Do radical right parties present blurry economic stances, or have they clarified their positions while moving towards the economic left? This article questions the strategic behaviour of radical right parties in Western Europe. It shows that although radical right parties have increased their discussion of economic issues, and expert placements of this party family on the economic dimension have become more centrist over time, the uncertainty surrounding these placements continues to be higher for the radical right than any other party family in Europe. The article then moves on to examine to what extent voter‐party congruence on redistribution, immigration and other issues of social lifestyle predict an individual's propensity to vote for the radical right compared to other parties. Although redistribution is the component of economic policy where the radical right seems to be centrist, the findings indicate that it remains party‐voter congruence on immigration that drives support for radical right parties, while the congruence level for redistribution has an insignificant effect. The article concludes that while radical right parties seem to have included some clearly left‐leaning economic proposals, which shifted the general expert views of these parties to the economic centre, their overall economic profiles remain as blurry as ever.

Issue ownership is an important determinant of the vote, and it is electorally beneficial for parties to build a strong reputation on their core issues. Even though issue ownership has already been studied extensively in the party literature, we know less about how citizens form ownership perceptions. We contribute to this literature by means of two studies on the connection between party behaviour and perceptions of issue ownership, with an empirical focus on issue competence reputations of parties. In Study 1, we combine party‐level information about issue attention, positions and performance with data on competence perceptions from a wide range of national election studies. Study 2 is a pre‐registered conjoint experiment designed to examine the causal link between party behaviour and perceived competence. Our results point to significant effects for all three hypothesised sources of competence reputations. Moving beyond previous work that has argued that competence reputations are mostly stable over time, after accounting for the variation due to parties' popularity, our results show that they fluctuate in the short term and that parties have some level of control over how they are perceived.

Researchers classify political parties into families by their shared cleavage origins. However, as parties have drifted from the original ideological commitments, it is unclear to what extent party families today can function as effective heuristics for shared positions. We propose an alternative way of classifying parties based solely on their ideological positions as one solution to this challenge. We use model‐based clustering to recast common subjective decisions involved in the process of creating party groups as problems of model selection, thus, providing non‐subjective criteria to define ideological clusters. By comparing canonical families to our ideological clusters, we show that while party families on the right are often too similar to justify categorizing them into different clusters, left‐wing families are weakly internally cohesive. Moreover, we identify two clusters predominantly composed of parties in Eastern Europe, questioning the degree to which categories originally designed to describe Western Europe can generalize to other regions.

This article examines how populism is linked to party organization and, specifically, intra‐party democracy. Populism can be defined as an ideology (ideational perspective), which is characterized by anti‐elitism, people‐centrism and a discourse emphasizing a moral struggle between ‘good people’ and ‘the elite’. On the other hand, there are leadership‐focused definitions which see populism as a form of organization with personalistic control (a leadership perspective). With respect to party organization, focusing on the ideational perspective leads to the expectation that populist parties will be internally democratic, and the leadership approach will lead to the opposite expectation. Using the recently published Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey (POPPA) that develops party‐specific populism scores, we examine more than 200 parties in 26 countries. The results highlight that populist parties gravitate toward personalized leaders and thus develop less democratic intra‐party structures. This finding contributes to our understanding of populist parties and their organizations.

That parties fulfil their pre‐election pledges once they are in government is a fundamental idea of many democracy models. This paper addresses the question of whether the government/opposition status of their party affects how much citizens want governments to fulfil their promises. We hypothesize that interest‐driven, rational voters are more likely to prefer their own party to keep its promises and investigate whether this rationale is impacted by public opinion and expert views. The analysis is based on a survey experiment conducted in Australia and Austria. It finds that voters broadly adhere to the democratic principle of expecting pledge fulfilment but, at the same time, some take a rational approach to government promises. The opinions of the public and experts mitigate but do not change this effect. Another key finding is the significant difference in the preference for promise keeping versus promise breaking between government and opposition voters in the Austrian case, the country with the more heterogeneous and polarized political system. This paper contributes to the literature on voters’ attitudes on democracy and pledge fulfilment by showing that voters are normatively driven but a significant number of voters deviate and instead follow the rational voter logic.

Parties’ parliamentary delegations contain a multitude of interests. While scholars suspect that this variation affects party behaviour, most work on parties’ policy statements treats parties as unitary actors. This reflects the absence of strong expectations concerning when (and how) the parliamentary caucus matters for platform construction, as well as the difficulties inherent in testing such claims. Drawing on the literature on women's descriptive representation, this article argues that the makeup of the parliamentary party likely has important consequences for issue entrepreneurship, the scope of issues represented on the manifesto and even the left‐right position of election platforms. With the most comprehensive party‐level study of women's representation ever conducted, three diversity hypotheses are tested using data on the gender makeup of parties’ parliamentary delegations and the content of their manifestos for 110 parties in 20 democracies between 1952 and 2011. The analyses show that as the percentage of women in the parliamentary party increases, parties address a greater diversity of issues in their election campaigns. Women's presence is also associated with more left‐leaning manifestos, even when controlling for parties’ prior ideological positions. Together, these findings illustrate a previously overlooked consequence of descriptive representation and provide a framework for understanding when and why the parliamentary party influences manifesto formation. They show that diversity – or lack thereof – has important consequences for parties’ policy statements, and thus the overall quality of representation.

This paper explores a major road to substantive representation in democracies, by clarifying whether demands of rich and poor citizens are taken up in the electoral platforms of political parties. Doing so constitutes a substantial broadening and deepening of our understanding of substantive representation – broadening the countries, issue‐areas and years that form the empirical basis for judging whether democracies manifest unequal representation; and deepening the process of representation by clarifying a key pathway connecting societal demands to policy outcomes. The paper hypothesises that party systems in general will respond more strongly to wealthy than to poor segments of a polity. It also hypothesises that left parties will more faithfully represent poorer and less significantly represent richer citizens than do right parties. We find substantial support for these expectations in a new dataset that combines multi‐country, multi‐issue‐area, multi‐wave survey data with data on party platforms for 39 democracies.

Parties strive to set the ‘terms of the debate’ in elections by selectively emphasising issue areas that enhance their popular appeal. Yet, do citizens respond to parties’ issue emphasis, or do they mainly respond to objective factors such as economic and environmental conditions, crime rates, immigration flows, and so on? We report a time-series, cross-sectional analyses of the relationship between the public's issue attention, parties’ issue emphases and objective national conditions across seven issue areas in 13 western publics between 1971 and 2021, finding a strong association between objective conditions and citizens’ subsequent issue attention, but weaker associations to party system issue attention. There are stronger links, however, between parties’ issue emphases and their supporters’ subsequent attention.

Research has consistently shown that women are less likely than men to participate in political parties as members and activists; this participation gender gap has persisted despite narrowing gender gaps in education, employment and in other types of political participation.  Yet while the gaps are widespread, their size varies greatly by country as well as by party.  To what extent do party organizational factors help explain these disparities? More pointedly, are there any lessons to be learned from past experiences about party mechanisms which might help to reduce these gaps? To answer these questions, this study investigates grassroots partisan participation in 68 parties in 12 parliamentary democracies, considering whether factors that have been shown to boost the number of women candidates and legislators are also associated with changing the traditionally male dominance of grassroots party politics.  We find evidence of links between some party mechanisms and higher women's intra‐party participation; however, because the same relationship holds for men's participation, they do not alter the participation gender gap. Only greater participation of women in parties’ parliamentary delegations is associated with smaller grassroots gender gaps. We conclude that parties which wish to close grassroots gender gaps should not rely solely on efforts aimed at remedying gender gaps at the elite level.

Political parties and interest groups play a vital role in incorporating societal interests into democratic decision‐making. Therefore, explaining the nature and variation in the relationship between them will advance our understanding of democratic governance. Existing research has primarily drawn attention to how exchange of resources shapes these relationships largely neglecting the role of contextual conditions. Our contribution is to examine whether parties’ structured interactions with different categories of interest groups vary systematically with the pattern of party competition at the level of policy dimensions. First, we argue that higher party fragmentation in a policy space makes organisational ties to interest groups more likely, due to fears of voter loss and splinter groups. Second, we expect higher polarisation between parties on a policy dimension to make ties to relevant groups less likely due to increased electoral costs. We find support for both expectations when analysing new data on 116 party units in 13 mature democracies along nine different policy dimensions. Our findings underline the value of considering the strategic context in which parties and interest groups interact to understand their relationship. The study sheds new light on parties and interest groups as intermediaries in democracy and contributes to a new research agenda connecting interest group research with studies of parties’ policy positions and responsiveness.

We examine the existence and strength of organizational ties between parties and interest groups by innovating on classic resource exchange theory. First, we propose that the nature of interest groups’ policy orientation and their general organizational capacity primarily explain the presence of ties, that is, ties are less likely to materialize when groups lack ideological policy goals and have limited organizational capacity. Second, the size and types of resources on offer from both sides are what principally account for the strength of existing ties. We hypothesize that resources from both parties and interest groups are positively associated with institutionalized relationships, but also that resources are hierarchically ordered, that is, resources that are exclusive for the transaction are particularly important for ties at higher levels of institutionalization. Using data from a novel organizational survey of parties and interest groups in seven Western democracies, we find support for the hypotheses using an integrated design of analysis.

When reporting on election results, the media declare parties as election ‘winners’ or ‘losers’, which has important consequences for voter perceptions and government formation. This article investigates news coverage of parties’ electoral performance in proportional representation systems, in which election results are often less clear‐cut compared to majoritarian systems. It tests the extent to which news coverage of parties’ electoral performance is based on objective measures or on party ideology. Its focus on the aftermath of the 2019 European Parliament election allows holding the electoral context constant across the 16 countries under study. Results from a Heckman selection model show that alongside a party's status as plurality winner and changes in electoral support, parties with radical socio‐cultural policy positions are both more likely to be covered and declared election winners in the news. These results have important implications for citizens’ attitudes and perceived party legitimacy in democratic societies.

Voters show ambivalent attitudes towards political parties: They agree that parties are necessary, but they neither like nor trust them. Existing theories fall short of explaining this paradox because they pay little attention to public opinion research. In this paper, we develop a different argument using qualitative methods. We first integrate the literature on political parties and public opinion to sketch the contours of our theory before refining it using rich empirical insights from open-ended survey answers and focus group data. Our resulting model holds that voters evaluate political parties based on the functional and virtuous linkages. They consider parties necessary because they see them as fulfilling democratic functions, but they dislike them because they are seen as behaving in non-virtuous ways when fulfilling their functions. Besides proposing a new analytical model, we also contribute to the literature by methodologically illustrating how to develop data-based theories.

The level of congruence between parties and their voters can vary greatly from one policy issue to another, which raises questions regarding the effectiveness of political representation. We seek to explain variation in party–voter congruence across issues and parties. We focus on the hypotheses that (1) average proximity between the positions of voters and the party they vote for will be highest on the issues that the party emphasises in the election campaign and that (2) this relationship will be stronger for niche parties. We test these hypotheses using data on the policy preferences of voters, party positions, party attention profiles and salience on concrete policy issues in four countries: The Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Sweden. Overall, we find that voter–party proximity tends to be higher on issues that the party emphasises. As these are the issues where parties typically have the greatest policy impact, this implies that the quality of representation is highest where it matters most. There is some limited evidence that the positive relationship between issue salience and proximity is stronger for niche parties. In sum, the quality of policy representation varies strongly with party‐level issue salience and to a lesser extent with the type of political party.

How do governments find the political capital to raise interest rates in pursuit of inflation stabilisation? Against common wisdom, this article shows that the ability of governments to exercise tight monetary policy largely depends on the level of unemployment insurance. Unemployment insurance is particularly useful to social democratic parties since their core constituency – labour – is the hardest hit by economic downturns. Empirical evidence from 17 OECD countries over thirty years demonstrates that high levels of unemployment insurance present a strong incentive for social democratic governments to respond more aggressively to positive changes in inflation. These findings resolve the puzzle of why partisan monetary cycles are not often observed in the literature and have important policy implications, given continued calls for scaling down social insurance.

Since the Golden Age of the Welfare State ended, the male‐breadwinner family model traditionally supported by conservative parties has been put under pressure. Familialism appears to be no longer attractive to a changing, more volatile constituency. By comparing four different European countries – namely, Denmark, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom – this work investigates the evolution of the conservative parties’ family policy positions in the post‐Fordist era (1990s–2010s). The article has two goals. First, relying on a multidimensional theoretical framework where both social consumption and social investment policy instruments are at stake, it probes whether conservatives have switched their positions by backing de‐familialism and thus the dual‐earner family model. Second, it explains policy position change or stability over time and cross‐country differences through a multicausal analytical framework.

The content analysis of party manifestos shows that, in the post‐Fordist era, the conservative parties have supported ‘optional familialism’, thus upholding both familiarizing and de‐familiarizing measures. However, such positions are not static. In the 1990s, support for familialism was higher while, since the 2000s, there has been a constant, increasing backing of de‐familialism. While the shift is evident for all the parties, cross‐country differences remain. The comparative historical analysis has pointed out that the specific ‘optional familialism’ positions taken by the conservative parties over time result from the interaction of constituency‐oriented, institutional, contextual and political factors.

What explains far‐right mobilisation in the protest arena? After decades of growing electoral support and policy influence, the far right is experiencing an increase in grassroots mobilisation. Scholars of social movements and political parties have devoted little attention to the determinants of far‐right protest mobilisation in Europe. In this article, we bridge previous research on the far right and social movements to advance hypotheses on the drivers of far‐right protest mobilisation based on grievances, opportunities and resource mobilisation models. We use an original dataset combining novel data on 4,845 far‐right protest events in 11 East and West European countries (2008–2018), with existing measures accounting for the (political, economic and cultural) context of mobilisation. We find that classical approaches to collective action can be fruitfully applied to the study of the far right. Cultural grievances, notably concerns about immigration, as well as the availability of institutional access points in contexts characterised by divided government increase far‐right protest mobilisation. But far‐right protest mobilisation also rests on the organisational resources available to nativist collective actors, that is, the network in which they are embedded, their visibility in the media and elected officials. These findings have important implications to understand far‐right success in advanced democracies. They show that far‐right mobilisation in the protest arena not only rests on favourable circumstances, but also on whether far‐right actors can profit from them. More broadly, the study links party politics and social movement research to grasp the far right's modes of political contestation, locating research on this phenomenon at the intersection of political sociology and comparative politics.

The policy influence of political parties is a classic subject of investigation in political science research. The typical conclusion is that parties influence policy only through government: The government controls the legislative process and has the parliamentary majority to legislate; the opposition is shut out. Yet the legislative process is merely the final part of a much longer policy process starting with an agenda‐setting phase that decides the issues of political conflict in the first place. This study proposes an agenda‐setting model of opposition policy influence which hypothesises sizable opposition policy influence through agenda‐setting: A government is likely to adopt legislation covering the opposition's position in order to silence opposition agenda‐setting. The model is tested on the manual coding of 316 Acts of Parliament adopted by the government and 26,533 Prime Minister's Questions from the Opposition across six issues in Britain (1979‒2015). The results have important implications for minority representation.

Environmental issues are an important aspect of party competition and voters’ political preferences. Yet political behaviour research often considers environmental attitudes as a component of a broader ‘second-dimension’ and either subsumes it into this or omits it. Using data from the fifth wave of the European Values Study, we demonstrate through factor analysis that environmentalism loads as a separate dimension across Western Europe, that environmentalism has somewhat different social predictors and that it has important associations with party preference that differ from those of other second dimension issues. Our findings have crucial implications. Firstly, not accounting for environmentalism in studies of political behaviour misses an important part of the picture. Secondly, subsuming environmentalism into a broader ‘cultural’ dimension may lead to incomplete conclusions about both social predictors and the electoral consequences of political attitudes and values. Thus, allowing for a separate environmental dimension opens up novel perspectives on political representation in Western democracies.