Western European Party Research Articles

Support for radical left parties in Western Europe: social background, ideology and political orientations

Radical left parties (RLP) have been significant actors in many Western European party systems since the expansion of mass democracy. In some cases, they have been very relevant forces in terms of popular support. Despite this fact, they have not received a great deal of attention in past decades from a comparative perspective. Through examination of the role of an important set of factors, this article provides, for the first time, a cross-national empirical account of the variation in voting for RLPs across Western Europe, based on individual-level data. It evaluates the effect of key socio-demographic and attitudinal individual-level variables on the RLP vote. The findings point to the continuing relevance of some social and political factors traditionally associated with votes for RLPs, and to the relevance of attitudinal variables.

Środowisko – tak, Zieloni – nie. Problematyka ochrony środowiska naturalnego w badaniach empirycznych

This article presents the perception of environmental issue by Polish society - attaching importance to these issues and the assessment of political activities in solving environmental problems. The first part of the article describes environmentalism and the green parties which gained relevant position in Western European party system in the 70s of the twentieth century. Then the activities of the Greens in Poland and other Central European countries are described that took place after the collapse of the communist system in 1989. The article also illustrates the results of research on social perception of the environmental issues. The vast majority of Poles consider these issues important and claim that politicians should increase their activities in this area. Nevertheless, this doesn't affect the position of the Greens in the Polish party system. This is due to the history after World War II when Central Europe was in the Soviet sphere of influence and the weakness of the green parties that have never been able to present their offer efficiently to public opinion.

Institutions and the stabilization of party systems in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe

Most explanations of party system stability focus on the strength of mass-elite linkages. We highlight the role of institutions, focusing on how electoral rules and elected institutions, especially the presidency, impact elites' incentives to coordinate on a stable set of parties or to form new parties, thus affecting electoral volatility. Using Central and Eastern European elections data, we find that directly elected presidents increase volatility and that presidential power magnifies this effect. Absent a directly elected president, high district magnitude is associated with increased volatility, but district magnitude dampens the impact of an elected president on volatility; hence, our findings underscore the interactive impact of institutions on party systems. We also find evidence that bicameralism and concurrence of presidential and parliamentary elections decrease electoral volatility. Our model not only explains persistently high electoral volatility in Eastern Europe, but the extreme stability of Western European party systems.

Where do radical right parties stand? Position blurring in multidimensional competition

This article questions the utility of assessing radical right party placement on economic issues, which has been extensively analyzed in academic literature. Starting from the premise that political parties have varying strategic stakes in different political issues, the article considers political competition in multiple issue dimensions. It suggests that political competition is not simply a matter of taking positions on political issues, but rather centers on manipulating the dimensional structure of politics. The core argument is that certain political parties, such as those of the radical right, seek to compete on neglected, secondary issues while simultaneously blurring their positions on established issues in order to attract broader support. Deliberate position blurring – considered costly by the literature – may thus be an effective strategy in multidimensional competition. The article combines quantitative analyses of electoral manifestos, expert placement of political parties, and voter preferences, by studying seventeen radical right parties in nine Western European party systems.

Design challenges in cross-national VAAs: the case of the EU Profiler

This paper analyses the design of the EU Profiler, the first truly cross–national VAA. We assess the convergent validity and scaling reliability of the low–dimensional models that are used to represent differences between parties and users. Convergent validity of the party positions in the EU Profiler is moderate to high, but scaling reliability is low for most of the issue dimensions included. We examine whether these problems are related to the EU Profiler's cross–national nature. The EU Profiler integrates the positions of parties from all over Europe into one pan–European model, even though students of European politics emphasise that there are structural differences between party competition in Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe. We find that the EU Profiler performs better in terms of scaling reliability in Western European party systems than in Central and Eastern European party systems. In addition, there are substantive differences between individual countries.

Maastricht and the Death of Social Democracy: The Creation of a Consumer Culture

The global financial crisis of 2009–2010 has further underscored the demise of social democracy as a legitimate political alternative, for example, due to an absence of a clearly articulated alternative approach to the crisis offered by Social Democratic parties, even though neoliberal deregulated markets have proven to be vulnerable to the corrupt and opaque practices that created a massive crisis of systemic confidence. The author contends that the Maastricht process has transformed the Western European party system away from parties based on ideology and toward catchall issue-oriented parties. For Socialist and Social Democratic parties, this has meant the end of the centrality of the welfare state in their ideological domain. However, other trends have been equally damaging. Unionization, which has been in decline since the 1980s, primarily because of the changing nature of the labor force in postindustrial societies, has been further affected by the Maastricht criteria, which sought to enhance the competitiveness through increasing productivity, reducing wage costs, and significantly restructuring the labor relations that organized labor had achieved. For Social Democratic parties, the changing demographic of its support base, the ideological collapse of the Soviet Union, the adoption of the Maastricht convergence agenda, and the rise of a debt-infused consumer culture has meant death.

Religion, class coalitions, and welfare states

1. Religion and the Western welfare state: the theoretical context Philip Manow and Kees van Kersbergen 2. Western European party systems and the religious cleavage Thomas Ertman 3. The religious foundations of work-family policies in Western Europe Kimberly J. Morgan 4. Italy: a Christian democratic or clientist welfare state? Julia Lynch 5. Religion and the welfare state in the Netherlands Kees van Kersbergen 6. A conservative welfare state regime without Christian Democracy? The French Etat-providence, 1880-1960 Philip Manow and Bruno Palier 7. Religion and the consolidation of the Swiss welfare state, 1848-1945 Herbert Obinger 8. The church as nation? The role of religion in the development of the Swedish welfare state Karen M. Anderson 9. The religious factor in US welfare state politics Jill Quadagno and Deanna Rohlinger 10. Religious social doctrines and poor relief: a different causal pathway Sigrun Kahl.

Party Organization and Electoral Competition

We propose a model in which two parties select the internal organization that helps them win the election. Party choices provide incentives to the politicians who represent them. Depending on whether politicians are opportunistic or partisan, we identify four effects. First, a selection effect: intraparty competition gives parties more candidates to choose from. Second, an incentive effect: intraparty competition adds a hurdle and impacts on candidates' incentives. Third, a trust effect: because of the incentive effect, intraparty competition is a signal to uninformed voters. Finally, with partisan preferences, an ideology effect appears. Ideology is a public good in a competitive party and induces free riding. Intraparty competition is valuable when voters are badly informed or intraparty competition is weak. These results rationalize the introduction of direct primaries in the United States, the organizational changes in Western European parties since 1960, and the organizational differences between centrist and extreme parties.

Who Do European Parties Represent? How Western European Parties Represent the Policy Preferences of Opinion Leaders

Several recent studies explore how American politicians represent the policy views of subconstituencies within the electorate. We extend this perspective to 12 West European democracies over the period 1973–2002 to examine how mainstream parties responded to electoral subconstituencies. We find that parties were highly responsive to the views of opinion leaders, i.e., citizens who regularly engaged in political discussions and persuasion; by contrast we find no evidence that other types of voters substantively influenced parties’ policy programmes. We also identify significant time lags in mainstream parties’ responses to opinion leaders’ policy beliefs. Our findings have interesting implications for subconstituency representation, for understanding parties’ internal policymaking processes, and for spatial modeling.

Party Goals, Institutional Veto Points and the Discourse on Political Corruption: The Evolution of the German Party Funding Regime

This article aims to integrate existing theories on parties and political systems with the literature on party funding. On an empirical level, it asks why the German system of party funding developed in the way that it did. Germany combines a system of high transparency levels for political parties with generous state funding. Taking actor‐centred institutionalism as a starting point, three variables are identified which explain the evolution of party funding regimes: the number of veto points available to opposition parties, parties’ dominant goals during decisions on reforms of funding regulation, and the public discourse on political corruption. Reforms of party funding regimes are assumed to become more probable (1) the more institutional veto points even opposition parties have at their disposal, (2) the lesser the influence of vote‐seeking strategies among parties, and (3) the more intense the societal discourse on political corruption. These hypotheses find support from the German case and may therefore be able to explain the convergence of western European party funding regimes around state subventions and transparency obligations.

The Cartel Party and the Rise of the New Extreme Right

In the cartel party literature, there are three different arguments as to why the behavior of Western European parties resembles the behavior of oligopolistic firms. Each version of the cartel party hypothesis hypothesized that the rise of the parties of the new extreme right can be seen as a reaction against the emergence of cartel parties and cartel party systems. The purpose of this paper is to refine this causal argument in the light of the three versions of the cartel party hypothesis identified in the literature. Statistical analyses are performed to compare and contrast the explanatory power of the three versions of the cartel party hypothesis. The analysis of the German and the Dutch data shows that the subjective version of the cartel party hypothesis has a greater explanatory power than the systemic and the systemic–subjective versions.

Ethnic Identity and Party Competition. An Analysis of the Electoral Performance of Ethnoregionalist Parties in Western Europe

The study of ethnoregionalist parties, therefore, allows us to explore an aspect of the Western European party systems that is of primary importance but to which so far the academic literature has not paid due attention. Specifically, as it will be illustrated more thoroughly over the next few pages, the image that these parties are bound exclusively to their function as representatives of a peripheral ethnic minority is utterly inadequate, whichever way one defines it. A closer look at their recent evolution and programmes will show instead that ethnoregionalist parties are much more dynamic and ready, on many occasions, to review their collocation in the political space as well as objectives, short and long-term strategies. This results in frequent raids on political territories normally under the control of major parties and in the taking away of a portion of disaffected or disappointed voters, with varying degrees of success. In other words, we will show that ethnoregionalist parties act (at least in specific cases, at specific moments) as protest or challenging parties as they provide an alternative to the traditional established ones.

Are Niche Parties Fundamentally Different from Mainstream Parties? The Causes and the Electoral Consequences of Western European Parties' Policy Shifts, 1976–1998

Do “niche” parties—such as Communist, Green, and extreme nationalist parties—adjust their policies in response to shifts in public opinion? Would such policy responsiveness enhance these parties' electoral support? We report the results of statistical analyses of the relationship between parties' policy positions, voters' policy preferences, and election outcomes in eight Western European democracies from 1976 to 1998 that suggest that the answer to both questions isno. Specifically, we find no evidence that niche parties responded to shifts in public opinion, while mainstream parties displayed consistent tendencies to respond to public opinion shifts. Furthermore, we find that in situations where niche parties moderated their policy positions they were systematically punished at the polls (a result consistent with the hypothesis that such parties represent extreme or noncentrist ideological clienteles), while mainstream parties did not pay similar electoral penalties. Our findings have important implications for political representation, for spatial models of elections, and for political parties' election strategies.

Russian parties and the political internet

Russian parties and the political internet

‘Small Steps’ or ‘Great Leaps’: How the Swedish Greens Are Learning the Lessons of Government Participation

As Green parties have solidified their positions within the Western European party systems, they have increasingly faced opportunities and pressures to participate in government at varying levels. This has raised significant questions regarding both how the Greens should progress strategically in relation to other longstanding political parties and also whether participation in government represents a process of ‘institutionalisation’ and a loss of the Greens’‘new politics’ credentials. This paper examines the strategic changes and developments within the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet de Gröna) as it has come to terms with opportunities to participate in government. It argues that the decisions within the party have reflected not only internal ideological debates, but also external pressures and opportunities. It also demonstrates that the experiences of the party at local and municipal levels have played a major role in encouraging the national party to consider negotiating with other parties. The paper attempts to draw lessons from the experiences of the Swedish Greens which may prove useful in trying to comprehend the future challenges and pressures facing the continued development of Europe’s Green parties.

Democratizing a Democratic Procedure: Myth or Reality?

The aim of the article is to analyse whether democratization of the candidate selection process has occurred in Western European parties in general and in Denmark in particular in the period from 1960 to 1990. The analysis is based on the party rules in force around 1960 and 1990 of 57 and 71 Western European parties, respectively. The general assumption is that the greater the role of the individual party member, the more democratically the parties conduct their internal affairs and, furthermore, the more decentralized the procedure, the greater the possibilities for individual party members to play a role. The analysis indicates that the candidate selection process was more decentralized and the role of the individual party member in the process were greater at the beginning of the 1990s than they were around 1960.

Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party: Xenophobic Populism Compared

Abstract Recent political experience in France, Austria, Italy, USA and New Zealand plus the theories of contemporary right-wing radical or populist parties of Herbert Kitschelt and Hans-Georg Betz, offer valuable insight into the rise of Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party. As in other ‘globalising’ and reform-imposing liberal democracies, the causes of Hansonism as generic protest populism are multiple, hard-to-avoid, and predictable. Yet general explanations need to be supplemented by recognizing specific features of her movement, which are highly contingent on particular contexts and personal characteristics. Hanson's own brand of xenophobic populism, however, also exhibits certain unique features when compared with other similar Western European parties. Such feature include—the gender of the party leader, the relative absence of conventional ‘racism’, and the emphasis on democratic values and advocacy for a form of protectionist welfare state. Ironically, while these specificities give Hansonism, for the moment, a more ‘humane’ and moderate tone they also may limit not only its anti-democratic, intolerant, and destablising potential, but also its long-term growth and influence. If Kitschelt is correct, new radical right or populist parties which fail to take full advantage of emerging global trends favoring small government, free markets and authoritarian values, will compromise their long-run chances of success. That prediction may already be at work in determining Hanson's fate.

Building party organisations and the relevance of past models: The communist and socialist parties in Spain and Portugal

This article explores the development of the party organisations of the communist and socialist parties in contemporary Spain and Portugal. An attempt is made to answer the question of whether these parties resemble the western European mass party model of organisation, which is characterised by the representation and integration of a particular segment of society within the organisational structure. From the contrasting western and southern European paths towards democracy, a hypothesis is generated contending that the limited opportunities and the lack of necessity diminish the likelihood for southern European working‐class parties to build mass organisations. The empirical findings, analysing the nature and size of individual membership, as well as the nature of the linkages between parties and trade unions, reveal that, with the possible exception of the Portuguese communists, the classic mass party is not reproduced in southern Europe. At the same time, however, the model of the party as a membership organisation apparently has not lost its legitimacy.

A Touchstone of Dissent: Euroscepticism in Contemporary Western European Party Systems

Abstract. With the recent acceleration of the integration process of the European Union there has been a rise in political parties expressing either scepticism or outright criticism of the nature of the integration process. Using a four–fold differentiation between single issue, protest, established parties and factions within parties, the first part of the article presents an overview of Euroscepticism within EU member states and Norway. This reveals the diversity of sources of Euroscepticism both in ideology and in the types of parties that are Eurosceptical but with a preponderance of protest parties taking Eurosceptical positions. The second part of the article is an attempt to map Euroscepticism in West European party systems through a consideration of ideology and party position in the party system. The conclusions are that Euroscepticism is mainly limited to parties on the periphery of their party system and is often there used as an issue that differentiates those parties from the more established parties which are only likely to express Euroscepticism through factions. Party based Euroscepticism is therefore both largely dependent on domestic contextual factors and a useful issue to map emergent domestic political constellations.

Understanding Developing European Party Systems: A Case Study of Czechoslovakia

This study focuses on an underdeveloped area in the analysis of post-Communist East-Central Europe: democratizing party systems. The transformation of party systems in this part of the world from one party-dominated to multiparty, democratic systems now impels political scientists to reorient their theoretical and conceptual approaches to reflect the winds of change. Because the Czechoslovak party system of 1990-1992 was a multiparty, segmented one with a number of destabilizing elements, Sartorrs "polarized pluralism" typology (1976) can be applied to analyze the nature of that party system and what the future may hold for the new Czech and Slovak systems. As the groundwork is laid in the analyses of Central and Eastern European party systems, further investigation using Western European party systems literature may help us focus and conceptualize the competing forces that shape the democratization process in these party systems.