For more than three decades, political authority in Mogadishu was shaped by violence, elite bargaining, and indirect governance, limiting citizens’ direct participation. In 25 December 2025, the city held its first direct local council elections in six decades, marking a critical shift in how political authority is exercised in a fragile context. Objective: This study examines how citizens experienced and interpreted this electoral moment and whether elections can generate legitimacy despite political contestation. Method: Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines district-level electoral data from 16 districts with quantitative analysis examines participation, ballot validity, party competition, and representation, while semi-structured interviews conducted among voters, captures perceptions of security, trust, and the meaning of voting. Finding: The findings show that, despite political disputes, elections were widely experienced as a transition from imposed authority to civic choice. Voters emphasized the significance of selecting representatives directly rather than through clan leaders or coercive actors. While participation and invalid ballot rates varied across districts, security conditions were broadly sufficient to enable open voting. The study contributes to debates on elections in fragile states by showing that elections can function as transitional institutions that normalize non-violent political competition and reframe political authority around citizen choice.

When studying questions of European democracy, research is still very much focused on national political actors. This can be partly explained by the fact that data on political parties’ positions toward Europe and citizens’ attitudes have been mainly collected at the national level, and because sample sizes at the regional or local levels are too small. However, political parties compete about issues related to Europe on different levels—and especially so in European border regions where the local level coincides even more strongly with the EU level. For the particular case of such inner-EU border regions, home to around one third of EU citizens, little is known about patterns of party competition and citizens’ specific demands and preferences. This study addresses this gap, using innovative data from the voting advice application VOTO, specifically designed for local elections held in Germany in 2024. Focusing on four German border regions—two on the Eastern and two on the Western border—it provides new insights into how European democracy works at the local level by examining political parties’ positions and citizens’ political preferences. In particular, the study investigates the extent to which border-specific features and party cues shape voters’ perspectives on cross-border cooperation and European integration. Our findings speak not only to insights from qualitative case studies, which tell us that citizens living in such border regions have specific preferences in terms of saliency and positions, but also to quantitative research studying Euroscepticism in European border regions.

ABSTRACT Why has assistance to Ukraine become politically contentious in some countries more than others? Much attention has been paid to the role of populist opposition parties in seeking to politicise the issue, especially as citizens have become less willing to bear the costs involved. But not all populist actors have challenged Ukraine policy in this way. This article argues that the decision to politicise depends on the extent of previous co-optation to the liberal mainstream position prior to the onset of war fatigue. Looking empirically at the cases of Poland and the United Kingdom, it shows how populist presence in government at the time of Russia’s invasion incentivised these parties to articulate a pro-assistance line which reduced their subsequent ability to politicise the issue at a later date. The findings help us understand how distinct sources of politicisation interact and highlight the importance of sequencing and other temporal considerations.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine challenges the liberal international order and tests the capacity of Western democracies to maintain long-term military and financial aid for Ukraine in a foreign war. Understanding whether governments’ pledges of resolve are backed by their citizens is crucial for the credibility of these commitments. Here we show, based on survey experiments with 10,011 respondents in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy, that these countries’ publics share a similar pattern of preferences. In all countries, citizens strongly endorse Ukraine’s sovereignty and self-determination while weighing human suffering and conflict escalation risk, but less so economic costs. However, within countries, attitudes are polarized: roughly one quarter of citizens with pro-Western orientations show firm resolve, whereas another quarter with anti-Western views remain largely indifferent to political outcomes for Ukraine. These divisions indicate that democratic party competition could constrain the unity and durability of Western resolve against autocratic aggression.

ABSTRACT Populist radical right (PRR) parties are expanding their grassroots despite widespread membership decline elsewhere. Yet little is known about who joins them and the implications of recruitment from other parties. This article compares former members of other parties (‘switchers’) with first-time members in Portugal's Chega, drawing on an original survey of thousands of members. The findings reveal a broadly homogeneous grassroots united around ideology and core PRR values. Differences between switchers and first-time members stem from the predominance of former right-wing partisans among switchers rather than from switching itself. Nonetheless, legacy effects persist in out-group affect: former right-wing members rate right-wing parties more positively and left-wing parties more negatively than former left-wing members, who display the opposite pattern. Overall, the results suggest that many switchers may have been ideologically predisposed toward the PRR and were activated by the emergence of a viable organizational supply. They also have important implications for understanding how PRR grassroots perceive party competition and coalition strategies in multiparty systems.

Niche parties have emerged in many democracies worldwide. Various aspects of these parties have been studied, including the role of mainstream parties in their electoral success. Key to that success, arguably, is news media attention. Is the media attention that niche parties receive affected by mainstream parties as well? In this paper, we combine news value theory with party competition theory to argue that other parties influence niche party visibility. Focusing on green parties in 11 countries between 1992 and 2021, we find evidence that the salience of green policies in mainstream parties’ manifestoes enhance green party visibility in newspapers if these parties take an adversarial position. This positive effect turns negative as the mainstream party becomes greener, which suggests that it steals a niche party’s thunder. The insight that mainstream parties can influence media attention to niche parties opens up new lines of research on the emergence of niche parties.

ABSTRACT I argue that party family labels assigned to parties are useful to voters in new democracies as they serve as a credible signal about party positions when other cues are less reliable. Voters look at how parties have embraced the party family labels of established party systems and parties that embrace these labels are associated with more accurate perceptions of their positions. As party competition stabilises and voters learn how to sort through their domestic signals, this relationship weakens. I find support for these expectations. These results help us understand how voters perceive party positions in new democracies.

ABSTRACT To have meaningful elections, political parties should offer clear, distinct policy programs, and if elected, consistently implement those programs. But the unique context of European integration challenges both the ability of political parties to offer a diverse set of political choices, and of national governments to implement those policies, especially in the economic area. Do citizens of European democracies feel that their alternatives are limited? This article assesses the patterns and consequences of voters’ perceptions of policy choices, using original survey data from Germany and Portugal. It makes two contributions: first, understanding the relevance of perceived policy choice beyond simple left-right congruence for democratic attitudes and voting behaviour, and second, comparing the relevance of economic and non-economic issues when it comes to policy choice. Results show that voters perceive their economic policy offer as limited compared to non-economic policies in Germany, where electoral competition revolves around socio-cultural issues, but not in Portugal, where party competition remains focused on economic issues. The findings also imply that economic policies are more decisive in determining democratic attitudes and vote choice than non-economic policies and confirm the usefulness of using fine-grained measures of political choice on the individual level.

While polarisation is on the rise in Western Europe, there is little descriptive evidence about which issues divide voters and how. There are even fewer studies that seek to explain how party salience strategies respond to polarising issues. This study addresses these gaps, underscoring a conceptual distinction that is often missed in the literature on issue competition — namely, that issues can divide the electorate at large (‘general issue polarisation’), or according to the party they support (‘party issue polarisation’). Survey data about voter preferences in six Western European countries shows that the correlation between these two types of issue polarisation is weak. For example, while some cultural issues like soft drug policy and same-sex marriage are highly polarising in general, they do not divide supporters of opposing parties so much. Using party Twitter activity as the dependent variable, it is shown that parties put less emphasis on issues the more extreme voter preferences are, running contrary to predictions based on prior work. By contrast, issues higher in party polarisation received more attention. This study highlights the importance of taking a multidimensional approach to issue polarisation, and calls for more refined theories of how parties deal with polarising issues.

Abstract Moldova’s geopolitical position, caught between Russia and the West, presents a critical, yet often oversimplified, lens through which to understand its post-Soviet development. This article problematizes the assumption, arguing that Moldovan party politics demonstrates a more fluid and contested landscape than commonly portrayed. Through a qualitative analysis of 31 party electoral programmes between 2001 and 2024, we map the evolution of ‘geopolitical codes’ – how parties articulate foreign policy – and examine their impact on consensus-building and strategic choices. The findings reveal nuanced ideological distinctions within both pro-Russian and pro-European factions, and adaptive codes shaped by both domestic competition and transnational pressures. Crucially, we demonstrate how inter-party dynamics – beyond simple geopolitical alignment – mediate external influences and shape Moldova’s foreign policy. This research contributes to the literature by moving beyond deterministic geopolitical frameworks, highlighting the agency of domestic actors in peripheral states, and offering a deepened understanding of how party competition shapes geopolitical orientation and consensus formation.

This study examines voter perceptions of political party similarity using data from a validated online survey conducted in Taiwan. It primarily collects qualitative data through open-ended questions, complemented by Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and feature matching techniques. The findings reveal that party competition in Taiwan is multidimensional, extending beyond traditional blue-green and unification-independence divides. Notably, local Taiwanese issues and social concerns have become increasingly prominent among emerging third parties. Feature matching results show that 22.53% of respondents clearly distinguish the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), while 11.42% identify the New Power Party (NPP), differentiating it from the pan-green camp as part of the emerging third force. Taiwan’s unique political context, shaped by democratization, cross-strait tensions, and the rise of influential third parties, provides valuable insights for comparative politics. The study offers an analytical framework for understanding party system evolution in emerging democracies and deepens our grasp of how identity politics and diverse political engagement transform political competition. This framework enables scholars to systematically capture complex voter perceptions in multi-party systems and facilitates comparative analysis across political environments marked by identity-based polarization and increasing party plurality.

ABSTRACTDistinguishing between personal and party votes is inherently challenging, and it remains unclear to what extent they function in each country. This study employs the ballot of a private member's bill as an instrumental variable to examine whether legislative behavior influences electoral outcomes in the United Kingdom, which has a highly institutionalized party system. The findings reveal that legislative behavior increases the vote share of Conservative MPs by 2.6 percentage points compared to the previous election. However, given the high prominence of the party vote, this increase is only large enough to change the electoral winner in just under 10% of the constituencies. Furthermore, for opposition MPs, legislative behavior had no effect in any respect. Nevertheless, this result suggests that personal votes exist even in an unlikely case—when party competition is intense and MPs have limited autonomy in Parliament.

Populist radical right-wing parties (PRRPs) marginalise migrants in their political campaigns, reinforcing anti-immigrant rhetoric at both the discourse and programmatic levels. In recent years, the novelty is that PRRPs also problematise migrants’ engagement in origin-country politics while courting selected migrant groups perceived as ‘desirable’. This article seeks to understand how PRRPs instrumentalise political transnationalism for their anti-immigrant policy agendas through the cases of the Party for Freedom (PVV) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), aiming to contribute to the literature scrutinising the recent unconventional strategies of PRRPs in the party competition. It examines 75 texts based on the public statements by politicians of the PVV and AfD regarding Turkish political transnationalism in Western Europe. The findings show that while PRRPs mainly oppose political support for Erdoğan, they seek to appeal to migrant groups who are critical to the homeland government.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how spatial party competition shapes topical negative campaigning during Germany's 2021 federal election. We define topical negative campaigning as attacks on opponents that target specific policy issues, and spatial pressure as a party's ideological proximity to all relevant competitors on a given issue dimension. We argue that in crowded ideological spaces-where parties hold similar positions on salient issues like the economy and the environment-negative campaigning increases as a strategic means of differentiation. When substance alone fails to create contrast, parties turn to negativity to stand out and sharpen their profile. Using 166,402 tweets from 1228 official party accounts, we examine negative campaigning across four issues: economy, ecology, culture, and COVID-19. Our method combines named entity recognition, stance detection (XLM-RoBERTa-XL), and a dictionary approach. We introduce a novel measure of spatial pressure that captures issue-specific proximity in a multiparty system. Our findings show that higher spatial pressure leads to more negativity on salient and contested issues (economy and ecology), but reduces it on lower-salience or depoliticised topics (culture and COVID-19). This demonstrates that the effect of ideological proximity is conditional on issue context and reveals negativity as a functional response to spatial crowding.

Abstract The framework for political donations in the UK creates a risk of political finance inflation, distorted political competition and corruption. In this article, we study reported donations from 2001 to 2023. The value of political donations, adjusted for inflation, has gone down—not up—over the period we study. Adjusting for the popularity of the parties, donations have been received relatively equally by the two big parties. The corruption risk from donations is minimal: the two big parties have not been particularly dependent on individual donors and few businesses bother donating. This benign situation is a matter of luck, not design. The decisions of individual donors or politicians could easily flip the system towards inflation, distorted party competition or greater corruption. In the wake of the 2025 local elections, reform should appeal to the UK's traditional big three parties: it is a way of partially insulating political parties against electoral volatility, as well as reducing the risks of inflation, distortion and corruption.

This study aims to analyze Germany's refugee policy in depth. The purpose of this study is to analyze the German refugee policy in depth, and to comprehensively analyze the complex mechanisms in the process of policy formulation and implementation by applying the two-layer game theory. The two-layer game theory divides the policy process into domestic and international levels, which helps to reveal the multiple dilemmas faced by Germany's refugee policy. At the domestic level, factors such as political party competition, public opinion shifts, and competition between federal and state power are intertwined, affecting the stability and implementation of the policy; at the international level, the responsibility sharing under the EU system, security and anti-terrorism pressures, and geo-strategic situation have put Germany's refugee policy in the predicament of internal and external attacks. Through this study, it is found that the solution to the German refugee problem needs to be synergized at both the domestic and international levels, including the paths of reconciling political differences, curbing the expansion of extreme right-wing forces, optimizing the efficiency of the integration policy, as well as reconfiguring the EU's responsibility sharing mechanism, regulating the legal boundaries of cooperation with third countries, and strengthening the diplomatic synergies of source-based governance, with a view to providing useful references for the solution to the refugee problem in Germany and the world.

Twenty-first century West European politics is more volatile than in any period since the end of World War II. A new transnational cleavage increasingly structures party competition and voter behaviour. To what extent does this new cleavage provide electoral stability and fragment traditional camps? This article answers these questions by introducing the Bloc Volatility and Fragmentation Dataset (BVFD) including metrics of volatility and fragmentation for party blocs, cleavage types and left-right party camps in 15 West European countries from 1951 to 2023. In general, these data show that the transnational cleavage has become larger and more stable in the last 30 years while the traditional cleavages have declined. The left and right party camps have also both become more fragmented. The findings of this article and the BVFD contribute to recent advances in the study of party system and cleavage change in Western Europe.

This study examines the political history and electoral participation patterns in Hiyanglam Assembly Constituency of Manipur from 2012 to 2022, analysing three consecutive elections to understand democratic participation trends, voting behaviour, and political transformation in this significant constituency. Using secondary data analysis and quantitative research methods, the study reveals significant shifts in political allegiance, voter turnout patterns, and party competition dynamics. The research findings indicate a transition from Congress dominance to BJP emergence, with electoral participation rates showing variations across the three election cycles. The constituency witnessed voter turnout rates of approximately 79.19% in 2012, 84% in 2017, and 94.82% in 2022, reflecting increasing democratic engagement. Key findings reveal that while traditional political parties maintained significant influence, newer political formations have successfully challenged established hegemonies, contributing to a more pluralistic electoral landscape. The study contributes to understanding micro-level electoral dynamics in Northeast India's complex political terrain and provides insights into democratic deepening processes in ethnically diverse constituencies.

ABSTRACTAs in many federal countries, subnational politics is the cornerstone of Argentine political careers, and the Congress is a central point for multilevel politics. Although existing literature shows that local politics influence the behavior of congressmen, their effect on committee appointments has been scarcely studied. This article examines the committee assignments of former mayors and governors in the Argentine Congress from 2011 to 2019. We find that being a first‐time legislator with prior experience as a mayor and coming from provinces with large public sectors, competitive party systems, and small district magnitudes positively influence the chances of being appointed to distributive committees, that is, those whose benefits can be more easily disaggregated into specific geographic constituencies. Our findings enhance the understanding of the connections between the federal legislative branch and local executives, and they highlight the importance of distributional theory in analyzing committee membership.

The dynamics of local political contests in Indonesia often involve complex challenges, ranging from party competition to controversies surrounding candidates. One of the crucial problems faced in the 2024 Langkat Regency Election was the public's skepticism toward the vice regent candidate, which created a risk of declining electability for the Syah Afandin–Tiorita Surbakti pair. In this context, political parties, particularly the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), were required to design a strategic and adaptive campaign to secure voter support. The main objective of this study is to analyze the campaign strategy implemented by PDIP in supporting the Syah Afandin–Tiorita Surbakti candidate pair and to examine how these strategies contributed to electoral success despite the controversies encountered. This study employs a qualitative approach with a descriptive method. Data were collected through interviews with party elites and campaign teams, direct observations during campaign activities, and document studies of campaign materials and media coverage. Data were then analyzed thematically to identify patterns in political marketing practices. The findings reveal that PDIP employed a combination of three political marketing approaches: push marketing, which mobilized the party machine across all levels; pull marketing, which highlighted the strengths and vision of the candidates; and pass marketing, which utilized interpersonal networks to strengthen grassroots engagement. These strategies effectively countered negative perceptions, rebuilt the candidate pair's image, and ultimately secured 55% of the vote in the quick count results. The implications of this study emphasize that well-structured political marketing strategies, when integrated with strong party solidarity and emotional proximity to voters, can be decisive in overcoming reputational challenges and ensuring victory in local elections