Comprising 172 years of European history (from 1848 to 2020), the Who governs dataset provides comprehensive and highly detailed information on the partisan composition of European governments, matching these data with information on those aspects of party politics that can either help to understand the dynamics of the governmental arena or are under the direct influence of the composition of governments. Most of the variables represent fundamental and well-established dimensions of party politics, such as the number of new parties or the fragmentation of the party systems, but some, most importantly party system closure, are more novel. Variables have been designed so that they can be applied to a maximum number of cases across time. Currently the dataset includes 68 different historical democratic periods, 753 elections, and more than 1817 parties and 1586 cases of government formation.

As a reaction to the COVID- 19 pandemic and the wave of global social justice protests in 2020, Generation Z (born 1997–2012)0 F feels an intensified obligation to get involved in politics, resulting in unprecedented youth activism. Gen Z is more politically active than previous generations of youth, partly due to this generation’s emergence as “digital natives.” An underlying theme motivating Gen Z activism is their affinity for addressing social justice issues through civic engagement. But do politically active young people concerned with social justice self-identify as being members of political parties? Or is their activism occurring predominantly online and in the streets? This article conducts an exploratory analysis to investigate whether youth bridge their social consciousness and activism with deliberative democracy, notably by joining political parties. By looking at youth activism and party membership across 46 countries, I find that political activism online exhibits some connection to party membership among young people. Understanding the connection between young people’s “chosen” forms of participation and formal institutions can provide insights into how online activism can break down barriers between youth and political institutions.

How do international nonprofit organizations influence political party formation in new democracies? Despite recent analyses of external influences on economic-restructuring, less attention has been paid to international assistance to political parties. Contrary to the scholarly literature stressing preexisting socioeconomic cleavages, I argue that new parties may emerge around political cleavages during rapid change; international assistance may encourage new parties to adopt organizational forms and issue areas lacking historical precedent, which are subsequently adapted to mobilize domestic public support. To demonstrate this claim, I contrast assistance by U.S. political party affiliates to parties in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where similar revolutionary movements emerged in the name of “civil society” in 1989 but diverged, with a Western market-oriented party in the Czech Republic and populist semidemocratic party in Slovakia winning subsequent elections. The divergent paths highlight the limits to applying Western models of party organization across contexts and the need for democratic actors to be strengthened beyond founding elections.

This Note introduces the Heads of Government dataset, which provides summary information about the ideological orientation of heads of government (left, center, or right, with separately provided information about religious orientation) in 33 states in Western Europe, the Americas, and the Asia–Pacific region between 1870 and 2012. The Note also describes some intriguing empirical patterns when it comes to over-time changes in the political prominence of left-wing, centrist, and right-wing parties.

This article addresses a question that sits at the heart of democracy studies today: What do we mean when we speak about a “crisis of democracy”? The article opens with introductory clarifications on the meanings of the concept of crisis—namely its root in medicine, and on three contemporary perspectives of democracy—trilateral, deliberative, and crisis. These perspectives are analyzed using monoarchic and diarchic distinctions. Next, the article lists the main discourses about crisis in recent political theory literature. In conclusion, the article proposes an answer to the question of what we mean by crisis of democracy by arguing that it is not democracy in general but one form of democracy in particular that is in crisis—a parliamentary democracy based on the centrality of suffrage and political parties.

This study analyses why income inequality and party polarisation proceed together in some countries but not in others. By focusing on the relationship between income inequality, the permissiveness of electoral systems and party polarisation, the study offers a theoretical explanation for how the combination of income inequality and permissive electoral systems generates higher party polarisation. After analysing a cross‐national dataset of party polarisation, income inequality and electoral institutions covering 24 advanced democracies between 1960 and 2011, it is found that a simple correlation between income inequality and party polarisation is not strong. However, the empirical results indicate that greater income inequality under permissive electoral systems contributes to growing party polarisation, which suggests that parties only have diverging ideological platforms due to greater income inequality when electoral systems encourage their moves towards the extreme; parties do not diverge when electoral systems discourage their moves towards the extreme.

This article systematically investigates interest group–party interactions in the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom based on cross‐national surveys with responses from 1,225 interest groups. The findings show that interest groups and parties still interact in the beginning of the twenty‐first century, but that the vast majority of their interaction involves a low degree of institutionalisation. Using fractional logit analysis, it is demonstrated that the strength of interest group–party linkage is primarily affected by systematic differences in state–society structures and organisational group characteristics. Moreover, differences are found in what conditions different types of interaction. Whereas historical legacies and partisan origin influence an interest group's structural party links, group resources make interactions of a less institutionalised, ad hoc nature more likely.

This article addresses and observes the crisis of Western democracy through the lens of the weakness of parties and party government, especially at the European Union (EU) level. Social stratification changes, global trends and ultimately the sustained economic crisis have placed political parties atthe national and the EU level under enormous strain. Moreover, demands posed by the crisis on national governments by the EU have generated conflicting interests of different member states. The resulting development of Horizontal Euroscepticism has made intergovernmental decision making, which has represented the backbone of the EU legitimacy up to now, extremely problematic and has posed the need for rethinking democracy in multi-level Europe, ultimately by strengthening supranational democracy through the creation of a form of party government at the EU level as well.

The assignment of policy competencies to the European Union has reduced the divergence of party policy positions nationally, leaving the electorate with fewer policy options. Building upon insights from spatial proximity theories of party competition, the convergence argument predicts convergence particularly in policy domains with increasing EU competence. As the policy commitments that derive from EU membership increase, parties become more constrained in terms of the feasible policy alternative they can implement when in office. The analysis uses manifesto data at the country‐party system level for nine policy domains. It uses ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation with country fixed effects, a lagged dependent variable and country corrected standard errors. Controlling for other factors that could plausibly explain policy convergence, the models also assess whether the convergent effect of party positions varies across different types of parties. The main finding is that in policy domains where the involvement of the EU has increased, the distance between parties' positions tends to decrease. The constraining impact of EU policy decisions differs between Member and non‐Member States. This effect is more apparent for the policy agendas of larger, mainstream and pro‐EU parties in the Member States.

In the midst of the great recession, the Spanish Socialists Worker’s Party (PSOE) lost the Government and experienced a process of instability while trying to reconnect with its electorate. The party’s strategic response was embracing highly inclusive deliberations on both key institutional and policy issues that eventually sparked tensions and division. These internal debates led to the introduction and implementation of other democratic innovations, such as direct votes and consultations that substantially transformed key features of the PSOE’s organizational model. The article discusses the main features and problems of such deliberations and democratic innovations, and their wider consequences.

In reinterrogating core concepts from his 2015 book, The End of Representative Politics, Simon Tormey explains the nature of emergent, evanescent, and contrarian forms of political practice. He sheds light on what is driving the political disruption transpiring now through a series of engaging comments from the field on well-known initiatives like Occupy, #15M, and Zapatistas and also lesser-known experiments such as the creation of new political parties like Castelló en Moviment, among others. Postrepresentative representation, it is argued, is not an oxymoron; it, like the term antipolitical politics, is rather a provocative concept designed to capture the radically new swarming politics underway in countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Iceland. Citizens are tooling up with ICTs, and this has led to resonant political movements like #15M in Spain or Occupy more broadly. Key takeaways from this interview include the double-edged nature of representation and the fact that new forms of political representation are breaking the mould.

Do citizens and Members of the European Parliament agree on the format and future of the EU? While the literature has emphasized the gap between pro-European elites and increasingly Eurosceptic electorates, this article relies on a novel dataset to explore the implications of measures of such (in)congruence at the EU level. We compare the preferences of elected representatives and of voters on a wide range of issues: democracy at the supranational level, the reform of EU policies, as well as institutions. The empirical analysis relies on a citizen survey and on an MEP survey conducted in the framework of the RECONNECT project. We evidence that the level of congruence varies across issues and that it is the representatives, not the citizens, who drive polarization.

This article investigates how globalization and organized labour condition partisan effects on different welfare state programs. The main argument is that the conditional effect of globalization on government partisanship depends on how relevant a program is to the needs of vulnerable groups and that organized labour additionally affects this relationship. Analyzing 21 OECD countries between 1980 and 2011/2014, empirical evidence largely corroborates this argument: Firstly, the expectation that partisan differences decrease with globalization in general and especially in weak labour countries in the case of programs that are less relevant for compensation holds true for old‐age provision and partly for sick pay insurance. Secondly, and in accordance with theoretical expectations concerning programs that are primarily relevant for compensation, partisan differences increase with globalization, in general regarding education and only in strong labour countries regarding unemployment benefits. Therefore, while globalization constrains national politics’ room for manoeuvre in some areas, parties are still able to follow their ideologically preferred policies and respond to compensation demands in others.

Assessments of party decline and decline of traditional forms of political participation often rely on the argument of party membership decline. Most studies analysing trends in party membership over time focus on aggregate country-level data at a few points in time. While they allow grasping general membership trends, they are not without shortcomings. This article presents the Members and Activists of Political Parties (MAPP) dataset related to the MAPP project. The dataset makes a large amount of data on party membership available to the larger public. The dataset provides 6,307 party membership data observations (M) covering 397 parties in 31 countries, mostly between 1945 and 2014. The article discusses the existing literature and data on party membership trends, how membership trends have been assessed so far, and the potential added value of the MAPP dataset.

This study explores the polarised nature of climate change politics in the USA. First, it describes the opposing stances on climate change taken by Republican and Democratic leaders. It then uses survey data to show that Republican and Democratic citizens hold widely differing views on climate change and that these differences are greatest among the most educated. Partisan polarisation poses a challenge to those seeking to build support for new policy efforts on climate change.

This article suggests theoretical refinements to the multiple streams framework (MSF) that make it applicable to parliamentary systems and the decision‐making stage of the policy process. Regarding the former, the important role of political parties in parliamentary democracies is highlighted. Party policy experts are expected to be members of the policy communities in the policy stream and to promote viable policy alternatives in their respective parties, while the party leadership is concerned with adopting policies in the political stream. With regard to the latter, the introduction of a second coupling process to analyse decision making more rigorously is suggested. Moreover, the article provides operational definitions of the framework's key concepts when applied to parliamentary systems and derives a systematic set of falsifiable hypotheses for agenda‐setting and decision making in these systems, thus addressing one of the main critiques against the MSF – namely that no hypotheses can be derived from it.

Political parties are typically seen as conservative institutions which rarely change. Despite this common perception, parties do change, and on occasion, transform themselves by changing features such as the party name and logo, or their policy program. How can we conceptualize these kinds of changes, and what are the electoral consequences for parties which change in these ways? In this paper, I argue that feature changes and policy changes are instances of party rebranding, or situations where a party attempts to overhaul its entire image. I then test the electoral consequences of feature and policy rebrands on a dataset of 239 political parties from 1945 to 2019. The results indicate that feature rebrands increase party vote share for the election after the rebrand, while policy rebrands have no effect. These findings have implications for our understanding of parties themselves and the kinds of party signals that voters respond to.

Crowd‐coding is a novel technique that allows for fast, affordable and reproducible online categorisation of large numbers of statements. It combines judgements by multiple, paid, non‐expert coders to avoid miscoding(s). It has been argued that crowd‐coding could replace expert judgements, using the coding of political texts as an example in which both strategies produce similar results. Since crowd‐coding yields the potential to extend the replication standard to data production and to ‘scale’ coding schemes based on a modest number of carefully devised test questions and answers, it is important that its possibilities and limitations are better understood. While previous results for low complexity coding tasks are encouraging, this study assesses whether and under what conditions simple and complex coding tasks can be outsourced to the crowd without sacrificing content validity in return for scalability. The simple task is to decide whether a party statement counts as positive reference to a concept – in this case: equality. The complex task is to distinguish between five concepts of equality. To account for the crowd‐coder's contextual knowledge, the IP restrictions are varied. The basis for comparisons is 1,404 party statements, coded by experts and the crowd (resulting in 30,000 online judgements). Comparisons of the expert‐crowd match at the level of statements and party manifestos show that the results are substantively similar even for the complex task, suggesting that complex category schemes can be scaled via crowd‐coding. The match is only slightly higher when IP restrictions are used as an approximation of coder expertise.

In a 2021 Special Issue in European Political Science, Anika Gauja and Karina Kosiara-Pedersen review the sub-field of party politics research. In doing so, they argue party politics scholarship reflects the broader development of the political science discipline, illustrating the evolving relationship between politics researchers and the organisations they study. In this reply, we argue that the party politics sub-field reflects the wider discipline in another crucial respect—it continues to marginalise gender politics scholarship. We demonstrate that a gendered lens fundamentally transforms key questions in the field around what party politics scholars study, and how and why they conduct their research, with relevant consequences for whose work is included. In failing to engage with this scholarship, “mainstream” party politics scholars are (re)producing unequal power relations and hierarchies within the discipline, while also depriving themselves of the capacity to address fully key questions of representation, democracy, continuity and change.