This article analyses the institutional and contextual factors that facilitate the election of political newcomers as heads of government in democratic regimes. Using data from 870 democratic elections between 1945 and 2015, it is found that political newcomers are more likely to be successful in presidential systems, in new democracies and when party systems are weakly institutionalised. The election of politically inexperienced candidates is also related to governmental performance. Political newcomers are more successful when the economic performance of the government is bad and when the government engages in high‐level corruption.

The electoral consequences of the Great Recession are analysed in this article by combining insights from economic voting theories and the literature on party system change. Taking cues from these two theoretical perspectives, the impact of the Great Recession on the stability and change of Western, Central and Eastern European party systems is assessed. The article starts from the premise that, in order to fully assess the impact of the contemporary crisis, classic economic voting hypotheses focused on incumbent parties need to be combined with accounts of long‐term party system change provided by realignment and dealignment theories. The empirical analysis draws on an original dataset of election results and economic and political indicators in 30 European democracies. The results indicate that during the Great Recession economic strain was associated with sizable losses for incumbent parties and an increasing destabilisation of Western European party systems, while its impact was significantly weaker in Central and Eastern European countries, where political rather than economic failures appeared to be more relevant. In line with the realignment perspective, the results also reveal that in Western Europe populist radical right, radical left and non‐mainstream parties benefited the most from the economic hardship, while support for mainstream parties decreased further.

Although scholars of West European politics have long debated whether the region's highly institutionalised party systems were becoming de‐aligned and electorally unstable, the political fallout from the post‐2008 financial crisis has lent a new sense of urgency to the debate. The threats posed to party systems by economic crises are hardly unique to Europe, however. The Latin American experience with the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s suggests that party system upheaval was not simply a function of retrospective economic voting during the period of crisis. It was also attributable to programmatically de‐aligning policy responses to crises – namely the ‘bait‐and‐switch’ imposition of austerity and adjustment measures by labour‐based, left‐leaning parties that were traditional champions of statist and redistributive policies. Such patterns of reform made it difficult for party systems to channel societal resistance to market orthodoxy in the post‐adjustment era, setting the stage for convulsive ‘reactive sequences’ when such resistance arose outside and against mainstream parties through varied forms of social and electoral protest, typically on the left flank. This article explores the political fallout from the European and Latin American economic crises from a comparative perspective, arguing that it is essential to think beyond the short‐term political dynamics of crisis management to consider the longer‐term institutional legacies and fragilities of the different political alignments forged around crisis‐induced policy reforms.

This paper argues that issue salience divergence – the extent to which parties in a party system diverge in their allocation of salience across issues – is a key characteristic of party system decidability. Elections do not only matter in that politicians and parties with different policy positions may come to power. They can also matter if competing elites emphasize different issues. Using data from the MARPOR project and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I demonstrate that voters perceive greater differences between parties when parties propose agendas that diverge with respect to issue salience. Furthermore, I demonstrate that perceptions of differences between parties mediate the effect of issue salience divergence on respondents’ satisfaction with democracy and self‐reported voter turnout. These findings indicate that salience‐based differentiation influences the quality of party systems alongside the traditional party system characteristics with important implications for public opinion and political behavior.

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.

Party ideology plays an important role in determining which government coalitions form. Research on coalition formation tends to focus on the ideological distance between coalition parties. However, the distribution of preferences within the coalition, and the legislature, also has implications for which government coalition forms – that is, a party's willingness to join a coalition depends not only on its prospective coalition partners, but also on the alternative coalitions it could form. Several hypotheses about the effects of legislative polarisation are offered and tested using data on coalition formation in 17 parliamentary democracies in the postwar period. This article also demonstrates how the traditional measure of ideological divisions within coalitions fails to capture certain aspects of ideological heterogeneity within the cabinet (and the opposition) and how Esteban and Ray's polarisation index helps in addressing these deficiencies.

Contexts outside the advanced developed democracies present a challenge to assessing how well party systems reflect voter preferences across over-arching policy dimensions because not all electorates readily interpret political conflict in dimensional terms. In this contribution, I advocate an approach suited for such contexts that combines deductive and inductive elements: It starts out with what observers consider the most important dividing lines in a party system, and then goes on to operationalize these dimensions in an inductive fashion by drawing on all theoretically relevant items that are available in mass and elite surveys. I devise a relative-fit measure of responsiveness that can be compared across space and time, even if positions at the elite and mass levels are measured on different scales. To illustrate the usefulness of the strategy, I show how it leads to novel contrasts in terms of programmatic responsiveness among four Latin American countries, namely Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, and Bolivia.

This article reviews Giovanni Sartori's contribution to contemporary political science. Sartori, who has just turned eighty, re-founded Italian political science and taught a generation of political scientists. He has made important contributions on democracy, party systems, and on political and constitutional engineering, and has written many significant methodological articles. Conceptual clarity, analytical rigour, methodological awareness, and interest in theory-building have allowed Sartori to become one of the most prominent political scientists of the 20th century.

Direct public funding (DPF) is a crucial resource for political parties in many of the world’s democracies. While research into the consequences of DPF has grown in prominence since the turn of the century, few efforts have been made to synthesize its findings. This article takes the first steps in doing so. Viewing DPF as an independent variable, we assess the impacts that party subsidization has on electoral competition, party organizations, party system development, and gender representation, before unpacking the intricacies of the DPF-corruption relationship. Given the inconclusive findings across these domains, the article discusses methodological challenges related to data availability and DPF operationalization, concluding with brief policy recommendations and several avenues for future research.

This research note challenges the utility of the “far right” label, which groups together the extreme right and the (populist) radical right, for the study of contemporary European party systems. It argues that while extreme right parties are typically consistent with the traditional conceptualization of anti-system parties, those belonging to the (populist) radical right increasingly experience a pattern of integration without substantive ideological moderation – i.e. negative integration – which challenges the Sartorian conceptualization. Nevertheless, Sartori's idea of disjointed space, which separates via “no coalition” points the parties that are perceived to be illegitimate players in the party system from the others, remains essential to understanding the diverging trends that characterize the extreme right and the (populist) radical right today as well as the cases that deviate from the typical pattern. The notion of disjointed space accounts for the qualitative difference between the actors that are perceived to be suitable for coalitions by the more traditional mainstream parties and, ultimately, allows us to understand why (populist) radical right parties are often integrated in party systems, while those of the extreme right are not. The analysis invites scholars to use the most precise term whenever possible rather than vaguely referring to the “far right,” as it overlooks key differences from a party system perspective. Notably, although nativist and authoritarian ideas increasingly permeate public debate, when it comes to political parties, it is more accurate to speak of the mainstreaming of the (populist) radical right rather than of the “far right” as a whole.

This research note traces the evolution of Sartori's theoretical reflection on the party system, primarily by describing the relationship between “format and mechanics” to assess its explanatory power. The main conclusion of the analysis is that Sartori's framework has all the elements of an empirical party system theory. A systemic theory of party relations does not have to explain party behaviour but only the combined effect, in terms of the system's mechanics, of all party actions. Thus, the theory states that the number of parties and their positioning in the unidimensional competitive space cause the system's mechanics. The dependent variable is ordinal, about the quantitative and qualitative distribution of power among the parties. This detracts from the parsimony of the theory and requires other independent or at least intervening variables besides the number of parties: ideological distance and direction of competition. This difference notwithstanding, we can still accept Sartori's framework as a general party system theory. Appropriate mid or lower-range theories could supplement the general one in explaining sub-systemic phenomena. Irrespective of whether we call it a classification, a framework or a theory, Sartori's contribution remains a fundamental milestone in the study of parties and party systems.

The article examines the key factors influencing women’s electoral success in European Parliament (EP) elections. We present a new conceptual approach and a novel model that simultaneously incorporates trends in party characteristics, institutional and socio-economic factors and cross-country trends in women’s representation. The model provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationships between party-level and Member State-level factors and the election of women to the EP. The study is based on an original dataset of 450 observations on national political parties from all Member States, spanning four European elections from 2004 to 2019.

Our results show that party characteristics such as incumbency rates, party size and ideological orientations (i.e. the party’s position on the GAL-TAN scale or its attitude towards European integration) play a key role in shaping women’s representation. This article provides novel insights into the unique features of Central and Eastern Europe, elucidating divergent patterns of women’s electoral prospects in conservative and progressive parties in Western democracies and Central and Eastern European post-communist EU Member States.

The study of party systems tends to focus on individual parties and overlooks factions and other sub-party units. Although the impact of the district magnitude on the number of electoral parties is well established, the electoral rules incentives on party subunits have been overlooked. Using electoral results at the district level, we assess the effect of the district magnitude on the effective number of parties and effective number of factions competing in elections and with legislative seats in Colombia (1958–1990). By focusing on parties and factions, we produce empirical evidence from 444 datapoints to support the claim made elsewhere that roots of multi-partism were present throughout the period studied, including under the National Front (1958–1970), where only two parties were permitted. The district magnitude impacts the number of parties and the number of party subunits, but its effect is stronger on the former. When the National Front came to an end and electoral rules were modified in the 1970s, there was an increase in party factionalism and new parties in the years before multiparty system rules were enshrined in the 1991 constitution.

Political finance in liberal democracies is often regarded as a source of pathology accompanied by demands for reform. But on what principles and values should political finance reform be grounded? The existing scholarship provides no more than sketchy advice on such matters. To address this gap, this paper presents a normative framework to evaluate political finance rules, which proposes (a) that the design of such rules should take account of the party system in which the financing rules will operate; (b) that both political finance rules and party systems should be evaluated in terms of three normative dimensions of partisanship (collegiality, systemic voice, and systemic accountability); and (c) that political finance reforms ought to counterbalance the pathologies inherent to different party systems. A set of political finance rules that satisfies these three conditions is an instantiation of what we describe as the ‘civic model of political finance’.

We tackle the problem of simulating seat- and vote-shares for a party system of a given size. We show how these shares can be generated using unordered and ordered Dirichlet distributions. We show that a distribution with a mean vector given by the rule described in Taagepera and Allik (2006, Electoral Studies 25, 696–713) fits real-world data almost as well as a saturated model where there is a parameter for each rank/system size combination.

Federal elections between 2008 and 2019 saw a great of volatility in Quebec, with important consequences for election outcomes. The surge in New Democratic Party (NDP) support in Quebec led the party to official opposition, while Liberal gains in 2011 led the party to a majority government, and Bloc Québécois gains in 2019 helped to reduce the Liberals to a minority. To what extent was this volatility driven by voters switching parties and to what degree was it driven by voters entering and exiting the electorate? This article uses ecological inference based on riding-level data to examine the dynamics of party competition in Quebec from 2008 to 2019. We show that while voter mobilization mattered to volatility, vote switching was the important driver of changing party fortunes during this period.