Parliament, different coalitions form from one vote to the next. To understand the process of coalition formation it is necessary to consider the inter-institutional context in which decisions are made. This paper develops hypotheses regarding how changes in the relations between the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers affect coalition formation in the European Parliament. The hypotheses are tested using roll-call data from the fifth parliamentary term. In line with expectations, it is found that coalition patterns are more consistent in relation to final decisions under the co-decision procedure (when both institutions come to an agreement) than they are under the consultation procedure. Furthermore, the closer relations between the institutions have increased the importance of the median party group on the left-right dimension in coalition formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates religiosity in relation to party choice in European Parliament elections. Conventional wisdom tells us that as Europe has secularised, the effect of religion on party choice should also have diminished. Yet, this cross-national and cross-temporal study of religious voting in European elections from 1989 to 2004 paints a more nuanced picture. It shows that a) the effect of religion has been declining, but has increased in recent years, b) religion matters in particular for voting for Christian Democratic parties and Conservative parties, c) while generational replacement reduces the overall effect of religion on electoral decisions, the effect of religion has recently increased within each generation, and d) the impact of religion depends on the religious context in which citizens live so that religion plays a bigger role in fractionalised societies. These findings are discussed in the light of a revived importance of religion for European politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when the literature on political parties is brimming with health and vitality, the parties themselves seem to be experiencing potentially severe legitimacy problems and to be suffering from a quite massive withdrawal of popular support and affection. This article addresses one key aspect of the problems facing contemporary parties in Europe, which is the challenge to party government. I begin by reviewing the changing pattern of party competition, in which I discuss the decline of partisanship in policy-making and the convergence of parties into a mainstream consensus. I then look again at the familiar 'parties-do-matter' thesis and at the evidence for declining partisanship within the electorate. In the third section of the paper I explore the various attempts to specify the conditions for party government, before going on in the final section to argue that these conditions have been undermined in such a way that it is now almost impossible to imagine party government in contemporary Europe either functioning effectively or sustaining complete legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalism has experienced a resurgence across Europe since 1980, and one common explanation for this resurgence is that the backlash to European integration aids radical right parties, which prioritise cultural protectionism in the form of anti-immigration and anti-ethnic minority appeals. In contrast, this article argues that, through the policy-making avenues available to certain parties, but not others, European integration encourages a different form of nationalism in highly regionalised countries: ethnoregionalism, which seeks either greater autonomy or independence for a sub-national unit. By examining how nationalist parties combine both cultural protectionism and ethnoregionalism, and the relative saliency that they attach to each, this article provides a novel way to disentangle the EU's different potential effects on nationalism. Through a quantitative analysis of party manifestos across 33 European countries for 1980–2019, this article finds that European integration has a significantly stronger effect on the saliency of ethnoregionalism than cultural protectionism. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: [DOI]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of issue politics has long suffered from a fragmentation between valence and positional conceptualisations, preventing the effective development of a general model of issue-based party competition. Building on an overview of the evolution of party competition in the Western world in recent decades, this article offers a theoretical development that builds on 'issue yield' theory to provide a conceptualisation of political goals that generalises across positional and valence issues. This in turn allows a common measurement strategy, offering the possibility to comparatively assess various characteristics (including the electoral potential) of both positional and valence issues. Finally, it describes the specific research design derived from this framework and its implementation in comparative perspective in six West European countries during 2017–2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The more populism enters public debates, the more it needs close scrutiny. Central and Eastern Europe offers a useful context for exploring the diversity of parties identified as populist. Anti-establishment rhetoric provides a suitable conceptual starting point because of its pervasive role in the region's political discourse. Using a new expert survey, this article details the relationship between anti-establishment salience and political positions, showing that anti-establishment parties occupy a full range across both economic and cultural dimensions and many occupy more centrist positions. Narrowing the focus to content analysis of anti-establishment parties' thin ideology in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, it is concurrently found that for many actors (including those usually labelled as populist) anti-establishment rhetoric is indeed predominant, yet not always extensively combined with other elements of populism: people-centrism and invocation of general will. The findings are important for understanding multiple varieties of anti-establishment politics also beyond the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly research on the emergence of anew politicsagenda of democratic regeneration, driven by the electoral growth of challenger parties, has focused the analysis primarily at the national and supranational levels, leaving the subnational level underexplored. This article contributes to filling this gap through a comparative analysis of party competition in peripheral regions of Italy, Spain and Great Britain during the European Great Recession. UsingRegional Manifestos Projectdata, it shows that the regionalisation of the state and the presence of a centre‒periphery cleavage represent no obstacle when it comes to responding to a change of preferences among the electorate. The transformation of political spaces in the aftermath of the Great Recession is happening as much at the regional as at the national level. At the same time, the political relevance of challenger parties and the diversity of regional responses contradict the alleged secondary nature of regional dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article introduces the special issue ‘Assessing democratic representation in multi-level democracies’ from a conceptual perspective. It adapts Powell’s chain of responsiveness – as a model of the democratic process on the national level – to the context of multi-level systems and discusses conditions that might facilitate or hamper responsiveness in regional democracies. The theoretical reasoning identifies added complexity, multiple actors sharing the same label and cross-level interdependent decisions as the key challenges to multi-level democracy. Empirical illustrations focus on the first stage of the representation process. Here voters should form rational policy preferences and take informed voting decisions, and parties are expected to offer coherent policy platforms that are tailored to the specifics of the regional level. While the analysis of party manifesto data suggests that regional parties cover regional issues, and strategic incentives to focus on other levels appear limited, survey-based information illustrates the cognitive burden of multi-level democracy on voters. In combination with a synopsis of the other contributions assembled in this issue, the findings suggest that information, responsibility and accountability problems may be particular obstacles to responsiveness in multi-level systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article revisits the influential partisan alignment hypothesis, which posits that subnational governments aligned with central governments exhibit higher expenditures. To promote their own and their party’s re-election chances, central government politicians allocate more resources to ideologically aligned co-partisans at the subnational level. Consequently, aligned subnational governments exhibit higher expenditures than non-aligned ones. This article examines alignment effects in subnational education spending. Education is a crucial test case because, unlike other expenditures, the allocation of education spending is discretionary and often does not follow precise formulas. Using a novel dataset covering 266 subnational regions in 14 countries over 20 years, we offer the first cross-country analysis of alignment effects. Controlling for rival explanations, the findings reveal alignment effects on subnational education expenditures. Furthermore, political institutions matter, as alignment effects are stronger in countries where subnational governments have more discretion over education policy while lacking their own revenue sources (vertical fiscal imbalance). These findings imply that decentralisation might increase educational and socio-economic inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When do political parties push for public investments in education, research, and infrastructure? Existing literature has mainly answered this question by pointing to parties’ state‒market ideology. In contrast, this article presents a novel argument highlighting the role of parties’ aspirations to office and their ambitions to maximize votes. It builds on the idea that investments not only constitute redistributive tools for politicians, but also work as public means to foster economic growth in the long run. This unique feature makes investments attractive for parties with high office and vote aspirations, because they anticipate government responsibility in the future and can use investments’ dispersed growth effects to appeal broadly to a large, heterogeneous pool of voters. Support for this claim is found through time-series cross-sectional analyses of party manifestos from 22 Western democracies between 1947 and 2013. Results also indicate that parties’ positions on the second social value dimension matter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

No matter the region of the world under study, party (system) institutionalisation has been traditionally considered to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the survival of democracy. Despite being one of the most quoted statements in the democratisation literature, the few studies looking at the relationship between institutionalisation and democratic endurance have found no evidence of the ‘almost magical’ powers of the former. This article revisits the abovementioned research question by making use of an original dataset covering all European democracies between 1848 and 2014. The main findings are threefold: (1) it is not the institutionalisation of political parties but the institutionalisation of party systems as a whole that has fostered the prospects for democratic survival in Europe; (2) there is a threshold of systemic institutionalisation which, once reached, will avoid democratic collapse; and (3) systemic over-institutionalisation does not seem to be so perilous for the survival of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Numerous new parties have emerged since voters became less loyal to established political parties. A number of these survived and have been analysed intensely, especially green and radical right parties; many other new parties disappeared and have been neglected by party research. This article analyses the fate of all 30 political parties that entered parliament in the Netherlands or Belgium between 1950 and 2003. Qualitative comparative analysis is used to identify characteristics of both surviving and disappeared new parties. Conditions related to party origin (roots in civil society, organisational newness, initial programmatic profile) are scrutinised, as are conditions pertaining to the party’s developmental process (party organisational strength and the occurrence of defections or party splits). Surviving parties are characterised by strong, rooted organisations that have not suffered defections. Most disappeared parties lacked a strong organisation and roots and have experienced shocks that they could not absorb. Organisational newness makes new parties vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How strongly is European integration being politicised in election campaigns, and what explains why a party chooses to emphasise Europe or, by contrast, remains silent about it? This article provides a systematic assessment of the salience of European integration in domestic election campaigns, tracking its development from the 1990s to the 2000s across six Western European countries based on media content analysis data. The findings show that the salience of Europe in election campaigns is actually rather limited when put into perspective by benchmarking it against other political issues. Moreover, ideological determinants are crucial in explaining European integration issue-emphasis. In particular, the more culturally conservative a party, the stronger its emphasis on Europe; the impact of the economic left–right divide, by contrast, is weaker and more ambiguous. However, Europe remains in the shadow of its twin issue, immigration, which shares a similar issue-emphasis pattern yet is more attractive to these culturally conservative parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Are holders of important ministerial positions more likely to survive in cabinet than their colleagues who hold less important positions? This study examines the relationship between the importance of a ministerial position and the length of time ministers are able to survive in government. It is based on an original dataset of cabinet ministers in seven West European countries from 1945 to 2011. Employing a little-used measure of ministerial survival based on overall time in government, it is found that holders of important ministerial positions are more durable than their colleagues who hold less important ministerial positions. Age, prior government experience and the size of the party to which the minister belongs are also associated with consistently significant effects. Further, the study explores the determinants of survival for two types of risk – exiting government with one’s party and exiting without it – showing that the effects of ministerial importance and other covariates are markedly different for these two types of exit. The findings have important implications for the understanding of ministerial and governmental stability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, two unexplored trends in European electoral politics are highlighted. Using newly collected data the article tracks the politicisation of corruption in electoral campaigns from 1981 to 2011, an electoral strategy that has been increasing over time in most European countries. It then empirically tests two aspects of this campaign strategy. First, what are the factors that are systematically associated with a party’s decision to politicise corruption? Second, what are the electoral effects in terms of relative vote share for parties that politicise corruption? Using an original data-set that employs multi-level data (parties nested in countries) the results demonstrate first that politicisation of corruption occurs systematically more often among established parties from the main opposition, new parties and parties on the political right, and occurs as a function of country-level corruption, district magnitude and public party financing. Second, it is found that the main opposition and new parties that use such a campaign strategy make significant electoral gains relative to the previous election compared to parties that do not politicise corruption. Yet gains are offset in low-corruption countries. The findings demonstrate salient implications for research on party systems, corruption studies and democratic legitimacy, among other areas of investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reviews Peter Mair’s argument on the failure of political parties and the subsequent failure of representative democracy in Europe. It develops a conceptual framework to test the validity of Mair’s argument against competing interpretations of the development of representative democracy. It identifies three ideal typical models of representative democracy that seem to have succeeded each other over time: cleavage-based democracy, competitive democracy, and audience democracy. The article proposes specific empirical hypotheses for political parties and voters in each of these periods and provides empirical evidence to test the validity of these hypotheses. It concludes with a discussion of the results, evaluating whether the changes that occurred indicate failure of representative democracy or rather the emergence of a different form of representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Populism has been on the rise for some time in Europe now, and its rise has been one of the key concerns of Peter Mair. He has linked it to the increasing erosion of the representative function of European party systems. The spectre that haunted him was ‘partyless democracy’, a democratic regime where parties had lost their representative function, which opened the door for unmediated populist protest. While largely sharing his interpretation of the overall structural trends giving rise to the populist challenges in Western Europe, the article is critical of the static character of his assessment. It suggests that there are three forms of ‘protest populism’, all of which may eventually end up transforming the West European party systems in the name of the new structuring conflicts that characterise contemporary European societies. In addition, it proposes to extend the scope of Peter’s argument to the less established democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the development of legitimacy across 20 European democracies (1990–2010). The claim is that the democratic performance of parties affects levels of legitimacy. A conceptual and empirical discussion is presented to establish this relationship. Democratic performance is characterised by trusting parties to be responsive to the electorate and responsible in government. Legitimacy is defined as a composite measure representing satisfaction with parties, compliance with the rule of law as well as voter turnout and willingness to protest. The responsiveness of parties appears less representative on public concerns and governmental responsibility appears closer to party interests than to the general interest. Hence, a ‘democratic deficit’ seems to have emerged across Europe, manifested by more electoral volatility, new parties and alternation in government and lower survival rates of governments. This negatively affects trust in parties, parliament and government efficacy. Hence, party behaviour has not strongly contributed to political legitimacy since the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims at ‘bringing ideology back in’ for the analysis of party politics and, more specifically, for the discussion of the delicate dyad ‘responsiveness vs. responsibility’. The article starts with an analytical discussion on the concept of ideology and on how to study its adaptation and change. It then reviews the ideological shifts that have characterised welfare state discourse and politics since the 1980s: first, the neoliberal turn and its attack on the old social democratic consensus; then the gradual emergence of a new ideological perspective that is called here liberal neo-welfarism. The main argument is that ideology plays an important role in framing partisan strategies in the delicate and increasingly prominent field of social politics. Ideological change reflects not only exogenous socio-economic transformations but also endogenous and relatively autonomous epistemic dynamics that bridge intellectual and partisan arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on a particular aspect dear to theories of democracy in general and theories of representation in particular: the tension between responsiveness and responsibility affecting political parties in modern, liberal democracies. In doing so, it engages with Peter Mair’s intellectual passion for this topic, which he developed over the years and intensively worked on until his premature death in 2011. He argued that this tension became ever more apparent, putting the very functioning and legitimacy of democratic government under great pressure. This contribution goes back in time, to the very beginning of the modern state, and argues that already the nascent parties and party systems were affected by the tension between responsiveness and responsibility. It then offers a synopsis, organised in a series of ‘pictures’ or ‘frames’ of the historical parcours along which this tension has impacted on the development of political parties. The article also presents and summarises the collective effort undertaken by a number of scholars, coming together to honour Peter Mair’s work, to shed further theoretical and empirical light on this fundamental tension. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ethnic outbidding in divided societies can have dire political consequences, ranging from the derailment of peace processes to inter-ethnic warfare. This article investigates the conditions contributing to successful outbidding within the framework of protracted peace negotiations by using the contrasting cases of Northern Ireland and Cyprus. Evidence demonstrates that successful outbidders are able to exploit the fears of their communities with respect to inter-ethnic compromise while identifying appropriate strategies and opportunities for redressing these grievances. The article demonstrates that the degree of outbidding success over the long term derives from combining diagnostic and prognostic frames linked to credible political and constitutional strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is often found that religious people are underrepresented among the radical right electorate, despite radical right parties’ claim of being defenders of the Judeo-Christian society. This study investigates this paradoxical finding and examines to what extent two dimensions of religion – practice and belief – play a role in voting for a radical right party across seven West European countries. Using the European Values Study from 2008, it was found that religiously active people are indeed less likely to vote for a radical right party, because they tend to vote for a Christian party. However, the study challenges the common wisdom that religion alone is a restraint on radical right voting and shows that orthodox believers in three countries – Belgium, Norway and Switzerland – feel more threatened by the presence of immigrants and therefore are more likely than their mainstream counterparts to vote for a radical right party. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How political representatives interact with constituents is contingent on the conditions under which they compete for re-election. It has been the assumption that intra-party competition shapes legislators’ incentive to cultivate a personal reputation and thereby the incentive to engage in any constituency-oriented action that reputation may be built on. Using data from the PARTIREP cross-national survey among regional and national legislators in 12 European democracies, the assumption is proven to be inaccurate: focusing on more than one action at a time, it becomes clear that district magnitude increases the time representatives spend on some constituency-oriented actions and decreases the time they spend on others (even when the electoral incentive to nurture a personal reputation is strong). The article demonstrates that representatives’ choice to engage in four constituency-oriented actions is related to the nature of these home styles and their electoral utility in a given context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the links between populist radical right parties and their voters regarding European integration in 11 European countries. It does so by using data from the 2008 European Social Survey and the 2006 UNC-Chapel Hill Expert Data Base on political parties and European integration. In addition to mapping the Eurosceptic orientations of political parties and their voters, the article examines the degree to which attitudes towards the EU and voting for populist radical parties are connected to each other. The results lend support to the hypothesis that most populist radical right parties have managed to establish links with their voters regarding European integration. The analysis also shows that links between populist radical right parties and their voters tend to be stronger for those parties that adopt more extreme negative positions towards European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates different dynamics in government formation in 16 Western and 10 Central-Eastern European democracies during the post-war period. The study provides the first systematic comparison of determinants of participation in government in the East and the West. Applying mixed effects logit regression models while taking into account missing values in the dataset, the results demonstrate substantial differences between the two regions and show that most of the existing findings about participation in government are driven by Western democracies. Policy-based factors are relevant in Western countries, but no indications were found for these factors in Central-East European democracies where membership of government is mainly the result of electoral gains and losses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Territorial autonomy is one aspect of power-sharing in multi-ethnic societies. Nevertheless, the multi-ethnic countries of Central and Eastern Europe are still among the most centralised in the European Union. This article analyses the failure of any attempts to establish (symmetric) federalism or (asymmetric) autonomy, creating self-governed regions by the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia. The analysis focuses on the positions of the main parties of the ethnic majorities and the Hungarian minority parties in the two countries. In both cases, the parties representing the Hungarian minorities have favoured territorial autonomy along ethnic lines, but this demand has been rejected by the parties of the ethnic majority. Against the historical legacy of unstable borders, the parties of the ethnic majority argue that territorial autonomy or federalisation might be a first step for a revisionist agenda and separatism. Instead, supported by the European integration, the parties have been able to agree on decentralisation as a half-hearted compromise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article develops a comprehensive and dynamic framework for analysing the party politics of territorial reforms in Europe (and beyond). The main focus is on explaining the strategy of political parties on the issue of territorial reform, by which is meant the position taken on, and the salience given to, the issue of how to allocate powers and resources across levels of government. The premise is that political parties can follow an electoral, ideological and territorial logic of action when deciding their strategy. The article distinguishes between the main drivers and argues that the choice of logic by political parties will be determined by the relative weight of strategic incentives, on the one hand, and ideological and organisational constraints, on the other. The framework also highlights the importance of contextual effects such as the polity’s institutional arrangements and the influence of time in the process of territorial restructuring, evident in the different moments of territorial reforms and the occurrence of feedback effects between them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research on the legitimacy of the welfare state has pointed to a potential negative impact of immigration. While much of this research has been concerned with a possible weakening of the general support for economic redistribution, this article analyses popular support for the introduction of a two-tier (dualist) welfare system, and focuses on the interplay between public opinion and party competition. It uses survey data from Denmark and Norway: two similar welfare states where elite politics on migration and welfare dualism has been markedly different over the last decade. It finds that the level and structure of popular support for welfare dualism are fairly similar in the two countries, but that attitudes toward dualism have a stronger impact on left–right voting in Denmark where the politics of welfare dualism has been actively advocated by the populist right party and pursued by a right-wing coalition government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines an aspect of transnational activity that is often neglected, namely the transnational activism of the far right. It uses a case study of the British National Party (BNP) and the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD – German National Democratic Party) in order to explore how its leaders and activists share ideas and information, policy and praxis, and how this is employed in the development of a strategic ‘master frame’ that they believe will allow them to overcome the limits of purely national activity in a globalised world. It explores the evolution of the links between the two parties, their nature and indeed the limits of such transnational activism upon national ‘frames’ in order to present a historical overview of the diffusion of ideology and strategy within the contemporary European far right. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Earlier research has concluded that European citizens do not update their Left–Right policy preferences or their party attachments in response to the content of parties’ election manifestos – i.e. partisan sorting is not observed in the mass public in response to shifts in the Left–Right tone of these manifestos. Here we extend this research to analyse whether we observe partisan sorting patterns that correspond with political experts’ perceptions of parties’ Left–Right policy shifts. Given that these experts plausibly consider all pertinent information when estimating parties’ Left–Right orientations – including party elites’ speeches, elite interviews, coalition behaviour, and legislative voting patterns – such a finding would imply that citizens do weigh the wider informational environment when updating their Left–Right orientations and their party support, even if they do not attach great weight to the parties’ policy manifestos. Our analyses provide support for this hypothesis with respect to niche parties, i.e. green, communist, and radical right parties, but not for mainstream parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Issue congruence between voters and parties can be achieved if voters and parties follow the party mandate model. A central requirement of this model is that parties fulfil their electoral mandate. This article studies collective party mandate fulfilment by comparing parties’ election manifestos with the parliamentary speeches of their politicians in two countries: a typical consensus democracy, the Netherlands, and a typical majoritarian democracy, the United Kingdom. The central question is whether a difference in collective mandate fulfilment exists between these two types of democracy. Contrary to previous findings, this study finds that such a difference does not exist, at least not with regard to the two countries analysed. This can be explained by the way in which the party mandate is conceptualised. The article also analyses the development of party mandate fulfilment over time and finds no evidence for the idea that collective mandate fulfilment is declining. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is often said that European Parliament elections fail as an instrument to express the will of the European people. However, while the elections are not contested at the European level and are often dominated by national issues, this does not necessarily imply that they fail to connect policy views of voters and representatives. This article examines policy congruence between voters and candidates, utilising the candidate and voter surveys of the European Election Study 2009. First, it demonstrates that policy preferences of candidates and voters are constrained by three separate policy dimensions. Second, it shows that the quality of representation is high in terms of left/right, the main dimension of conflict in European politics, but lower on the cultural and European integration dimensions. Finally, it establishes that in some cases the aggregation of national parties in political groups in the European Parliament poses problems for effective political representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Differences in the intra-party balance of power explain variation in social democratic responses to the economic crisis of the late 1970s. This article evidences this claim by analysing the case of welfare state retrenchment by social democratic parties. Welfare state retrenchment is electorally risky for social democrats and often contrary to their principles. Therefore cases of welfare state retrenchment by social democrats provide an excellent case study of the difficult trade-offs parties have to make between office, policy and vote pay-offs. The article claims that leadership-dominated parties advance office-seeking strategies and are therefore responsive to economic conditions and public opinion. Conversely, activist-dominated parties advance policy-seeking strategies and therefore support traditional social democratic policy platforms or seek more radical solutions. By comparing seven social democratic parties (Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK) between 1980 and 2005, this article explains variation in when social democrats introduced welfare state retrenchment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature on party organisational change emphasises environmental factors as well as internal circumstances. The literature on Europeanisation and political parties privileges the EU as a key environmental factor in terms of change. This article combines insights from the party organisation and Europeanisation literatures in order to more precisely conceptualise the EU as a stimulus and therefore causal factor in party organisational change. Two types of party change are analysed, new party positions (MEPs and specialised EU party staff) and party leaderships' responses to internal dissent over the EU. Linking a specific form of EU stimulus to a particular party goal helps to explain certain types of change, while inter-governmental bargaining may produce uncertainty for domestic political actors thereby inducing defensive reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Government alternation is a fundamental component of any efficient democracy and it could be seen both as an empirical proof (in democracy there is government alternation) or as an ideal pattern of competition (in democracy there should be government alternation). However, to what extent do democracies work according to such an ideal pattern? A Government Turnover Index (GTI) is provided to answer this question with respect to 524 governments in 22 European contemporary democracies since World War II. As suggested by the data and by the GTI, there is not necessarily a link between democratic competition and government alternation, although some democracies are more likely to experience it. It is therefore necessary to direct the analysis towards some systemic factors which may favour or hinder government alternation (such as the party system structure and the institutional framework). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Party finance reformers often call for European parties to increase their financial reliance on small donors, but researchers have made few efforts to establish the feasibility of such strategies. This study examines partisan giving in Europe, investigating the potential for parties and policymakers to increase this type of political participation. It also asks whether there are national-level factors that make such efforts more likely to succeed in some countries. The research uses data from the European Social Survey to examine patterns of contributions to political parties in 16 European countries. It finds that the strength of partisanship predicts political giving independent of party membership, which suggests that European political parties may have some scope to increase their number of individual donors. On the other hand, existing tax policies to encourage political giving do not seem to be effective in increasing this type of partisan political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally the assumption is that legislators act to maximise their chances of re-election, with their optimal behaviour determined by the party-centred or candidate-centred nature of the electoral system in use. Existing evidence of the impact of members' actual behaviour on subsequent electoral performance is inconclusive. This research explores whether or not legislators who choose to focus on cultivating personal votes reap rewards from the electorate under the Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system. Exploring electoral reward under STV is particularly significant because some legislators face intra-party competition for votes while others do not - a key determining incentive for cultivating personal votes. This study uses a survey of Irish legislators in 2002 and 2007 to measure constituency orientation and effort. The data suggest an electoral reward for personal vote cultivation, although the relationship between intra-system incentive and reward is apparently not always as expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]