Party Positions Research Articles

Party-Based Sovereignism in EU Countries: Main Patterns and Their Justification

Abstract In this article, we examine party positions on sovereignty issues in European countries based on an analysis of party supply. First, we develop an index of sovereignism reflecting the multidimensional articulation and differentiated emphasis put by parties on sovereignist issues. By applying the index to Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) data, the analysis maps all EU member states. Second, we integrate in the analysis party- and country-level data (including the orientations of domestic public opinion). Through multivariate regression analysis we show how party ideology, contextual factors and public mood favoured the spread of party-based sovereignism in European countries.

Variations in Social Europe? National political parties' positions on EU‐level social regulations

AbstractHow do national political parties vary in their views on Social Europe? I focus on an aspect that has received less attention despite its growing prevalence—EU regulations with ambitions to diminish social inequality to encourage social convergence among Member States. Since the Juncker Commission, the European Commission has become increasingly active in pursuing this aspect of Social Europe. Thus, understanding parties' positions on this aspect of Social Europe has become more important. However, current literature lacks measures of national party stances towards Social Europe, and explanations for these stances. Here, I use data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (2006, 2009, 2014 and 2019) to develop an indirect measure of party positions on Social Europe. Leveraging studies in party politics and EU politics, I propose that party families and national economic conditions may affect parties' positions on Social Europe. The analyses suggest substantial variation in parties' positions on Social Europe both within and across party families. The analyses also demonstrate that socialist and green parties support Social Europe most, whereas radical right parties support it least. Lastly, I do not find systematic evidence that national economic conditions influence parties' support for this aspect of Social Europe.

Do Parties Matter? Party Positions and European Voters’ Attitudes toward Economic and Political Globalization

Abstract To what extent do party positions influence voters’ attitudes toward the economic and political aspects of globalization? Initially an issue following a left-right dimension of conflict, globalization increasingly divides mainstream from nonmainstream parties. In this study, I argue that parties help citizens form opinions on globalization issues. I then use data on voters’ attitudes and party positions on globalization to test this supply-side theory of globalization attitudes on both economic and political dimensions. Holding demand-side factors such as economic self-interest and predispositions/values constant, I find that party positions strongly affect voters’ views on economic and political globalization, with the effect being similar to that of education. Moreover, I find that the effect of cues from left- and right-populist parties is much more negative than that of mainstream parties, replicating previous elite-level findings on the positioning of these party families. Finally, green party cues show conflicting results for the economic and political dimensions, with green cues affecting voters negatively on economic globalization but positively on political globalization. The findings in this study call for a deeper exploration of the supply-side determinants of globalization attitudes.

Electoral dynamics, new nationalisms, and party positions on Syrian refugees in Turkey

ABSTRACT When and under what conditions do ideologically similar nationalist parties adopt different positions and discourses about refugees and immigrants? We address this question by examining nationalist parties’ approaches toward Syrian refugees in Turkey. Documenting these differences based on an original Twitter dataset and party manifestos, we argue that electoral dynamics under the new presidential system have shaped nationalist parties’ discourses about refugees in the country. In particular, we explore how pre-electoral alliances and a strategic opening in the political space have motivated nationalist parties to amplify, ambiguate, or silence their otherwise conservative and nativist refugee discourses. Additionally, we maintain that urbanization has influenced the discursive strategies of nationalist party elites toward immigrants and refugees, giving rise to contradictory forms of nationalism in urban areas, including both far-right and liberal nationalisms. Overall, this study offers valuable insights into the complex interactions between refugee politics, electoral dynamics, nationalism, and urbanization in Turkey.

The Ideology of Brazilian Parties and Presidents: A Research Note on Coalitional Presidentialism Under Stress

ABSTRACTThis research note contributes updated and extended point estimates of the ideological positions of Brazilian political parties and novel estimates of the positions of all presidents since redemocratization in 1985. Presidents and parties are jointly responsible for the operability of Brazil’s version of coalitional presidentialism. Locating these key political actors in a unidimensional left–right space over time reveals rising challenges to the institutional matrix, particularly since 2013. Ideological polarization among parties has sharply increased, presidents have become more distant from Congress, and the political center has become increasingly vacated. Coalitional presidentialism is being subjected to unprecedented ideological stress as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva begins his third term in office.

Cleavage theory meets gender equality: examining party positions in Germany

ABSTRACT The paper analyses party positions on gender equality policies in Germany. While these policies have been intensively studied in various national contexts and for different parties, less is known to what extent these positions are explained by socio-cultural or socio-economic cleavages. Based on an original party expert survey, conducted in Germany in 2021, we demonstrate that the political space in Germany on gender equality policies is strongly structured along the GAL-TAN divide. We also show that the positions of moderate TAN parties differ most strongly regarding LGBTQI issues whilst GAL parties equally support women -related and LGBTQI-related issues. The Green party and the right-wing party AfD occupy the most consistent and salient but also outermost positions in the political space. Our study makes a substantial contribution to the analysis of gender equality policies and offers a systematic analysis of party positions in the realm of the cultural GAL-TAN cleavage.

Can the party family approach explain Polish partisan positions? A case study on the policy field of higher education in post-socialist Poland

ABSTRACT Research on partisan positions on higher education policies has focused to date mainly on parties in sustained democratic regimes in Western Europe. This study compares these findings with Polish parties’ positioning and investigates the extent to which parties’ preferences in post-socialist Poland can be explained by their party family affiliations. Poland provides an interesting case because of its socialist heritage of strong government control in the higher education sector and the rather fluid party system with a comparatively large share of populist right parties. By means of a qualitative content analysis of 41 party manifestos from 1989–2019, partisan positions of Christian democratic, social democratic, liberal, agrarian, and populist right parties are categorized along the re-distributive and control dimension of higher education policies. While party families can explain Polish parties’ positioning on the control dimension, there is a cross-party consensus to expand the sector and increase public funding due to strong popular demand after the transformation which contrasts with the positions of West European parties. Key results are a rising salience of this policy field in party manifestos and a detailed description of populist right parties’ preferences for government control of higher education institutions and expansion of this sector.

ANALISIS YURIDIS TERHADAP AKTA NOTARIS YANG DINYATAKAN TIDAK BERKEKUATAN HUKUM (Study Putusan Hakim No: 28/Pdt.G/2013/PN.Bdw)

Indonesian country as a country of law, in form of certainty of order legal protection notarial deeds made before a notary for all matters relating to agreements and will be stated in a notarial deed and the aim is to declare the deed inauthentic and will not be left to the judge to decide that the authentic deed is relegated to a deed under the hand and can be canceled and declared to be invalid or null and void by the deed. This research aims to understand the legal consequences of notarial deeds based on decisions (study decision number 28/Pdt.G/2017/PN Bdw). The legal position of parties who are declared to have no legal force, this research uses a normative juridical method and the approach used is a statutory, conseptual (doctrine) and case approach. The sources of legal materials used are primary legal materials, secondary legal materials, and tertary legal materials. And in this research, we use liblary data collection techniques (liberary research) and analyze the data deductively namely drawing conclusions from a general problem regarding the concrete problem being faced. The results found are contained in the decision of the panel of judges in Case Number 28/Pdt.G/2017/PN Bdw. In the considerations that the judge applied, it was in accordance with article 1865 of the Civil Code which states that every person who has claimed to have rights.

Party-System Polarization and Individual Perceptions of Party Differences: Two Divergent Effects on Turnout

AbstractIn this article, we argue that party-system polarization and subjective perceptions of ideological party differences are conceptually and empirically distinct phenomena that affect electoral participation differently. Looking at 84 elections worldwide, we show that party-system polarization, and the sharp conflicts associated with it, depresses turnout because many citizens are put off by extreme party positions and unrewarding polemics. By contrast, the individual perception of differences between parties increases turnout because more citizens can find a party that is close to their own position and identify others as being further away. These opposite effects are possible because party-system polarization leads only some individuals to perceive differences between parties but leads others to avoid the emotionalized political arena. Moreover, individuals' ability to recognize differences between parties is not necessarily a consequence of party-system polarization. The contradictory findings in previous research are due to a conceptual and empirical blurring of these two essentially different aspects.

Poland and the Middle East Crisis 2023–2024: Reaction of Polish Political Forces

This research presents an analysis of the reaction of Polish political forces to the acute conflict between Hamas and Israel, which began on October 7, 2023. The paper examines how this conflict has affected Polish domestic and foreign policy, especially in the context of the migration crisis and antisemitic sentiments in Europe. The authors analyse in detail the political, historical and social aspects that have shaped the positions of various Polish parties in response to Middle Eastern events. The study addresses how Polish political forces are responding to challenges related to international security and migration waves, which is particularly relevant in the light of events in the Gaza Strip. Particular attention is paid to the dynamics of the changing positions of Polish political parties, starting with sympathy for Israel and shifting to support for Palestine following the death of a Polish volunteer and a number of other developments, including the escalation between Israel and Iran. The authors draw conclusions about the complexity of Polish political responses to international conflicts, reflecting the diversity of internal and external pressures and ideologies.

Военные поставки Украине как поляризирующий фактор в президентской избирательной кампании США

The foreign policy agenda in the American presidential campaign, unlike how it was throughout almost the entire U.S. history, turned into a hot topic during the election campaign of 2023–2024. Military assistance to Ukraine became an important part of this pre-election period. The positions of Democratic and Republican parties continued to grow apart on this issue, this split on a foreign policy topic also being quite unpreceded until recently. Though during the current election campaign, almost all presidential candidates, with very rare exceptions, came out in favor of military assistance to Ukraine, yet the majority of the Republican contenders alleged that this conflict ought not be a primary focus, and called upon the administration to identify its strategic goals in Ukraine and limit the weapons deliveries to the realization of these goals. They saw China, not Russia, as the major challenge. Meanwhile, Joe Biden and other Democratic contenders increasingly voiced the argument that the weapons deliveries to Ukraine were important not only for this country, but for the United States itself and for the whole world, and if they did not come in time or in sufficient quantities, Russia would present a threat to its neighboring countries, and Europe could be facing a major war. After the Hamas’s attack on Israel, the resistance of the Republican fraction in Congress to voting in favor of allocating means for military assistance to Ukraine increased, while the White House found itself in a position where it had to distribute its foreign aid between the Ukrainian conflict and the Middle East crisis. Although during the two years of the election campaign, Donald Trump’s popularity grew, and his control over the Republican party expanded, there were some Republicans, and presidential candidates in particular, who criticized Biden not for excessive, but for insufficient support to Ukraine. Yet the political forecasts for a possible second term for Trump were commonly associated with a decrease in U.S. weapons supplies to Ukraine.

ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИЕ РЕФОРМЫ В УЗБЕКИСТАНЕ: ИТОГИ И ПОСЛЕДСТВИЯ

The article deals with the first results of socio-political and socio-economic reforms initiated by the new President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Sh. Mirziyoyev, who succeeded I. Karimov in 2016. Over the past 7 years Uzbekistan has held 3 presidential (2016, 2021 and 2023), and 1 parliamentary elections (2019–2020), as well as the Constitutional Referendum (2023). The article presents an analysis of the results of all those most important events for the country and shows what impact they have had on Uzbek society. It studies the positions of the main political parties that participated in the parliamentary elections and their candidates represented in the presidential election. The author emphasizes the role of the incumbent President Sh. Mirziyoyev, who announced the beginning of significant reforms in all major spheres of the country’s life. He also gives the main directions and content of these reforms. Profiles of 5 leading political parties of Uzbekistan, which are represented in the lower house of parliament, are analyzed.. The results of the parliamentary elections of 2014–2015 and 2019–2029 are compared. There is a study in the course of the presidential election campaigns of 2021 and 2023, as well as the electoral programs of the candidates who participated in them. The forecast for further development of the political system of the Republic of Uzbekistan in the conditions of continuation of the course on its modernization declared by Sh. Mirziyoyev is made.

Analyzing political party positions through multi-language twitter text embeddings.

Traditional monolingual word embedding models transform words into high-dimensional vectors which represent semantics relations between words as relationships between vectors in the high-dimensional space. They serve as productive tools to interpret multifarious aspects of the social world in social science research. Building on the previous research which interprets multifaceted meanings of words by projecting them onto word-level dimensions defined by differences between antonyms, we extend the architecture of establishing word-level cultural dimensions to the sentence level and adopt a Language-agnostic BERT model (LaBSE) to detect position similarities in a multi-language environment. We assess the efficacy of our sentence-level methodology using Twitter data from US politicians, comparing it to the traditional word-level embedding model. We also adopt Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to investigate detailed topics in these tweets and interpret politicians' positions from different angles. In addition, we adopt Twitter data from Spanish politicians and visualize their positions in a multi-language space to analyze position similarities across countries. The results show that our sentence-level methodology outperform traditional word-level model. We also demonstrate that our methodology is effective dealing with fine-sorted themes from the result that political positions towards different topics vary even within the same politicians. Through verification using American and Spanish political datasets, we find that the positioning of American and Spanish politicians on our defined liberal-conservative axis aligns with social common sense, political news, and previous research. Our architecture improves the standard word-level methodology and can be considered as a useful architecture for sentence-level applications in the future.

Cadet Ladies

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of women in the Constitutional Democratic Party from its very foundation up to the preparation of the organization for the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917. The author seeks to reconstruct a socio-cultural portrait of “cadet ladies”, to find out the factors that could have influenced their entry into the party and to characterize their activities in the organization. Special attention is paid to the position in the party hierarchy that women could occupy, as well as to the opportunities for advancement in it. Cadet ladies were mainly responsible for maintaining the organizationʹs welfare, housekeeping, logistics, events and charitable institutions, but at the same time were actively involved in key decision-making, although they did not have the same political rights as men. Moreover, women gained the right to vote after the February Revolution, the number of Cadet ladies in key party positions increased dramatically, which confirms their importance to constitutional democrats. Characteristic features of the socio-cultural portrait of the women of the Peopleʹs Freedom Party are also highlighted. Cadet ladies grew up in post-reform Russia, when social and economic changes in the country and society had a huge impact on the process of womenʹs emancipation. The opportunity to receive a quality education, acquire a profession and work, to choose a spouse out of mutual respect and similarity of views — all these served as factors for acquiring the subjectivity that later allowed the cadet ladies to become the political phenomenon discussed in this article.

Combining voter preferences with party position estimates from different sources for studying voting behavior and representation

Researchers interested in policy voting and substantive representation face the challenge to combine party positions with voter preference data on a common scale. One solution is to rely on voters’ perceptions of parties’ policy positions, as reported in surveys. However, this kind of data is often only available for the common left–right dimension, but not for more concrete policy scales, and it suffers from bias. We first discuss how to free perceptual data from bias by relying on a Bayesian version of the Aldrich–McKelvey rescaling technique. Then we discuss two prominent alternative sources of party position estimates: expert survey positions, and positions based on the CMP coding scheme of the manifesto project. While both types of party position estimates are considered to be of good quality, it is unclear how they fit into voter preference scales. This paper presents a simple rescaling technique that improves the matching.

‘Party position, electoral incentives, and attention to European Union issues in the 2019 European Parliament election’

Under what conditions do Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) give attention to EU issues in European Parliament (EP) election campaigns? This study examines how party positioning on European integration and individual electoral incentives affected MEPs’ attention to EU issues in the 2019 EP election campaign. Based on data collected from Twitter, the findings show that pro-EU parties and individual vote-seeking incentives increased attention to EU issues. More specifically, they show that MEPs from pro-EU mainstream parties had incentives to debate about EU issues, especially when they competed for votes. The findings help to unfold the interplay between party-level and legislator-level factors and its effects on attention to EU issues and aim to contribute to research on EU issue salience and EP election campaigns.

Existence of Estoppel Doctrines in Common Law Contracts: Challenges and Opportunities for Civil Law-Based Lawyers

A basic concept of contract is an object of law that is often defined as an agreement made by parties to perform duties and obligations and receive rights in return. The legal positions of parties involved in a contract are governed by contract law that is complex. It covers principles, doctrines, rights, obligations, and access to remedy regarding any breach of the contract. The complexities of the contract law are further inevitably impacted by the system of the law within a country. The principles, regulations, and legal concepts in civil law countries generally rely heavily on written forms. In contrast, common law countries based the law on precedent cases or the developments of court decisions. This fundamental difference potentially causes either challenges or opportunities for the lawyers practising outside their jurisdiction, as the application of the concepts and doctrines used are different. This paper will discuss a distinguished difference in a doctrine of contract law adopted by the common law system like Australia, which is called Estoppel, that might remain less applied in civil law countries like Indonesia.

The Israeli parties' positions in comparative perspective

The multidimensionality of the Israeli political system is expected given Israel’s electoral system and cleavage structure. We introduce a new dataset and measurement of party positions in Israel and provide evidence that Israel’s party system is comparable to other multiparty systems in Europe (CHES-EU) and Latin America (CHES-LA). We argue and provide evidence that the most important dimension in the Israeli party system, similar to other multiparty systems, is the general Left-Right continuum, which combines both economic and cultural policy issues. Yet, unlike other established democracies, parties’ positions on the Left-Right continuum are closely related to their positions on policies related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. We also discuss Israeli-specific issues which structure the Israeli party competition. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it allows scholars of party competition to include Israel as a comparative case in their research. Second, it is the first study that provides valid and reliable measurement of Israeli parties’ positions across multiple issues.

Research on the Two-way Interaction Between Voters and Political Parties in Elections

In democratic politics in the Western world, the process of elections are full with direct interactions with voters. Hence, voters choice affects whether a political party can become the ruling party. Voters prefer to choose parties that are in line with their own interests, and political parties need voters support to win the election. This paper studies the two-way interaction between voters and political parties in elections. The needs of target voters will affect the political views and positions of political parties. Therefore, in order to gain support, the party will promise to carry out some policies that would benefit the target voters. While the voters affect political parties positions, the parties also affect the voters choices, and Brexit is an example worth studying. Through media and advertisements, parties promote their core values and achievements, shape the image of candidates, and belittle the opponents. In this way, the parties can affect the votes preferable party and thus win the election.

Feminism as a polarizing axis of the political conversation on Twitter: the case of #IreneMonteroDimision

The fragmentation of the Spanish party system has led to a growing political polarization, particularly evident on the Internet. The discursive strategies of political actors online, combined with the particularities of communication on social media platforms such as the disinhibition effect, echo chambers, and filter bubbles, are likely to promote a state of tension among digital citizens. This tension is particularly pronounced in gender issues, which have become key positions of political parties, with convergence of sexism in the community and a highly reactive misogynistic online culture that turns female politicians into easy targets. Starting from the hashtag #IreneMonteroDimision, which conveys a paradigmatic criticism movement against the Spanish Minister of Equality, an analysis of the social conversation on Twitter is developed to determine its intentionality, tone, and orientation, as well as the themes and users that generated the most tension. In this way, multimodal content and discourse analysis is applied to the 418 tweets with the greatest interaction and explicitly directed at the minister. The hypothesis is that the criticism of Irene Montero goes beyond the management of her Ministry to place her at the center of a power struggle in which political ideology, hate speech, and antifeminism converge. The study has shown that attacks on Montero extend to the Executive and the feminist movement; they are promoted by a mass of politicized and polarized profiles, with constant activism and a tendency towards contagious replication of messages. These practices, as well as the participation of artificial profiles, allow us to appreciate signs of astroturfing; behind this seemingly natural critical reaction, there are orchestrated movements of antifeminist and far-right profiles (gender trolling), but also of trans-exclusionary feminists opposed to legislation promoted by Montero.