How voters' perceptions of junior coalition partners depend on the prime minister's position

Recent studies document that voters infer parties' left‐right policy agreement based on governing coalition arrangements. This article extends this research to present theoretical and empirical evidence that European citizens update their perceptions of junior coalition partners' left‐right policies to reflect the policies of the prime minister's party, but that citizens do not reciprocally project junior coalition partners' policies onto the prime minister's party. These findings illuminate the simple rules that citizens employ to infer parties' policy positions, broaden understanding of how citizens perceive coalition governance and imply that ‘niche’ parties, whose electoral appeal depends upon maintaining a distinctive policy profile, assume electoral risks when they enter government.     

Stepping in the same river twice: Stability amidst change in Eastern European party competition

Party competition in Eastern Europe faces a seeming paradox. On the one hand, research finds increased political volatility in these countries, while, on the other, some authors demonstrate inherent ideological stability in the region. This research note presents a new methodological approach to adjudicating between these two findings, and suggests that while political organisations come and go, the ideological structure of party competition in Eastern Europe is strikingly steady. By developing a number of different measures of the dimensional structure of party competition, the consistency of the measures across countries, as well as their relative stability within countries over time, is demonstrated. The findings speak to current developments in Eastern Europe, and have implications beyond the region. The conclusion that even volatile party systems can be underpinned by stable ideological oppositions points to two different types of party system structure: one related to parties as organisations, and the other related to parties as expressions of political divides.     

The Funding of Political Parties

Despite attempts over the last decade to bring an end to what has become an ‘arms race’ between political parties, party funding in the UK continues to defy resolution. Drawing on the experience of the committee charged by the last Labour administration to put party funding and electoral spending on a more sustainable footing, this article examines the issues and the main sticking points. It outlines the basis on which the negotiations were undertaken, and the main hurdles they sought to overcome. It highlights the disagreement between the parties on the definition of the central issue, the problems associated with the main funding sources for each of the parties, and the viability of state funding. It discusses why success proved elusive, but also why a solution is necessary, since in the absence of robust rules, parties and therefore the UK political system more broadly, are ‘a hostage to the next scandal’.     

Quotas,women's leadership and grassroots women activists: Bringing women into the party?

Research has consistently shown that women are less likely than men to participate in political parties as members and activists; this participation gender gap has persisted despite narrowing gender gaps in education, employment and in other types of political participation.  Yet while the gaps are widespread, their size varies greatly by country as well as by party.  To what extent do party organizational factors help explain these disparities? More pointedly, are there any lessons to be learned from past experiences about party mechanisms which might help to reduce these gaps? To answer these questions, this study investigates grassroots partisan participation in 68 parties in 12 parliamentary democracies, considering whether factors that have been shown to boost the number of women candidates and legislators are also associated with changing the traditionally male dominance of grassroots party politics.  We find evidence of links between some party mechanisms and higher women's intra-party participation; however, because the same relationship holds for men's participation, they do not alter the participation gender gap. Only greater participation of women in parties’ parliamentary delegations is associated with smaller grassroots gender gaps. We conclude that parties which wish to close grassroots gender gaps should not rely solely on efforts aimed at remedying gender gaps at the elite level.     

Appearing moderate or radical? Radical left party success and the two-dimensional political space

Abstract

Challenger parties’ electoral successes have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Based on the example of West European radical left parties, this article investigates whether and how centripetal and centrifugal positional movements on different conflict dimensions influence the election results of these parties. Depending on parties’ issue-linkages, these strategies will have a different effect for the economic and the non-economic issue dimension. Due to radical left parties’ long-term commitment and a strong party-issue linkage on economic issues, more moderate positions will play to their electoral advantage. In contrast, far-left parties compete with social democratic and green-libertarian parties for party-issue linkages on the non-economic issue dimension. Here, they benefit from promoting centrifugal strategies. Based on time-series cross-section analyses for 25 West European far-left parties between 1990 and 2017, the empirical results show that the success of radical left parties’ positional strategies varies with the conflict dimension in question and that this effect is only partly moderated by the positions of competing mainstream left parties.     

The family policy positions of conservative parties: A farewell to the male-breadwinner family model?

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

Interest group–party linkage in the twenty‐first century: Evidence from Denmark,the Netherlands and the United Kingdom

This article systematically investigates interest group–party interactions in the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom based on cross‐national surveys with responses from 1,225 interest groups. The findings show that interest groups and parties still interact in the beginning of the twenty‐first century, but that the vast majority of their interaction involves a low degree of institutionalisation. Using fractional logit analysis, it is demonstrated that the strength of interest group–party linkage is primarily affected by systematic differences in state–society structures and organisational group characteristics. Moreover, differences are found in what conditions different types of interaction. Whereas historical legacies and partisan origin influence an interest group's structural party links, group resources make interactions of a less institutionalised, ad hoc nature more likely.     

Income inequality,electoral systems and party polarisation

This study analyses why income inequality and party polarisation proceed together in some countries but not in others. By focusing on the relationship between income inequality, the permissiveness of electoral systems and party polarisation, the study offers a theoretical explanation for how the combination of income inequality and permissive electoral systems generates higher party polarisation. After analysing a cross‐national dataset of party polarisation, income inequality and electoral institutions covering 24 advanced democracies between 1960 and 2011, it is found that a simple correlation between income inequality and party polarisation is not strong. However, the empirical results indicate that greater income inequality under permissive electoral systems contributes to growing party polarisation, which suggests that parties only have diverging ideological platforms due to greater income inequality when electoral systems encourage their moves towards the extreme; parties do not diverge when electoral systems discourage their moves towards the extreme.     

Parental Socialization and Rational Party Identification

This article constructs a rational choice model of the intergenerational transmission of party identification. At a given time, identification with a party is the estimate of average future benefits from candidates of that party. Experienced voters constantly update this expectation using political events since the last realignment to predict the future in accordance with Bayes Rule. New voters, however, have no experience of their own. In Bayesian terms, they need prior beliefs. It turns out that under certain specified conditions, these young voters should rationally choose to employ parental experience to help orient themselves to politics. The resulting model predicts several well–known features of political socialization, including the strong correlation between parents' and children's partisanship, the greater partisan independence of young voters, and the tendency of partisan alignments to decay.     

Still men’s parties? Gender and the radical right in comparative perspective

This framing paper introduces the symposium on gender and the radical right. With the exception of a few recent studies, gender issues have received little attention in research on the European radical right. The purpose of this symposium is to address that and examine (1) whether radical right parties are still ‘men’s parties’ – parties led and supported primarily by men and (2) to what extent and how women and women’s concerns have been included by these parties. It argues that radical right parties have changed their appeal since their origins in the 1980s. There is now evidence of the fact that radical right parties, at least in some countries, exhibit an active political involvement of women and engage in some representation of women’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 recent gendered changes in radical right parties, this symposium stresses the academic and political importance of studying gender relations in radical right politics.     

Why do only some people who support parties actually join them? Evidence from Britain

What makes people join a political party is one of the most commonly studied questions in research on party members. Nearly all this research, however, is based on talking to people who have actually joined parties. This article simultaneously analyses surveys of members of political parties in Britain and surveys of non-member supporters of those same parties. This uniquely enables us to model the decision to join parties. The results suggest that most of the elements that constitute the influential ‘General Incentives Model’ are significant. But it also reveals that, while party supporters imagine that selective benefits, social norms and opposing rival parties’ policies are key factors in members’ decisions to join a party, those who actually do so are more likely to say they are motivated by attachments to their party’s values, policies and leaders, as well as by an altruistic desire to support democracy more generally.     

Party Polarization and Party Structuring of Policy Attitudes: A Comparison of Three NES Panel Studies

The conventional wisdom in the partisan change literature predicts that increasing party conflict on one issue agenda leads to a decline in party conflict on another agenda—a process called conflict displacement. We have argued that recent party politics in the United States has experienced conflict extension, with the Democratic and Republican parties in the electorate growing more polarized on cultural, racial, and social welfare issues, rather than conflict displacement. Here, we suggest that the failure of the literature to account for conflict extension results from incomplete assumptions about individual-level partisan change. The partisan change literature typically considers only issue-based change in party identification, which necessarily leads to the aggregate prediction of conflict displacement. This ignores the possibility of party-based change in issue attitudes. If party-based issue conversion does occur, the aggregate result can be conflict extension rather than conflict displacement. Our analysis uses data from the three-wave panel studies conducted by the National Election Studies in 1956, 1958, and 1960; in 1972, 1974, and 1976; and in 1992, 1994, and 1996 to assess our alternative account of individual-level partisan change. We show that when Democratic and Republican elites are polarized on an issue, and party identifiers are aware of those differences, some individuals respond by adjusting their party ties to conform to their issue positions, but others respond by adjusting their issue positions to conform to their party identification.