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This article investigates the impact of niche party success on the policy agendas of mainstream parties. Following from the expected electoral effects of issue politicization, the success of radical right and green parties will cause different reactions from mainstream parties. While mainstream parties emphasize anti-immigrant positions in response to radical right success, green party success will have the opposite effect for environmental issues. Since green parties constitute issue owners, their success will make established parties de-emphasize the environment. Analyzing time-series cross-section data for sixteen Western European countries from 1980 to 2011, this article empirically establishes that green and radical right parties differ in their effect on mainstream party behavior and that their impact depends on the ideological position and past electoral performance of the mainstream parties.

ABSTRACTThis article investigates how unemployment risk within households affects voting for the radical right. The authors contribute to recent advances in the literature that have highlighted the role of economic threat for understanding the support of radical-right parties. In contrast to existing work, the authors do not treat voters as atomistic individuals; they instead investigate households as a crucial site of preference formation. Combining largescale labor market data with comparative survey data, they confirm the expectations of their theoretical framework by demonstrating that the effect of occupational unemployment risk on radical-right support is strongly conditioned by household-risk constellations. Voting for the radical right is a function not only of a voter's own risk, but also of his or her partner's risk. The article provides additional evidence on the extent to which these effects are gendered and on the mechanisms that link household risk and party choice. The results imply that much of the existing literature on individual risk exposure potentially underestimates its effect on political behavior due to the neglect of multiplier effects within households.

This article investigates how the success of radical right parties affects the policy positions of mainstream parties. We do this using a regression discontinuity approach that allows us to causally attribute mainstream parties' positional changes to radical right strength independent of public opinion as a potential confounder. Making use of exogenous variation created through differences in electoral thresholds, we empirically demonstrate that radical right success, indeed, causally affects mainstream parties' positions. This is true for mainstream left as well as mainstream right parties. These findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on party competition as they indicate that other parties' behavior and not only public opinion plays a crucial role in explaining parties' policy shift. ; Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich / This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.

Many studies have found that European parties change their policy positions in response to changes in public opinion. This is both theoretically and normatively appealing, suggesting that European party politics operates in a way that is consistent with spatial models. Nonetheless, virtually all previous studies are based on a single, uni-dimensional measure of public opinion: left–right self-placement from the Eurobarometer surveys. This measure has a number of flaws, including the fact that political conflict in Europe now occurs across multiple issue dimensions beyond the classic divide on state involvement in the economy. We used new measures of Europeans' ideological positions across four different issue dimensions and 26 countries from 1981–2016, together with data on parties' policy positions from their manifestos, to re-evaluate findings on responsiveness. Across many different model specifications, samples and outcome measures, we found virtually no evidence that European political parties respond to public opinion on any issue dimension. Our findings suggest that scholars may require better measures of party positions, more nuanced theories of responsiveness (for example to sub-groups, or across longer time horizons), or may need to refocus their attention towards responsiveness via policy outcomes rather than parties' policy commitments.

This article investigates how changes in same-sex rights affect attitudes toward homosexuality. We argue that different same-sex relationship policies vary in their impact. Whereas registered partnership laws construct a distinct target population that receives new benefits, marriage equality sends an unambiguously positive signal and reduces the perceived group difference through inclusion into existing rights. As a consequence, marriage equality should have a positive effect on attitudes toward homosexuality, whereas partnership laws should have much less positive effects and could even lead to backlash among some groups. Combining data from eight waves of the European Social Survey with data on legislation, we analyze the effects of same-sex marriage, registered partnerships, and marriage bans on attitudes toward gays and lesbians. Marriage has a positive effect, bans and registered partnerships have a negative effect. Legalized partnership is especially associated with significantly more negative attitudes among nonreligious and less educated people.

This article investigates how the success of radical right parties affects the policy positions of mainstream parties. We do this using a regression discontinuity approach that allows us to causally attribute mainstream parties' positional changes to radical right strength independent of public opinion as a potential confounder. Making use of exogenous variation created through differences in electoral thresholds, we empirically demonstrate that radical right success, indeed, causally affects mainstream parties' positions. This is true for mainstream left as well as mainstream right parties. These findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on party competition as they indicate that other parties' behavior and not only public opinion plays a crucial role in explaining parties' policy shift.

This article investigates how the success of radical right parties affects the policy positions of mainstream parties. We do this using a regression discontinuity approach that allows us to causally attribute mainstream parties' positional changes to radical right strength independent of public opinion as a potential confounder. Making use of exogenous variation created through differences in electoral thresholds, we empirically demonstrate that radical right success, indeed, causally affects mainstream parties' positions. This is true for mainstream left as well as mainstream right parties. These findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on party competition as they indicate that other parties' behavior and not only public opinion plays a crucial role in explaining parties' policy shift.

This article investigates how changes in immigration policies affect migration as a vote-defining issue at upcoming elections. So far, the literature on issue voting has mostly focused on the role of issue entrepreneurs in politicizing new issues. In this article, however, we introduce policy change as a new potential determinant in the process of issue evolution. Moreover, in contrast to most of the literature that investigates the role of policy outcomes (such as economic growth or unemployment) on voting decisions, we analyze the effect of laws which can be directly attributed to governments and political parties. We focus on within-country variation and analyze national election surveys from the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany between 1994 and 2011. These surveys include information on both self- and party-placements regarding immigration issues. To measure policy changes, we use data on immigration policies from the newly built Immigration Policies in Comparison dataset. While we expect a general reform effect, we investigate in more detail whether liberal and restrictive reforms have a similar effect on votes for left/right, government/opposition parties. It is shown that both liberal and restrictive reforms lead to increasing issue voting. While we show that government parties are not more affected than opposition parties, we see that party ideology partly plays a role.