This symposium probes contemporary classifications of the “far-right”, “populist radical right” and “radical right” variety. It also considers whether there is a need to look beyond socio-economic factors to explain the upward trajectory such parties experienced in recent years. The symposium thus connects to ongoing debates regarding the nature of this party family (or families) and to previous accounts of their successes across Western Europe.

Despite widespread interest in corruption and how to root it out, the problem continues to grow. Anti-corruption strategies and methods have proved ineffective in achieving lasting reductions in corruption. Anti-corruption academic research has not been free of criticism, and part of the problem is its emphasis on macro-level analysis. The case studies in corruption and anti-corruption in this symposium focus on specific areas that have received surprisingly little attention in the literature: the effectiveness of political finance supervisory bodies; the impact of European Union post-conditionality on anti-corruption efforts; and the increased use of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in shaping the way that corruption is conceptualised and combated on a global scale. Together, the articles in this symposium offer some novel insights and approaches to the issue of how best to understand and assess different ways of addressing corruption in specific sectors which have received insufficient attention in the literature to date.

This article provides the contextual background to the symposium on Populist Discourses and Political Communication in Southern Europe. It explains the symposium’s objectives and introduces the rationale of its articles on Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Within this context, the editors also highlight the specific conditions for the emergence of typical forms of Southern European populism, as well as its distinctive features, focusing on the challenges populism poses to politics and media research. The implications of the phenomenon for the future of the European project are also addressed.

The question of democracy—for or against? Is less a dichotomous choice than a matter of sliding scales. All agree that the people ought to have some involvement and virtually nobody believes that all must govern all the time. This Introduction presents a tour d’horizon of the historical debate and presents a brief summary of the different arguments in this Symposium.

Social media have changed the way politicians communicate with and relate to their constituencies during election campaigns and routine periods alike. Many scholars have postulated that populists would benefit most from the new digital media. Despite their growing importance, few studies have addressed the features of online populist communication and how to assess its success. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap by providing a framework for the analysis of populist communication on social media. Taking the case of Italy’s Lega Nord (Northern League (LN)) as an example, the article will clarify which aspects of online communication are most valued by LN supporters, in relation to both the key elements of populism (references to ‘the people’, ‘elites’ and ‘others’) and the expression of an emotional style in the messages. The article analyses the controlled communication that LN and its leader, Matteo Salvini, published on their Facebook profiles during a sample period of 30 days. Our findings demonstrate that populism, emotional style and, in general, the role of the leader as a source of communication positively affect the ‘likeability’ of a message.

Ballot box voting is the main mechanism of political choice in modern liberal democracies. It is also often thought of as the essence of political freedom. Traditional voting has significant virtues. But as a mechanism for exercising political freedom, ballot box voting has serious flaws. The average citizen has almost no chance of affecting the outcome of an electoral process. In part as a result, he or she also has strong incentives to make ill-informed and illogical decisions. “Voting with your feet” is a superior option on both fronts. It is thereby often a superior mechanism of political freedom.

One of the most innovative measures of the political financing regulatory reforms of the past 2 decades was the creation or designation of new political financing supervisory bodies, entrusted to monitor and enforce political financing regulations. These bodies have been growing in numbers in the last 2 decades, partly in response to public opinion pressure and partly to international commitments. Drawing on regulatory and organisational capacity theories, this article seeks to develop a new index to measure the enforcement capacity of these bodies.

In this article, we investigate the ideology of the populist radical right (PRR) and the extent to which its political message has changed over time. In doing so, we also judge the usefulness of the PRR-tag. Like seminal scholarship on these parties, we contend that both economic and social positions are relevant for contemporary radical right parties. Further, we argue that contemporary parties’ stances are indicative of a nationalist ideology. Using the Manifesto Project Dataset, we investigate radical right policy preferences between 1970 and 2015. Results indicate that right-wing economic stances are more prevalent prior to the twenty-first century and that radical right parties increasingly make economically leftist claims. Results also demonstrate that radical right parties are not always the farthest to right in national political spaces. Further, we show that contemporary parties make nationalist claims. Indeed, nationalism not only increasingly characterizes these parties but also increasingly distinguishes them from other major party families, whose average positions over time are globalist. We argue that contemporary radical right parties are better conceptualized and described as neo-nationalist, a label consistent with both their social and economic positions.

Its reliance on social media and television to mobilise supporters and popularise the figure of its charismatic leader, political science lecturer Pablo Iglesias, is one of the main characteristic features of Podemos, a new, left-leaning populist party that has shaken the political establishment of Spain since its irruption as a decisive political force in the 2014 European elections. Podemos could actually be defined as a ‘transmedia party’, as it combines the use of social media to reach young constituents with traditional TV talk show appearances to reach a wider, and also older, audience. This dualism (traditionalism and innovation) is also present in Podemos’ own configuration as a blend of a social movement and a vertically ruled political party, with a simultaneous presence outside and inside representative structures like parliaments and local governments. Far from hiding from recurrent accusations of populism, Podemos takes pride in being considered a populist movement. Actually, their leaders see their party-cum-movement as a practical implementation of the theories of the Argentinean philosopher Ernesto Laclau: their left-leaning populist formation is the necessary vanguard of a new democratic majority that will replace the current neoliberal hegemony. This unusual reflexivity is studied through a critical discourse analysis of published interviews with Podemos’ leaders.

The USA vigorously enforces its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), increasingly on an extraterritorial basis. The application of the FCPA to persons and circumstances outside the territory of the US shapes international anti-corruption efforts in ways that may run counter to effective governance practices and meaningful anti-corruption reform in the global economy. This short essay explores three aspects of FCPA enforcement which detract from the broader goals of global anti-corruption governance: the narrow conception of corruption upon which the FCPA is based, the strategic trade frame which underlies the FCPA’s internationalization, and the legitimacy problems these raise.

The appeal of far-right parties’ ideologies is one of the key drivers of such parties’ electoral wins in Europe. Most studies, however, have focused on the far right’s anti-immigrant or anti-minority discourse as the defining feature of this party family. In this article, we examine: (1) The conditions under which far-right parties benefit electorally from their Eurosceptic discourses, and (2) How center-right parties’ responses to the far right affect the latter’s electoral outcomes. The results of multilevel regression models show that when the distance between far-right and center-right parties’ positions toward European integration narrows, the vote share of far-right parties increases—but only up to a point. When the distance continues to narrow, without reaching zero, the far right’s vote share decreases. Our empirical analysis relies on the Chapel Hill Expert Survey series dataset and examines 75 cases of far-right parties in 22 European countries between 1999 and 2014. The findings suggest that center-right parties face a difficult strategic dilemma as they compete for votes with the far right: moving incrementally closer to the far right’s position can benefit the far right by intensifying competition over the issue of European integration. An almost full cooperation of the far right’s agenda, however, dampens the success of the far right. The center right must strike a balance that allows it to be responsive to Eurosceptic voters while retaining a centrist identity.

The Great Recession that hit the world in 2008 functioned as a critical juncture, nurturing socioeconomic but also political transformations. Some of the political developments during the crisis have challenged civil, political and social rights, triggering a Great Regression. In the geographical areas that have been hardest hit by the financial crisis, particularly in the European periphery, waves of protest have, however, challenged the austerity policies adopted by national governments under heavy pressure from lending institutions including the European Central Bank, the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund. This has put democracy under stress, but also triggered at some capacity for innovation. While some have considered the multiple crises as proof that governments need more technical expertise, others have blamed an “econocracy” that has taken over political decisions while pretending they are not political. Siding with this second vision, I will suggest in these notes that what we need is more, rather than less participation in democracy. I develop my argument by summarising some recent reflections in the social sciences on the challenges that the financial crisis poses to democracy, and the ways to address those challenges.

Along with other South-European countries, since 2008, Greece has experienced deep economic and social dislocation, leading to a crisis of representation and triggering populist mobilisations and anti-populist reactions. This article focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around populist representations, something that has not attracted much attention in the relevant literature. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, focusing on their mutual constitution from a discursive perspective, it articulates a brief yet comprehensive genealogy of populist and anti-populist actors (parties and media) in Greece, exploring their discursive strategies. Moving on, it identifies the main characteristics this antagonistic divide took on within the newly contested, crisis-ridden sociopolitical field, highlighting the implications for a contemporary understanding of cleavages, with potentially broader implications.

What is the effect of external stimuli in curbing corruption at the national level? This article analyses the intervening impact of EU post-conditionality and GRECO monitoring on countries’ anti-corruption record. It finds that “soft governance” has a positive impact and stimulates national responses against corruption. This positive influence increases when is additionally conditioned by strong internal stimuli targeting corruption.

What is the impact of unemployment on far-right party support? This article develops a framework that links unemployment to far-right party support, while taking into account both the heterogeneity of the workforce and the role of labour market policies. More specifically, we focus on unemployment as a driver of economic insecurity and examine its effect on outsider and insider labour market groups. We identify the extent to which two labour market policies—unemployment benefits and Employment Protection Legislation (EPL)—mediate the effect of unemployment on economic insecurity, thus limiting the impact of unemployment on far-right party support. We carry out a large N analysis on a sample of 14 Western and 10 Eastern European countries between 1991 and 2013. We find that unemployment only leads to higher far-right support when unemployment benefits replacement rates are low. The results with regard to the mediating effect of EPL are more complex as EPL only mediates the impact of unemployment when we take into account the share of foreign-born population in the country.

Research on the effects of referendums and citizens’ initiatives in the USA and Switzerland have shown that provisions for institutions of direct democracy (referendums and initiatives) are statistically associated with lower inequality, lower budget deficits and higher levels of GDP per capita at the state/canton level. This paper breaks new ground by replicating the American and Swiss research on nationwide referendums in European democracies. The results differ in some respects from the Swiss and American results. While, this paper to a degree corroborates the association between equality and citizens’ initiatives, there is no evidence in support of the proposition that citizen-initiated referendums are correlated with lower public debt. And, contrary to the findings of the earlier research, the paper finds evidence that provisions for referendums lead to lower GDP per capita. Moreover, the analysis cannot point to specific exemplars of countries that showcase the relationships. It remains difficult to point to any specific policy effect of referendums and initiatives in Europe.

The political consequences of climate change have been topics at numerous political science conferences. Contrary to the plurality of discussions at these meetings, it is striking that there is no systematic account of the carbon footprint of political science conferences themselves. Applying a GIS-based approach I estimate the travel induced greenhouse gas emissions of the last six ECPR General Conferences (2013–18). The results show that for the five conferences that took part in Europe the average emissions per attendee were between 0.5–1.3 tons CO2-equivalents. At the 2015 conference in Montreal it were even 1.9–3.4 tons. Compared to estimations based on the latest IPCC reports which call for a reduction of per capita emissions to 2.5 tons by 2030 and even 0.7 tons by 2050 in order to keep on track with the 1.5-degree goal, the travel induced GHG-emissions of ECPR conferences are very high. Yet, further estimations demonstrate that significant emission reductions are possible: by choosing more central conference venues, promoting low-emission landbound means of transportation and introducing online participation for researchers from far away, the carbon footprint could be reduced by 75–90 per cent. The article also gives concrete recommendations how the carbon footprint of conferences could be reduced.

Portuguese politics and mainstream media have been resistant to the recent spread of populism. This article examines the specific features of Portuguese politics and media that might explain the apparent exception, and puts it to test by analysing the prevalence of populist discourses and styles of communication in different types of online media. The sample is composed of mediated and unmediated messages on immigration and corruption, two issues that are commonly present in populist discourses by both right- and left-wing political actors. Overall, the content analysis shows that although populist discourses are not recurrent in politics and media, social media have amplified the visibility of this kind of discourses in Portugal.

Fifteen years ago, Rydgren (Scand Polit Stud 25(1):27–56, 2002) asked why no electorally successful radical right-wing party had yet emerged in Sweden. In this respect, Sweden was a negative case. Rydgren posited four main explanations: (1) social class mattered more in Sweden than elsewhere. Working-class voters identified strongly with their social class and with the Social Democratic party, making them largely unavailable to radical right-wing mobilization; (2) socioeconomic issues still structured most politics in Sweden, and issues belonging to the sociocultural dimension—most importantly immigration—were of low salience for voters; (3) voters still perceived clear policy alternatives across the left-right divide; and (4) the leading radical right-wing alternative, the Sweden Democrats, was perceived as being too extreme. Since 2010, however, Sweden can no longer be considered a negative case, and in this article, we argue that in order to understand the rise and growth of the Sweden Democrats, we should focus on changes in the factors enumerated above.