Political parties in EU member states are situated in a complex multilevel polity, having to engage with their domestic political reality together with EU politics and international linkages with fellow European parties. But how do these parties organize? This research intends to understand how competing, though not mutually exclusive logics of political behaviour can help explain the variations in how parties apprehend this multilevel context. Relying on a rich empirical strategy with 68 semi-structured interviews with European and national party elites in 19 national political parties from Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, supplemented by a party statutes investigation and data gathering in the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we conduct a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). It starts from the broad assumption that parties’ multilevel organization needs to be contextually understood, relying on both past and current party dynamics, as well as the actions of the (senior) individuals populating party organizations. Our analysis shows that parties’ different multilevel organization is the result of an interaction between various factors, crucially party genetics and individual agency.

This research note examines the evolving nature of political parties in the contemporary era, with a particular focus on the trend of movementization, defined as the process by which political parties adopt organizational, strategic, and discursive elements of social movements to revitalize their declining structures and reconnect with society. While early studies on this phenomenon primarily focused on movement parties—challenger actors that positioned themselves at the intersection of institutional and contentious politics, blending conventional and unconventional repertoires of action—recent developments suggest that movementization is no longer confined to movement-parties only. Instead, it is becoming a broader trend affecting both challenger and mainstream parties across the entire ideological spectrum. This research note aims to review and critically assess the existing literature on movementization, identifying key theoretical and empirical contributions while highlighting unresolved questions and methodological gaps. Although substantial work has been done on individual case studies, the field remains fragmented and lacks systematic comparative analysis. To advance the study of movementization, this note calls for a shift from case-centric approaches toward comparative frameworks, integrating quantitative indicators and cross-national perspectives to better assess the prevalence, drivers, and consequences of this transformation. By doing so, it seeks to contribute to a more structured and generalizable understanding of how movementization is reshaping contemporary party politics.

Are shifting party-union relationships impacting the vote intentions of union members in Canada? By analyzing voting intentions within the Canadian labour movement, the findings illuminate the complexity of union members’ electoral behaviour and the strategic opportunities for parties vying for their votes. The authors find that while union members continue to be more likely than the average voter to support the NDP, this support is nuanced by factors such as union type, gender, education, age, and income. Notably, the study finds that the Conservatives have made significant inroads among construction union members and those with college education, challenging traditional assumptions about Canadian labour politics.

LGBTQ+ people remain underrepresented in politics, leading scholars to examine a variety of barriers to office. Based on work on women in politics, this paper focuses on one possible barrier: political finance. Is there a political financing gap between straight cisgender and LGBTQ+ candidates? Are there inequalities among LGBTQ+ candidates? If so, what explains them? This article explores these questions by combining a dataset of out LGBTQ+ candidates in the 2015–21 federal elections with political donations data from Elections Canada. When we examine bivariate financing gaps, we find LGBTQ+ candidates receive less money than their straight cisgender counterparts. These gaps are gendered: queer cisgender women, transgender, and nonbinary candidates receive the least money. When we adjust for other variables, we still find LGBTQ+ candidates in the Conservative Party and transgender and nonbinary candidates across parties receive less money. This article contributes to work on gender and identity in campaign finance and LGBTQ+ representation.

The literature on vice presidencies fails to explain the women’s inclusion as vice-presidential candidates, as the strategies of ticket balancing predict a higher number of female running mates than what is observed. Based on theories of gender representation, this study develops hypotheses about the inclusion of women as vice-presidential candidates and tests them using an original dataset comprising 471 presidential tickets from Latin America (1978–2022), a region where women’s representation has expanded. The analysis reveals that small and left-wing parties nominate more women as vice presidents than major and right-wing parties. Although female vice-presidential candidates tend to have less political experience than their male presidential counterparts, they often add a diverse and complementary policy expertise to the ticket. The findings underscore that women’s inclusion as vice-presidential candidates depends mostly on partisan calculations, since gender quotas rarely apply to the vice presidency.

This research note introduces the Canadian Vote Intention Dataset, a new, integrated, publicly available database of nearly eight decades of public opinion surveys from Gallup, Environics, Pollara, the Canadian Election Study and the Consortium on Electoral Democracy. The dataset contains 1,019,639 responses on Canadians’ federal vote intention as well as a suite of demographic and geographic variables, including age, gender, religion, language, education, union membership, occupation, community size, province and region. We describe the dataset and custom survey weights, as well as the R package and interactive online application we developed to accompany the dataset. We then demonstrate the dataset’s utility through new analyses of the long-term evolution of gender, education and community size gaps in Canadian party support from 1945 to 2022.

The early 1970s was a tumultuous time for abortion law and policy in North Dakota where the defeat of an abortion liberalization initiative in 1972 was quickly followed by Roe v. Wade in 1973. The resulting political and cultural circumstances strongly favored the North Dakota Right to Life Association, which saw much of its agenda passed by the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support. This study uses a political culture perspective to examine the development of North Dakota abortion law and policy in the years after Roe. It illustrates how the state legislature, interest groups, the bureaucracy, and the courts reacted to a series of disruptions in abortion policy. The resulting policies made abortion a continuing source of tension within North Dakota politics.

US politics is living a tense period of transformation. Approaching the presidential elections of 2024, many commentators question the fate of the US representative democracy and its political system. Political scientists have largely contributed to the critical analysis of the US case. A special mention goes to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The two scholars have marked the last two decades of US political science with a brilliant reconstruction of the American crisis and some of its key trends: the progressive increase of inequality; the mounting role of business lobbies; the decline of the US political economy and the erosion of the federal institutions. The present research note reviews three key books that shed light on contemporary US political economy through a typical political science approach. The value of these books goes well beyond the originality of the analysis of US politics. The books remind us the importance of three theoretical domains that marked political science and that merit to be further developed: interest group theory, neo-institutionalism and historical theories of democratization. Then, they shed light on the current dramatic tensions over representative democracies, well beyond the US exceptionalism. Hacker and Pierson provide an illuminating analysis of democratic tensions and give insights for the future research agenda of scholars of western political economies (including Italy and Europe). The books eventually outline some interesting methodological lines of future research.

One of the most important global political developments is the current wave of autocratization. Most research identifies this as an executive-led process, while others highlight the role opposition actors play in resisting it. We combine this work into a common framework asking, how (anti-)democratic are party systems? Party-system literature emphasises and measures policy differences, while we conceptualise party systems’ democratic positions highlighting to what extent divergent regime preferences are prevalent across parties. To estimate this dimension, we introduce the Party-System Democracy Index (PSDI), capable of tracking regime preferences across party systems from 1970 to 2019 across 178 countries and 3,151 country-years. We implement well-established content, convergent, and construct validity tests to confirm the PSDI’s reliability. Finally, we also show that the PSDI is an important predictor for regime changes in either direction and that changes in the PSDI can signal a looming regime change. This work provides a new framework for studying regime changes and contributes to the renewal of the party-systems literature.

A common challenge in studying Italian parliamentary discourse is the lack of accessible, machine-readable, and systematized parliamentary data. To address this, this article introduces the ItaParlCorpus dataset, a new, annotated, machine-readable collection of Italian parliamentary plenary speeches for the Camera dei Deputati, the lower house of Parliament, spanning from 1948 to 2022. This dataset encompasses 470 million words and 2.4 million speeches delivered by 5830 unique speakers representing 77 different political parties. The files are designed for easy processing and analysis using widely-used programming languages, and they include metadata such as speaker identification and party affiliation. This opens up opportunities for in-depth analyses on a variety of topics related to parliamentary behavior, elite rhetoric, and the salience of political themes, exploring how these vary across party families and over time.

Political parties vary in their responses to electoral challenges, including the rise of populist competitors. To address these challenges, they sometimes engage with peripheral issues located outside their ideological comfort zones, and at other times they adhere more closely to their core policies. Although these patterns are well-documented, voters' perceptions thereof remain under-examined. This article argues that voters evaluate parties' claims not just based on the direction of their policy engagement – positive or negative – but also based on the commitment behind these actions, distinguishing ideological commitment from strategic manoeuvres. Employing a pre-registered vignette experiment, the article shows that voters differentiate responses to core versus peripheral issues, regardless of their personal agreement with the policies. Populist attitudes further moderate these perceptions, as voters with such views are typically more sceptical of parties' motives, limiting the impact of party behaviour on perceived commitment primarily to non-populist individuals. This highlights the importance of perceived commitment in elections and the constraints parties face in responding to competition.

Ideological polarization between political parties is essential for meaningful electoral competition, but at its extreme can strain democratic functioning. Despite a widespread recognition that multiple divides structure contemporary party polarization in Europe, its prevailing conceptualization and measurement remain one-dimensional. To resolve this tension, we introduce a novel, multidimensional approach to party polarization. Our main focus is on whether different ideological divides reinforce or crosscut each other. We calculate the effective dimensionality of a policy space using the correlation matrix of parties’ positions, which accounts for how the dimensions interrelate. Using both artificial data and positional estimates from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (1999–2019), we highlight the advantages of our approach and demonstrate that it is better able to capture the relationship between party polarization and mass partisanship. This study has important theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications for our understanding of polarization and democratic representation in a changing political landscape.

Whether referendums, initiatives, and other mechanisms of direct democracy enhance representative systems is a matter of debate. Skeptics note—among other criticisms—that turnout tends to be low in referendums, often lower than in candidate elections in the same country. If citizens do not care enough to participate, how useful can these mechanisms be for improving the quality of democratic systems? We argue that low referendum turnout has as much to do with parties’ disincentives to mobilize voters as it does with voter disinterest. Prior research on political behavior in referendums has focused largely on Europe and assumes that voters view them as elections of lesser importance. By shifting focus to Latin America, we introduce more variation in the features of political parties that influence levels of turnout. We draw on cross-national evidence, qualitative research in Colombia, and quantitative analysis of municipal-level referendum voting behavior in Brazil. The key to understanding low voter turnout in these settings is the relatively weaker incentives that political parties have to turn out the vote when control over office is not at stake. We demonstrate that, in clientelistic systems, party operatives have particularly weak incentives to get their constituents out to the polls.