Party Politics

A growing body of research points to heterogeneity in the predictors of turnout and highlights the importance of longitudinal designs in exploring within-country variation as a remedy. Building on this perspective, the present study examines the determinants of district-level voter turnout in Turkey using a panel dataset covering all provinces across 18 general elections between 1950 and 2023. Leveraging the country’s unique variation in institutional and socioeconomic structure across time and space, results based on the Mundlak regression show that compulsory voting, socioeconomic development, and democratizing elections are associated with higher turnout, while political fragmentation and larger party systems are linked to lower turnout. Surprisingly, elections held under majoritarian systems experienced higher turnout than those under PR. Findings from additional analyses further suggest that higher levels of wasted votes, driven by the 10% national electoral threshold, may have dampened voter turnout in PR elections in the more recent decades, particularly in some districts. Overall, these findings suggest that voter turnout is a function of both local-level contextual factors and aggregate-level institutional features.

This study argues that election years shape whether majority ethnonationalist (MEN) organizations in European countries engage in ethnic riot and protest, with effects differing by party status. For MEN non-parties, elections highlight a good (votes) that they do not pursue, reducing incentives for ethnic riots and protests during election years. In contrast, for MEN parties, elections make votes more salient, increasing their incentive to employ such tactics. Using original data on 281 MEN organizations across 18 European countries, two-way fixed effects estimations show that for MEN non-parties, an election year is associated with a 3.40 percentage point decrease in the predicted probability of ethnic riot. In contrast, for MEN parties, election years are positively associated with riots. No clear interactive association is found for protests. The findings advance existing evidence on majority ethnonationalism and far right politics in Europe with evidence of organizational mobilization differences.

We examine how the degree of social closure among political elites shapes mass-level political trust in Latin America, a region marked by historically closed elites and persistently low trust. Building on contrasting perspectives, we argue that elite closure undermines citizens’ trust, but its influence also depends on a country’s long-term patterns of closure. In contexts where elites have been highly closed over time, further increases are expected to erode trust. In more open systems, by contrast, closure may be positively associated. Our analysis combines LAPOP data (2004–2018) with PELA-USAL elite indicators in a large-N comparative framework. Estimates from hierarchical models indicate that elite closure—characterized by legislative re-election rates and family ties in politics—significantly reduces political trust. However, these results are heterogeneous: rising closure erodes trust only in countries where elites have historically been highly closed, highlighting the context-dependent role of elite composition in shaping citizens’ political trust.

It is often assumed that parliamentary activity, by demonstrating MPs’ commitment and the diligent fulfilment of their duties, is viewed favourably by the electorate and increases their chances of re-election. Our results imply a more nuanced picture. Drawing on data from the Polish Sejm between 2005 and 2023, we find that parliamentary activity has no discernible positive effect on re-election for most MPs. We also document that MPs with the lowest activity levels retain a high likelihood of securing a seat in subsequent elections. These patterns are difficult to reconcile with voters rewarding parliamentary conduct. Instead, our evidence points to the decisive role of an MP’s position in the party hierarchy in shaping voter perceptions and electoral success. In line with this, re-election depends largely on an MP’s ranking on the party list, which remains remarkably stable over time. Overall, our findings suggest that party structures and internal selection processes can substantially constrain voter-driven accountability, even in electoral systems that allow voters to choose among individual candidates.

The standard model of representative democracy is increasingly challenged. Partly because of the tight historical and theoretical connection between representative democracy and political parties, it is not well understood how the latter relate to other models of democracy. Whereas previous studies have examined ideology and populism to explain why parties differ in the conceptions of democracy they advance, we argue that personalism, as expressed in party organization, is part of the story. Combining data from PPDB and V-Party, we analyze the relationship between party personalism and opposing models of democracy for 194 parties from 38 countries. Centralized personalism goes together with supporting direct democracy, illiberalism, and majoritarianism. In contrast, parties exhibiting a high degree of decentralized personalism tend towards liberalism and consensus democracy. When the “rules of the game” are not universally accepted anymore, we need to understand better which players seek to make changes and why.

Across Africa, people have varied understandings of what “democracy” is, with implications for democratic support, political participation, and willingness to resist democratic backsliding. Drawing on insights from literature about varied understandings of democracy and partisan bias in perceiving democratic backsliding, I argue that partisanship influences the ways that citizens understand democracy—specifically, whether they understand it in procedural or instrumental terms--but that this relationship depends on the nature of political competition within a country. Using cross-sectional survey data from the Afrobarometer, alongside data from the World Values Survey over time in Ghana and Zimbabwe, this study demonstrates ruling party partisans are more likely to understand democracy in instrumental terms, while opposition party partisans understand it in more procedural terms. This partisan gap in understandings of democracy is more pronounced in countries with higher levels of clientelism and lower levels of multiparty competition.

Why does the electoral success of anti-establishment populist movements lead to fewer, rather than more, effective political parties? Using panel data from electoral democracies worldwide (1970–2020), we document a robust negative relationship between populist electoral success and subsequent party system fragmentation. We theorize that the electoral validation of populism triggers three mechanisms that concentrate party systems: delegitimation of moderate positions, polarization that eliminates centrist parties, and the establishment of barriers preventing new challengers from entering. Employing entropy-balanced two-way fixed effects, we find that a one unit increase in our Vote-Weighted Populism Index reduces the effective number of parties by 0.388 units. This effect persists across diverse institutional contexts, though regional analysis reveals important variation: the concentration effect is strongest in Europe and Asia-Pacific, and null in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. In terms of moderation, we demonstrate that economic recessions amplify the effect, nearly doubling its magnitude, while other institutional factors seem to play no significant role.

The article examines the impact of the recent crises – the Eurozone crisis, the refugee crisis, Brexit, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine – on the structuration of party competition in six Northwestern European countries. Situating the multiple crises in a long-term perspective on the transformation of party systems, we emphasize their reinforcing effect on the structuring capacity of the new cultural divide. In some countries, this divide and its main driving forces have become so powerful in transforming the political space that we observe an emerging multi-polar pattern of party configurations. This pattern is characterized by a green new left opposed to the populist radical right on the new cultural dimension. In contrast, the center-left and the center-right, despite converging, still oppose each other on the economic dimension. Empirically, the article examines election campaigns in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, drawing on the original PolDem relational content analysis of mass media coverage published before national elections from the 1970s up to 2022.

Although consisting of EU (potential) candidate countries, the Western Balkan Six (WB6: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia) remain largely absent from the study of party politics. Mapping the dominant lines of party contestation in the region and comparing them cross-nationally is vital to understanding what types of ideological conflicts divide the parties of this region, how programmatic the party systems are, and whether they resemble other party systems. We are the first to use and validate the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey to investigate which issues structure Western Balkan party systems and to quantitatively map these systems. Generally, these party systems are weakly programmatic, unidimensional, and structured along cultural issues with a background consensus on the EU. This article contributes to the scholarly understanding of party competition in a geopolitically important region and facilitates future research on party systems in young democracies.

Participatory Budgeting (PB) has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for global diffusion. However, its ability to endure over time and become fully institutionalized remains more limited. This study addresses one of the most frequently cited explanations for PB’s instability: changes in the ruling party. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, we argue that it is not party turnover per se that leads to the discontinuation of PB, but rather the ideological orientation of such changes. To investigate this hypothesis, we draw on an original dataset covering 295 Spanish municipalities, including both cases of PB continuity and discontinuity. Our findings indicate that changes in the ruling party alone do not account for the interruption of PBs. Instead, the key determinant is the ideological direction of government change or continuity: PB is more likely to persist when left-wing parties remain in power or when transitions occur toward left-wing administrations.

Recent years have seen growing scholarly attention to the role of intra-coalition partisan change. Yet, Shomer et al. (2022) critiqued the common definition of government termination that regards any partisan change as a government termination, arguing that it inflates the number of governments and distorts scholarly understanding of government duration—particularly in certain countries. This research note examines whether, and to what extent, adopting Shomer et al.’s (2022) modified definition alters substantive conclusions about the determinants of government duration and stability. We follow their approach, redefining government termination based on: (1) a new prime minister, (2) an election, or (3) a crucial partisan loss that alters majority status. Using this revised definition and applying parametric event history models that incorporate established determinants of duration, we find evidence that the conventional measure can bias conclusions about what drives government stability, especially with regards to the impact of ENGP and parliamentary polarization.

Does the internal organization of governmental parties influence their ability to respond to shifts in public opinion? We argue that intra-government democracy, defined as the average internal democracy of governmental parties, explains variation in responsiveness. Intra-government democracy has positive features such as promoting internal deliberation and it encourages attention to core supporters’ preferences. However, deliberation limits policy changes, and responding to supporters may distract governing parties from the median voter. Thus, we expect that internally democratic governments will be less responsive to changes in the median voter position. We test this expectation using three different estimation strategies for time-series cross-national data on public opinion and governmental policies since the 1970s, and these analyses support our argument. This finding has important implications for our understanding of how intra-party institutions influence substantive responsiveness to public opinion.

Perennial gridlock in Washington has led to many political and media elites calling for an end to the filibuster. But would it matter? In this paper, we derive a series of legislative bargaining models and show that eliminating the filibuster would likely affect gridlock in a narrow set of circumstances. Using data on gridlock from Binder (2015), we conduct simulations to examine the effect of removing the filibuster on outcomes. The results demonstrate that, while some believe that getting the rid of the filibuster is a panacea, the practical effects of doing are more muted.

Beyond mass rallies, cinema-inspired campaigns, and television debates, digital platforms have introduced new dynamics to political communication in India. This paper analyses how Indian political parties use Instagram Reels to construct political messages, focusing on the themes, strategies, and visual styles that characterise their digital representation. To interpret how platform rules and attention-driven strategies are reshaping political discourse, the study draws on the attention economy, the race to the bottom of the brainstem, and platformisation. These frameworks highlight the most effective messages, emotions, and visual formats that fit their algorithmic logic and platform-specific requirements. The research focuses on content analysis of the 30 most-viewed Instagram Reels from the six prominent political parties. Indian political communication increasingly mirrors influencer culture and platformisation logics. The noise of sensationalist spectacles and affective-stimulus-driven emotive content marginalises the substantive rational needs of political communication in a diverse democratic society.

How does the provision of political appointments influence coalition support in multiparty presidential systems? While the importance of cabinet portfolios for coalition governments is well-established, lower-tier positions have received less attention being limited to compensations for weak policy-making capabilities. In multiparty presidential systems, however, these appointments also function as bargaining chips during coalition formation. I argue that bureaucratic appointments help sustain coalition support, especially during votes on bills issued by the executive power. Analyzing roll-call data from Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies (2003–2018) across 161 bills, I find that besides ministerial portfolios, lower-tier appointments strongly increase legislative support, highlighting the strategic use of patronage under high political stakes. These findings contribute to understanding coalition management strategies in fragmented presidential systems.

This study examines how political parties engage strategically with referendum campaigns, a less-explored aspect of their broader referendum involvement. Building on referendum instrumentalization studies as well as cognate literatures, an analytical framework identifies five potential strategic factors that might explain why parties participate in referendum campaigns and formulates corresponding hypotheses regarding their effect. The framework is applied to 33 recent Swiss referendums, using social media and newspaper advertisements as a proxy for party participation. Binomial logistic regression reveals that public attention for a referendum, its issue’s salience to a party, and (to a lesser extent) a party’s initiator status significantly favor the likelihood of campaign participation, suggesting that Swiss parties primarily leverage referendum campaigns for policy-seeking and image-building strategies. This study therefore contributes to understanding of the interplay between referendums and party strategies in contemporary political contexts, and allows for the expansion of instrumentalization perspectives to include non-initiating parties.

Compared to national-level studies research on parties’ issue salience in local politics remains significantly underdeveloped. How local party branches balance the general party ideology with local context when deciding which issues to prioritise is still not well understood. This article addresses this gap by examining the drivers of issue salience in local election manifestos, specifically investigating the extent to which it is determined by the national party organisation and place-based municipal conditions. Drawing on an unprecedented dataset of 262 local election manifestos from 36 municipalities across two election cycles in Flanders (Belgium), the study measures and explains the emphasis on 17 policy issues using a supervised machine learning approach. Findings indicate that local parties’ issue salience is influenced by both national party preferences and local context, demonstrating their role as strategic actors who make deliberate choices about which issues to emphasise and de-emphasise.

How does coalition participation influence party membership? We argue that parties that take part in coalition governments are likely to experience less favorable party membership developments than parties governing alone because of the compromises they have to agree on in multi-party cabinets. This should be particularly likely for parties in ideologically diverse coalition governments since parties participating in such cabinets are more likely to have to deviate from originally promised policy positions; and for junior coalition partners, as they have less influence over policy and are less able to claim credit for government achievements. We evaluate these expectations on the basis of a new dataset that covers information on (1) the number of members in all German state parties between 1990 and 2023, (2) the ideological profile of the state parties, and (3) the status of a state party as a member of a state coalition government. We find that junior coalition partners lose significantly more members than parties that govern alone. Furthermore, an increasing programmatic distance within the cabinet on economic issues is related to a decreasing number of members of the respective government parties.

Far-right communication often portrays a division between ‘the people’ and perceived antagonists, potentially fuelling intergroup tensions. A pivotal element is the politicisation of religion: in Christian-shaped regions, far-right parties invoke Christianity as part of Western identity – despite their weak religious ties and growing secularisation. This paradox raises questions about religion’s function in far-right discourse. I argue that far-right parties systematically use a conservative reading of Christianity as a demarcation tool – marking not only Islam but also cultural liberalism as incompatible with a Christian-framed ingroup. Using parliamentary data from Europe, I conduct automated text classification to identify religious markers and their co-occurrence with inclusionary–exclusionary rhetoric across countries and over time. Results reveal group-specific framing, distinct patterns of religious invocation compared to other parties, and links of these patterns to events. This study demonstrates how Christian narratives serve as rhetorical resources for boundary construction, challenging the cohesion of even secularised societies.