Scholars have proposed integrating deliberative democracy processes and new technologies within party structures to address the legitimacy crisis of political parties. However, for established political groups, this is not an easy road to take. The paper delves into these issues by presenting the case study of Agorà Democratiche within the Italian Democratic Party (PD), the major center-left party in Italy. Agorà aimed to engage party members and like-minded citizens in shaping the party’s agenda through deliberative assemblies. This adoption by Agorà introduced a new form of political participation that led thousands of citizens to voice their opinions. However, it encountered several challenges. The paper argues that democratic innovations do not always yield the desired outcomes for political parties. Participatory and deliberative processes might be hard to implement in established political groups that are accustomed to old political schemas. More specifically, I pinpoint four main obstacles encountered by Agorà Democratiche: the ‘culture of verticality’ within the party, an unfavorable external context, the lack of institutionalization of the programme, and the ambiguous role played by technology. If not handled carefully, new technologies and deliberative processes can worsen the existing crisis within political parties by falling short of expectations and further undermining the organization’s credibility.

Do voters punish local politicians for raising taxes? In California, proposed tax increases must be approved via local ballot measures. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits the narrow passage of local tax initiatives, we find that incumbents do not generally suffer a penalty when cities raise taxes, with the notable exception of business taxes. We explore several mechanisms behind this result and uncover suggestive evidence that business interests may be particularly likely to mobilize following a tax increase. These results suggest that interest groups likely play an important role in determining whether new taxes generate voter backlash.

Do radical right parties present blurry economic stances, or have they clarified their positions while moving towards the economic left? This article questions the strategic behaviour of radical right parties in Western Europe. It shows that although radical right parties have increased their discussion of economic issues, and expert placements of this party family on the economic dimension have become more centrist over time, the uncertainty surrounding these placements continues to be higher for the radical right than any other party family in Europe. The article then moves on to examine to what extent voter‐party congruence on redistribution, immigration and other issues of social lifestyle predict an individual's propensity to vote for the radical right compared to other parties. Although redistribution is the component of economic policy where the radical right seems to be centrist, the findings indicate that it remains party‐voter congruence on immigration that drives support for radical right parties, while the congruence level for redistribution has an insignificant effect. The article concludes that while radical right parties seem to have included some clearly left‐leaning economic proposals, which shifted the general expert views of these parties to the economic centre, their overall economic profiles remain as blurry as ever.

Issue ownership is an important determinant of the vote, and it is electorally beneficial for parties to build a strong reputation on their core issues. Even though issue ownership has already been studied extensively in the party literature, we know less about how citizens form ownership perceptions. We contribute to this literature by means of two studies on the connection between party behaviour and perceptions of issue ownership, with an empirical focus on issue competence reputations of parties. In Study 1, we combine party‐level information about issue attention, positions and performance with data on competence perceptions from a wide range of national election studies. Study 2 is a pre‐registered conjoint experiment designed to examine the causal link between party behaviour and perceived competence. Our results point to significant effects for all three hypothesised sources of competence reputations. Moving beyond previous work that has argued that competence reputations are mostly stable over time, after accounting for the variation due to parties' popularity, our results show that they fluctuate in the short term and that parties have some level of control over how they are perceived.

Researchers classify political parties into families by their shared cleavage origins. However, as parties have drifted from the original ideological commitments, it is unclear to what extent party families today can function as effective heuristics for shared positions. We propose an alternative way of classifying parties based solely on their ideological positions as one solution to this challenge. We use model‐based clustering to recast common subjective decisions involved in the process of creating party groups as problems of model selection, thus, providing non‐subjective criteria to define ideological clusters. By comparing canonical families to our ideological clusters, we show that while party families on the right are often too similar to justify categorizing them into different clusters, left‐wing families are weakly internally cohesive. Moreover, we identify two clusters predominantly composed of parties in Eastern Europe, questioning the degree to which categories originally designed to describe Western Europe can generalize to other regions.

This article examines how populism is linked to party organization and, specifically, intra‐party democracy. Populism can be defined as an ideology (ideational perspective), which is characterized by anti‐elitism, people‐centrism and a discourse emphasizing a moral struggle between ‘good people’ and ‘the elite’. On the other hand, there are leadership‐focused definitions which see populism as a form of organization with personalistic control (a leadership perspective). With respect to party organization, focusing on the ideational perspective leads to the expectation that populist parties will be internally democratic, and the leadership approach will lead to the opposite expectation. Using the recently published Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey (POPPA) that develops party‐specific populism scores, we examine more than 200 parties in 26 countries. The results highlight that populist parties gravitate toward personalized leaders and thus develop less democratic intra‐party structures. This finding contributes to our understanding of populist parties and their organizations.

That parties fulfil their pre‐election pledges once they are in government is a fundamental idea of many democracy models. This paper addresses the question of whether the government/opposition status of their party affects how much citizens want governments to fulfil their promises. We hypothesize that interest‐driven, rational voters are more likely to prefer their own party to keep its promises and investigate whether this rationale is impacted by public opinion and expert views. The analysis is based on a survey experiment conducted in Australia and Austria. It finds that voters broadly adhere to the democratic principle of expecting pledge fulfilment but, at the same time, some take a rational approach to government promises. The opinions of the public and experts mitigate but do not change this effect. Another key finding is the significant difference in the preference for promise keeping versus promise breaking between government and opposition voters in the Austrian case, the country with the more heterogeneous and polarized political system. This paper contributes to the literature on voters’ attitudes on democracy and pledge fulfilment by showing that voters are normatively driven but a significant number of voters deviate and instead follow the rational voter logic.

Parties’ parliamentary delegations contain a multitude of interests. While scholars suspect that this variation affects party behaviour, most work on parties’ policy statements treats parties as unitary actors. This reflects the absence of strong expectations concerning when (and how) the parliamentary caucus matters for platform construction, as well as the difficulties inherent in testing such claims. Drawing on the literature on women's descriptive representation, this article argues that the makeup of the parliamentary party likely has important consequences for issue entrepreneurship, the scope of issues represented on the manifesto and even the left‐right position of election platforms. With the most comprehensive party‐level study of women's representation ever conducted, three diversity hypotheses are tested using data on the gender makeup of parties’ parliamentary delegations and the content of their manifestos for 110 parties in 20 democracies between 1952 and 2011. The analyses show that as the percentage of women in the parliamentary party increases, parties address a greater diversity of issues in their election campaigns. Women's presence is also associated with more left‐leaning manifestos, even when controlling for parties’ prior ideological positions. Together, these findings illustrate a previously overlooked consequence of descriptive representation and provide a framework for understanding when and why the parliamentary party influences manifesto formation. They show that diversity – or lack thereof – has important consequences for parties’ policy statements, and thus the overall quality of representation.

This paper explores a major road to substantive representation in democracies, by clarifying whether demands of rich and poor citizens are taken up in the electoral platforms of political parties. Doing so constitutes a substantial broadening and deepening of our understanding of substantive representation – broadening the countries, issue‐areas and years that form the empirical basis for judging whether democracies manifest unequal representation; and deepening the process of representation by clarifying a key pathway connecting societal demands to policy outcomes. The paper hypothesises that party systems in general will respond more strongly to wealthy than to poor segments of a polity. It also hypothesises that left parties will more faithfully represent poorer and less significantly represent richer citizens than do right parties. We find substantial support for these expectations in a new dataset that combines multi‐country, multi‐issue‐area, multi‐wave survey data with data on party platforms for 39 democracies.

Parties strive to set the ‘terms of the debate’ in elections by selectively emphasising issue areas that enhance their popular appeal. Yet, do citizens respond to parties’ issue emphasis, or do they mainly respond to objective factors such as economic and environmental conditions, crime rates, immigration flows, and so on? We report a time-series, cross-sectional analyses of the relationship between the public's issue attention, parties’ issue emphases and objective national conditions across seven issue areas in 13 western publics between 1971 and 2021, finding a strong association between objective conditions and citizens’ subsequent issue attention, but weaker associations to party system issue attention. There are stronger links, however, between parties’ issue emphases and their supporters’ subsequent attention.

Research has consistently shown that women are less likely than men to participate in political parties as members and activists; this participation gender gap has persisted despite narrowing gender gaps in education, employment and in other types of political participation.  Yet while the gaps are widespread, their size varies greatly by country as well as by party.  To what extent do party organizational factors help explain these disparities? More pointedly, are there any lessons to be learned from past experiences about party mechanisms which might help to reduce these gaps? To answer these questions, this study investigates grassroots partisan participation in 68 parties in 12 parliamentary democracies, considering whether factors that have been shown to boost the number of women candidates and legislators are also associated with changing the traditionally male dominance of grassroots party politics.  We find evidence of links between some party mechanisms and higher women's intra‐party participation; however, because the same relationship holds for men's participation, they do not alter the participation gender gap. Only greater participation of women in parties’ parliamentary delegations is associated with smaller grassroots gender gaps. We conclude that parties which wish to close grassroots gender gaps should not rely solely on efforts aimed at remedying gender gaps at the elite level.

Political parties and interest groups play a vital role in incorporating societal interests into democratic decision‐making. Therefore, explaining the nature and variation in the relationship between them will advance our understanding of democratic governance. Existing research has primarily drawn attention to how exchange of resources shapes these relationships largely neglecting the role of contextual conditions. Our contribution is to examine whether parties’ structured interactions with different categories of interest groups vary systematically with the pattern of party competition at the level of policy dimensions. First, we argue that higher party fragmentation in a policy space makes organisational ties to interest groups more likely, due to fears of voter loss and splinter groups. Second, we expect higher polarisation between parties on a policy dimension to make ties to relevant groups less likely due to increased electoral costs. We find support for both expectations when analysing new data on 116 party units in 13 mature democracies along nine different policy dimensions. Our findings underline the value of considering the strategic context in which parties and interest groups interact to understand their relationship. The study sheds new light on parties and interest groups as intermediaries in democracy and contributes to a new research agenda connecting interest group research with studies of parties’ policy positions and responsiveness.

We examine the existence and strength of organizational ties between parties and interest groups by innovating on classic resource exchange theory. First, we propose that the nature of interest groups’ policy orientation and their general organizational capacity primarily explain the presence of ties, that is, ties are less likely to materialize when groups lack ideological policy goals and have limited organizational capacity. Second, the size and types of resources on offer from both sides are what principally account for the strength of existing ties. We hypothesize that resources from both parties and interest groups are positively associated with institutionalized relationships, but also that resources are hierarchically ordered, that is, resources that are exclusive for the transaction are particularly important for ties at higher levels of institutionalization. Using data from a novel organizational survey of parties and interest groups in seven Western democracies, we find support for the hypotheses using an integrated design of analysis.

When reporting on election results, the media declare parties as election ‘winners’ or ‘losers’, which has important consequences for voter perceptions and government formation. This article investigates news coverage of parties’ electoral performance in proportional representation systems, in which election results are often less clear‐cut compared to majoritarian systems. It tests the extent to which news coverage of parties’ electoral performance is based on objective measures or on party ideology. Its focus on the aftermath of the 2019 European Parliament election allows holding the electoral context constant across the 16 countries under study. Results from a Heckman selection model show that alongside a party's status as plurality winner and changes in electoral support, parties with radical socio‐cultural policy positions are both more likely to be covered and declared election winners in the news. These results have important implications for citizens’ attitudes and perceived party legitimacy in democratic societies.