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Populism is often associated with direct democracy. However, empirical support for this connection remains limited. Analysing a unique dataset on national referendums across 29 countries, this study challenges the presumption that populists are more inclined to advocate for referendums. Surprisingly, populists exhibit this tendency primarily when in opposition. Despite the increasing inclusion of populist parties in coalition governments, their impact on facilitating national-level direct democracy is more complex than anticipated. Utilising V-DEM data over 30 years, we find that populists prima facie enhance the use of direct democracy. However, this effect is contingent on contextual factors, such as party system institutionalisation and the democracy's age, indicating a nuanced relationship between populism and direct democratic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turnout has become increasingly unequal in many advanced democracies over the last few decades. Disadvantaged social groups are found to exhibit lower turnout compared to their better-off counterparts. According to numerous scholars, this growing gap is mainly attributed to the weakening of mass organizations that traditionally appealed to socio-economically disadvantaged social groups, particularly trade unions. However, very few studies have investigated these trends in Italy, a country that has witnessed a significant decrease in electoral turnout since the late 1970s, and where the socioeconomic causes of this decline have not been systematically explored. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to analyse, first and foremost, whether electoral participation in Italy is becoming increasingly unequal. Then, it moves to explore the extent to which the turnout gap between individuals with low and high socio-economic status (SES) could be moderated by both de-unionization and trade unions' membership. By utilizing a dataset that combines 10 waves of the Italian National Election Study (1983-2018), the paper demonstrates that the turnout gap between low and high SES individuals has substantially widened over the last decades. Furthermore, it suggests that while the overall turnout gap is at least partially affected by the strength of trade unions in the country, trade unions still seem to be able to mobilize their members, particularly among lower social groups. This finding underscores the potential of trade unions to continue playing a role in equalizing turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have shown a consistent decline in class voting over time, arguing that social class no longer structures political competition. Yet, the loss of the explanatory power of social class should be attributed to the shift of left-wing parties towards less friendly issue positions for their class-based electorate and not entirely to demand-side explanations. This article focuses on the explanatory factors underpinning the decline of class voting, in particular economic and cultural ones. It does so by relying on a longitudinal dataset including survey data from the EES and party manifesto data from the CMP over the last 25 years in 12 European countries. Results show that when class-based parties adopt pro-labour positions, class voting is reinforced. By contrast, when class-bloc parties stand out for their pro-multiculturalism positions, class voting weakens significantly. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1987108. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its 2012 beginnings as a marginal radical right splinter group, in the 2022 general election 'Fratelli d'Italia' (Brothers of Italy, FdI) was the most voted party and its leader, Giorgia Meloni, became the first Italian female Prime minister. While both leader and party can be classified as belonging to the populist radical right family, we argue that FdI must be understood also as a 'rooted newcomer', i.e. a party that can count on pre-existing organisational resources, building its appeal also on symbolic elements already familiar to the electorate when the party was formed. Focusing on the supply side, we tackle some of the main open questions related to the party's ambivalent nature, often fluctuating between a post-fascist profile and a frequently reiterated support for other European radical right illiberal leaders and more moderate positions. We identify the politics of illiberalism as the key challenge the party faces in its transition from opposition to government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Results of the last electoral season in Western Europe have been mostly seen in the light of the success of challenger, anti-establishment parties. According to this narrative, past elections have been overwhelmingly dominated by cultural issues such as immigration and the EU. However, these accounts suffer from several limitations. First, they generally focus on the determinants of the static component of electoral results (i.e. vote choice) rather than the factors leading to vote change (i.e. the individual-level component of aggregate electoral change). Second, relying on party manifestos and programmatic platforms, they usually offer a party-based reconstruction of the general climate of elections. As a consequence, they provide only an indirect, at best limited, overview of the actual political issues that might have driven electoral results. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we introduce a new methodological strategy to characterize electoral results in comparative perspective. To do so we leverage an issue-rich public opinion dataset to estimate individual-level vote change towards each party as a function of issue-based party-voter affinity measures in 6 European countries. Relying on 38 logistic regression models (one for each party), our results contradict many current interpretations of electoral results in Western Europe, in fact showing that economic issues, rather than broad cultural ones, emerged as the most relevant predictors of vote inflows. Furthermore, it also demonstrates the relevance of "cross-ideological" mobilization across all the 6 countries covered in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Common Security and Defense Policy of the European Union has recently come to the forefront as a potential force of integration. This study explores the consequences (if any) of such a move, investigating how likely it is for Common Security and Defense Policy to be politicized and become a new area of dissent. The article explores conditions of politicization at three different levels of analysis: (a) the systemic level, where Common Security and Defense Policy position in a bi-dimensional political space (left–right and anti-pro EU) is discussed; (b) the party level, where potentially successful issue entrepreneurs of Common Security and Defense Policy are identified; (c) the individual voter level, where the probabilities of being mobilized by issue entrepreneurs of Common Security and Defense Policy are assessed. Our analysis suggests that although Common Security and Defense Policy is prone to be politicized and right-wing parties are the most likely group to do so, this move may backfire as right-wing voters are less likely to be mobilized on Common Security and Defense Policy compared to their left-wing counterpart. We discuss the implications of these results for the conceptualization of politicization and European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]