In June Alliance MP Frank Grover left the Alliance for the Christian Heritage party. As he continued to sit on the opposition benches, this made little difference to the political balance within Parliament.

This paper challenges some widespread theoretical assumptions and practices in the study of populism and proposes a new multidimensional approach to generate and analyse data on this latent construct. Rather than focusing on categorising subjects as populists or not, it recommends reaching a better understanding of what populism is, the salience and relative weight of its attributes and how they interact creating an inner populist logic.

Despite the increasing media and academic attention, historical discrepancies in how to conceptualise and operationalise populism have hindered cumulative progress in the literature. Initially most efforts were devoted to the study of specific movements, without a clear comparative angle, and the concept of populism was often conflated with that of nationalism. When the literature started to pay more attention to the analysis of the attributes associated with populism serious disagreements emerged concerning its true essence. Populism has been conceptualised as an ideology, a cynical strategy, a performative style and a discursive logic of articulation. The disputes between these competing interpretations have arguably slowed down the generation of comparative data.

Although this article is meant to be a critique of the current state of the field and a call to make it pivot into a slightly different direction, it does not adopt an iconoclast stance and largely tries to reconcile the different existing research traditions – ideational, discursive, performative and strategic. It shows that their efforts are to a great extent complementary but mostly operating on different rungs of the ladder of abstraction. This paper argues that shifting from minimal definitions into a multidimensional approach may stimulate the generation of comparative data on a wider range of attributes and facilitate the identification of degrees and varieties within populism.

This paper develops a new analytical framework which deconstructs populism into five dimensions: (1) depiction of the polity, (2) morality, (3) construction of society, (4) sovereignty and (5) leadership. These dimensions, that synthesise the most influential conceptualisations of populism, are empirically and theoretically interconnected and encompass ideational, discursive and performative attributes suggested in the literature. These dimensions are in turn composed of lower order attributes forming a multilayered network structure. This multidimensional framework provides a heuristic template that can be adapted and operationalised in diverse ways depending on the hypotheses, type of data and subjects of the analysis. Some examples of how to turn these dimensions into variables to capture supply‐ and demand‐side populism are introduced. Future empirical research could help map and better understand the network of interactions and intersections among these dimensions and attributes. This could be the key to settle some of the current conceptual debates about populism and its varieties.

Party politics and electoral research generally assume that party members are loyal voters. This article first assesses the empirical basis for this assumption before providing individual‐level explanations for defection. It combines prominent theories from party politics and electoral behaviour research and argues that internal disagreement and external pressure can each bring about disloyal voting. The hypotheses are motivated with multi‐country European survey data and tested on two sets of party‐level national surveys. The results show, first, that, on average, 8 per cent of European party members cast a defecting vote in the last election, and second, that dissatisfaction with the leadership is the strongest predictor of defection. Additionally, internal ideological disagreement is associated with higher probabilities of defection, whereas the effects of pull factors in the form of contentious policies are rather limited. These findings emphasise the importance of testing scientific assumptions and the potential significance of party leadership contests.

Treaties are a valuable tool for policymakers because they are both legally binding on, and symbolically powerful signals of, commitments of states that ratify. Why states choose to ratify treaties is unclear, although social pressures appear to play some role. This article argues that global performance indicators can influence the ratification process, but that the effect varies depending on where states fall on these measures. In the mid‐range of a scale, fast ratification has significant benefits and relatively few costs. However, indicators have less of a catalysing effect at the extreme ends of the scale, where the costs are higher and the benefits are lower. This article uses policy performance indicators as independent variables in duration analyses of the ratification of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (2003) and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children (2000). It finds states in the mid‐range of the indicator are faster to ratify than states that are not ranked, whereas the other categories are statistically insignificant. These findings imply that indicators matter for those in the middle, but not as much for those at the extremes. This finding enriches our understanding of treaty ratification and has potential implications for performance metrics as a tool to promote policy change for those states in the middle, highlighting the strengths and limitations of indicators as a force for change.

This study examines the ideological alignment of beliefs within opposing partisan camps in Europe. Integrating multiple types of research, I hypothesize that partisans on the ideological left exhibit greater alignment in their beliefs compared to those on the right – an asymmetry that extends across various issues. I argue that on the scale of ideological contention, it matters if partisans on one ideological pole are more aligned in beliefs than those on the other. Only the less ideological of opposing camps determines the extent of mutual disagreement. Utilizing conventional methods and innovative belief network modelling, I analyse survey data from the fourth and eighth waves of the European Social Survey (2008, 2016). To test the hypothesis, I match partisans with the data on their party's ideology, covering partisans from 131 parties in 15 European countries to test this hypothesis. My findings reveal that, both at the European level and within national contexts, there is a broad and substantive asymmetry between the right and the left across ideological dimensions and issues. However, the study also uncovers the limits of this asymmetry, highlighting a significant shift in ideological alignment on sociocultural issues on the right, indicating the emergence of a deeper, broader ideological conflict in that dimension. Furthermore, my analysis demonstrates the marginal influence of strategies like position blurring and programmatic nicheness. These insights shed light on the nature of partisan contention in Europe and how it disproportionately depends on ideological alignment on the right.

Many previous theoretical analyses of multiparty coalition behaviour have been based either on one‐dimensional policy model or on a constant‐sum game interpretation. For theoretical and empirical reasons this paper focusses on a competitive two‐dimensional model. In this model parties are concerned with policy outcomes but choose party positions both with a view to electoral consequences and as a basis for coalition bargaining. The political heart is proposed as the set of possible coalition outcomes. The heart is either the core of the political game or is determined by a small number of party positions. Under certain conditions an equilibrium in the choice of party positions can be shown to exist. The model suggests that parties can be categorized as either strong or weak core parties, anti‐core parties or peripheral parties. This categorization of parties implies a typology of party systems, which gives some theoretical foundation for the occurrence of minority, minimal winning and surplus coalitions in many of the European countries in the postwar period.

This study examines sentence comprehension in two in-situ heritage Slovene communities in Italy’s border-shift context, comparing the Gorizia/Trieste (N = 66) and Natisone Valley (N = 43) adult populations with monolingual Slovene speakers. While both heritage groups operate in Italian-dominant bilingual environments near the Slovenian border, they differ in Slovene exposure due to varying institutional support. Using a sentence–picture verification task, this study examines comprehension of non-canonical word order, relative clauses and cataphoric dependencies. The Gorizia/Trieste group performed comparably to monolinguals, demonstrating strong sensitivity to case morphology and syntactic processing. Conversely, the Natisone group showed reduced accuracy and longer response times across all domains, reflecting case system vulnerability and processing limitations linked to reduced exposure. These findings highlight the important role of active maintenance and institutional support, independent of geographical proximity to the mainland, in shaping heritage language grammars and their use.

We prove that for bounded, divergence-free vector fields $\boldsymbol{b}$ in $L^1_{loc}((0,1];BV(\mathbb{T}^d;\mathbb{R}^d))$, there exists a unique incompressible measure on integral curves of $\boldsymbol{b}$. We recall the vector field constructed by Depauw in [8], which lies in the above class, and prove that for this vector field, the unique incompressible measure on integral curves exhibits stochasticity.

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource‐based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual‐level grievances interact with macro‐level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual‐level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross‐level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.

The process of government formation after the general elections to the Lower House of Parliament, the Nationalrat, on 3 October 1999 could not be brought to an end before the turn of the year. The conservative party, the ÖVP, which had been junior partner in a grand coalition with the social democratic party, the SPÖ, since 1987, had declared during its election campaign that it would go into opposition if it did not finish above third place. As a matter of fact, the populist right-wing FPÖ managed to surpass the ÖVP by 414 votes and for the first time in electoral history became the second strongest party at the national level (see Political Data Yearbook 1999). Up to this time, the FPÖ under its charismatic party chairman Jörg Haider had been considered as unacceptable for government participation because of his vehement attacks against the ‘old parties’ and other ‘pillars’ of the democratic republic, in particular social partnership, because of his radical ideas aiming to establish an authoritarian presidential republic, and because of his ambiguous stance towards National Socialism. Expecting heavy international protests in case of government participation of the FPÖ, Federal President Thomas Klestil favoured a continuation of the incumbent SPÖ–ÖVP coalition, even if the political climate between the two parties and the reform capacity of the government had deteriorated in recent years.

What are the political conditions affecting male MPs’ willingness to represent women's interests in parliament? This paper explores the role of electoral vulnerability in this regard and analyzes whether male MPs’ re‐election prospects affect their likelihood of paying attention to women's concerns. Theoretically, we expect that male MPs are not blamed if they do not represent women's interests but can gain additional credit for doing so. Thus, male MPs should be more likely to speak on behalf of women if their electoral vulnerability is high and if they need to win additional votes to be re‐elected. Empirically, the paper analyzes the representation of women's issues in the British House of Commons, by using Early Day Motions tabled preceding the General Elections in 2001, 2005, 2010 and 2015. The results show that male MPs are more likely to represent women's interests when their re‐election is at risk.

How does the educational divide impact contemporary redistributive politics in the knowledge economy? Traditional political economy models which see education as a labour market asset predict the relatively secure educated will oppose redistribution, while the precarious less‐educated will support it. In contrast, a conception of education as a marker of social status suggests that the less‐educated may be more inclined than status‐secure university graduates to draw harsh boundaries against welfare state beneficiaries as a means to maintain social esteem. Building on both theoretical approaches, I analyze 2016 European Social Survey data from 15 Western European countries. I find that education has a negative relationship to support for an expansive welfare state. By contrast, education is strongly positively associated with perceptions of welfare state beneficiaries as deserving.

This has implications for education as a structural divide in electoral politics. Evidence that attitudes towards the scope of the welfare state mediate the effects of education on vote choice is mixed. However, KHB mediation analyses decomposing the effects of education on vote choice reveal that deservingness perceptions are a particularly substantial mediator of education effects on voting for radical right and green parties. This explains in part why these parties represent the poles of the educational divide, whose attitudinal basis is usually understood to be socio‐cultural rather than redistributive.

The mass media is conventionally assumed to play an important role in welfare state politics. So far, however, we have very little systematic theorizing or empirical evidence of when and how the mass media reports on welfare state reforms. Building on news value theory and the welfare state reform literature, we develop a set of hypotheses about mass media reporting on welfare state reforms. We argue that mass media attention is conditioned not only by the direction of reforms, with cuts getting more attention than expansions, but also by the election platform that the incumbent party ran on in the last election as well as by the policy reputation of the government. Drawing on a new dataset including about 4,800 news articles in British, Danish and German quality newspapers from 1995 to 2014, we find supporting empirical evidence of our expectations.

Government responsiveness is a key feature and justification for democracy. Yet, previous studies show that the ability of governments to deliver responsive policies critically depends on the availability of resources. This study suggests that the shadow economy hurts democratic responsiveness because it reduces government revenues and decreases the reliability of economic statistics. Governments facing lower resources then respond to wider economic constraints and not to their publics. Using Eurobarometer data to evaluate public opinion in 15 European democracies and data on welfare generosity to measure policy outputs, this study finds that larger submerged economies correspond to less responsive governments. Additionally, the empirical analysis highlights that the shadow economy makes welfare systems less generous and taxation rates more demanding. These novel results have important implications for our understanding of democracy and help us clarify the conditions under which governments are more or less likely to deliver responsive policies. Finally, these results demonstrate the importance of studying the political consequences of the shadow economy.