European Party Research Articles

New rights, new members? The consequences of intra-party primaries for membership

In response to declining membership, European parties moved to offering direct participation of members and/or non-members in leadership and candidate primaries. However, their consequences for party members remains unclear. This paper aims to address this issue by suggesting a new conceptual framework exploring the combined effect of the degree of inclusiveness of the two key formal dimensions of “who can run” and “who can vote” in intra-party primaries and their joint positive or negative effect on party membership size, attitude toward the leadership and turnout during the primary. Based on secondary and new pre- and post-primary party membership surveys data and in-depth membership interviews, the paper qualitatively and comparatively studies primaries within the UK Conservatives, the German Greens and the French Parti Socialiste. It finds that mainly primaries limited to members combined with permissive candidate requirements have potentially positive consequences for parties, attracting citizens back to parties, leading to higher participation and membership satisfaction. Thus, the paper contributes to the understanding of the consequences of party reforms for parties and party members.

The success of the Eurosceptic opposition forces in the European Parliament deputies’ elections 2024: causes and consequences

The article examines the results of the elections of deputies of the European Parliament, which took place on June 6-9, 2024 in all 27 member states of the European Union. Ten mains officially registered European parties participating in these elections are represented, including six so-called Euro-optimistic ones supporting the EU, and three Eurosceptic ones criticizing the current state of the Union. The analysis of the main results of the activities of the European Parliament of the previous IX convocation from 2019 to 2024, including the results of the activities of all parliamentary groups operating in it and representing eight leading European parties, was carried out. The key trends in the transformation of the European party and political system over the past five years are considered, including the decline in popularity of the leading European parties and their member parties: Conservatives, Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens, and the growing attractiveness of Eurosceptic and populist parties in many EU member states, electoral successes in national elections of representatives of the right, including right-wing radicals the parties that have been in opposition for many years and the aggravation of problems related to the security and defense capability of the EU. The electoral positions of the leading European parties, as well as the forecast estimates of their participation in the Eurovision 2024. The results of these European elections are considered and the results of the formation of a new structure of the European Parliament are analyzed, including the formation of new opposition Eurosceptic right-wing groups: Patriots for Europe, formed by the Hungarian Fidesz party of V. Orban, the French National Rally party of M. Le Pen, the Czech ANO party of A. Babiash, etc., and the Europe of Sovereign Nations, which arose on the initiative of the Alternative for Germany party.

Positions of the Leading European Parties on the Eve of the European Parliament Elections 2024

The article analyses the main trends in the transformation of the party and political system of the European Union on the eve of the next elections to the European Parliament in June 2024. The article examines the main events of recent years that had the main impact on the process of this transformation. New trends in the change of this system were noted, which included strengthening the popularity and influence of Eurosceptic parties, increasing internal tension concerning relations between old and new members of the European Union. The research demonstrates that following the results of the national parliamentary elections held over the past five years in almost all EU member states, the influence of the leading political parties, which for many years occupied dominant positions in the executive and representative authorities of these countries, has significantly decreased. The phenomenon of increasing representation of women in the bodies of the EU and its member states and its impact on their formation is considered. The influence of changes in the social structure of the European community and their impact on the electoral preferences of Europeans is analysed. The preelection positions of all leading European parties that currently have their factions in the European Parliament are presented, including their election manifestos and candidacies for the post of the President of the European Commission (EC), the so-called Spitzenkandidaten. The forecasts of the results of the participation of leading panEuropean political parties in the European Parliament Elections 2024, made by a number of European non-governmental organizations and leading media holdings, as well as possible options for post-election inter-party coalitions that shape positions of the European Parliament, are demonstrated.

Populism: reconceptualising a multifaceted concept

Abstract. Populism is an interdisciplinary ever-changing topic. It has generated endless controversies. Scholars are confused in their conceptualisation. We have varieties of populism with more or less radical versions. Nevertheless, I know that populism is not just a European phenomenon. It spread throughout the world. The rising of populism has produced an explosion of many conceptual studies. The populist political parties emerge whether on the right or the left wing. This paper examines the literature facets of populism, and in particular radical right wing populism, in Europe particularly in the United Kingdom. It shows that the left-behinds citizens tend to vote for populist parties. There is a rising support for radical populist political parties in Europe. Populist discourse asserts that the rich political elite govern by conspiracy against the people, and their governance is not for the common good. Moreover, they are ‘true representation of the people’. Based on academic, this article literature wants to explore populism as an ideology and new concepts of populism such as strategic and an identitybased populism tool to widen the populist electorate in Europe, in particular right-wing populism,. Mots-clés : populisme, radicalisme de droite, contre l’establishment, le peuple, pensé unique Keywords: populism, right wing radicalism, anti-establishment, people; single-mindedness

New Breakaway Parties in Slovakia: Exploring Intra-party Democracy Shifts

Many new parties are electorally succeeding across European party systems, including in post-communist countries. This is especially true in Slovakia, where it is accompanied by another very specific phenomenon, which in our perspective defines recent parliamentary elections – the prevalence of new breakaway parties. These newly formed parties created by splitting from parliamentary parties are now competing alongside them in early parliamentary elections. The 2020-2023 period, in addition to seeing the fall of governments, and a general political crisis and instability, was also characterized by frequent party factionalism. During this period, turbulent development within SMER-SD, ĽSNS and OĽaNO translated into the formation of three new parties – HLAS-SD, Republika, and the Democrats, which represent our case studies. The aim of our paper is to analyse how these new breakaway parties differ from their original parties organizationally, in the processes associated with intra-party democracy (IPD). We empirically explore their leadership selection, candidate selection and membership policies. The existing data (based on the Populism and Political Parties Database) indicate that their three parent parties are highly personalized with low IPD. The findings of our comparative analysis reveal that the new breakaway parties have incorporated more transparent approaches to intraparty processes compared to their parent parties. However, concerning candidate selection, they have not embraced greater inclusiveness than the parties they originated from. Overall, despite a noticeable trend towards intraparty depersonalization, the opportunity for a broader membership base to participate in the decision making process remains largely unrealized.

Subnational Roads to National Success? Decentralization and the Rise of Populist Parties in Europe

Subnational Roads to National Success? Decentralization and the Rise of Populist Parties in Europe

The rise of populist radical right parties in Europe

After World War II, radical right parties in Europe experienced a decline, but over the last three decades, they have regained strength, becoming significant players in European politics. Since the early twenty-first century, they have secured representation at various levels, from local governments to national parliaments and the European Parliament. Nowadays, populist radical right parties rank among the top three most powerful political forces in one-third of European countries. In Austria, the FPÖ ( Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs) emerged as the leading party in the 2024 elections, winning 28.9% of the vote. In Italy, the Fratelli d’Italia coalition came to power with 25.99% of the vote in 2022. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party won its fourth consecutive election. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN – Rassemblement National) achieved major victories in both the European Parliament and national elections, becoming the country’s largest party. Though initially considered marginal, populist radical right parties have become a lasting and serious force in European politics. This special issue features six carefully selected articles, each offering empirical and theoretical insights into different aspects of the rise of radical right and right-wing populist parties in Europe, contributing to a broader understanding of this phenomenon.

Russia and Central European illiberal actors: mutual legitimation amid the full-scale invasion of Ukraine

ABSTRACT Over the past 15 years, the relationship between illiberal European actors and Russia has become increasingly intertwined. Russia has cultivated these relationships, viewing illiberal actors as a means of influencing Europe. Despite the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which could have been considered a critical juncture, some European parties and politicians did not sever their connections with Russia. This paper addresses this conundrum, focusing on how illiberal Central European actors, exemplified by the FPÖ and Hungary's Fidesz, continue to reference Russia in their rhetoric, and how Russian state rhetoric, represented by state-controlled media, constructs its discourse on Hungary and Austria in response. Through a multi-method analysis, the paper argues that European illiberal parties and Russia engage in mutual legitimation strategies, leveraging shared narratives to bolster their positions domestically and internationally. The paper identifies common argumentative frames used by illiberal actors, highlighting the intertwined nature of their legitimation strategies.

What Drives the Impact of Personalization in Western Europe?

ABSTRACT The personalisation of politics has been widely studied in the past few decades, especially in Western Europe, from several viewpoints, from the electoral to the party-centered one, from the governmental to the media-related one. Nonetheless, very few contributions have focused on the determinants of personalization, even if this latter process might be linked to more general – and much relevant –societal, institutional, or party-related phenomena. In this article, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a novel framework to explain the evolution of the impact of the personalization of politics – i.e., the fact that personalization has had a stronger or weaker influence – in Western Europe between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. We depart from cross-time and cross-country data collected in the first expert survey on the personalization of politics (the PoPES) and investigate the effect of three sets of possible determinants: societal changes (the decrease in the strength of the class cleavage or the diffusion of TV), institutional factors (the presence of presidential elections or personal-vote-driving electoral systems’ features), and party-related changes (the organizational decline of Western European parties). Regression analyses show that almost none of these determinants have influenced personalization's impact in Western Europe.

Religious references in political campaigning: a comparative analysis of Latin America and Western Europe on social media

The relationship between religion and politics is receiving increasing attention in political science, although the focus is often on voter attitudes. Despite secularization trends, scholars expect a resurgence of religion in Western European party politics, where Christianity as a native identity is opposed to non-native Islam by populist radical right parties. In this context, it is primarily hostility toward other religious groups that structures religious elements in political communication. In most Latin American societies, religiosity plays a much greater role for individuals, which is reflected in the discourses of political elites who use genuine religious references to appeal to religious voters (“sacralization of politics”). Using data from my own recent research on content analysis of parties’ and candidates’ Facebook profiles, this article compares how political actors in Latin America and Western Europe use religious references in electoral campaigns and how salient these discourses are. The results help to explain the different prominence of religious discourses in different democratic regions and religious markets. The article contributes to the ongoing debate on the role of religion in 21st century politics.

Why History Matters? Populist Radical Right Governments in the EU and Their Foreign Policy

ABSTRACT Four European populist radical right (PRR) prime minister parties (PiS, Fidesz, SDS and FdI) have displayed differing approaches to foreign policy. In part, these differences can be explained by their specific visions of history. Central and Eastern European (CEE) parties such as PiS, Fidesz and to a certain extent SDS, became more radical and Eurosceptic when in power. FdI, on the other hand, became less Eurosceptic and more mainstream after coming to power. CEE parties have constructed their identities around anti-communism and the notion of Western betrayal, making the liberal West and the EU their significant Other. On the contrary, for FdI it is more difficult to have the EU as a significant Other in the same sense, because Italy was a founding member of the EU and its historical grievances are not directed at the West. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also been approached and used differently by the leaders of these parties. Giorgia Meloni, Janez Janša and, at least initially, Jarosław Kaczyński used the war to strengthen their European credentials, while Viktor Orbán used it to intensify his fight against the liberal West.

‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’? European radical left parties’ response to Russia’s war in Ukraine

The 2022 Russian (re)invasion of Ukraine highlights the need to understand better how European parties react towards aggressions by anti-liberal authoritarian states. In this article, we focus on the still relatively understudied yet crucial case of the radical left. Since our initial quantitative overview shows that there is no united front on positions of radical left parties towards Russia’s actions, we argue for the necessity of a deeper analysis of radical left strategies. A similar empirical analysis, however, is lacking. To fill this gap, we provide a qualitative content analysis of the reactions to Russia’s 2022 aggression on Ukraine from different ideological sub-types of radical left parties from the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Portugal. We conclude that there is a clear heterogeneity in the way the radical left approaches the invasion of Ukraine, which, albeit not perfectly, corresponds with ideological and strategic sub-types within the party family. Therefore, it makes little sense to regard the party family as a whole as ‘pro-Russian’. The findings invite further comparative studies on varying reactions to Russia’s aggressions within and across particular party families.

Far‐right movement parties in Europe: Two perspectives

Far‐right movement parties in Europe: Two perspectives

New democracy and centre-right dominance in Greece: a new normal?

ABSTRACT In the parliamentary elections of 2023, the ruling New Democracy (ND) party of prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was re-elected triumphantly. ND’s victory marks an unprecedented moment of centre-right dominance in Greece since 1974 and goes against the trend of the so-called ‘crisis of the centre-right’ elsewhere in Europe. This article claims that ND’s strategy under Mitsotakis has been typical of the winning formula of other centre-right parties in Europe in previous decades. Yet, that this formula is now so successful in Greece owes much to the country’s post-crisis context, out of which the Mitsotakis leadership emerged. Given the geopolitical position of Greece and the historical intertwining of the question of its international orientation with major cleavages of domestic politics, the article argues that the success of Mitsotakis draws particularly on a certain form of posturing in foreign and European policy that allows him to reconcile contradictions inside ND’s electoral coalition.

Party system ideological polarization in Western Europe: data, trends, drivers, and links with other key party system properties (1945–2021)

ABSTRACT Unlike other key party system properties (e.g. fragmentation, volatility), polarization lacks a publicly available cross-national and longitudinal dataset that can be used as an established source among the scientific community. This article aims to fill this gap by introducing a novel publicly available dataset of party system ideological polarization in Western European party systems. The dataset relies on multiple expert surveys and provides measures of party system ideological polarization for each parliamentary election and legislature in 20 Western European countries since 1945. The article also presents party system polarization’s comparative longitudinal trends, drivers, and links with other key party system properties. It finds that party system ideological polarization is on the rise in Western Europe, mainly due to a progressive shift in the electoral support from ideologically moderate mainstream parties to more extreme challenger parties. Moreover, in recent years, high party system polarization has recurred in highly fragmented and volatile contexts, thus creating a detrimental context for the working of democracy.

Transnationalism and Populist Networks in a Digital Era: Canada and the Freedom Convoy

Abstracts The growth and success of right-wing populist movements globally has been remarkable since the early 2010s. Indeed, populist parties in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and North America have received tremendous electoral success, shaping a movement for the people and by the people within the political sphere. To what extent do populist movements influence other such programs across national borders? Research has suggested that globalization has facilitated the spread of populist ideology. Transnational populism emphasizes the “people” as a “horizontal, membership-based collective with membership premised on an in/out logic between nations, allowing populist national movements to engage and share a global ideological program. This paper seeks to understand and measure to what extent populism has become a transnational movement and identify how populism moves across national borders through online political participation. To explore this question, we collected over 6.7 million digital trace data on X/Twitter during Canada’s January–February 2022 Freedom Convoy movement. Receiving support from thousands of citizens, the Freedom Convoy revealed the ability of populist ideology to move aimlessly across international borders. We used a deep-learning model applied to text analysis to implement a classification task to measure populist narratives during the movement.

Co-ethnic core intermediaries: Swedish speakers in Finnish party politics

ABSTRACT Scholars have unpacked the conditions out of which electorally successful ethnic parties in Europe emerge and the important roles they play in diverse contexts. But the existing research overlooks important political actors, whose influence explains some of the behaviors of these ethnic parties. In this analysis, we explore the different roles of co-ethnic core intermediaries (CCIs) – that is, officials who come from the same ethnic groups as those whose interests ethnic parties champion but represent other mainstream political parties. Based on an illustrative case study of the Swedish-speaking Finns, this article demonstrates that CCIs both benefit and threaten ethnic parties: they generate support among and facilitate collaboration with other mainstream political parties; however, they also cause voter attrition and pursue ethnic causes in ways that differ from the ethnic party.

Populist alone, but harmless together? Analysing inter- and transnational populism of EP parties ID and ECR on Facebook

Right-wing populist parties are highly successful in online communication and have made electoral gains in a wide range of European countries. In the European Parliament, until the recent European elections in 2024, the majority of them were distributed between the two party alliances and parliamentary groups Identity and Democracy (ID) and European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). To analyse their communicative strategies, we collected all Facebook posts of the party and parliamentary group accounts of ID and ECR ( N = 616) within one year (08/21–08/22). Subsequently, structural topic modelling (STM), sentiment analysis and manual content analysis were applied to determine their communication strategies. Overall, the results indicate that ECR and ID are communicating rather moderately online. However, while ECR differs significantly from its national member parties, ID seems to reproduce right-wing populist narratives. Overall, this paper argues for a stronger focus on European party alliances, not only national parties, when researching right-wing populist communication in the EU.

Immigration and Its Impact on Europe's Societal Security: Examining the Rise of Far-Right Parties (2014-2024)

This study examines the relationship between immigration and the rise of far-right parties in Europe from 2014 to 2024, focusing on the implications for societal security. It explores how far-right parties have capitalized on immigration, framing it as a critical threat to national identity and social stability. Applying the Copenhagen School’s securitization theory, the research analyzes how these parties have redefined immigration as a national security issue, thereby legitimizing more stringent immigration policies and exclusionary practices. The findings indicate that far-right parties have effectively utilized public anxieties and uncertainties surrounding immigration to influence the political discourse across Europe. This shift has significant socio-political consequences, posing challenges to the European Union’s foundational principles of integration, democracy, and human rights. The study highlights concerns over democratic backsliding, the erosion of social policies, and threats to freedom of movement and human rights. Additionally, it examines the potential impacts on the EU’s cohesion policy, foreign policy, enlargement process, and environmental sustainability. The research underscores a major transformation in Europe’s political landscape with far-reaching implications for the stability of the European Union and its member states.

Populist Party Responsiveness and Populist Party Voter Satisfaction With Democracy in Europe

<p>Voters of populist parties tend to be dissatisfied with democracy. Some scholars attribute this dissatisfaction with how our democracies function to poor representation by mainstream parties and a feeling of not being heard. We should see this representation improve with the success of populist parties. This improved representation should, in turn, have a positive impact on populist party voters’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). Existing case studies have only looked at the link between formal populist party representation in parliament or government, and populist party voters’ SWD, with mixed findings, the most puzzling of which is that populist party voters may even become less satisfied with growing formal representation. There is no comparative study on populist parties’ actual responsiveness to populist party voters and the connection to their SWD. Thus, we ask: How well do populist parties represent populist party voters, and how does this populist party responsiveness influence populist party voters’ satisfaction with democracy? We define populist party responsiveness as issue-based agenda-responsiveness between populist party voters and populist parties and investigate the link to SWD using data on 21 countries from the 2019 European Election Studies. We find that populist parties in Europe are not generally more responsive to populist party voters than mainstream parties. Populist parties’ agenda-responsiveness has a positive effect on populist voters’ SWD while being in government does not increase the positive effect of populist party responsiveness on their voters’ SWD. They may be disenchanted by how well their parties can eventually “walk the talk.”</p>