While electoral systems shape candidates’ incentives to cultivate personal reputations, institutional rules do not translate mechanically into campaign behaviour. We argue that both electoral institutions and ideological traditions shape campaign strategies: ideological traditions influence both the attractiveness of candidate-centred appeals and how strongly candidates respond to institutional incentives. We present the first large cross-national test of their joint influence, using data from 37 elections in 16 countries under proportional representation. We show that candidate-centred campaigning is more prevalent in open list systems, but that this institutional effect is not uniform. Candidates from leftleaning parties are more party-centred, and the personalising effect of open lists is weaker among them than among candidates from right leaning parties. These findings show that the consequences of electoral reform depend on the normative and strategic contexts in which parties operate.
This article examines leadership contests in European mainstream parties confronting electoral decline and attempting to restore competitiveness. Focusing on this broader phenomenon, it analyses incumbent leaders seeking renewed mandates through open primary elections in such contexts. The article applies Stark’s (1996) selection criteria (‘acceptability’, ‘electability’ and ‘competence’) to the 2024 Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) leadership contest in Greece as a demanding empirical and methodological setting: an incumbent leader seeking re-election through a competitive open primary within a recovery major party after only limited electoral improvement. Drawing on candidates’ speeches, press reports, official results and polling indicators mapped onto Stark’s criteria, the study evaluates party members’ and supporters’ perceptions of the main contenders. The findings show that the incumbent leader, Nikos Androulakis, led his opponents on all three criteria and suggest that incumbent re-election in recovery major parties is broadly consistent with Stark’s model when electability is interpreted as credible electoral recovery and unity concerns stem from strategic rather than ideological conflict.
In single-party and dominant-party regimes, do party members and non-party members at the grassroots level respond differently to party-linked collective action? This paper examines how different framings of party-linked collective action shape participation among party members and non-party members in Vietnam – one of the world’s most enduring single-party regimes – using a preregistered field experiment involving more than 7000 rural women. Contrary to assumptions that party members engage in party-linked collective action for selective or ideological reasons, we find that party members are also more responsive to collective, community-oriented framings. Using a field experiment and interviews, we show that grassroots party members are more community-minded than their non-party counterparts. These findings suggest that, in addition to careerism or ideological loyalty in authoritarian party membership, altruistic and community-minded engagement is an important additional dimension. The presence of community-oriented grassroots party members has important implications for the legitimacy and durability of dominant-party regimes.
Research on the electoral impact of foreign policy has largely focused on the United States. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers an opportunity to reassess this question in a European context. This article examines the role the war in Ukraine played in shaping electoral behaviour in Italy during the September 2022 general elections. Relying on the ITANES pre- and post-electoral survey, we assess whether attitudes toward supporting Ukraine contributed to explaining Italian voter choices. The results indicate that orientations toward the Ukraine war, operationalised as support for both economic sanctions against Russia and military assistance to Ukraine, were associated with voter choice, even though domestic issues, such as immigration, remained more influential in structuring electoral preferences. We argue that this pattern reflects the strategic behaviour of parties in addressing a politically sensitive and potentially divisive issue. The article contributes to the ongoing debate on the electoral relevance of foreign policy by providing new evidence from a critical moment for the European continent.
While there is an extensive literature on ethno-regionalist parties (ERPs) in Western Europe, Kurdish ERPs in Turkey remain undertheorized. Focusing on party ideology, organizational structure, and electoral strategy, this article advances three findings. First, ideologically, Kurdish ERPs consistently articulate a left-leaning program centered on labor and democratization, while increasingly integrating post-materialist tenets such as feminism and environmentalism. Second, organizationally, they function as movement parties with a highly resilient structure. Third, strategically, they expand beyond their ethnic stronghold through broad leftist alliances and a “Turkification” ( Türkiyelileşme ) process, becoming pivotal national actors. These findings underscore the need to account for the interaction between ethno-regional mobilization, political-institutional constraints, and party-movement linkages in understanding ERPs in the European periphery.
This study investigates party membership motivations in South Korea, a highly polarized new democracy, and how they distinctively shape intra-party and campaign participation. Using survey data from 1,410 Democratic and People Power Party members, we evaluate the General Incentives Model alongside negative partisan motivation. Results show that while altruism is the primary reason for joining, higher affective polarization significantly intensifies negative partisan motivation, making it a key membership driver, particularly among conservatives. Crucially, engagement mechanisms are not monolithic: selective benefits predict both forms of participation, whereas collective policy motives specifically foster campaigning. Conversely, social norms motivation deters visible campaigning due to polarization-induced cross-pressures. Furthermore, negative partisan motivation reduces routine intra-party engagement without increasing campaign involvement. Ultimately, membership surges driven by out-group hostility produce “detached members,” indicating that expanding party rolls in polarized contexts does not automatically deepen democratic participation or organizational capacity.
It is often assumed that parliamentary activity, by demonstrating MPs’ commitment and the diligent fulfilment of their duties, is viewed favourably by the electorate and increases their chances of re-election. Our results imply a more nuanced picture. Drawing on data from the Polish Sejm between 2005 and 2023, we find that parliamentary activity has no discernible positive effect on re-election for most MPs. We also document that MPs with the lowest activity levels retain a high likelihood of securing a seat in subsequent elections. These patterns are difficult to reconcile with voters rewarding parliamentary conduct. Instead, our evidence points to the decisive role of an MP’s position in the party hierarchy in shaping voter perceptions and electoral success. In line with this, re-election depends largely on an MP’s ranking on the party list, which remains remarkably stable over time. Overall, our findings suggest that party structures and internal selection processes can substantially constrain voter-driven accountability, even in electoral systems that allow voters to choose among individual candidates.
This Research Note explores the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and party politics by applying Katz and Mair’s “three faces” framework to analyze the role of AI in reshaping party organization. While AI is not yet uniformly transforming parties, its growing use in campaigning, policymaking, membership engagement, and internal management introduces new dynamics of centralisation, personalisation, and automation. The note highlights both the opportunities AI offers for efficiency and responsiveness, and the risks it poses to transparency, accountability, and democratic representation. It argues that the incorporation of AI into party life is uneven, contested, and mediated by broader political and institutional configurations, and require closer empirical and conceptual scrutiny. In doing so, the paper outlines a new research agenda for understanding how technological change intersects with party transformation in contemporary democracies.
Although consisting of EU (potential) candidate countries, the Western Balkan Six (WB6: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia) remain largely absent from the study of party politics. Mapping the dominant lines of party contestation in the region and comparing them cross-nationally is vital to understanding what types of ideological conflicts divide the parties of this region, how programmatic the party systems are, and whether they resemble other party systems. We are the first to use and validate the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey to investigate which issues structure Western Balkan party systems and to quantitatively map these systems. Generally, these party systems are weakly programmatic, unidimensional, and structured along cultural issues with a background consensus on the EU. This article contributes to the scholarly understanding of party competition in a geopolitically important region and facilitates future research on party systems in young democracies.
Despite relatively low legal age thresholds for legislative office in Latin America, young people remain markedly underrepresented in national parliaments. Drawing on more than 9,000 individual interviews from the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America (PELA-USAL) project covering 18 countries between 1994 and 2024, this research note provides a cross-national descriptive overview of the age profile of legislators. The analysis examines age distributions across countries, political parties, gender, and ideological positioning. The findings show that only 12.2% of deputies are under 35, with substantial cross-national variation: while only 3.4% of legislators in Argentina fall into this category, the share reaches 14.8% in Mexico. Using individual-level survey data, the study documents persistent youth underrepresentation and highlights important variation across party systems and ideological orientations in Latin American legislatures.
Does the internal organization of governmental parties influence their ability to respond to shifts in public opinion? We argue that intra-government democracy , defined as the average internal democracy of governmental parties, explains variation in responsiveness. Intra-government democracy has positive features such as promoting internal deliberation and it encourages attention to core supporters’ preferences. However, deliberation limits policy changes, and responding to supporters may distract governing parties from the median voter. Thus, we expect that internally democratic governments will be less responsive to changes in the median voter position. We test this expectation using three different estimation strategies for time-series cross-national data on public opinion and governmental policies since the 1970s, and these analyses support our argument. This finding has important implications for our understanding of how intra-party institutions influence substantive responsiveness to public opinion.
The COVID-19 pandemic became one of the most salient issues for the public in the past few years, so that political parties had to address this issue if they wanted to maximize their vote share and thus the support of the citizens in upcoming elections. Due to the pandemic’s all-encompassing nature, many parties were forced to adjust their policy stances to the multitude of issues facing the public, the economy, and the health care sector. In this contribution, we analyse to what extent parties associated the COVID-19 pandemic with their issue ownership drawing upon German parliamentary parties’ press releases. Using a novel multi-step text analysis approach, we estimate which additional topics parties address in their press releases when publishing their position on the COVID-19 pandemic. We find mixed evidence for our expectation: only in a limited number of prominent issue areas, including domestic affairs, labour policy, macroeconomic issues and civil rights, do the parties we identify as more likely to associate these issues with the pandemic actually make such associations.
