Comparative historical analyses have emphasized the role played by conservative parties in the consolidation of democratic regimes in Europe. They have also identified the main factors shaping the political and electoral strength of the right in democratization processes. On the basis of these analyses, the Spanish Second Republic (1931–36) has been characterized as a very inauspicious ground for the development of a strong conservative party. However, the right managed to build a successful electoral force in a short period of time. This paper explores the factors affecting the electoral strength of the Spanish right by conducting ecological statistical analyses in the three republican legislative elections. Empirical results show that the right managed to build strong links with national voters on the basis of sociopolitical cleavages and underlying social and institutional characteristics. In particular, they reveal the key importance of the religious cleavage in the party system of the 1930s and the crucial role played by Catholic lay organizations in the success of the right. Ultimately, this finding shows that, contrary to previous theoretical expectations, initial organizational precariousness was not an unsurmountable obstacle for the electoral success of the Spanish right.

This article tests two contrasting hypotheses about changes in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism–progressiveness, which pertains to attitudes toward matters of procreation, sexuality, and family and gender roles. While the “cultural turn” literature expects the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism to increase over time alongside that of all other cultural issues, studies inspired by secularization theory rather predict a decrease in its relevance—due to religious decline. Analyzing the data from the European Values Study (1981–2017) for 20 West European countries, we find empirical evidence for a decrease and no indication of an increase in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism. Religious decline weakened the effect of moral traditionalism on religious and conservative voting over time due to the most traditionalist voters shifting away from these parties. Our findings, therefore, highlight the need to differentiate between different types of cultural motives behind voting choice in Western Europe.

What motivated right-wing and conservative parties to endorse a policy of land expropriation and redistribution in Brazil? I argue that urban-dominated right-wing parties endorsed agrarian reform in order to: (i) reduce crime in wealthier metropolises by reversing rural–urban migration; and (ii) gain competitive advantage against left-wing challengers. To test this argument I conduct process tracing, analysing over 500 elite statements about agrarian reform, drawn from archival, interview and survey data. In addition, I model land expropriations at the municipal level and show how right-wing administrations disproportionately expropriated land in the states of origin of migrants and, within those, in localities where the Left was more competitive. My results portray how two externalities of inequality – crime and competition with the Left – motivated conservative support for agrarian reform in Brazil.

Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? The authors address this question by examining the consequences of the deadliest pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347–1351). They claim that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if the loss of life is high enough to increase the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor-repressive regimes, such as serfdom, become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. The authors test their theory by tracing the consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. They find that areas hit hardest by that pandemic were more likely to adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns, to exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics, and to have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler’s National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.

In this article, we examine how labour market policy interventions, notably short-time work (STW), affect voting behaviour in times of electoral downturn. We use the 2009 German general elections as an example. This is a particularly interesting case because the grand coalition of Christian democrats (CDU/CSU) and social democrats (SPD) was up for re-election against the backdrop of a major recession following the 2007/08 financial crisis and extensively used STW policies to counteract rising unemployment. Interestingly, STW policy and unemployment vary considerably between regions. We exploit this variance to create a unique dataset that combines regional information on STW policy and unemployment in 299 German electoral constituencies with individual data from the post-election survey. Our results show that especially the SPD profited from high STW rates at constituency level on election day, but this policy was insufficient to preclude the major losses social democrats suffered during the election. More generally, our results indicate that classic labour market policy can generate electoral support for social democratic parties, even as a “junior partner” in a grand coalition. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether such support is sufficient for electoral victories.

This article investigates the effect of local economic conditions on voting behavior by focusing on the export-oriented agricultural areas of Argentina during the commodities boom. It assesses the marginal effect of export wealth on electoral outcomes by studying the impact of soybean production, the main Argentine export product during this period. The combination of rising agricultural prices and a salient national tax on exports allows us to evaluate how wealth and tax policy shape local electoral behavior. This study relies on a spatial econometric analysis of the vote across Argentine departments for the 2007–15 period, along with qualitative evidence from interviews and a descriptive analysis of government appointments.

By analysing the socially segmented party–voter linkages deployed by the Unión Demócrata Independiente (Independent Democratic Union, UDI), a Chilean conservative party, this article demonstrates the usefulness of combining Kitschelt's party–voter linkage framework with Gibson's conceptual approach to conservative party electoral coalition-making. In Latin America, parties take advantage of social fragmentation and the availability of non-state campaign financing to combine multiple linkage types and thus attract socially diverse constituencies. Although it is an opposition party, UDI's historical trajectory and organisation have enabled it to receive private funds from its traditional and party-identified core constituency (business and conservative sectors), whose programmatic preferences and interests it represents, and then use these resources in a ‘charismatic’ mobilisation approach and particularistic exchanges with a non-core constituency (low-income, non-traditional voters of the radical right), in a segmented, but nationally integrated, electoral strategy.