The article investigates whether and to what extent the welfare policies of Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) vary in diverse government coalitions. Relying on a multidimensional framework differentiating coalitional politics along the welfare size and deservingness dimension, we conduct a comparative case study analysing welfare reforms of the ‘standard’ centre-right/PRRP government coalition ÖVP-FPÖ in Austria and the ‘new’ populist government coalition M5S-Lega in Italy. We find that both PRRPs do not promote pro-welfare policies in general, but rather opt for selective expansion of benefits for ‘makers’, while aiming at retrenching benefits for ‘takers’. This welfare strategy includes pensioners and male breadwinner families but excludes migrants or long-term unemployed. The analysis furthermore shows that the central line of conflict with the centre-right ÖVP is mostly about the size of welfare policies, especially for ‘deserving’ citizens, while with the socially more left-leaning M5S it is rather centred around the deservingness dimension, e.g., benefits for takers. These results offer a more fine-grained understanding of the PRRPs’ welfare agenda and their coalitional welfare politics in office.

A burgeoning literature documents the emergence of a new globalization cleavage in Western Europe, centered around the issues of immigration and European integration. We investigate to what extent the globalization cleavage has crystallized by studying the alignment of preferences regarding open borders, their connection to more fundamental elements in the normative component of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism, and the extent to which this links up to the organizational component through party choice. To do this, we use innovative items tapping into political priorities, values, understandings of democracy, and virtues in a cross-sectional comparative survey in Norway and the UK. We find that the globalization cleavage is significantly more developed in the UK than in Norway but lacks a solidified normative component in both. This implies that considerable opportunities remain for ideological entrepreneurs to either fortify or dilute this cleavage, even in the UK.

This article demonstrates that deindustrialization increases ethnonational mobilization. We maintain that levels of mobilization of ethnonational movements are to an important extent a residual to the class cleavage, that is, to the degree the class conflict dominates political competition. Since in the context of Western Europe industrialism is the main force behind the class cleavage, deindustrialization weakens this cleavage and allows instead for mobilization along ethnonational divisions. In order to empirically test our argument, we analyze levels of electoral mobilization of ethnonational party blocs among 15 Western European minorities between 1918 and 2018. Our analysis clearly reveals that levels of industrialization are negatively related to ethnonational mobilization. However, this is only true for regions with historically high levels of industrialization and if the ethnonational movement is unified. The article contributes to the comparative literature on the electoral performance of ethnonational parties and the literature on deindustrialization and nationalism.

Why is taxing the rich so difficult despite rising inequality and public support for progressive taxation? Recent research has mostly focused on the ‘demand side’ of electoral tax politics, showing that economic crises can increase public demands for progressive taxation in contemporary societies. Complementing this research, we focus on the political ‘supply side’, investigating the conditions under which social democratic parties take up these calls and translate them into policy. Studying wealth taxation in the course of the global financial crisis, we argue that whether parties pushed for taxing wealth crucially depended on intra-party struggles between the (office-seeking) leadership and the (policy-seeking) left wing. Only if the leadership became convinced that redistributive tax policy was electorally promising, did the social democratic parties fight for implementing wealth taxes. We evaluate this theoretical proposition in a comparative analysis of wealth tax policies in Austria, Germany and Spain in 2008–2015.

In Slovakia, women are poorly represented in politics and public life. Yet it is the first country in Central Europe with a female president. By applying a mixed-methods approach to analyzing an original dataset containing media coverage of leading presidential candidates (n = 1492), this study explores how the media covered them and discusses under what conditions gender-stereotypical coverage could be detrimental or beneficial to electoral outcomes. The results show media outlet type was not significantly associated with a gender-stereotypical attribution of communal and agentic traits to candidates. Tabloids and quality press equally perpetuated gender stereotypes. Irrespective of their gender, journalists were more likely to depict women candidates as possessing communal qualities perceived as incompatible with leadership. However, findings from the qualitative analysis suggest that when corruption perception is high, and public trust in institutions is low, communal traits stereotypically attributed to women are appreciated. Novelty also works to women’s advantage. These findings have important implications for women candidates’ campaign strategies.

Do parties relegate female ministers to portfolios that are politically less important for them? This research note contributes to this debate and examines whether the issue salience of parties for specific policy areas has an effect on the nomination of a female minister. Previous theoretical work assumes that party leaders will be more likely to select men for those portfolios that are highly salient for the party. To test this assumption empirically, the paper analyzes the appointment of women cabinet members in the German states between 2006 and 2021. Notably, the findings contradict the theoretical expectations as well as previous empirical results from a cross-national study: On the German sub-national level the nomination of a female minister is more likely if the respective portfolio is highly salient for the governing party. Parties and their policy-preferences seem to be an important factor in explaining the share of women in sub-national cabinets.

Democratic theorists have long emphasized the importance of participatory equality, that is, that all citizens should have an equal right to participate. It is still unclear, however, whether ordinary citizens view this principle as central to democracy and how different violations of this principle affect subjective democratic legitimacy. The attitudes of citizens are imperative when it comes to the subjective legitimacy of democratic systems, and it is therefore important to examine how participatory inequalities affect these attitudes. We here contribute to this research agenda with survey experiments embedded in two surveys (n = 324, n = 840). We here examine (1) whether citizens consider participatory inequality to be an important democratic principle, and (2) how gender and educational inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and the perceived usefulness of the participatory input. The results show that citizens generally consider participatory inequalities to be important, but only gender inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and usefulness. Hence it is important to consider the type of inequality to understand the implications.

The existing literature on vote switching – a major cause of electoral change – rarely discusses strategic incentives as motivating voters to switch parties between elections. We study how coalition-directed voting, a common type of strategic voting in parliamentary democracies, affects vote switching. Utilizing an original three-wave online panel survey conducted in Israel in 2019–2020, we show that voters engage in formateur optimization and policy balancing: they switch their vote in order to affect the identity of the next formateur and desert a party they previously voted for if they believe it will not enter the next coalition. We also show that the perceived level of competition between potential formateurs moderates the effect of coalition expectations on vote switching. The paper highlights the importance of coalition and formateur considerations in electoral change and contributes to a better understanding of both coalition-directed voting and individual-level vote switching.

Many democracies are witnessing the rise and continuing success of parties and politicians who oppose fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Recent research finds that voters support illiberal politicians, because they trade off policy congruence against attitudes toward liberal democracy. Other studies, however, suggest that authoritarian and populist voters might actually have a preference to vote for illiberal candidates. We argue that both factors interact: Authoritarian and populist voters are more willing to trade off policy representation against support for liberal democracy. To test this mechanism, we rely on a survey experiment conducted in Germany. The results clearly demonstrate that voters indeed trade off policy congruence against liberal democracy. Moreover, this effect is particularly strong for populist and authoritarian voters. Overall, the results have important implications for understanding when and which voters support or oppose liberal democracy.

The revision of sexist laws is complicated not only by disagreements between progressives and traditionalists but also by opposing views held by different types of traditionalists. We design a two-wave list experiment with information treatments to examine public opinion toward reforming the Japanese monarchy’s male-only patrilineal succession rule, focusing on two strands of traditionalism: conservatism and sexism. We show that conservatism, not sexism, is associated with stronger opposition to the ascension of female monarchs. Moreover, opinions toward gendered succession rules are hard to dislodge, because they are rooted in deep-held values. Treatments that highlight the capability of female heirs, the rarity of current practices in peer nations, and the perils posed by succession crises fail to change respondent preferences. Our study reveals the discordance within traditional values, and how this can impede efforts to reform statutory gender discrimination.

We distinguish between the experience and expectation of subjective status decline in relation to electoral behaviour. Studies often link support for radical parties, especially radical right ones, to voters’ experience of status decline. A few other studies argue that voters’ expectation of status decline also triggers radical right support. Without precise measures of both perceptions, it has been difficult to distinguish which (or both) is most relevant for radical right support in Western Europe and the USA. Using survey data from 2018 (n = 4,076) and 2020 (n = 2,106) in Finland, we could precisely measure and distinguish between voters’ experience and expectation of status decline. Descriptively, voters who have experienced status decline have low income, whereas voters who expect status decline have (lower)middle income. Using multivariate analyses, we find that voters who expect status decline consistently prefer radical right parties more than voters who expect status improvement. However, there is no robust evidence of radical right support among voters who have experienced status decline. These findings suggest that the expectation, not experience, of status decline drives radical right support. If these expectations trigger radical right support in Nordic welfare states, they may be even more pertinent in less comprehensive welfare states.

The emphasis national parties put on European Union (EU) issues in their manifestos varies to a great extent between countries. A systematic explanation of this variation is, however, still lacking. We address this gap by exploring the effect of the temporal proximity between national and European Parliament (EP) elections within the national electoral cycle on national parties’ EU issue emphasis. Multilevel mixed-effects Tobit regressions on a sample of 956 manifestos, produced by 340 parties running for national elections in 27 EU member states between 1979 and 2019, indicate that temporal proximity displays a positive effect on national parties’ EU issue salience: the closer in time EP elections are to national elections within the national electoral cycle, the more parties emphasize EU issues in their national election manifestos. This is particularly the case for non-Eurosceptic parties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of party competition in EU member states.

Most trade agreements are ratified with overwhelming support by legislators throughout the world. This lack of opposition is surprising given the strong distributional consequences of trade and the expectation of conventional political economy theory that parliamentary votes on trade policy should be closely contested between winners and losers of globalization. To analyze the driving forces behind legislators’ voting behavior while avoiding the obscuring effect of party discipline, I analyze under which circumstances legislators decide to rebel against their party’s position when voting on the ratification of trade agreements. I put forward two hypotheses: First, rebellions are more likely when the trade agreement is with a larger trading partner and when the liberalization through the agreement is more comprehensive. Second, legislators will rebel when their party’s position does not align with their constituency’s economic interests. These hypotheses are supported by a series of multinomial regression analyses based on an original dataset comprising votes of several thousand legislators from multiple countries on the ratification of trade agreements.

How do the media describe the intersectional identities of elected politicians? Our study focuses on parliamentarians in the Netherlands who fall outside the prevailing norm in politics: women and female and male ethnic minorities. Drawing on 2,783 newspaper articles published between 1994 and 2012 and matched samples, we find that the media structurally emphasize the identities of all parliamentarians who are not white men. Women politicians are more often described in terms of gender, ethnic minorities in terms of ethnicity and Muslim politicians in terms of religion. Ethnic majority men, meanwhile, are most often described by their political ideology. We find that this works already for one minority identity, as well as multiple identities. By continuously highlighting the identities of politicians that diverge from the norm, the media, we argue, paint pictures of women and ethnic minority politicians as different and out of place.

According to partisan theory, variations in policy choices and outputs originate from the party composition of the government studied. In this study, we take a novel approach to address such assumptions by linking changes in municipal taxes with local government changes. We also add a baseline scenario in which we examine whether the composition of the local government affects tax levels. Drawing on a dataset that contains official Swedish statistics from 1994 to 2018, we find convincing support for the partisan effect. Tax levels are higher under left-wing rule, and more specifically, tax cuts particularly occur when left-wing governments are replaced by right-wing ones. These results do not vanish when controls are accounted for, while it can be particularly noticed that the condition of the municipal economy influences partisan ambitions. These findings thereby contradict prior theoretical assumptions that the local arena is free from ideological battles.

This article explores how women’s descriptive representation affects legal gender equality of economic opportunity. Building on existing studies on women’s descriptive and substantive representation, we argue that as the proportion of female legislators and ministers increases, legal gender equality of economic opportunity improves. Additionally, we expect that a country’s institutional context significantly shapes the influence of women in different positions of power on legal gender equality. The higher the legislature’s law-making power, the greater the effect of female legislators on legal gender equality; under the same condition, its relative influence compared to female cabinet ministers is also greater. Similarly, we hypothesize that the higher the level of democracy, the more effective female legislators compared to female ministers. To test these arguments, we draw on the database that provides cross-national information on legal discrimination against women in economic opportunities and provide supporting evidence for our arguments.

When mainstream parties accommodate radical-right parties, do citizens grow more concerned about immigration? Based on a rich literature, we argue that challenger parties’ ability to affect mainstream party positions, particularly on immigration, is associated with greater public salience of immigration and voter positivity towards challengers exists. We use Comparative Manifesto Project and Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data in order to show that challenger issue entrepreneurship, and mainstream accommodation are associated with greater public concern for challenger issues. These factors do not result in greater public positivity towards challengers. Our findings thus support the argument that a mainstream party accommodative strategy might not be as beneficial for them as often expected by pundit and political scientists alike. This has implications for understanding the effect of indirect party strategies on public attitudes, since mainstream accommodation changes public concern regarding issues, which may bolster challengers’ positions, including radical-right parties.