The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine raised for many parties the question of how to position themselves in view of urgently requested arms deliveries. Since, the topic of arms trade, which has hitherto rarely been addressed, has become a heavily politicized and divisive issue and partly even polarized public opinion. A major prerequisite for parties’ position-taking is to anticipate how voters react to such arms transfers and, more specifically, whether their respective attitudes are structured along the predominant left-right axis. Based on a large-scale survey experiment with French and German voters ($N = 6617$) in the year before the Russian invasion, we are able to focus on the relationship between ideological predispositions, vote intentions, and issue attitudes in a non-politicized period. Using both vignette and conjoint experiments, we demonstrate that voters’ attitudes on military transfers can be subsumed remarkably well under the left-right scale. Differentiating the impact of normative and economic considerations, the former is stronger among the left, while the latter also affects the attitudes of rightist citizens. However, normative considerations are the most important concern along the whole political spectrum. The turn of the German Green Party in 2022 to assist countries that are being aggressively attacked (because of the Responsibility to Protect), was not reflected in our data.

The question of deradicalization looms large in the historiography of western European socialism. But in this contested field, the contributions of the New Left historian, Ralph Miliband, have been curiously neglected. Through his work on the British Labour Party, Miliband developed a distinctive account of deradicalization that foregrounds the fact that when parties enter government, party elites find themselves transplanted into new, alien institutions. Over time, he argued, they then come to internalize the worldviews of those institutions and reshape their parties accordingly. This essay presents the first quantitative and cross-national test of this “experience of governing hypothesis,” using Comparative Manifesto Project data from western European socialist parties between 1945 and 2021 and a novel matching technique for panel data. Miliband’s theory is strongly supported by this analysis, which also demonstrates the value of taking a multi-dimensional approach to deradicalization.

When and how do party politics matter in junior allies’ decisions to engage in multinational military operations? Developing a new role theory model of party politics and multinational military operations, we put forward a two-level argument. First, we argue that the rationale for military action is defined in a contest between political parties with expectations of what constitutes the proper purpose (constitutive roles) and functions (functional roles) of the state. Second, we hold that material and ontological insecurities reduce political space for contestation and debate, but that junior allies tend to focus on role demands for ‘good states’ and ‘good allies’ rather than the nature and aim of the military operation. To unpack our argument, we analyse the debate among political parties in Romania and Denmark leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Concluding our analysis, we outline the implications for the changing security order and current debates in NATO member states on how to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In 1900, news of U.S. postal officials committing fraud in Cuba became a scandal that influenced the political, legal, and governmental trajectory of U.S. imperialism. Anti-imperialist Democrats used the frauds to undermine Republican pro-imperialists on the eve of the 1900 election. Prominent Republicans hoped to contain the scandal through swift punishment, but when the accused refused extradition, the resulting Supreme Court case, though rarely discussed, became the first of the Insular Cases. In 1900, it was not yet clear whether the U.S. empire would be run by self-interested actors or self-proclaimed progressive reformers. The commitment to progressive imperialism observed later in other colonies was, at least in part, worked out in this postal frauds case, as individuals chose how to respond to the scandal. Their actions were guided as much by scandal and the pursuit of self-interest as they were by lofty ideals about good government.

Liberalization is a perennial topic in politics and political science. We first review a broad scholarly debate, showing that the mainstream theories make rival and contradictory claims regarding the role of political parties in (de)liberalization reforms. We then develop a framework of conditional partisan influence, arguing that and under what conditions parties matter. We test our (and rival) propositions with a new dataset on (de)liberalization reforms in 23 democracies since 1973 covering several policy areas. Methodologically, we argue that existing quantitative studies are problematic: They rely on time-series cross-section models using country-year observations; but governments do not change annually, so that the number of observations is artificially inflated, resulting in incorrect estimates. We propose mixed-effects models instead, with country-year observations nested in cabinets, which are nested in countries and years. The results show under what conditions parties matter for (de)liberalization. More generally, the paper argues that mixed-effects models should become the new standard for studying partisan influences.

From Oliver North's congressional testimony in 1987 to his near-successful Senate run in 1994, this article assesses the significance of the Iran-Contra scandal to the American domestic political landscape. It positions Iran-Contra at a transitional moment in right-wing politics, torn between loyalty to Reagan on one hand and the combativeness of the 1990s’ New Right on the other. In four stages—denial, fame, fundraising, and forgetting—defenders of North set forth a model of how ascendant forces in the New Right would, post-Reagan, transform scandal into political capital. Iran-Contra provided grist for media outlets that demonized the mainstream media, voters and members of Congress who excused criminality, and two White Houses who longed to forgive and forget. Thus can the historiography of American conservatism, currently in full bloom, begin to reckon with Iran-Contra's place in domestic politics.

The literature on congressional decision-making has largely ignored the influence of the minority party in the legislative process. This follows from the widely held belief that the majority party dominates the agenda-setting process. Though the minority party rarely achieves major policy success in Congress, we argue that the minority has significantly more influence over the legislative agenda than is commonly believed. We posit that, under some conditions, the minority has enough bargaining leverage to get floor votes on their proposals, in the form of both amendments and bills. We test our theoretical expectations with a novel design utilizing whip count data from the House and show that when a whip count on a bill occurs, the likelihood of a minority amendment disappointment and a majority amendment roll increases, respectively. This suggests that the more leverage the minority party has, the more we see their legislative proposals on the floor.

Recent research suggests that party leaders can strategically impact the perceived left–right position of their parties by changing their selective emphasis on certain issues. We suggest that a party's ideological image can also be altered by the portfolio allocation of the coalition government in which the party participates. By controlling a portfolio, the party will have a more direct influence on the related issue and will frequently communicate the party's issue position publicly, thereby cultivating a perception of strong emphasis on the related issue. We run a cross-national party-level analysis showing that portfolio allocation matters with regard to the importance of the subdimensions for the general left–right dimension. In particular, the influence of sociocultural stances depends on the share of sociocultural portfolios. In addition, we show that the mechanism does not apply at the beginning of a government's tenure, but only after a year or longer in office.

The 1983 Chicago mayoral election, which polarized Black and white voters, left the nascent Latino electorate in an uncertain position. A reevaluation of this election clarifies the impact of Black mayoral candidate Harold Washington, whose candidacy laid bare significant political divisions and anti-Black sentiment among Latinos as they grappled with their relationship to whiteness. Divisions aside, Washington's effort to court the Latino vote helped legitimate a monolithic, panethnic label in Chicago politics, as evidenced by organizational records, campaign advertising, electoral data, and bilingual media coverage. Reframing the 1983 election as a dual process of race making and panethnic labeling bridges scholarship on Black mayors, Latino politics, and urban history, and questions an enduring political memory of 1983 that has obscured both Latino anti-Blackness and the fragility of Latino unity.

While almost all European democracies from the 1980s started to accord legal recognition to same-sex couples, Italy was, in 2016, the last West European country to adopt a regulation, after a tortuous path. Why was Italy such a latecomer? What kind of barriers were encountered by the legislative process? What were the factors behind the policy change? To answer these questions, this article first discusses current morality policymaking, paying specific attention to the literature dealing with same-sex partnerships. Second, it provides a reconstruction of the Italian policy trajectory, from the entrance of the issue into political debate until the enactment of the civil union law, by considering both partisan and societal actors for and against the legislative initiative. The article argues that the Italian progress towards the regulation of same-sex unions depended on the balance of power between change and blocking coalitions and their degree of congruence during the policymaking process. In 2016 the government formed a broad consensus and the parliament passed a law on civil unions. However, the new law represented only a small departure from the status quo due to the low congruence between actors within the change coalition.

“I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” explained George Washington Plunkitt speaking to the journalist William L. Riordan at the dawn of the twentieth century. For many college students, William Riordan's collection of musings and reminiscences from New York State Senator Plunkitt, delivered at a shoeshine stand on Manhattan's West Side, offers a definitive introduction to the history of urban machine politics. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, first published in 1905, has become a ubiquitous text, frequently assigned in political science courses and excerpted in U.S. history source books. Plunkitt's reflections, while entertaining, present a transactional and opportunistic form of political practice. He famously differentiates between honest graft and dishonest graft; insists that showing up at fires to help victims is key to holding your district; declares the Irish to be natural born leaders; and derides reformers as “mornin’ glories.” He rages against the key urban reform project of the era, civil service examinations, as “the curse of the nation,” amounting to “a lot of fool questions about the number of cubic inches of water in the Atlantic and the quality of sand in the Sahara desert.” Civil service exams blocked machine politicians from distributing jobs to loyal followers, which in the case of the New York Democratic machine typically meant recently arrived Irish immigrants. As Plunkitt explains, “The Irishman is grateful. His one thought is to serve the city which gave him a home. He has this thought even before he lands in New York, for his friends here often have a good place in one of the city's departments picked out for him while he is still in the old country.” Plunkitt's characterization of the linkage between migrant arrival and municipal work points to the central role that access to city payrolls played in the economic and political history of the New York Irish. Arguably, the only other urban group that relied as heavily on city jobs for economic mobility has been African Americans.

Although originalism’s emergence as an important theory of constitutional interpretation is usually attributed to efforts by the Reagan administration, the role the theory played in the South’s determined resistance to civil rights legislation in the 1960s actually helped create the Reagan coalition in the first place. North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., the constitutional theorist of the Southern Caucus, developed and deployed originalism because he saw its potential to stymie civil rights legislation and stabilize a Democratic coalition under significant stress. Ervin failed in those efforts, but his turn to originalism had lasting effects. The theory helped Ervin and other conservative southerners explain to outsiders and to themselves why they shifted from support for an interventionist state powerful enough to enforce segregation to an ideology founded on individual rights and liberty. It thus eased the South’s integration with the emerging New Right.

In many countries, right-wing populist parties have gained electoral support by attracting voters from mainstream left parties. This has prompted public and scholarly debate about whether mainstream left parties can regain political power by taking a more restrictive position on immigration, a so-called accommodation strategy. However, selection bias confounds observational estimates of the effectiveness of this strategy. This letter reports the results of a survey experiment conducted among Danish voters during a unique political situation in which the mainstream left party's position on immigration is ambiguous, enabling experimental manipulation of voters' perceptions of the party's position. The authors show that, consistent with spatial models of politics, accommodation attracts anti-immigration voters and repels pro-immigration voters. Because repelled voters defect to other left parties, while attracted voters come from right parties, accommodation increases overall support for parties that support a mainstream left government. The results demonstrate that in some contexts, accommodation can improve the political prospects of the mainstream left.

In recent decades, citizenship policies in Europe have changed significantly: some governments have introduced restrictive new requirements for citizenship, while others have made citizenship more accessible. What explains this variation? Despite a burgeoning literature on both comparative citizenship and spatial competition among parties, scholarship on this question remains in its infancy and primarily focused on the influence of the far right. Expanding on this growing research, this article argues that citizenship policy change results from electoral competition on both sides of the political spectrum, in conjunction with governments’ ideological orientation. Using new data on citizenship policies across sixteen European countries from 1975 to 2014, the author demonstrates that left-of-center governments facing increasing levels of left party competition are associated with more accessible policy changes, while increasing levels of party competition from the far right yield more restrictive policy changes under not only right-of-center governments, but also centrist and left-of-center governments as well.