Within 18 months of its second consecutive general election (March 2018) as Italy's largest party, the valence populist 5-Star Movement (M5S) had dropped to polling 4th, halving its 30% + vote-share, behind parties of both the right and the left. In those 18-months, the party participated in two governments: one of the right and one of the centre-left. Two broad explanations for such decline are presented here: party credibility loss related to its (non)-ideological placement and penalties associated with incumbency. The former is predicted to lead those who initially supported the party to disengage from party preferences while the later is predicted to have respondents desert their preference for M5S to other parties. Using Italian panel survey data on partisan representation from March 2018 through September 2020, this manuscript identifies the opinions of those who those who deserted the party, those who disengaged from party preferences, and those who remained loyal to M5S. Descriptive analysis will first call attention to the differences between loyalists, deserters, the disengaged, and survey respondents more broadly. Multivariate analysis suggests the role of incumbency-based factors as an explanation for a decline in party support. The ideological position of the party (or being beyond left-and-right) had only a minor role. A discussion then focuses on the results of populists in power and the role of ideology in valence populism. Without an ideological core, once in power, voters punish (valence) populist party as they would any other, holding them to account for leadership and government performance.

This note suggests that should ethno-regional parties broaden their agenda, they could be electorally punished. Literature suggests an electoral incentive to a broader party issue agenda, even for some 'niche' parties. However as quintessential 'niche' parties due to their limited ability to be competitive with the general electorate, we argue ethno-regional parties can only gain votes by specializing on a narrow, concentrated set of issues. They will have limited success when engaging in broad or diverse issue competition with mainstream issues. Using over 40 years of electoral data from eight advanced capitalist democracies, our main empirical finding is that, as Ethno-regional parties broaden or diversify their issue agenda they are likely to lose subsequent vote share.

Research has demonstrated that voters use coalition heuristics in their perceptions of party policy shifts: Junior coalition partners are perceived to shift in parallel to prime minister parties, while no such effect is found for opposition parties. Still, little is known of how voters perceive government support parties. Support parties publicly commit to side with the government on crucial votes yet are not formally represented in cabinet. We argue that voters indeed associate formal support parties with the cabinet and apply coalition heuristics accordingly. Drawing on data from 21 European countries, we provide evidence that voters perceive support parties shifting in parallel with the prime minister. To increase the internal validity of our cross-country findings, we additionally draw on an illustrative case study of Spain with individual-level panel data, which conforms to theoretical expectations. Our results have important implications for electoral competition, partisan behavior, and (minority) government formation.

Previous research has demonstrated that citizens use heuristics in their ideological perceptions of the placement of governing partners. Yet what about the perceptions after the government termination from non-government support parties? To what extent is updating evident and is there heterogeneity in the response? We examine these questions using a Spanish Survey Panel over 6 months in 2018-2019 after the termination of the Rajoy II government. We demonstrate that updating prior beliefs tend to be conservative, but that greater and stronger informational signals can lead respondents to alter their perceptions. Significant updating can be found with time, among those more politically knowledgeable, and in regions not governed by the previously nationally cooperating partners. Our results have implications for those interested in party perceptions and consequences of government cooperation - in particular supporting party relationships.

What is the purpose of lengthy negotiations when a coalition government forms? Do they make a difference in coalition policy-making? Negotiations that produce policy agreements between coalition partners have been suggested to strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms. We argue that bargaining time, regardless if it results in a written policy agreement or not, is an investment in future government reform productivity. Longer negotiation periods indicate that the bargaining parties have negotiated deals over conflicting policy issues and have allowed parties to build trust between them and gain support for future policies within the party organization, promoting reform productivity. Further, we expect that longer negotiation periods can mitigate problems of policy conflict within cabinets, thereby resulting in higher reform productivity. We evaluate our theoretical expectations using a data set on economic reform measures introduced in 10 Western European countries (1978-2017), based on a coding of more than 1000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The results show support for our expectations, demonstrating that economic reform productivity is higher in coalition governments that have bargained for a longer time when forming. We also find support for the claim that bargaining time mitigates the negative effect of intra-cabinet ideological conflict on reform productivity.

Unlike other ballots, referendums do not provide voters a list of parties or candidates to choose from. Here we argue that referendum voting behaviour, however, can be understood through the lends of partisanship and the socio-economic context during the voting period. The personalisation of contemporary politics would also suggest an important role of political leadership in swaying voting decisions. The article applies this theory in analysis of the vote YES of the 2020 Italian Constitutional Referendum. We attribute the success of the 2020 referendum to the role of partisanship, leader favorability, systemic and elite discontent, and the role that interest played in voting decision. Exploring the role that party leaders may have in the voting behaviour on referenda is an area for future research, especially in an era of the presidentialized political parties.

Which governments implement interventionist or liberalising labour policy reforms, and does the economic context matter? Drawing on the previous literature on government ideology and public policy, we hypothesise that leftist governments are more likely to implement interventionist labour policies. However, we also expect that economic circumstances influence parties' room to manoeuvre, and we thus hypothesise that the impact of government partisanship on labour policy reform will be weaker during troublesome economic circumstances. The main contribution of this paper is empirical, in that we take seriously the 'dependent variable problem' of policy studies that look to aggregate measures to detect instances of retrenchment, by making use of a new dataset on the directionality of 1,446 individual labour reform measures enacted across 13 nations between 1978 and 2017, allowing us to compare government labour policy during periods of varying levels of budgetary deficit, employment, and debt levels. Our results show that left-wing governments implement more interventionist labour policies, but only during less economically 'challenging' periods - during dire economic circumstances, economic orthodoxy seems to trump ideology in governmental policy-making processes.

What is the purpose of lengthy negotiations when a coalition government forms? Do they make a difference in coalition policy-making? Negotiations that produce policy agreements between coalition partners have been suggested to strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms. We argue that bargaining time, regardless if it results in a written policy agreement or not, is an investment in future government reform productivity. Longer negotiation periods indicate that the bargaining parties have negotiated deals over conflicting policy issues and have allowed parties to build trust between them and gain support for future policies within the party organization, promoting reform productivity. Further, we expect that longer negotiation periods can mitigate problems of policy conflict within cabinets, thereby resulting in higher reform productivity. We evaluate our theoretical expectations using a data set on economic reform measures introduced in 10 Western European countries (1978–2017), based on a coding of more than 1000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The results show support for our expectations, demonstrating that economic reform productivity is higher in coalition governments that have bargained for a longer time when forming. We also find support for the claim that bargaining time mitigates the negative effect of intra-cabinet ideological conflict on reform productivity.

The literature on the concept of niche parties is rapidly growing. Characterized by a narrow electorate with extreme issue positions or salience and their responsiveness to this electorate, debate remains as to their operationalization and multidimensional behavior. This paper explores the variation in definitions used to identify niche parties or "nicheness" and analyzes their implications for the validity of findings about the strategic behavior of niche parties. Specifically, we replicate a much cited article, which argues that niche parties are more responsive to their supporters than mainstream parties while mainstream parties are more responsive to the general electorate. Using manifesto, expert, and survey data covering more than 81 European parties in the period 2006-2019, we show that this key finding is surprisingly robust to various niche party definitions. Beyond this, we demonstrate that niche parties are more responsive to their voters in multidimensional space, while mainstream parties are primarily responsive to the general electorate. The multidimensional responsiveness of niche parties - to their narrower electorate - ought to be taken into account by future scholars of party-voter linkages.

In many countries, the president of the republic is directly elected through popular vote. Most such nations have an electoral system that provides for a double-round of voting. Often termed a two-round system, such elections have a second turn if no candidate obtains an absolute majority in the first round. This article presents an original dataset covering all the presidential and the semi-presidential regimes (73 countries) that have adopted two-round system along with the results of 423 elections for both the first and second round and whether the result was determined in the first round, whether the plurality winner of the first round was victorious in the second round, or whether there was a second round ‘comeback’ – when the runner-up of the first round was victorious in the second. A variety of exploratory hypotheses are presented that try to predict the likelihood of a second round or a comeback. Few are validated. The presence of an incumbent and a qualified method of presidential selection increases the probability of a second round occurring while a greater number of candidates and greater electoral volatility make it less likely. We find that no variables related to political institutions, presidential resources, or the structure of the first round predictive of a second round comeback. We make the dataset public so that future scholars can continue this form of investigation.

The vote NO (a defeat for the proponents) of the 2016 Italian referendum has been broadly attributed to a wave of protest politics sweeping Western democracies. Given that the government of Matteo Renzi proposed and supported the referendum, the resulting vote against government interests raises a crucial theoretical question: to what extent does the referendum vote reflect the characteristics of a protest vote? To disentangle the meaning and impact of protest, we distinguish two dimensions: the ‘system discontent’ and the ‘elite discontent’, referring to both general and focalized images: general sentiments towards the representational aspects of political institutions as compared to focused sentiments towards government performances. The circumstances surrounding the referendum provide a crucial test for whether these two forms of protest can be at odds with one another. We expect and find that elite discontented voters tend to reject this referendum. Vice versa, system discontent increased support for the referendum, as it would reform political institutions to which voters had negative sentiments. Findings suggest that analyses of political psychology and behaviour identify the conceptual foundations for protest and ask whether forms of protest work in parallel or at odds. Protest attitudes and their effects should be thought of as multidimensional.

This paper introduces eight country-level datasets with >50,000 observations that can be used to analyze novel comparative questions concerning party personnel strategies-how parties recruit candidates and allocate members across party, legislative, and cabinet positions. We make these datasets public to inspire comparative research, especially from an electoral systems perspective; electoral systems shape constituency representation and influence how parties recruit candidates and organize members in legislative and government bodies. In this paper, we first briefly review the relevant literature on electoral nomination and post-election appointment and then describe our motivations for constructing multi-country datasets that can be used to further comparative research. To illustrate the possibilities in these new datasets, we show how recruitment and placement of parliamentarians with particular personal characteristics correlates with their placement onto specific committees and cabinet posts. A conclusion identifies other areas of research that might benefit from using the party personnel datasets.

One of the growing constituencies of populist movements has been those facing labour market risks. These individuals are hypothesized to be the most likely to find themselves in need of government protection or service provision as their occupations face challenges from abroad through global competition, domestically through competition from immigrant labour, or technologically from automation. Nations, however, vary in how their populations experience such risks. Some nations expend greater effort on job placement or retraining programmes. Others provide legislative protections for workers that shield them from the potential of lost employment. Using data from the latest three rounds of the European Social Survey, this paper seeks to examine how individual-level preferences towards populist radical right parties are mediated by the visibility/size of contemporary county-level efforts to ameliorate labour market risk in a sample of 14 West European nations. The analysis distinguishes whether occupational characteristics and/or government policies have a differential impact on supporting populist radical right parties. While labour market policies might be designed to mitigate labour market risk, for many individuals, they have the effect of intensifying support for populist parties.

Referenda provide the opportunity for voters to express political economic protest and provide additional ways to support parties they vote for in elections. Alternatively, referenda also provide voters a chance to express their policy references in a way that does not affect which party will lead the government. The rejection of the 2016 Italian Constitutional referendum by 60% of voters and the approval the 2020 Italian Constitutional Referendum by 70% of voters could be a result of changing political economic conditions, underlying partisanship, or a change in approval of the reforms contained within the referendum. The article examines these possibilities in turn and then in a multivariate analysis. First, the overall change in economic discontent, satisfaction with the governing coalition, and belief in the content of the reforms between 2016 and 2020 will be examined. We also examine the how voters of each of the parties in the 2018 general election shifted on these variables. Then individual level analysis of consistent voters and switchers will assess the relative strength of partisanship, economic, political, and referendum-specific factors in convincing voters to switch their vote., we find that referendum-specific factors had the strongest predictive power. voters approved of the contents that would reduce the number of politicians in Italy. Our results contribute to the studies on second-order elections where voters are allowed for greater expressive preferences.

The chapter introduces the notion of “party personnel strategies.” The concept refers to the process by which political parties allocate their elected members to legislative committees. The theory is grounded in the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm. The legislators are the pool of “personnel” from which the party draws when staffing specialized standing committees of the legislature. Party strategy is conditioned by both policy goals and the imperatives of the electoral system under which seats are won. Parties engage in a “personnel practice,” which is their observed pattern of assigning members with certain individual background characteristics to given committees. The chapter establishes the cases on which the book’s arguments are tested: Britain, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and Portugal. The chapter lists the elections and the thirteen major political parties covered for each country.

This chapter explains methodological choices. It offers greater detail about how the dependent variable is coded. Because of the three-outcome variable (high policy, public goods, or distributive committee type), the discrete choice method of multinomial logistic (MNL) regression is used. It permits assessing the extent to which parties make tradeoffs across both committee types and models of party personnel (expertise and electoral–constituency). The chapter explains the reasons why MNL is preferable to binomial logistic regression by a comparison of results on one of the book’s party cases (the German Christian Democratic Union) under either regression format and calculates predicted probabilities for Bundestag committee placement using some of our independent variables. It also explains that some parties (those in Israel and Japan) do not make tradeoffs across committee types to the same degree as parties in our others cases, and are therefore analyzed with binomial logistic regression instead. An index of overlap of committee types on which individual members serve is developed and shown for all parties covered in the book.

The book develops the notion of “party personnel strategies”, which are the ways in which political parties assign their elected members—their “personnel”—to serve collective organizational goals. Key party goals are to advance a policy brand and maximize seats in the legislature. We offer a theory of how assignments of members to specialized legislative committees contribute to these goals. Individual members vary in their personal attributes, such as prior occupation, gender, and local experience. Parties seek to harness the attributes of their members by assigning them to committees where members’ expertise is relevant; doing so may enhance the party’s policy brand. Under some electoral systems, parties may need to trade off the harnessing of expertise against the pursuit of seats, instead matching legislators according to electoral situation (e.g., marginality of seat) or characteristics of their constituency (e.g., population density). The book offers analysis of the extent to which parties trade of these goals by matching the attributes of their personnel and their electoral needs to the functions of the available committee seats. The analysis is based on a dataset of around 6,000 legislators across thirty-eight elections in six established parliamentary democracies with diverse electoral systems.

This chapter introduces the typology of committee types: high policy, public goods, and distributive. It develops the theory of party personnel strategy, consisting of two models political parties may use: the expertise model and the electoral–constituency model. The chapter derives testable premises for the expertise model, which states that parties assign legislators according to individual attributes (e.g., occupation, gender, and local electoral experience) that signal a background relevant to the type of committee on which they serve. The chapter argues that parties of the left and right will tend to differ in which committee types they emphasize, even in the same electoral system, according to their issue ownership. It summarizes the thirteen parties on their tendencies to have legislators with each of the key individual attributes.

This chapter develops the electoral–constituency model of party personnel. Under this model, parties deploy their personnel according to their ability to draw votes within specific electoral districts or to specific competing candidates of the party. The chapter derives testable premises, grounded in a two-dimensional characterization of electoral systems: (1) the extent to which they shape a party’s seat maximization through dependence on the geographical location of votes; and (2) the extent of a party’s dependence on “personal votes” of individual candidates. Nationwide proportional representation (PR) versus systems with many electoral districts define the first dimension, while the second dimension is characterized by differences between systems with closed party lists and those employing a single nontransferable vote (SNTV). The chapter discusses how different single-tier and mixed-member systems generate different tradeoffs between parties’ use of the expertise and electoral–constituency models. In particular, the electoral–constituency model suggests that parties allocate members from safe districts differently from those elected in swing/marginal districts. The chapter presents data on the parties covered in the book according to variables such as the margin of electoral victory and population density of districts represented.

Referenda provide the opportunity for voters to express political economic protest and provide additional ways to support parties they vote for in elections. Alternatively, referenda also provide voters a chance to express their policy references in a way that does not affect which party will lead the government. The rejection of the 2016 Italian Constitutional referendum by 60% of voters and the approval the 2020 Italian Constitutional Referendum by 70% of voters could be a result of changing political economic conditions, influences related to partisanship and party leadership, or a change in approval of the reforms contained within the referendum. The article examines these possibilities in turn and then in a multivariate analysis. First, the overall change in economic discontent, satisfaction with the governing coalition and leaders, and belief in the content of the reforms between 2016 and 2020 will be examined. We also examine the how voters of each of the parties in the 2018 general election shifted on these variables. Then individual level analysis of consistent voters and switchers will assess the relative strength of partisanship, economic, political, and referendum-specific factors in convincing voters to switch their vote. We find that referendum-specific factors had the strongest predictive power followed by those related to government approval. Voters approved of the contents that would reduce the number of politicians in Italy and used the referendum to express support or displeasure with the incumbent’s policy programme. Our results contribute to the studies on second-order elections where voters are allowed for greater expressive preferences.