Research on the relationship between the far right and the mainstream has predominantly focused on how far-right electoral success exerts external pressure on mainstream parties, leading them to accommodate reactionary frames and policies. While this literature has provided important insights on party competition, it underplays the agency of mainstream actors. This conceptual paper advances a new research agenda centred on the notion of “far-righting the mainstream”. Rather than treating far-right ideas as exogenous imports, we foreground the endogenous ideological, institutional, and state-centred dynamics through which mainstream parties actively shape, legitimise, and implement reactionary agendas. By reconceptualising the mainstream as a contingent, historically specific, and productive site of reactionary politics, this approach moves beyond accommodation-based explanations and offers a framework for analysing democratic regression and authoritarian drift in contemporary party systems. If the mainstream’s reactionary turn cannot be explained solely by party competition or public opinion, what are the key drivers of this transformation? We argue that this evolution is rooted in (1) broader economic and geopolitical challenges; (2) the ongoing ideological reconfiguration of liberal traditions; and (3) emerging class realignments in response to these destabilising conditions. Ultimately, we propose “far-righting the mainstream” as a framework for better diagnosing the mechanisms underlying democratic regression within contemporary societies. At the same time, , it provides a basis for evaluating strategies aimed at countering the normalisation of reactionary politics.
How did the West European mainstream manage conflicting positional demands on the issue of immigration? This submission unpacks party positional changes on immigration, integration and national identity, and explores potential reasons why they were made. After probing the type and extent of changes by the five major party families in Western Europe, the results suggest a cautious mainstream primarily intensifying or de-escalating its positions within existing policy dimensions. Yet the direction of these changes also was counterintuitive and predominantly went against relevant prompts in the external political environment. The advantage of this strategy is the political mainstream may claim positions have changed although they largely remained the same. The disadvantage, however, is mainstream parties also must explain how a more liberal or restrictive, assimilative or multicultural, or, cosmopolitan or nationalist position qualifies as “change” to satisfy opponents and supporters alike.
This study examines the relationship between subjective general health and institutional political participation, with a focus on the mediating mechanisms and age-related heterogeneity in this association. Using data from Round 10 of the European Social Survey, we find that better subjective health significantly increases institutional political participation, particularly among older adults. Path analysis and structural equation modelling reveal that this relationship is mediated by political trust, internal political efficacy, and external political efficacy. These mechanisms collectively explain the link between health and political engagement. Importantly, age moderates this relationship: while health has a pronounced effect on political participation among older adults, it is not a significant determinant for younger adults aged 18–50, likely due to their generally stable health. We adopted the civic voluntarism model to analyze the results. The findings provide a nuanced, boundary-conditioned perspective on the resource model of political participation. Rather than offering an unconditional confirmation of health as a direct participatory resource, our results indicate that health operates primarily as a catalyst for psychological engagement, particularly for the elderly. Conversely, no substantial evidence supports the issue-engagement hypothesis. as unhealthy individuals do not exhibit higher participation in institutional political activities.
What do the different free movement and citizenship regimes of the U.S. and the EU reveal about their political projects and the nature of their polities? Proponents of European integration see free movement as an explicit goal on a continent fragmented by separate cultures and identities, robust and diverse national institutions, modest economic integration relative to the U.S., and relatively low-mobility national cultures that make reducing barriers and encouraging free movement central to the European project. By contrast, the relationship of internal free movement to the political project of U.S. federalism is far less direct, and mobility is encouraged by a shared language, culture, and national identity, relatively homogeneous state institutions, high and longstanding economic integration, and a historical culture of mobility. Though the EU often tries to imitate aspects of the U.S.–especially hoping to emulate American geographic mobility and the economic dynamism it signifies–these are very different political projects, and their steps to foster free movement and shared citizenship occur under very different conditions.
The EU and the US have emerged as central actors in the governance of the digital economy. Existing scholarship tends to view their digital governance models as distinctive approaches, with the EU advancing a rights-based model and the US favoring a market-based approach. Yet, such arguments mask the underlying interdependencies that shape digital policymaking on both sides of the Atlantic. In this paper, we show how the digital market governance strategies of the EU and the US were shaped through the constant interactions of their respective attempts to unleash market competition and shield citizens from harm. By tracing the evolution of transatlantic digital governance since the 1990s, we highlight how both jurisdictions initially emphasized market making over market correction, hoping to unleash the promises of new technology. As the digital economy consolidated around a few large US-based technology companies, however, digital governance in the EU shifted toward a more protective approach. EU digital governance attempted to balance the EU’s dependence on foreign digital technology firms—and their influence on EU policymaking—with efforts to get these firms to follow EU market rules. European regulatory efforts reverberated across the Atlantic as US policymakers took up concerns related to market concentration. With the reelection of Donald Trump, digital policy is increasingly becoming intertwined with both trade and security policy on both sides of the Atlantic. The paper, then, underscores the interrelated nature of digital policy-making where markets and authority increasingly span borders.
What motivates people to hold liberal or conservative policy preferences? Following an interactive interpretation of the dual process model of ideology, we examine how Europeans’ value-based predispositions interact to predict their immigration-policy preferences. We conduct three sets of analyses. First, we establish whether there is an association between predispositions and immigration preferences in all countries in the first ten rounds of the European Social Survey. Second, we investigate whether the patterns we observe in the first two sets of analyses carry over to a set of immigration-policy preferences asked about in rounds 1, 4, 7, and 8. In line with previous research, we find that more accepting and open immigration-policy preferences require both altruistic and libertarian predispositions. However, more restrictive and exclusive immigration-policy preferences can result from either an egoistic (vs. altruistic) predisposition or an authoritarian (vs. libertarian) predisposition, with egoistic predispositions exerting the strongest impact.
This paper examines how EU gender equality norm diffusion, conservative counter-mobilization, and multidimensional gender-role attitudes shape gender gaps in protest participation across Europe and neighboring states. The backlash amplification hypothesis expects that EU-driven equality norms narrow gender gaps where conservative mobilization is weak and widen them where it is strong. The hybridization hypothesis posits that hybrid attitudinal profiles combining egalitarian and traditional orientations gain political relevance in contexts of intense counter-mobilization and high norm diffusion. The analysis draws on three waves of the European Values Study and country-level indicators, using latent class analysis to model gender-role attitudes and multinomial logistic regressions with cross-level interactions to estimate protest participation across four categories: non-participation, low-effort acts (petitions, boycotts), high-effort activities (demonstrations, strikes), and mixed-effort engagement (combining both types). The results partially support both hypotheses. The backlash amplification pattern is clearest in low-effort protest, where gender gaps narrow under weak mobilization and widen under strong mobilization, but weaker in high- and mixed-effort forms. Hybrid attitudinal profiles matter mainly for low- and mixed-effort protest but not for abstention or high-effort participation. The findings imply that EU norm diffusion does not uniformly reduce gender gaps in protest and can, under strong conservative backlash, reinforce them.
After receding from the headlines for a long time, the Single Market has returned to the forefront of the European Union agenda. The project to pursue the “four freedoms” of goods, services, labor and capital remains over shadowed by calls to develop new EU capacities for strategic autonomy in security and economic affairs, but it is once again widely praised as a key tool—if still a contested one—to promote European competitiveness and power. This special issue assembles a group of experts to speak to these discussions by illuminating aspects of the Single Market’s development and current functioning. Two distinctive moves frame its contributions. One is the use of comparative perspective, setting EU features alongside those of the other vast internal market of the Western world—the United States. Not only does comparison help us to highlight what stands out about EU economic governance, it offers some insight into the evolving US politics that are a crucial external condition for Europe’s choices. The other is a focus on normative goals and trade-off s in internal-market governance. Any project to promote multi-jurisdictional market integration raises major issues about the promotion and distribution of economic gains, the provision of effective democratic government, and respect and tolerance for diverse populations. Using leverage from similarities and differences with the US, we highlight some of the normative principles at work in Europe’s Single Market. This introduction frames key normative trade-off s around the governance of internal openness in multilevel systems, makes the case for the EU-US comparison about them, and surveys the contributing articles on harmonization and regulatory competition, digital markets, competition policy, commercial and personal mobility, and the delegation of democratic authority.
Promoting issues close to the agenda of radical left parties (RLPs), progressive social movements (PSMs) have mobilised a new generation of activists in many European democracies in recent years. This article examines how and why RLPs and PSMs cooperate. Methodologically, it triangulates semi-structured interviews with elites from the two main Portuguese RLPs, Left Bloc and Portuguese Communist Party, and of three recent PSMs (International Feminist Strike, School Strike for Climate, and House for Living Platform), and includes interviews with activists with overlapping memberships of the two. Overall, we find interactions to partly align with the co-evolution thesis: both sides maintain autonomy while engaging in informal, non-exclusive collaborations. Yet the relationship is less stable than the model implies and does not necessarily generate sustained mutual adaptation. PSMs primarily cooperate for instrumental reasons: to amplify visibility, influence policymaking and obtain material support. RLPs, in turn, see PSMs as mechanisms to reinforce their policy agenda. Interactions are predominantly informal, through overlapping memberships, which facilitate the exchange of information and resources but also generate tensions. Consistent with the literature, cooperation is shaped by parties’ organisational and ideological traits. However, social movements are not passive actors, with their positions and strategies also significantly shaping interactions with RLPs.
Where US and EU competition regimes have common roots in the fight against robber barons and authoritarian regimes, they may be argued to have far more in common than is generally imagined within a dominant narrative of US neoliberalism versus EU ordoliberalism. In this collection of essays, EU and US competition regimes have a particular position, being far less inimical to processes of centralisation than government regulation generally. Where this contribution ends by arguing that a return to anti-authoritarian competition regimes is now appropriate, especially in the face of rapid technological advance and structural upheaval, it reaches that conclusion by detailing the political economy of competition law and policy in the US and the EU, processes of convergence and divergence throughout a history, as well as the particular place of competition law as a creature of terra nullis, or, as a regulatory instrument within the private sphere that often pre-empts democratically-legitimated schemes of regulation.
Women in politics are targets of harassment, intimidation, and abuse. Violence affects women in all aspects of their life and parliaments are not immune to this problem. Beyond individual suffering, gender-based violence interfere with women’s right to participate in political life and undermines the representativeness of political institutions. What are parliamentary institutions of the EU and EU member-states doing to address this? Despite growing international recognition, the adoption of specific policies to tackle the issue within parliamentary institutions is insufficient. Drawing on a framework that combines the literature on public ethics regulation and feminist institutionalism, we compare the measures to prevent and detect gender-based violence in EU27 parliaments and the European Parliament. The data shows lack of recognition of the issue in almost half of the European parliaments. The variety of categories of parliamentary personnel and the complexity that results from differences in their legal status make internal parliamentary policies fragmented, with different procedures for different groups, and ultimately incomplete. Harassment is typically understood as a workplace hazard, rather than an issue of political equality and representation, with the vast majority of parliaments excluding members of parliament from their protective measures. The ideal of gender-sensitive parliaments is still far away.
Non-majoritarian institutions like independent agencies and central banks play a significant role in market governance in the EU, the U.S., and everywhere. For many scholars, however, delegation to non-majoritarian institutions requires the embedding in a single, coherent democratic people in order to be legitimate. This view underlies many of the strongest normative critiques of the EU, where the substantial powers of non-majoritarian institutions like the Commisison, the European Central Bank, and many decentralized agencies enjoy no such justification. I argue that this common normative account relies on an unsustainable notion of cultural and political coherence as a prerequisite for legitimacy. In its place, I defend a theory of legitimacy which builds on robust claims to the common good, expertise, and value inputs—all authorized and controlled by thinner democratic procedures. Using the example of single-market governance in the EU and the U.S., I show that legitimacy assessments which presuppose strong cultural and political coherence overstate the differences between the two polities.
This article explores the national role conceptions (NRCs) and underlying sources that Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia adopt in their foreign policy orientations. Applying Holsti’s (1970) role theory, we conducted a comparative and discourse-sensitive content analysis of leaders’ addresses at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) between 2008 and 2024. The analysis contends that leaders’ foreign policy discourse is shaped by a coexisting role tension between identity-missioned and conflict-oriented Balkanisation versus norm-missioned and cooperation-oriented Europeanisation. First, identity-missioned active independent and liberation supporter roles, with pertinent sources of international principles, perception of threat, humanitarian concern, and historical legacies, discursively reproduce Balkanisation across inter-state and regional levels. Second, norm-missioned role of faithful ally, grounded in sense of belonging, geographical location, humanitarian concerns, and economic needs, functions as a catalyst for cooperation-oriented discursive Europeanisation at the international level. Third, Serbia, redefining the role tension between Europeanisation and Balkanisation, emerges as a sui generis case. Belgrade’s distinct roles, excluding faithful ally and including anti-imperialist agent, and ever-changing interpretations of sources set it apart from other states.
The concept of ‘movement party’ has become influential in bridging research on political parties and social movements, yet it remains under-theorised and unevenly operationalised, particularly in the study of European radical left parties (RLPs). This article reassesses the analytical utility of the movement party concept through a comparative qualitative analysis of three RLPs: Podemos (Spain), La France insoumise (France), and Bloco de Esquerda (Portugal). Building on Kitschelt’s original formulation and adapting a three-part framework from studies of radical right movement parties, the article examines organisational structure, internal decision-making, and external mobilisation. The findings reveal significant variation. La France insoumise most closely approximates the movement-party ideal type, albeit in a charismatic-patrimonial form resistant to institutionalisation. Podemos and Bloco de Esquerda, initially closer to digital-plebiscitarian and grassroots-democratic movement parties respectively, have evolved towards greater organisational institutionalisation while retaining durable links to protest arenas and social movements. These parties are better conceptualised as movement-oriented rather than full movement parties. Overall, the study demonstrates that the movement party remains a valuable heuristic concept when treated as an ideal type, enabling systematic comparison, identification of subtypes, and analysis of organisational change within the radical left.
This introduction to the special issue reviews research on party politics, social movement organisations, and political activism and identifies gaps in research on radical left mobilisation in the twenty-first century. First, this introduction provides a definition of radical left cooperation, and outlines key theoretical concepts which can help to advance its study. It explains why such cooperation is likely to be conditioned by contextual social, political, and economic factors. Second, it outlines the structure and contributions of the special issue. It concludes by discussing the key findings and how their insights advance the study of radical left cooperation.
Research suggests that when RLPs enter national government their linkages tend to weaken because policy compromise is followed by movement demobilisation, and as the party in public office gains influence over the party organisation. Little is known, however, about radical left linkage or potential incumbency effects at the local level where RLPs have more experience of governing. This article addresses this gap by focusing on four RLPs, that headed local councils during the last decade (AKEL, Die Linke, SP, and SV). The analysis of the reported linkage activities of the respective local branches of these parties before and after taking office questions whether an incumbency effect exists at the local level. The findings instead demonstrate that RLPs tend to engage in local level linkages which directly promote aspects of their radical left policy agenda and highlight the role of ideological and organisational variables in shaping RLP links with social groups.
The Icelandic Pirate Party was first elected in 2013 and served for four consecutive terms in the Icelandic parliament. However, in the most recent (snap) election of November 2024, the Pirates did not manage to get re-elected to parliament. In this study, we examine the development of the Pirate Party using a theoretical framework that sees the life cycle of political parties as divided into three major stages: an 'identification' stage, an 'organisation' stage, and a 'stabilisation' stage. According to this model, a party's survival depends on its success in moving from one stage to the next. Drawing from diverse data sources, we map the history of the party; to what extent it followed the expectations of the model and how this speaks to its initial aspirations for a new way of doing politics. Our results suggest that the party's historical trajectory fits the theoretical framework remarkably well: the party appears to have entered the 'organisation' stage in 2016-2017 and has since then been struggling to reach the 'stabilisation' stage. Whether this struggle contributed to their recent electoral loss is hard to say, but it seems that they are not quite just another establishment party-at least not yet.
The distinctiveness of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) within the radical left family raises questions about the specific political trajectory it chose to follow during the crisis period (2008–2018). The article seeks to explore the party’s connections with the movements against austerity during this period, and, more generally, with the explosion of protest in Greek society. It examines the KKE’s strategy regarding social mobilisation, focusing on the case of the All Workers’ Militant Front (PAME). The article draws on research on party linkage strategies, the relations between radical left parties and movements, and movement parties, to provide a comprehensive analysis of the KKE’s linkage strategies. It analyses how PAME became the key linkage strategy of the KKE, operating as a front for trade union forces. In addition, it shows how the structure of PAME functioned as the model for the party’s intervention in other social spaces. The subsequent discussion will focus on the evolution of this strategy during and after the crisis, with particular attention given to its repercussions on the party’s organisational structure, its position within the context of party competition, and its interactions with social movements.
In Italy, radical extra-parliamentary left-wing groups with a strong youth presence display an almost complete absence of collaboration with political parties, including those on the left. This article investigates why this separation exists and how it is justified by young activists. Drawing on 44 qualitative interviews with activists from 38 groups in 14 cities, the analysis shows that weak collaboration cannot be explained solely by distrust or strategic calculations. Rather, it reflects a multi-level incompatibility between the party form of political organisation and the practices and expectations that structure contemporary radical youth activism. The fracture concerns, first, aims and horizons of action, with activists orienting their engagement towards radical transformation and prefigurative alternatives rather than institutional compromise. Second, it concerns organisational cultures, as assembly-based, horizontal and initiative-driven models clash with delegated, leadership-centred and bureaucratic party routines. Third, it concerns political language and relevance, with parties often perceived as anachronistic and detached from “real life” problems. Finally, it concerns the meanings of participation: for many young people, activism is also a space for sociability, recognition, identity, and personal growth, which the party form is widely perceived as unable to provide.
This paper addresses two related questions. First, why did some of the many Pirate Parties that emerged at the turn of the millennium fail to gain traction, while others succeeded in entering government at the subnational or even national level? Second, why are Pirate Parties today—aside from a few notable exceptions—generally in decline? These questions are far from trivial. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, when Pirate Parties rose to prominence alongside mass protest movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy, and the Indignados, digital technologies were widely celebrated as engines of democratic renewal. More than a decade later, digitalization has become pervasive, and issues of intellectual property, surveillance, and democratic erosion have grown more urgent, particularly with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. So where have all the Pirates gone? Drawing on a comparative analysis of two paired cases of Pirate Parties in Spain and Germany, and in Poland and Czechia, I argue that explanations for Pirate Parties’ electoral stagnation, success, or decline lie not on the demand side, but on the supply side. Specifically, they are rooted in strategic interactions with other political parties, as well as with social movements and civil society, encompassing issue-based, organizational, and image-related challenges.
