Die Demokratie und ihre Gegenbewegungen: eine kritische (Selbst‑)Reflexion zu Begriffen und Referenzrahmen in der Rechtsextremismusforschung

So far, research on right-wing extremism has been able to provide wide-ranging insights into political parties and right-wing movements as well as their embedding in terms of the history of ideas. The reference framework of that research is democracy. However, there is no analysis of ideological criticism of the reality of democracies. Therefore, it has been impossible to identify the potential risks of radical and extreme right phenomena for established and young democracies yet. Additionally, researchers have not been able so far to obtain information on what these phenomena say about the state of democracies. The plea is to align studies on right-wing extremism with research on democracies and ideology critique. The aim is a “reflexive” research on right-wing extremism.     

What Motivates the Gatekeepers? Explaining Governing Party Preferences on Immigration

Most scholarship on immigration politics is made up of isolated case studies or cross‐disciplinary work that does not build on existing political science theory. This study attempts to remedy this shortcoming in three ways: (1) we derive theories from the growing body of immigration literature, to hypothesize about why political parties would be more or less open to immigration; (2) we link these theories to the broader political science literature on parties and institutions; and (3) we construct a data set on the determinants of immigration politics, covering 18 developed countries from 1987 to 1999. Our primary hypothesis is that political institutions shape immigration politics by facilitating or constraining majoritarian sentiment (which is generally opposed to liberalizing immigration). Our analysis finds that in political systems where majoritarianism is constrained by institutional “checks,” governing parties support immigration more strongly, even when controlling for a broad range of alternative explanations.     

Old right or new right? The ideological positioning of parties of the far right

Abstract.  Since the 1980s, parties of the far right have increased their share of votes in many Western European nations, and some have even participated in governing coalitions. The ascendancy of far right parties has been met with various hypotheses attempting to rationalize their role in the politics of these nations: Are far right parties a manifestation of protest politics, brought about by hard economic times (old right model), or are they representative of the continued political development of Western industrialized nations (new right model)? Most analyses have focused on the voters for these parties; this work focuses on the election manifestos of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), National Front of France (FN), Italian National Alliance (MSI-AN), Lega Nord (LN) and the Germany Republikaner (Reps) in order to reconstruct the dimensions of party competition in each nation and determine where each of these parties fall within the dimensions of party competition. Support is shown for a new right axis of party competition, suggesting that parties of the far right may in fact be part of the political development of Western European nations.     

What do Parties Want? Policy versus Office

What parties want – policy, office or votes – affects how they represent their voters, make strategic decisions and respond to external changes in society. What parties strive to accomplish is crucially important for what they do. Moreover, our knowledge of what parties want affects what we expect them to do. For instance, coalition theory assumes that parties have homogeneous goals, and hence are equally likely to join coalitions given the same circumstances. However, this article investigates this basic assumption of party goal homogeneity and finds that party goals do indeed diverge. The article demonstrates that party goals are influenced by party-specific factors such as party size, policy position and intra-party politics. It therefore suggests, further, that intra-party politics should be included more systematically in future studies of party behaviour.     

Linking coalition attitudes and split-ticket voting: The Scottish Parliament elections of 2007

The Scottish Parliament elections of 2007 were the third to be held under the country’s mixed-member proportional system. As voters continue to adapt to the new system, we explore two aspects of its use: i) preferences for coalitions as opposed to single-party government, and ii) ticket-splitting. The two are considered together for two reasons. First, both can be seen as manifestations of a preference for multiple parties, and as a result they share a number of likely predictors in common. In empirical practice, however, we find that rather different factors predict the two variables: ticket-splitting looks to be based on strategic partisan or ideological calculation, whereas coalition attitudes are less about partisan interests and more about an overall view of the kind of policies and politics delivered by coalitions. Second, there is potential for a causal connection between our two dependent variables, and indeed we do find clear evidence of such an attitude–behaviour link: some voters appear to split their ticket precisely because they would prefer a coalition.     

The rise of post-imperial populism: The case of right-wing Euroscepticism in Britain

Abstract.  Recent approaches to contemporary Euroscepticism have explained it in terms of the politics of opposition and peripherality characteristic of competitive party systems. Euroscepticism becomes a central strategy by which non-mainstream parties or factions within mainstream parties attempt to gain political advantage. In the British case, there has been a focus on the influence Eurosceptic factionalism can have within a first-past-the-post parliamentary system. This article challenges explanations of British Euroscepticism in terms of the politics of opposition and the workings of the party system. Instead, it is proposed that a structural crisis of British party politics has allowed Euroscepticism to enter the political mainstream. The author conceives of Euroscepticism as a distinct and powerful national movement asserting conceptions of Britain's exceptional national identity. This is viewed as part of a post-imperial crisis that shifts parties, and factions within parties, towards populist forms of legitimation that have weakened possibilities for stable and coherent political leadership over European integration. Consequently, mainstream parties have struggled to protect themselves against the ideological influence of this populist Euroscepticism. This is particularly evident during periods of Eurosceptic mobilization, and is demonstrated in this article through the examination of the extensive role played by right-wing Eurosceptic forces during the attempt by the Major Government to ratify the Maastricht Treaty.     

All That is Solid Melts into Air: Party Identification in Norway

For two decades researchers have been arguing whether profound changes were taking place in electoral politics or not. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to party identification in the European debate. In Norway, party identification has dropped dramatically since the mid-1980s. We hypothesize that the strong psychological ties between citizens and parties, described as party identification, have become a rare occurrence for several reasons. The intense debate over EU membership weakened the formation of party identification in two periods linked to the referendums in 1972 and 1994, but we also believe the observed decline in party identification to be a long-term change linked to the fading of the old cleavages and the decline of parties as mass organizations. The hypotheses have been tested on data from the Norwegian Electoral Surveys and the Referendum Surveys from 1972 and 1994. Although the hypotheses find support, alternative explanations cannot be ruled out at this stage.     

The Populist Radical Right: A Pathological Normalcy

In recent years more and more studies have pointed to the limitations of demand-side explanations of the electoral success of populist radical right parties. They argue that supply-side factors need to be included as well. While previous authors have made these claims on the basis of purely empirical arguments, this article provides a (meta)theoretical argumentation for the importance of supply-side explanations. It takes issue with the dominant view on the populist radical right, which considers it to be alien to mainstream values in contemporary western democracies – the ‘normal pathology thesis’. Instead, it argues that the populist radical right should be seen as a radical interpretation of mainstream values, or more akin to a pathological normalcy. This argument is substantiated on the basis of an empirical analysis of party ideologies and mass attitudes. The proposed paradigmatic shift has profound consequences for the way the populist radical right and western democracy relate, as well as for how the populist radical right is best studied. Most importantly, it makes demand for populist radical right politics rather an assumption than a puzzle, and turns the prime focus of research on to the political struggle over issue saliency and positions, and on to the role of populist radical right parties within these struggles.     

Right-Libertarian Parties and the “New Values”: A Re-examination*

Among the most noted and studied societal tendencies of recent decades have been those associated with structural change in industrial societies becoming postindustrial. Within political science, much attention has been focused on the behavioural and institutional effects of value change accompanying that transition, and especially on the diminishing impact of class and ideology on politics. Among the institutional effects have been (at times and in some places) decline in support for “established” parties and the rise of alternative political organizations, including new parties on both the left and right. Many of the new parties of the left, and especially those labelled “left-libertarian”, are generally viewed as harbingers of things-to-come in the “new” politics - progressive vehicles, driven along by the tides of change. In contrast, the new parties of the right are generally viewed as conservative, authoritarian, materialist reactions to change - representing transitional efforts to stop change and its effects. The latter parties presumably tell more about the past, the present, and efforts to preserve them, than about the “new” in politics. The purpose of this article is to explore the possibility that some of the new right-wing parties - especially those in social democracies - might themselves be viewed more accurately (or at least as justifiably, based on reinterpretation of the available evidence) as reflections of new values and as vehicles of forward-looking change. If so, then those parties, like their left-libertarian counterparts, may tell us something about the future of postindustrial politics.     

When Voters and Parties Agree: Valence Issues and Party Competition

There has been much talk of valence, consensus or competence politics but little theoretical explanation or empirical investigation of how this has arisen. In this article I argue that British political competition has become competence-based because the major parties and the electorate have converged on the dominant left–right dimension of British voting behaviour. As a result, commonly cited core vote explanations for party polarisation have only limited application. The electorate has converged on left–right issues, narrowing the policy space and the available positional strategies of political parties. A different pattern is found for the issue of Europe, and this is interpreted in light of possible causal mechanisms. The article offers a formal model for a rise in valence politics as parties and voters converge, and the implications are discussed for theories of party competition. I argue in favour of competence and salience-based theories of party strategy in place of a reliance on traditional spatial models.     

'Beyond Left and Right': The New Partisan Politics of Welfare

The 'new politics of the welfare state,' the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries' capacities to pursue contentious measures and avoid electoral blame. Policy structures, vested interests, and institutions play a prominent role in accounting for cross-national differences in leaders' abilities to diffuse responsibility for divisive initiatives. One important omission from the 'new politics' literature, however, is a discussion of partisan politics. 'Old' conceptualizations of the political right and left are implicitly taken as constants despite radical changes in the governing agenda of many leftist parties over the last decade. Responding to this oversight, Castles (1998) has recently probed the role of parties with respect to aggregate government expenditures, only to concludethat parties do not matter under 'conditions of constraint.' This article contends that parties are relevant to the 'new politics' and that, under specified institutional conditions, their impact is counterintuitive. In some notable cases the left has had more effect inbruising the welfare state than the right. One explanation for these cross-cutting tendencies is that parties not only provide a principal source of political agency, they also serve as strategies, thereby conditioning opportunities for political leadership. By extension, they need to be situatedwithin the 'new politics' constellation of blame-avoidance instruments.     

Attention! The meanings of attention to politics in surveys

This research note explores the role of reported attention to politics in survey overclaiming about politics. Using recognition of real and fictitious political parties in the context of the UK's 2019 European Parliament elections, we find that people who report higher attention to politics are more likely to over-report recognition of fictitious parties, and are also more likely to recognize new real political parties - those that emerged around the issue of ‘Brexit’ in the months before the election. To resolve these patterns, we show that political attention makes little difference to the accuracy of responses for people who have high political knowledge, or if it does so, it increases accuracy. However, for those with lower political knowledge, high reported political attention is a source of potential survey error and bias. These findings are consistent with higher survey satisficing and norm compliance among those who report having greater attention to politics, particularly among those who have lower knowledge. The implications are important for understanding the meaning and consequences of ‘attention to politics’ in surveys.     

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.     

Governments,decentralisation, and the risk of electoral defeat

In the last three decades several countries around the world have transferred authority from their national to their regional governments. However, not all their regions have been empowered to the same degree and important differences can be observed between and within countries. Why do some regions obtain more power than others? Current literature argues that variation in the redistribution of power and resources between regions is introduced by demand. Yet these explanations are conditional on the presence of strong regionalist parties or territorial cleavages. This article proposes instead a theory that links the government’s risk of future electoral defeat with heterogeneous decentralisation, and tests its effects using data from 15 European countries and 141 regions. The results provide evidence that parties in government protect themselves against the risk of electoral defeat by selectively targeting decentralisation towards regions in which they are politically strong. The findings challenge previous research that overestimates the importance of regionalist parties while overlooking differences between regions.     

A partisan model of government expenditure

Partisan models of budget politics largely concentrate on the size of government, budget deficits and debt, but most theories have little to say as to what the effect of party politics on both the size and the composition of budgets is. This paper seeks to extend previous literature in two directions. First, a model of spending preferences is developed that relates actors' preferred level and allocation of expenditure to electoral gains from fiscal policies. Second, changes in both total expenditure and the expenditure mix of two budget categories are analyzed for the effect of parties' spending preferences as stated in their election manifestos. Using data on 19 OECD countries from 1971 to 1999, the paper finds support for general partisan hypothesis. The results suggest that the actual spending preferences of parties matter whereas they do not indicate that parties of the left consistently differ from parties of the right in their spending behavior.     

New Parties: Game Changers or ‘Much Ado About Nothing'?

This article is about the new parties that competed at the Danish parliamentary election of 2019. It addresses three key questions: why did they emerge, what types of parties were they and what impact did they have on Danish party politics. We can identify the causes for their emergence and participation in interplay of relatively lenient rules for party registration, personal ambition, recent events – particularly the Syrian crisis and arrival of refugees – as well as anti-establishment sentiments on the political right. The three new parties shared salient characteristics: they had dominant leaders, were genuinely new, had extraparliamentary origins and were independent of societal organizations. In terms of effects on the party system, the main impact was during the campaign where the strongly anti-immigration agenda proposed by two of the parties dominated the conversation and appeared to cause some movement by established parties in a more immigrant friendly direction. Only one of the far right parties won seats in parliament and its prospects of wielding influence on policy with a Socialdemocratic government are slim.     

Elite perceptions of mass preferences in The Netherlands; biases in cognitive responsiveness

Abstract. Several studies have shown dissimilarities between political leaders and voters in terms of political attitudes and policy preferences. Though many explanations have been offered for this phenomenon, the knowledge factor has been overlooked. The basic question of this paper is how knowledgeable politicians are of the political opinions of their voters as well as of the general public. Forty-six national Dutch politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of the public at large and of their own voters who agree with specific political statements. These estimates were then compared with the actual distribution of opinions. Though using a rather strict criterion it has been found that politicians tend to give inaccurate estimates of the public's support for various political issues. The inaccuracy does not differ between members of the government and members of parliament, but politicians of parties in office appear to perform worse than members of opposition parties. The data do not support the hypothesis about politicians' ability to correctly estimate majority and minority opinions, or to accurately localize their own voters relative to the public at large. Furthermore it is observed that politicians overestimate rather than underestimate differences in opinion between the electorate and their own voters. No difference is found in politicians'estimates of political issues which can or cannot be classified in terms of 'left' or 'right'. In addition, politicians do not judge their voters to be more right-wing than they actually are. Contrary to our hypothesis, Social-Democratic politicians are not more likely to show a 'conservative bias' in estimating their voters' preferences compared to politicians from the Christian-Democratic and Liberal parties. Finally, the relevance of our findings for political sciences as well as some normative consequences are briefly discussed.     

Cost of ruling as a game of tones: The accumulation of bad news and incumbents’ vote loss

An extensive body of research documents how governing parties generally suffer electoral defeats. Varying explanations have been offered, most of which touch upon the liabilities of policy responsibility. Although media coverage is generally acknowledged as one of these liabilities, few empirical studies have examined how news content affect government support. Based on the fact that voters get their information about politics, policies and societal issues from the media, this article studies how the constant stream of negative news influences incumbent support over a 20-year period in Denmark. Modeling a previously untested argument on the cost of ruling, it shows that the accumulation of bad news throughout tenure exerts a substantial effect on government support.     

Does housing create votes? Explaining the electoral success of the AKP in Turkey

In this paper we examine the rise and consolidation of the Justice and Development Party (Adelet ve Kalinma Partisi, AKP) by analyzing its success in local elections. Our examination of the durability of the AKP takes into account existing explanations of Turkish electoral politics such as economic voting, center-periphery relations, and traditional party cleavages, as well as the clientelistic tendencies of Turkish parties. We argue that the intensification of neo-liberal economic policies encouraged the AKP to seek alternative sources for distributive politics, which it found in Turkey's Mass Housing Administration (TOKİ). Using political, economic, and socio-demographic data for 900 municipal districts in Turkey, we empirically analyze the relationship between TOKİ financed housing projects and the AKP's success in the three mayoral elections between 2004 and 2014. Our results show that while traditional explanations of Turkish party voting account for some of the AKP's success, distributive politics in the form of TOKİ housing projects is a stronger predictor of the party's durability.     

Duverger's Laws: Between social and institutional determinism

Abstract. The purpose of this article is to relocate Duverger's Laws within the debate about the effects of electoral systems on the number of parties. Although Duverger's theory has always been seen as the best example of a purely institutionalist approach to the issue, it is possible to argue that this is only true if one overemphasises the meaning of the laws without considering Duverger's justification and explanations for them. However, if one takes into consideration not only the laws, but also Duverger's theories about the effects of electoral systems on the number of parties as a whole, one can argue that his theses do not have a purely institutionalist character and can therefore coexist with theories that try to take into account variables other than electoral rules.