Research shows that voters use coalition decisions as a heuristic to infer party positions, but little work has studied whether coalition decisions have long-term effects. I argue that voters have longer-lasting impressions of coalition relationships that affect their perceptions of parties after any given coalition ends. Voters keep a running tally of which parties have governed together and update their perceptions of current coalitions based on these prior expectations. Using data from ParlGov and CSES, I analyze coalition relationships across European countries to model the inter-dependencies between party dyads. The results of this analysis show that voters view parties that have previously coalesced as closer together when neither party is in government, as long as they do not change partners, and voters have the strongest reactions to unprecedented and exclusive coalition partnerships.

The democratization of party leaders and candidates has garnered significant attention in recent decades across various countries. However, the comparative literature has devoted less attention to other internal party democratic innovations such as party internal referendums. So far, scholarly research has focused on case studies describing the rules and main features of such events, while participation remains largely unexplored. This paper aims to bridge this gap by exploring the relevance of four meso-level features on turnout: competitiveness, saliency, frequency, and length of the voting period. To test the relevance of such factors, the paper builds on an original database of 407 intra-party referendums in the Czech Pirate Party, Five Stars Movement and Podemos conducted from 2013 to 2023. The results point out the significance of more extended voting periods and proposals on public policies as the main drivers of turnout. These results also have significant consequences in the study of participation within (digital) political parties.

Interest groups often seek media attention to gain traction for their views. Media attention is scarce, however, and previous research shows that this attention tends to be directed toward more resourceful interest groups. We build on this and argue that interest groups with stronger organizational ties to political parties are more likely to appear in the news, and that this effect is positively conditioned by parties’ media attention. Organizational ties facilitate collaboration between the actors, allow for coordination of media strategies, and enable the actors to draw on each other’s media networks. Journalists may furthermore deem interest groups with stronger ties to parties as more newsworthy. We find support for our hypotheses using detailed survey data on organizational ties and a corpus of daily news content across twelve newspapers in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom between 2016 and 2018. The study suggests that organizational connections between groups and political parties can widen media coverage of groups by promoting those that parties favor for reasons beyond their resources. Since stronger organizational ties grant interest groups direct access to political parties, the findings above all imply that media coverage of groups mimics existing patterns of access to key political decision makers.

The responsiveness of political parties to voters’ policy preferences is a core feature of democracies. A growing number of studies analyze this phenomenon, but key obstacles remain, such as the availability of reliable measures and the infrequency of these measures (election periods). As a consequence, the literature remains vague in theorizing and analyzing instances where the preferences of the median voter clash with those of the party electorate. By studying party responsiveness in a different setting, this paper advances the literature on these fronts: we focus on the Swiss political context, where the frequent use of direct democratic institutions enables us to evaluate the dynamic responsiveness of political parties with several observations per year for a large variety of topics. The paper uses a Bayesian item response theory model to operationalize the general ideological position of ballot proposals and uses them to evaluate parties’ responsiveness to the median voter and party voter. Our results confirm the most recent literature that political parties are responsive to their own electorates’ position shift but not the median voter. Furthermore, we show that, in situations where the signal from the general electorate and the party voters disagree, parties value the party voter more, thus giving even more weight to their partisan electorate. These findings have important implications for the study of party responsiveness.

Drawing on the case of the US Civil War, this article redefines crises of hegemony as crises of “articulation,” in which insurgent actors disrupt support for joining up the elements of the dominant social order under existing terms. The collapse of mass white consent just prior to the war entailed partisan struggle over imagined demographic futures. Breaking with the nativists of their former party, Illinois Whigs, turned Republicans, argued that the extension of slavery into Indigenous territory and northern Mexico would permit the planter class to monopolize the land, overrun it with the enslaved, and condemn white workers, many of them immigrants, to a life of endless toil in the factory. Having thus framed slavery as a demographic threat, northern Republicans held that the territorial claims of white settlers must supersede those of planters. Alabama Democrats, now Southern Rights secessionists, retained their erstwhile party’s expansionist politics but predicted that prohibiting the transport of human chattel to new territories would dam whites up with the enslaved, who, after overtaking the white population, could overthrow slavery and the white race itself. The article illuminates the role of population politics and partisan struggle in the re-organization of white supremacy and the advent of critical historical conjunctures. That white supremacy underpins even paradigmatic transitions to liberal democracy may also inform the work of mass movements, as they diagnose and challenge the ways in which supposedly democratic institutions consolidate, rather than protect against, elite power.

Previous research has shown that the perception of party positions changes when they are in government. To what extent does this also apply to populist radical parties? Including radical actors in a coalition gives some legitimization to their views and normalizes them; therefore, they might be perceived as ideologically more moderate. However, the reactions to government inclusion might be different for supporters of populist radical parties compared to other voters. Hence, this paper aims to examine if populist radical parties that are included in a government coalition are perceived as ideologically more moderate and whether partisanship moderates this effect. A time-series cross-sectional analysis of the public perception of governing populist radical parties in 29 elections across 20 European countries shows that they are not always seen as more moderate when in office. This paper contributes to the study of coalition heuristics and populists in power and has important consequences for our understanding of party mainstreaming.

This research note critically examines the structural failures of Mexico’s post-2000 democratic transition, arguing that the rise of illiberal populism under the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) is not the cause but the consequence of a stalled and superficial democratization process. While formal electoral procedures were strengthened, underlying issues such as state capture, elite dominance, widespread corruption, and socioeconomic exclusion remained unaddressed. By reducing democracy to procedural minimalism, political elites failed to deliver substantive democratic outcomes, eroding institutional legitimacy, and fueling public disillusionment.

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.