Programmatic Profile Research Articles

The Rassemblement National and COVID-19: How Nativism, Authoritarianism and Expert Populism Did Not Pay Off during the Pandemic

AbstractThe article examines the response of the French National Rally (Rassemblement National – RN) to COVID-19. It combines computer-based and qualitative content analysis of Facebook posts and press releases to uncover the salience and frames of the infection. I find that the RN used an ambivalent strategy to respond to the pandemic, linking an unexpected problem to its core ideological tenets, while also adapting its programmatic profile. Specifically, the RN interpreted COVID-19 in terms of immigration and defence. Diagnostic frames drew on nativist, authoritarian and populist tenets to identify the origin of the infection (migrants), and to attribute blame for its spread (lack of border controls). Moreover, prognostic frames used disagreement within the scientific community to criticize governments' policies and propose alternatives. While this strategy allowed the RN to address an issue outside its ‘comfort zone’, its support base remained stable. These results point at the radical right's strategic use of expert knowledge and populist logics to try to improve its credibility in mainstream public debates.

With respect for the core business: the impact of party ideology on the odds of government participation among regionalist parties

An increasing number of regionalist parties have participated in regional or national executive office. This article examines the specific conditions under which this party type increases its odds of successful cabinet entry – with a focus on ideological party change. Their programmatic profile is mapped before and after government entry by applying quantitative content analysis on coded electoral manifestos. The binary logistic regression analyses provide empirical evidence that regionalist parties that compromise on their territorial core business are more likely to enter (regional) government. Regionalist parties are also more likely to cross the threshold of (regional) governance when they operate in more decentralized countries and when they are a larger electoral factor in the regional political arena. Other relevant control variables, such as economic growth, national electoral score and party age, do not generate a significant effect on the odds of government participation.

Cultural retaliation: the cultural policies of the ‘new’ Front National

This study examines the conception of culture and the cultural policies of the French Front National. Tracing the developments of the party’s cultural agenda before and after Marine Le Pen took over the leadership of the party from her father, I show how the Front National has adapted its discourse on cultural policy to its wider programmatic profile. In the context of a strategy of de-radicalisation promoted by Marine Le Pen, recent years have witnessed focussed efforts by the party leadership to professionalise and modernise the party’s cultural policy programme. However, the analysis of the party’s current cultural policy agenda reveals a remarkable continuity in the way the party leadership conceives of national culture and of what cultural policy should promote. This programmatic continuity becomes apparent in the analysis of the local cultural policies of municipalities won by the Front National in 2014. Exploring the cultural agendas of ten local governments with a Front National majority, I argue that the cultural policies of the Front National remain deeply rooted in a nativist understanding of culture and a dirigiste approach that wilfully excludes postcolonial minorities.

An ‘Angela Merkel Effect’? The Impact of Gender on CDU/CSU Voting Intention between 1998 and 2013

By referring to the theoretical and empirical literature on ‘same gender voting’ and the ‘modern gender gap’, this contribution aims to analyse whether gender played a role in party choice in Bundestag elections. We concentrate on the time period between 1998 and 2013, enabling us to cover three elections while Angela Merkel was the chancellor candidate of CDU and CSU (2005, 2009 and 2013), while she was CDU party chair (2002) and while no women served as chancellor candidate or party chair of CDU and CSU. The results of a dataset compiled from five German national election studies show that women were not more likely to opt for the CDU/CSU since the nomination of Angela Merkel as chancellor candidate, nor were they less likely to vote for the Christian Democrats due to their rather conservative programmatic profile on the order of society.

How programmatic profiles of niche parties affect their electoral performance

Previous studies on the electoral performance of niche parties have not fully taken into account the evolutionary aspect of the programmatic profiles of these parties, although the majority of these parties were analysed from when they first came into existence, as new parties. Acknowledging the variation in programmatic profiles between niche parties and over time, the article argues that the electoral effects of nicheness and programmatic concentration as programmatic features of niche parties vary over their lifecycle. When entering the electoral arena, niche parties benefit from high levels of nicheness and programmatic concentration. However, these positive effects decrease as parties grow older and face different challenges to those of their early days. The empirical analysis of green and extreme right parties in this article supports the corresponding hypotheses. Results show that the positive effects of nicheness and programmatic concentration vanish over time and indicate niche parties’ own influence on their electoral destiny.

The Life and Death of New Political Parties in the Low Countries

Numerous new parties have emerged since voters became less loyal to established political parties. A number of these survived and have been analysed intensely, especially green and radical right parties; many other new parties disappeared and have been neglected by party research. This article analyses the fate of all 30 political parties that entered parliament in the Netherlands or Belgium between 1950 and 2003. Qualitative comparative analysis is used to identify characteristics of both surviving and disappeared new parties. Conditions related to party origin (roots in civil society, organisational newness, initial programmatic profile) are scrutinised, as are conditions pertaining to the party’s developmental process (party organisational strength and the occurrence of defections or party splits). Surviving parties are characterised by strong, rooted organisations that have not suffered defections. Most disappeared parties lacked a strong organisation and roots and have experienced shocks that they could not absorb. Organisational newness makes new parties vulnerable.

Societal Transformation and Programmatic Change in the CDU

This article places the changing policy profile of the CDU into the context of the gradual transformation of German society since the 1970s and especially since unification in 1990. It argues that in order to understand key areas where the CDU has reformed its programme, we must first understand the broader, meta-level trends in society. In its main section, the article sketches out the long-term changes that have occurred in three principal areas (demographics, labour market outcomes and the economic status and the role of women), and relates these to debates that have taken place in the CDU's programmatic profile. The article therefore concludes that consideration of the societal context complements agency-based explanations for programmatic change.

Origins of party formation and new party success in advanced democracies

AbstractWhich new parties entered national parliaments in advanced democracies over the last four decades and how did they perform after their national breakthrough? This article argues that distinguishing two types of party formation (that facilitate or complicate party institutionalisation) helps to explain why some entries flourish, while others vanish quickly from the national stage. New parties formed by individual entrepreneurs that cannot rely on ties to already organised groups are less likely to get reelected to parliament after breakthrough than rooted newcomers. This hypothesis is tested on a newly compiled dataset of new parties that entered parliaments in 17 advanced democracies from 1968 onwards. Applying multilevel analyses, the factors that shape newcomers' capacity to reenter parliament after breakthrough are assessed. Five factors have significant effects, yet affect party performance only in particular phases: both a party's electoral support at breakthrough and its operation in a system with a strong regional tier increase the likelihood of initial reelection. In contrast, a distinct programmatic profile, the permissiveness of the electoral system and easy access to free broadcasting increase a party's chance of repeated reelection. Only formation type significantly affects both phases and does so most strongly, substantiating the theoretical approach used in this article.

The social and intellectual dimensions in the construction of scientific knowledge: the institutional theory in organization studies in Brazil

Based on the assumption that scientific knowledge is a social construction, (re)produced by a community of practicing researchers, in this article we seek to delineate two dimensions of this process. The first, which we have called the social dimension, has to do with the social interactions among researchers in a determined scientific field, being evaluated as a co-authorship network. The second, the intellectual dimension, defined as the programmatic profile expressed by its substantive content and provided references, is constituted in relational citation structures. With this analytical division in mind, we set out to research how the intellectual structure is conditioned by the social relationships among researchers, with a focus on the institutional analysis perspective in organizational studies in Brazil. For this purpose, we empirically evaluated the phenomenon from the convergence of the social network analysis with the scientometric analysis, seeking support for these analyses within the structurationist perspective of the institutional theory. The results point toward a conditioning of the intellectual dimension by the social dimension since there is significant evidence from individual relationships and relationships at the group level that support the argument for a recursive relationship between the two dimensions.

“Help Them Move the ILO Way”: The International Labor Organization and the Modernization Discourse in the Era of Decolonization and the Cold War

In 1953 Jef Rens, assistant director-general of the International Labor Organization (ILO), the UN specialized agency for social and labor affairs, returned to Geneva from an official mission to Egypt. Rens was both fascinated and shocked by the profound changes taking place in the country as a result of the government's efforts to manage what he described as the transition from a traditional rural into a modern industrialized society. In terms of the broader social consequences this transition would inevitably bring about, the future seemed still an open book. This was in Rens's view exactly the point where the ILO came in. “This part of the world and similar areas are moving—that's certain,” he noted enthusiastically in his report, “so let's not miss the chance to help them move the ILO way!”1 Rens's reference to a specific “ILO way” of modernization points very clearly to the major transformation international organizations like the ILO underwent both in terms of self-conception and programmatic profile in the post-World War II era, when they began to address the problems of countries which were soon to be summarized under the heading “third world”. In this context, international organizations served as key transmitters of, as well as major arenas for, debate on ideas and concepts of modernization on a global scale. The UN system in particular played a key role in establishing a development discourse in the period after the World War II. Right from when it was set up in 1945, it was one of the central forums—if not the central forum—in which development issues were discussed and global benchmarks established. Furthermore, in the years following 1945, international organizations served as a pool and transmitter of expert knowledge on development policy, and thus made a significant contribution to ensuring that development thinking continued to evolve and approaches to development policy were realigned as the need arose. Perhaps no other field, then, illustrates the enormous increase in the importance of international organizations in the twentieth century better than that of development policy.2 While this fact is increasingly recognized in historical research, the important role the ILO played in the propagation of the development idea has, unlike in the case of the United Nations or the Bretton Woods institutions, been largely ignored to date.3 One reason for this exclusion is that the ILO, which was founded in 1919 as part of the Paris Peace Treaties, has largely been identified with its activities defining labor standards. Its high reputation as a body which since the end of World War I, has defined and promoted a myriad of so-called international labor standards dealing with a broad range of topics4 may have obscured the fact that, after 1945, the ILO quickly changed from a standard-setting to an operational institution providing technical assistance in economically and socially “underdeveloped areas” of the world—activities that have ever since formed the second pillar on which the organization's work rests.5

Reinventing Green Politics: On the Strategic Repositioning of the German Green Party

Whilst environmental issues, most notably climate change, have recently been more prominent in public debate than at any earlier time, Green parties are confronted with a fundamental challenge: The agenda of ‘new politics’ that had once been their original project has meanwhile become largely exhausted, and the profound transformation of societal structures, value preferences and party political competition necessitates a comprehensive reinvention of Green politics. Focusing on the German Greens, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, this article spells out the thesis of the exhaustion of the Green project and investigates how since the end of the Red–Green coalition under Chancellor Schröder the party has tried to forge a new, electorally attractive, programmatic profile. Detailed analysis of its evolving environmental and social policy position and of its relationship to the specific concerns and priorities energising late-modern consumer societies suggests that whilst in principle Germany's new five-party system offers favourable opportunity structures for Bündnis 90/Die Grünen to regain executive power, there is as yet little evidence of a successful reinvention of Green politics.