Party Family Research Articles

Human Rights Court and Truth Reconciliation Commission for the Settlement of Human Rights in Indonesia

The law on human rights court has brought the new hopes for certain people have suffered because of the human rights violation happened in the past government (before the law enacted in the years of 2000). The demand of justice has been made by victims, the families of victims and other sympathetic parties by bringing those who have violated human rights in the past. The demand for justice does not only focus on human rights violations, which occurred in the past but also similar human rights violations that will occur in the future. The existence of a permanent Human Rights Court seems to imply that human rights will be upheld and protected. The resolution of past human rights violations via a conflict approach is preferable for the national reconciliation. The resolution of past human rights violations through extra-judicial organizations is an advanced step towards resolving the case, whereas a conflict approach can be used to settle the case. The existence of the Human Rights Law provides a new frontier in implementing the principle of restorative justice in the approach of case settlement. It is hoped that such restorative justice can create a political balance between the past and the future.

Networks and Social Influence in European Legislative Politics

The Treaty of Lisbon strengthened the role of national parliaments in the European Union. It introduced an ‘early warning system’, granting parliamentary chambers the right to reject legislative proposals by the European Commission. Previous studies assumed independence between the decisions of parliaments to reject a legislative proposal. We apply recent advances in inferential network analysis and argue that parliamentary vetoes are better explained by conceptualizing parliaments’ veto actions as a temporal network. Network effects can be observed along the dimension of party families. Based on a new permutation approach, we find that parliaments with similar party majorities influence each other over the course of the decision period (‘social influence’), rather than basing their decisions independently on joint prior partisanship (‘selection’).

Book Review: The Radical Left Party Family in Western Europe, 1989–2015

Book Review: The Radical Left Party Family in Western Europe, 1989–2015

European Monetary Union Reform Preferences of French and German Parliamentarians

We analyze data from an author‐conducted survey of members of the French and German parliaments on European Monetary Union reform preferences. We consider three potential drivers of preferences: nationality, ideology, and personal characteristics. For European Monetary Union policies like Eurobonds, the Fiscal Compact and the European Central Bank asset purchase program we find a robust difference between parliamentarians of both countries if they belong to the same party family and controlling for individual characteristics. Based on our estimates, however, we predict agreement between German left‐wingers and French conservatives even for ideological differences that are smaller than the current difference between the left and the right European party families. Our findings suggest that deeply‐rooted national differences do not impose a prohibitive obstacle to a German‐French parliamentary consensus on European Monetary Union policies.

What Kind of Party Is the UK Independence Party? The Future of the Extreme Right in Britain or Just Another Tory Party?

This article aims to further our understanding of the nature of the UK Independence Party. Our approach differs from much of the existing literature on party families, by analysing public attitudes towards the UK Independence Party in comparison with other parties. Multidimensional unfolding is utilised to map UK Independence Party’s place in the British party system, Tobit regressions are employed to compare UK Independence Party’s support base with that of the British National Party and the Conservatives and, finally, latent class analysis is used to assess the heterogeneity in UK Independence Party’s support base. The conclusion is that, with increasing success, the UK Independence Party has established itself as the only viable electoral option for British extreme right voters while also making serious inroads into more traditional conservative circles, who are Eurosceptic but not extreme. This bridging position between the mainstream and the extreme makes the UK Independence Party distinctive from other British parties and has parallels with the positions of anti-establishment, European Union sceptical and immigration-critical parties elsewhere in Europe.

Book Review: Paolo Chiocchetti, The Radical Left Party Family in Western Europe, 1989–2015

Book Review: Paolo Chiocchetti, <i>The Radical Left Party Family in Western Europe, 1989–2015</i>

Partisan effects in morality policy making

AbstractCurrent comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.

Radical right-wing parties in Europe

AbstractIn this paper I discuss, critically, the literature on populism and the extent to which it applies to the contemporary radical right-wing parties in Europe. These parties are often – and increasingly – referred to as populist parties. I argue that it is misleading to label these parties ‘populist parties’, since populism is not the most pertinent feature of this party family. These parties are mainly defined by ethnic nationalism, and not a populist ideology. In their discourse they are primarily preoccupied with questions pertaining to national identity and national security – and their ‘negative’ doubles immigration, multiculturalism, Islamist threat – and they consistently pit ‘the people’ mainly against elites that they view as responsible for a cultural and political threat against their idealized image of their nation state. The ethnic nationalism of European radical right-wing parties is more important for their discourse and tends to influence the populist elements.

The Electoral Success of the Radical Left: Explaining the Least Likely Case of the Communist Party in Graz

Recently, scholars have shown a growing interest in radical left parties (RLPs). In terms of electoral success, the rise of the KPÖ Graz, the Communist Party in Austria’s second biggest city, represents perhaps the most counterintuitive case in Western Europe. Adding to previous studies, the rise of the KPÖ Graz contradicts many of the claims made and patterns found about the conditions for the electoral success of RLPs. While the national KPÖ was voted out of parliament in 1959, the Graz branch has been a member of local government since 1998. Since then, the party has managed to gain 20 per cent of the vote in three out of four elections. In 2017, the KPÖ defended its place as the second largest party in local legislature and stayed ahead of the radical right FPÖ, on the rise at the national level. In stark contrast to the Communists’ current strength, however, they did not gain even 2 per cent of the vote in 1983. This analysis shows how the party has managed to ‘own’ the issue of housing and to exploit local political opportunities in order to be electorally successful. The findings point to the importance of agency and the subnational level for RLPs, and highlight more general questions in the study of this party family.

Party family or nation state? The post-decisional politics of supranational socio-economic regulation

Do parties matter in the course of the domestic implementation of policy that is made beyond the nation state? Based on within-country and cross-country comparisons and empirical evidence from the regulation of working time by governments of the Left and the Right in Britain and France, this article offers two insights. First, the partisan composition of government matters, in line with cleavage theory of party positioning on European integration but, second, the national context in which ruling parties implement that policy affects the scope of the validity of the partisan hypothesis. Thus it is argued that, far from ending domestic political contestation on the Left-Right axis, policy made beyond the frontiers of the state in the context of European integration and its concrete domestic manifestations are subject to it but in domestically-defined ways.

Are (populist) radical right parties Männerparteien? Evidence from Bulgaria

This paper focuses on the representation of women in radical right parties and examines the often assumed relationship between the radical right and gender, namely that radical right parties are overwhelmingly ran, supported by, and representing the male part of the population. Using data from elections, party platforms, and parliamentary committees the paper asks ‘Are PRR parties Männerparteien?’ Using data from Bulgaria, we suggest that the Männerparteien argument is too simplistic and argue that in order to make a claim about representation, one needs to study both female and male MPs and across all party families. We find that while radical right parties are still primarily composed of men, an examination of the substantive representation of women’s issues, puts this relationship into question. Furthermore, we show that while men outnumber women in all political parties, both radical right women and men have been more active in women’s issues than their gender counterparts from other political parties. These findings suggest two things: one, we cannot study gender equality matters without comparing the activity of both men and women; and two, the classification of radical right parties as Männerparteien based on descriptive representation only, is too simplistic and to an extent, misleading.

Women in cabinets

There is still relatively little research on what factors explain the share of women in cabinets across countries and time. Focusing on party ideology, we advance this budding research. First, we examine if heads of government from left-leaning and/or liberal parties tend to select a larger proportion female cabinet members than those from conservative parties. Second, we evaluate whether a switch toward a left-leaning or liberal government benefits women’s cabinet presence. We test both propositions empirically with a data set covering mainly Western and industrialized countries after 1968. Our statistical analysis only find lukewarm support for the first proposition, that is, left-wing parties are no longer more likely to nominate women to cabinet posts than other party families, particularly liberal parties. Rather, what we do find is that a change in government, regardless of whether the new formateur is left-wing, liberal, or conservative, benefits the nomination of women to cabinet posts.

Political Parties and MPs’ Morality Policy Voting Behaviour: Evidence from Germany

This article investigates the impact of party membership on MPs’ morality policy voting behaviour, going beyond the common dichotomy of left and right parties and differentiating the preferences of other party families (e.g. Christian democrats, Liberals and Greens) regarding abortion, stem-cell research and euthanasia. We argue that parties generally face a ‘self-determination vs. protection of life’ trade-off. In the case of embryo research, however, a party’s economic preferences and its position towards the freedom of research come into play, too. Exploring eight free votes in Germany after 1990, our analysis identifies party membership as the key determinant, supporting the claim that parties are groups of people who share common values. Moreover, we corroborate our subfield-specific argument, as regarding stem-cell research, Christian democrats vote less conservative and the liberal position of Greens even reverses.

Ethnic and Regionalist Parties in Western Europe: A Party Family?

AbstractParties that defend the interest of one or a few ethnic groups and/or regions are, despite their differences, recurrently grouped together into a single party family. This article systematically applies the multidimensional framework offered by Mair and Mudde in order to provide an up‐to‐date inventory of the universe of ethnic and regionalist parties in Western Europe and assess whether they form a family. The evidence indicates that although the ethnic and regionalist family appears to be somewhat less coherent than more established families, there are clear similarities between the proposed (core) member parties. More specifically, the common denominators that distinguish the members of the ethnic and regionalist party family are their rather similar origins, sociologies, and policy orientations.

The value of restorative justice

This paper starts by defining restorative justice and analysing its components. It looks at its practical benefits for the criminal justice system and explores the human benefits, not only for victims, but also for offenders, the families of both parties and the community. The experience of restorative justice in juvenile courts in New Zealand is examined in order to highlight the main benefits of the practice. Studies have shown that restorative justice can have positive effects such as reducing reoffending, providing an insight into offending, bringing together victims and offenders and repairing emotional harm. The paper concludes that although restorative justice on its own will not fix all social problems, it has many positive impacts on participants.

Party rules, party resources and the politics of parliamentary democracies

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database Project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this article, we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focusing on parties’ resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older data sets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: that is, declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and the forms that this democratization takes.

Social democratic parties and the rise of ecologism: A comparative analysis of Western Europe

The rise of green politics and new social movements posed serious challenges for existing party families. Social democratic parties, in particular, found themselves increasingly crammed between old demands of rising industrial productivity and a stable economic growth on the one hand and new demands regarding ecological sustainability and environmental protection on the other. In this study, I examine the influence of green politics on social democratic party ideologies in Western Europe (N=19) during the last decades of the twentieth century. In the first step of the analysis, I carry out a descriptive examination in order to identify parties where ecological demands are clearly present. Here, the empirical observations indicate that parties domiciling in the northern and central parts of Europe generally have been more prone to establish ecological views than parties in Southern Europe. The second step of the study presents at least indicative evidence regarding possible causes of these ecological shifts. Building on previous research on party change – but using a qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA) in order to detect equifinal and conjunctural causality – I identify four sufficient paths leading to considerable ecological change within social democratic parties.

Gender, voting and Christian Democratic parties

ABSTRACTThe influence of gender on voting behaviour has attracted a growing amount of academic attention in recent years as scholars have looked for evidence that female voters have moved to the left in Western democracies. Closer examination of the electorate of different right-wing party families in Western Europe uncovers, however, that there is no sign of a gender imbalance in the electorate of Christian Democratic parties. This article therefore examines male and female support for Christian Democratic parties in four countries (Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands). It firstly explores whether a modern gender gap in Christian Democratic support is obscured by lingering compositional differences in terms of religious belonging and practice and participation in the workforce. However, while compositional differences do significantly influence the relationship between gender and Christian Democratic voting, controlling for these differences does not expose a previously hidden modern gender gap. Secondly, the article, drawing on the modern gender gap literature, tests whether there are significant differences in the effect of structural, situational and cultural/attitudinal variables on male and female voters. The results show that apart from age, the effects of these predictors on Christian Democratic support do not vary by gender.

High turnout in the Low Countries: Partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands

We use a quasi-experimental framework to test the conventional wisdom that left-of-center parties benefit from higher turnout by analyzing the partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands. Fixed effects, multilevel, and matching models of party family vote shares in the Netherlands before and after the reform–and in reference to a control group of Belgian party families–show consistent evidence the voting reform led to an increase in the vote share of Dutch social democratic parties and a decrease in the vote share won by minor and extreme parties. We find some evidence that Christian democratic and liberal parties also benefited from the voting reform, but argue this finding is not causally related to the reform itself.

The party politicization of administrative elites in the Netherlands

This paper explores four potential motivations for the party politicization of the senior civil service: ideological agreement, coalition governance, party family issue priorities, and consociational representation. Using data on the party affiliation of 134 secretaries-general (SGs) serving in the Dutch ministerial bureaucracy between 1945 and 2013, it examines the partisan logic of appointment patterns among senior civil servants in the Netherlands. Overall levels of politicization are very high (almost 70 percent of all SGs have a discernible party affiliation), with a strong increase between 1970 and 1990 and a slight drop-off during the past decades. The appointment patterns suggest that the main drivers behind the party politicization of the Dutch elite bureaucracy are the demand for ideological agreement and a consociational quest for the representation of the ‘pillar parties’ in the senior civil service.