Research suggests that political campaigns use online political microtargeting to mobilize a party’s existing voter base rather than to persuade new voters. However, most studies have been conducted in the US, where low turnout and high partisanship create optimal conditions for such a strategy. In this study, we analyze novel data on political parties’ use of targeting in Facebook and Instagram ads to examine the nature of microtargeting. The context of the 2022 Danish general election - with multiple parties, high voter turnout, and low partisanship - is a hard case for the mobilization thesis. Yet, in line with existing literature, we find that political parties focus their online targeting strategies on existing voters. However, the findings also suggest that political parties adjust their messages to conform with the presumed preferences of the targeted group, highlighting heterogeneity in the mobilization strategy.

We replicate and extend previous research that asks whether operational ideology moderates the relationship between trust in elections and non-voting political participation (NVP) in the United States. Using data from the 2024 American National Election Study (ANES, n = 4256), we find more evidence that operational liberals are positively associated with NVP regardless of trust, whereas distrusting operational conservatives, in particular, are associated with greater NVP. Panel data from the 2020–2024 ANES ( n = 1857) further reveal that prior liberal operational ideology is positively associated with subsequent trust in elections and NVP. Together, our findings contribute to existing literature by demonstrating ideological heterogeneity in trust in elections, NVP, and the relationship between the two. Should these patterns continue, a central challenge of preserving democratic processes may be less about the inherent value of trust and participation, and more about under which conditions these factors signal broader democratic health.

To what extent do measures of the issue positions and salience of political parties differ when they are extracted from mass media debates and election manifestos? Answering this question, the paper serves a dual purpose within this special issue of Party Politics : (i) introducing the PolDem election dataset used throughout the issue, and (ii) analyzing its convergence with the widely used Manifesto Project data. The newly released PolDem dataset, based on a relational content analysis of newspaper articles published during national election campaigns, covers 15 European countries and 111 campaigns. Focusing on four broad issue domains (economic, cultural, European integration, and political issues) across countries from Northwestern, Southern, and Central-Eastern Europe, the results demonstrate strong convergence in issue positions, except for in political issues related to democracy and corruption. However, the datasets differ significantly in issue salience, especially for less salient, noneconomic issues, niche parties and in less polarized contexts.

Is the mainstream news coverage of politics contributing to the legitimization and normalization of the radical right? To answer this question, we focus on two countries (Portugal and Spain) where Radical Right Parties (RRPs) emerged late and developed very quickly. A longitudinal dataset (2015–2024) of newspaper articles was employed to assess the salience of VOX and Chega , their leaders, and four core issues of the radical-right, before and after they first entered the national parliament. A major theoretical expectation was that parliamentary entrance might bolster the media salience of these parties and their leaders vis-à-vis other new political parties. While we find that Chega does indeed receive more media attention than other comparable parties, especially during election times, no such pattern can be detected for VOX. Concerning attention given to leaders, measured as salience and personalization index, we confirm that André Ventura, leader of Chega is given disproportionate attention, while that is not the case for VOX’s Santiago Abascal. Concerning issues, our findings indicate that although notable cross-national differences in media coverage persist, several key issues were already prominent before 2019 (consistent with the agenda-setting expectation) and may have helped advance the radical-right agenda in both Portugal and Spain.

The article examines the impact of the recent crises – the Eurozone crisis, the refugee crisis, Brexit, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine – on the structuration of party competition in six Northwestern European countries. Situating the multiple crises in a long-term perspective on the transformation of party systems, we emphasize their reinforcing effect on the structuring capacity of the new cultural divide. In some countries, this divide and its main driving forces have become so powerful in transforming the political space that we observe an emerging multi-polar pattern of party configurations. This pattern is characterized by a green new left opposed to the populist radical right on the new cultural dimension. In contrast, the center-left and the center-right, despite converging, still oppose each other on the economic dimension. Empirically, the article examines election campaigns in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, drawing on the original PolDem relational content analysis of mass media coverage published before national elections from the 1970s up to 2022.

Far-right communication often portrays a division between ‘the people’ and perceived antagonists, potentially fuelling intergroup tensions. A pivotal element is the politicisation of religion: in Christian-shaped regions, far-right parties invoke Christianity as part of Western identity – despite their weak religious ties and growing secularisation. This paradox raises questions about religion’s function in far-right discourse. I argue that far-right parties systematically use a conservative reading of Christianity as a demarcation tool – marking not only Islam but also cultural liberalism as incompatible with a Christian-framed ingroup. Using parliamentary data from Europe, I conduct automated text classification to identify religious markers and their co-occurrence with inclusionary–exclusionary rhetoric across countries and over time. Results reveal group-specific framing, distinct patterns of religious invocation compared to other parties, and links of these patterns to events. This study demonstrates how Christian narratives serve as rhetorical resources for boundary construction, challenging the cohesion of even secularised societies.

Why is compromising information about misconduct in political parties leaked to the media by party insiders? Drawing on previous research and interviews with political and investigative journalists, we hypothesize that such media disclosures are made with political intent and thus more likely when (1) party list nominations take place and (2) when parties are losing popular support. Through an analysis of 349 newspaper articles of misconduct in political parties leaked by party insiders to Swedish print media between 2010 and 2024, we find support for both expectations. We therefore conclude that intra-party leaks are indeed likely to be made with political intent, at least indirectly. This paper contributes novel theoretical and empirical insights to research on political parties, political scandals, and leaks and whistleblowing by illustrating the role media disclosures made by party insiders play in internal party power struggles.

Elections are not only verdicts on incumbents but also contests over the issues that parties emphasize. This paper asks whether parties’ issue-specific campaign strategies influence their electoral success, and how parties decide on those strategies. We leverage a new dataset on parties’ electoral campaign efforts in 15 European countries to examine three dimensions of campaign strategy: the salience of issues, the position they take on those issues, and the extremity or moderation of those positions. As for the parties’ strategic choices, the results confirm that European parties organize their issue-specific campaigns largely in line with their ideological positions and their status as challengers or mainstream parties. In response to the electoral effect of their campaign strategies, the results confirm the received wisdom that the parties’ issue-specific campaigns have only a limited effect on the electoral outcome. However, this general result has to be nuanced by party family: challengers and mainstream party families have benefited to varying degrees from their respective strategies. The effects of campaigns on electoral success are the largest for the radical right, which has benefited from putting the emphasis on cultural issues and taking clear-cut or even extreme positions on economic issues. Our findings shed new light on party responsiveness and the limits of political persuasion, showing when campaign appeals can sway voters and when structural factors trump campaign effects.

While party system volatility remains high in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), less is known about whether electoral competition has become programmatically structured. This paper examines the extent and evolution of programmatic differentiation across four CEE countries, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, and Romania, between the 1990s and 2023. Relying on quantitative content analysis of newspaper coverage during parliamentary election campaigns, it investigates system-level trends in programmatic competition, issue salience, and politicization, as well as party-level patterns of issue salience and entrepreneurship. The results show that programmatic competition is substantial and relatively stable over time, but varies across countries depending on historical legacies and regime trajectories. Cultural conflicts have gained importance, particularly under democratic backsliding. While established parties exhibit routinized and distinct programmatic profiles, new parties expand the issue agenda by politicizing less emphasized conflicts. The findings underscore the continued relevance of cleavage theory for understanding party competition in post-communist Europe.

Defined by values of nativism, authoritarianism and populism, radical right parties (RRPs) have also been associated with traditional attitudes on women’s roles in the family and workplace. As such, gender traditional nativists are often purported to be their core supporters. But does this RRP voter profile hold over time across Western Europe? We examine this question using extensive individual-level data from three waves of the European Values Survey complemented by 15 waves of Dutch LISS panel data. While confirming the continuing role of nativism in RRP support, we find that traditionalist attitudes about gender roles do not describe the only type of RRP voter. Since 2009, there is also an important set of gender-egalitarian nativists who are attracted to these parties. Further analysis of the panel data suggests that this phenomenon reflects expansion to new RRP voters rather than the conversion of established radical right supporters to more gender-egalitarian views.