Do electoral rules shape party centralization? Duverger posed the question seven decades ago; confounding factors have kept it open ever since. We argue that centralization also responds strategically to institutional and ecological incentives, not only to inheritance, imitation, or top-down imposition. Brazil's bifurcated mayoral rules offer a quasi-experimental test: municipalities under 200,000 registered voters elect mayors by single-member plurality (SMP); larger ones use a two-round system (TRS). A regression discontinuity design at this threshold identifies the causal effect of electoral rules on party organization, using elected (decentralized) versus appointed (centralized) local branches as the outcome. TRS municipalities sustain about two to three more elected branches than comparable SMP municipalities, and under SMP the probability of gaining a new branch drops sharply once about two parties hold one — consistent with Cox's M+1 rule. A cross-national analysis of 365 parties in 56 democracies with directly elected presidents is consistent with the pattern. Restrictive rules centralize parties from the bottom up.
How prominent are conspiracy theory beliefs among supporters of populist and radical right movements? Are they characteristic of the populist ‘thin-ideology’ rather than the ‘thick’ ideologies that accompany it and are they associated with supporting candidates in elections? While the literature notes a convergence between the populist worldview and conspiratorial beliefs, most studies analyze single countries, and miss out on broader cross-national patterns. In two studies, I examine whether conspiracy theory beliefs are associated with support for populist and radical right parties across Europe, distinguishing populism’ s effect from accompanying ideologies, using two large cross-national European datasets, the Voices of Central Europe dataset (9 countries) and European Social Survey (24 countries). Study 1 shows nuanced results with conspiracy theory beliefs strongly associated with support for both populist and radical right parties in Central Europe when controlling for party family, with radical right ideology being the strongest predictor, while Study 2 demonstrates similar associations with latent populist attitudes and authoritarianism, as well as feeling close to a populist or radical right party and having voted for them in the previous election. While conspiracy theory believers are shown to be more likely to support populist candidates, this relationship leans heavily rightward. These results further our understanding of the consequences of conspiracy theory beliefs on voter behavior by providing cross-national evidence for the conspiracy theory-populist connection.
Previous work finds that party polarisation increases proximity voting. However, there is surprisingly little evidence about how. This article compares the importance of two possible mediators. First, party polarisation reduces the indifference voters have towards parties' policy platforms. As a result, party polarisation should increase voters' motivation to evaluate parties based on policy agreement. Second, party polarisation makes it easier for voters to know the relative positions of the parties, improving their ability to choose the closest party. Drawing on cross-national data from the most recent European parliamentary elections, the voter's motivation is operationalised as the ‘policy differential’ – the spread of party distances relative to the closest party. Similarly, the voter's ability is measured in terms of ‘party position knowledge’, the fraction of parties the voter places in the same order as country experts. A causal mediation analysis shows that both the voter's indifference and their party position knowledge have comparably sized, substantial mediation effects, accounting for the vast majority of the total effect of ideological party polarisation on left-right proximity voting. Therefore, this article contributes rare evidence about the mechanism by which party polarisation leads to proximity voting.
What are the effects of political violence on election outcomes in established democracies? We argue that exposure to political violence raises citizens’ demands for security. Existing accounts disagree on whether this demand rewards incumbents, conservative parties, or the radical right, but they agree that it should cost extremist parties perceived as contributing to instability. Using a novel police dataset of 148 incidents of political violence, almost all from the far left or the far right, during Greece’s snap parliamentary elections of May and June 2012, we employ a difference-in-differences design at the voting center level in Athens and Thessaloniki. We find no evidence that political violence affects voter turnout. Further, we find only tenuous evidence of an electoral boost from violent incidents for populist radical right parties. Political violence does, however, reduce the combined vote share of extremist parties in exposed areas. Separating far-left from far-right incidents suggests that each extremist party loses support after violence from its own ideological side, though the evidence is stronger for the far right and we treat the pattern as descriptive. We argue that the backlash against extremist parties as a whole speaks to research on how voters punish parties associated with violence, as well as to wider debates about democratic resilience in times of crisis.
Does partisanship undermine economic accountability? Although research shows that partisan bias in economic perceptions varies across economic conditions, the explanation for this variation remains contested. An ambiguity account expects the partisan gap to narrow whenever economic signals are clear, in booms as in busts; a threat account expects it to narrow only when conditions deteriorate severely. Because both accounts predict compression during downturns, separating them means observing strong, sustained growth as well, ideally among the same citizens who lived through the crisis. Using twelve waves of Spanish panel data covering a full economic cycle (2010–2020), I find the asymmetric pattern the threat account predicts: the gap between government and opposition partisans compresses sharply during crises but persists, and widens, during strong expansion. Strong identifiers display roughly twice the gap of weak identifiers at every point in the cycle, yet both groups compress at similar rates as conditions deteriorate. Finally, economic evaluations continue to shape government approval and incumbent support in a pattern consistent with the theorized accountability chain. Even in one of its more politically and economically turbulent decades, Spain shows that accountability is still solid when it is most needed.
