Between Christian and multicultural democracy: religious legacies and minority politics

The article presents a comparative analysis of the religious underpinnings of 19 liberal democracies in the West and their relevance for contemporary minority politics. The democratic relevance of religion is conceptualised as stemming from actors (churches, religious parties) and from historical and structural factors such as confessional patterns, relationships between state and church and degrees of secularisation in 19 democracies with a Christian background. The article’s historical mapping demonstrates that democratic development has occurred in distinct patterns rooted in the Catholic?Protestant divide. It then demonstrates that there are distinct effects of this divide on minority politics. It is hypothesised that in line with the confessional patterning of democratisation, Catholic countries and actors seem to be more resistant to the pressures arising from religious pluralisation than Protestant ones and that, even after 9/11, there is no cross-national or cross-confessional convergence in these responses.     

Partisan effects in morality policy making

Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.     

Electoral infidelity: Why party members cast defecting votes

Party politics and electoral research generally assume that party members are loyal voters. This article first assesses the empirical basis for this assumption before providing individual‐level explanations for defection. It combines prominent theories from party politics and electoral behaviour research and argues that internal disagreement and external pressure can each bring about disloyal voting. The hypotheses are motivated with multi‐country European survey data and tested on two sets of party‐level national surveys. The results show, first, that, on average, 8 per cent of European party members cast a defecting vote in the last election, and second, that dissatisfaction with the leadership is the strongest predictor of defection. Additionally, internal ideological disagreement is associated with higher probabilities of defection, whereas the effects of pull factors in the form of contentious policies are rather limited. These findings emphasise the importance of testing scientific assumptions and the potential significance of party leadership contests.     

Risk,politics, and development: Lessons from the UK's democracy aid

Political risks are inescapable in development. Donors keep them in check with a range of tools, but existing options provide little guidance about how political forms of risk can—or should—shape programme design. This paper presents a novel framework that offers practical guidance on how to think about and manage some of these risks. This is based on a review of programmes delivered by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which provides a specific type of aid: democracy assistance. Political forms of risk have a strong influence on that aid, so it provides a valuable example. Our framework centres on two trade‐offs inherent in the provision of aid for democracy support. The first relates to the type of approach employed in a programme; should it focus on a thematic issue or a specific event, or should it focus primarily on an institution and its processes? The second concerns the scope of a programme in terms of who it includes. Understanding the costs and benefits of these trade‐offs will help development practitioners to make decisions about political risks in a more rigorous and transparent way and, potentially, to shift from a culture of risk aversion, to one of informed risk‐taking.     

Electoral volatility and parties’ ideological responsiveness

For a number of decades now, scholars have been indicating that ties between citizens and parties are eroding. As a consequence, electoral behaviour has become more volatile and also more unpredictable. The consequences of this process of change on parties’ strategic behaviour have, however, received little attention. In this article, the impact of dealignment on parties’ strategic behaviour is examined, with the focus being on the extent to which parties are responsive to the mean voter. The expectation of dealignment allowing parties ‘to move around more freely’ leads to the hypothesis that parties are more responsive in a context of dealignment. The analyses provide evidence that is in line with this expectation. Ideological responsiveness is conditioned by the level of volatility in the electorate. The conclusion to draw from these results is that dealignment, which profoundly affects voters’ behaviour, leads parties to become more responsive to the mean voter.     

Positions and saliency of immigration in party manifestos: A novel dataset using crowd coding

Immigration is one of the most widely debated issues today. It has, therefore, also become an important issue in party competition, and radical right parties are trying to exploit the issue. This opens up many pressing questions for researchers. To answer these questions, data on the self‐ascribed and unified party positions on immigration and immigrant integration issues is needed. So far, researchers have relied on expert survey data, media analysis data and ‘proxy’ categories from the Manifesto Project Dataset. However, the former two only give the mediated party position, and the latter relies on proxies that do not specifically measure immigration. The new dataset presented in this article provides researchers with party positions and saliency estimates on two issue dimensions – immigration and immigrant integration – in 14 countries and 43 elections. Deriving the data from manifestos enables the provision of parties’ unified and unfiltered immigration positions for countries and time points not covered in expert surveys and media studies, making it possible to link immigration and immigrant integration positions and saliency scores to other issue areas covered in the Manifesto Project Dataset. Well‐established criteria are used to distinguish between statements on (1) immigration control and (2) immigrant integration. This allows for a more fine‐grained analysis along these two dimensions. Furthermore, the dataset has been generated using the new method of crowd coding, which allows a relatively fast manual coding of political texts. Some of the advantages of crowd coding are that it is easily replicated and expanded, and, as such, presents the research community with the opportunity to amend and expand upon this coding scheme.     

The mysterious overvaluation of KRW in the 1990s†

Existing theories on real exchange rates predict a significant undervaluation of the Korean won (KRW) in the early and mid-1990s. The paper demonstrates why this expectation did not materialize and instead an unprecedentedly large degree of overvaluation took place. Focusing on three variables, namely, financial repression, devaluation pass-through, and policy exhibitionism, the paper examines how the unraveling of the developmental state eventually gave rise to the 1990s’ overvaluation. It argues that the policy exhibitionism of the new civilian government amplified the influence of Chaebol on monetary policies, which in turn created a strong appreciative force to KRW. It also contends that the increasing exchange rate pass-through onto the prices of imported intermediate goods explains why Chaebol did not desire to tame the excessive appreciative trend despite its detrimental effect on their exports. The paper offers policy implications for other state-led, emerging economies.     

Foreign threat and political party change: Russia and changes in party manifestos

How do political parties react to foreign security threats? There has been very little attention paid in the literature generally to how parties react to international events, particularly how parties react to foreign policy threats. Using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project, we examine how political parties in countries in Europe have reacted to Russian actions in terms of their emphasis on security issues. Based upon our analysis of the manifestoes from 331 parties in 36 countries we find that, generally, interstate threats have no significant effect on the military position adopted by political parties, although these effects vary by party type and by the type of threat. Russian based threats appear to be associated with the Far Left becoming more dovish (which is consistent with what would be expected by the literature) and the Far Right becoming significantly less hawkish.     

Legitimacy and post-conflict state-building: the undervalued role of performance legitimacy

Legitimacy is essential to state-building after conflict. Yet, the prescribed path to gaining legitimacy is often a narrow one that borrows heavily from the experiences of Western states. Elections are prescribed as an essential first step on the logic that this means gaining process legitimacy can rebuild a social contract between citizens and the state, a social contract that is rooted in democratic norms and values. This article proposes an alternative path, one that emphasises the critical role of performance legitimacy and its non-exclusive nature. Performance legitimacy is granted when citizens perceive that some or all of their basic needs are being met. The article offers a new analytical framework for understanding a state’s potential source of performance legitimacy, how non-state actors may vie with the state to seize this form of legitimacy, and what consequences this has for processes of state institution-building after conflict. In this respect, this article seeks to reorient theory and practice to a broader view of legitimacy and its critical role in post-conflict state-building.     

Change—and Scepticism—as a Constant: Anthony King on Parties and Party Systems

Tony King had a healthy disrespect for conventional wisdom but a deep appreciation for common sense. Drawing on an eclectic mix of sources, both qualitative and quantitative, he wore his learning lightly, the better to highlight and explain to academic and non‐academic audiences how shifts in society and public opinion drove change inside parties and in the party systems in which they operated. King asked great questions and provided answers that simultaneously captured complexity and the big picture. His provocative interpretations and analysis were always stimulating—and many of them proved highly prescient.