Parties can not only actively adjust the electoral rules to reach more favourable outcomes, as is most often recognized in political science, but they also passively create an environment that systematically influences electoral competition. This link is theorized and included in the wider framework capturing the mutual dependence of electoral systems and party systems. The impact of passive influence is successfully tested on one out of two factors closely related to party systems: choice set size (i.e., number of options provided to voters) and degree of ideological polarization. The research utilizes established datasets (i.e., Constituency-Level Elections Archive, Party System Polarization Index, Chapel Hill Expert Survey, and Manifesto Project Database) and via regression analysis with clustered robust standard errors concludes that the choice set size constitutes an attribute with passive influence over electoral systems. Thus, it must be reflected when outcomes of electoral systems are estimated or compared across various contexts.

Political parties commonly experience internal disagreements. Recently, evidence is accumulating that outright internal discord makes a party much less attractive to voters. However, we do not understand well when citizens perceive a party to be internally conflicted in the first place. We here explain citizens’ perceptions from a democratic life cycle perspective: Factors related to the periodic conduct of elections induce higher levels of intra-party conflict and make it more visible to citizens. To test this argument, we combine survey data on citizens’ perceptions of political parties in Germany spanning 16 years with indicators moderating (the visibility of) intra-party conflict. The analysis shows that citizens perceive more internal conflict when parties are heterogenous, when they are governing, when election day is distant, and when electoral losses accumulate. This demonstrates the recurring patterns in citizens’ perceptions of political parties and suggests self-reinforcing dynamics between citizen assessments and election outcomes.

This article is the first to show that gender shapes the degree to which legislators use formal mechanisms to oversee government activities. Extensive scholarly work has analysed the use of oversight instruments, especially regarding who monitors whom. Whether, how, and why the conformity of men and women with institutional roles differs, has not yet received scholarly attention. We hypothesise that women become more active than men in overseeing the executive when in opposition while reducing their monitoring activities even more strongly than men when in government because of different social roles ascribed to men and women as well as differences in risk aversity between sexes. We analyse panel data for three oversight tools from the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2013 to test this proposition. Our findings imply that characteristics of political actors influence even a strongly institutionalised process as oversight and further clarify the gender bias in political representation.

Previous literature suggests a party’s electoral result can shape its vote share and calculus of voting in a subsequent election. Less is known about whether this information-updating process helps explain the success of radical right parties (RRPs) in a multi-level system. To answer this question, I use the case of Germany to test whether a bottom-up spillover effect exists for RRPs. Through a regression discontinuity design, I first find that crossing regional electoral hurdles can substantially improve RRPs’ electoral performance in a subsequent general election. Yet, this positive spillover effect cannot be found for other party families. Next, I use a panel to ascertain which mechanisms drive this effect for RRPs. The analysis suggests the legitimation mechanism is more dominant than the viability mechanism and exposure mechanism. These findings enrich our understanding of both the second-order election framework and RRP studies.

The article examines the key factors influencing women’s electoral success in European Parliament (EP) elections. We present a new conceptual approach and a novel model that simultaneously incorporates trends in party characteristics, institutional and socio-economic factors and cross-country trends in women’s representation. The model provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationships between party-level and Member State-level factors and the election of women to the EP. The study is based on an original dataset of 450 observations on national political parties from all Member States, spanning four European elections from 2004 to 2019.

Our results show that party characteristics such as incumbency rates, party size and ideological orientations (i.e. the party’s position on the GAL-TAN scale or its attitude towards European integration) play a key role in shaping women’s representation. This article provides novel insights into the unique features of Central and Eastern Europe, elucidating divergent patterns of women’s electoral prospects in conservative and progressive parties in Western democracies and Central and Eastern European post-communist EU Member States.

If elections are to perform their legitimizing role, they should not only be objectively free, fair and non-fraudulent, but should also be perceived by the public as such. This paper investigates who perceives elections to be fair and why by contrasting two main logics: one based on the idea that perceptions of election integrity arise from external cues voters get from their environment and a second logic claiming that perceptions are internally created based on attitudes and beliefs. We use original survey data collected in ten countries around the European Elections 2019. We find that perceptions of election fairness are unrelated to country levels of integrity but mainly relate to voters’ status as winners/losers of the elections, attachment to the institutions they elect and populist attitudes. We also find beliefs on fake news influence to weakly mediate the relation between populist attitudes and perceptions of election fairness.

In this paper, we develop a framework for studying the role of group identities in contemporary cleavage formation. Identities, we suggest, hold the key to a central conundrum of current political sociology: the fact that today’s electoral realignments appear to be rooted in the social structure of post-industrial societies, while the decline of mass organizations has dissolved traditional links between politics and social structure. Bringing cleavage theory into dialog with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, we theorize how group identities may play an important role in stabilizing a new universalism-particularism cleavage emerging in Western Europe today. We identify two key processes of cleavage identity formation: bottom-up processes of “social closure” and top-down “classification struggles” waged by political entrepreneurs. For both processes, we review empirical findings and formulate an agenda for further research.

Specialized anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) aim to address corruption problems when conventional institutional mechanisms are dysfunctional. Yet, we still lack thorough understanding of the conditions that enable ACAs to withstand undue influences of the overarching political regime. Informed by the judicial politics literature, we examine the value of public opinion in empowering ACAs. Leveraging the evolving political conditions of Hong Kong, we argue that a lack of public support for other government organs offers opportunities for an ACA to distinguish itself from the rest of the regime and establish operational independence. We find that a signature ACA of Hong Kong, created by the British colonial government, has been uniquely sensitive to public complaints of corruption. The agency is the most responsive when other government branches are perceived to be lacking integrity. Also, negative appraisals of the political regime encourage the ACA’s institutional functions and increase the degree of enforcement discretion entrusted to it. Our findings suggest a mechanism of ACA empowerment whereby the public is committed to sustaining agency independence because of their distrust and the unpopularity of other government organs. Therefore, potential institutional threats posed by an unpopular regime to the ACA may actually strengthen the latter’s power and autonomy.

Populist supporters have been found to take cues from populist incumbents. Yet, little is known about how they incorporate party cues in their political beliefs when populists are in office. This research note argues that (1) citizens who identify with populist parties engage in partisan motivated reasoning – that is, they are driven by the desire to be consistent with their partisan allegiances – and that (2) they engage in partisan motivated reasoning more intensely than their non-populist counterparts because populist party cues strongly prompt them to process biased information. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, it is evidenced that populist supporters express much warmer economic views when their parties hold power. Warm economic views are also found to increase significantly more in accordance with strength of partisanship and exposure to political information for populist supporters than for non-populist supporters when their respective parties govern. Results highlight a mechanism by which populist incumbents are likely to remain attractive despite their poor economic record. They have implications for our understanding of the mainstreaming of populist parties in Europe.

This paper investigates why some attempts at pacted transitions from non-democratic rule fail, while others succeed. It determines the composition of opposition organizations that enable pacting. The paper draws on a data set compiled by the author comparing forty-five attempts at negotiations. The qualitative comparative analysis shows that those negotiations that include the opposition with strong organizational capacity succeed and end up with democratization. This strong organizational power of the opposition can be drawn from trade unions or the Catholic Church participating in negotiations, even if the initial regime is personalistic.

How does media exposure relate to support for radical right populist parties (RRPPs)? We contribute to this classic debate by analyzing the web browsing histories and survey responses of six thousand study participants in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK during the 2019 European Parliament election. Linking direct measures of online news exposure to voting behavior allows us to assess the effects of the salience of issues politicized by RRPPs on their electoral support. The likelihood to vote for RRPPs was higher when the EU was more salient in individual media diets, while exposure to the less salient issue of immigration did not increase the propensity to vote for RRPPs. Alongside consistent results for other party families and interactions with pre-existing voting intentions, the findings indicate that the electoral effects of online media are contingent on the overall salience of a specific issue and voters’ predispositions.

How do varying levels of inter-group contact affect voter preferences in connection with ethnically radical political candidates and parties? Two competing hypotheses have emerged in the last 60 years: the first, known as the group threat hypothesis, argues that voters from an ethnic or religious group in more ethnically or racially heterogeneous districts will exhibit stronger preferences for ethnically radical political candidates. The contact hypothesis argues that groups living in mixed localities are actually less likely to support ethnic radicals. Both perspectives have found empirical support, but no previous study has offered a theoretical explanation for two seemingly contradictory conclusions. We specify just such a theory, arguing that the effect of district level integration is conditioned by the direction of a group’s share of the national population. We test this theory quantitatively using electoral data from Northern Ireland between 1983 and 2010.

The Covid-19 pandemic placed responsibility on the European Union (EU) to effectively mitigate this common challenge. An important aspect of the common fight against the virus was the collective procurement of vaccines. The initially slow process of vaccine delivery may have caused overall frustration within societies and may also have had a profound effect on people’s assessment of their country’s EU membership. This paper examines this assumption via unique panel data collected in Germany in three waves between November 2020 and August 2021. We show that citizens evaluated their country’s EU membership negatively especially when the EU’s progress on vaccinations was in its early stages. In addition, public assessment was particularly negative when vaccination progress was compared to the situation in the United Kingdom (UK). Overall, our findings point to volatile levels of EU support depending on respondents’ perceptions of the success of the UK outside the EU.

Comeback prime ministers (CBPMs), who return to office after a break, have been a notable, but conspicuously understudied, feature of several parliamentary democracies. This article provides the first ever comparative study of CBPMs. To make sense of the varying frequency of CBPMs in 18 established democracies from 1945 to 2024, we refer to competing party rationales of (re-)selecting prime ministers in different contexts, with the latter shaping the former. Apart from powerful presidents in semi-presidential regimes, the frequency of early replacements of prime ministers, the scope of alternations of the prime minister’s party, and the degree of intraparty personalization offer plausible explanations for the cross-national and temporal variation of prime-ministerial returns. While CBPMs have become less common since 1990, the remaining cases include some particularly powerful party leaders, underscoring the continuing importance of this neglected feature for understanding chief executive selection in established parliamentary democracies and beyond.

Trust in national and local institutions is an essential component of democracy. The literature has dealt mainly with the former, while less attention has been given to the latter. This paper advances a novel theoretical approach to inquire about trust in local institutions, which is also used to test national ones. We posit that trust is affected by the perceptions individuals have of the physical space where they live. Both a) the perceived quality of life in the neighbourhood where individuals live and b) the neighbourhood (perceived) peripherality are hypothesized to affect trust in local (and to a lesser extent) national institutions. We test our hypotheses in Italy, over a large representative sample of more than 40.000 respondents. We show that both variables are crucial predictors of local trust, but only the perceived quality of life predicts national trust. Equally important, social, cultural and economic individual capital does not modify the relation.

The expulsion of party members for the expression of dissent is a common practice in democratic states around the world, which can have momentous consequences for individual parties and the political system at large. In this article, we address the question of whether limitations on party members’ free speech can be defended on normative grounds. Drawing on a conception of parties that sees them as broader membership organisations that allow citizens to exercise political agency in a unique fashion, as well as on insights from the broader normative-theoretical literature on organisations, we build a strong presumptive case that interference with party members’ political freedoms is normatively problematic. Exploring numerous weighty arguments in favour of limiting freedom of speech within parties, we find that none of them provides a knock-down argument against our case. The argument we advance has important implications for contemporary theoretical debates about parties and partisanship, and for the regulation of parties’ internal affairs more generally.

Whereas individual-level studies find that encompassing welfare states might in general be incompatible with large-scale immigration, studies on welfare spending find inconclusive results. We address this puzzle by pointing to the moderating role of social program design. We separate programs according to their degree of natives’ interest based on coverage, generosity and stratification characteristics for the social areas of unemployment, sickness/disability, and pensions for 18 OECD countries. We then test the moderating effect of natives’ interest on the impact of immigration on individual support for social spending and actual social spending in the three areas. Our results indicate that programs do react to immigration by decreasing support and budgets when natives’ interest is low, whereas programs where the interest of natives is high tend to increase individual support and spending.

In this study we test whether interest organizations that are confrontational towards EU institutions are less successful than their more cooperative counterparts in obtaining funding from the European Commission (EC). The transfer of public funds to interest organizations is a key dynamic in state-civil society relationships. Research shows that organizations, especially public groups, often heavily rely on public funds to the point that, without funds, many would cease to exist. ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ is thus a popular expression among leaders of organizations who apply for funds. Scholars document a widespread perception among group leaders that a confrontational attitude towards the state can lead to curtail of public funds. This perception is based on the assumption that state institutions use public funding to discipline confrontational interest organizations. We test this assumption using quantitative and qualitative data collected from a survey of 270 interest organizations who applied for EC funding between 2015 and 2018. Our findings suggest that, while almost half of our survey respondents feel that critical attitudes towards the EU would have negative consequences for their funding applications, empirically, confrontational and cooperative organizations have the same chances of obtaining EC grants. This finding is robust across different interest organization categories, including when non-applicants and mortality anxiety are considered in the analysis. The results add a new layer to resource dependency theory pointing at the incongruence between an organization’s perception of its relationship with public institutions and the observation of that relationship.