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AbstractA unique revote allows for a natural experiment to evaluate whether campaign effects can last for nearly a decade: A right‐wing conservative party missed the 5% threshold in a German state by a mere vote in 2007, but the Constitutional Court ordered a revote in a single precinct over potential election fraud. After a one‐sided campaign focusing on law and order, the party's vote share increased more than sixfold. By comparing the precinct with its direct surroundings, the study shows that the revote campaign had long‐lasting effects on vote choice and broader security‐sensitive behavior. Residents in the revote precinct installed more warning signs on their property to deter burglars. They were not more supportive of right‐wing attitudes but were more likely to believe that election fraud reoccurred. Based on habitual‐voting and social‐norm theories, the study suggests that persuasion could be durable if candidates provide an unchallenged interpretation of political events.

Drawing on a unique panel data set of supporters of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the study shows that programmatic differences between supporters of Frauke Petry and Bernd Lucke cannot sufficiently explain the crucial intraparty leadership contest of July 2015. Programmatic differences were minor in 2013 but became pronounced over time. Politically active supporters were disaffected with the old moderate leadership of Bernd Lucke, who pursued an organizational reform to reduce the influence of the rank-and-file. Social media also played a key role in the leadership turnover, as alternative news sources on social media were only politicized by the intraparty opposition. It is conceivable that the structure of social media networks influences opinion formation processes and internal affairs of right-wing populist parties in general, as their supporters tend to have low trust in mainstream news.

Machine-coded event datasets have become popular in conflict research. I argue that systematic media biases render news-based event data unsuitable for studying networks of insurgents and political parties. Insurgent networks are too secretive to be captured by media reports, whereas alliances among regular political parties are too constant to be considered newsworthy. I analyze the data accuracy of the network study of insurgents and political parties in Thailand by Metternich et al. (2013), which is based on the most comprehensive event dataset currently available: Lockheed Martin's International Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) project. Using simple evaluation criteria, I show that most of the network data entries are incorrect, leading to a depiction of the networks that is unrelated to real-world cleavages in Thailand. While my hand-coded event dataset captures relatively more network-relevant information than ICEWS, the comparison confirms that journalists specifically underreport cooperative events among insurgents and parties. In addition, the ICEWS project provides unreliable counts of conflictual events in Thailand. Using alternative conflict measurements from the Deep South Watch dataset and a dummy variable based on established periods of unrest, I show that violent activities in Thailand's Deep South declined during periods of conflict between pro- and anti-Thaksin groups. Conflicts were unrelated to network fragmentation, contradicting the primary finding of Metternich et al.

Parties and social movements play an important role in many theories of political science. Yet, the study of intraparty politics remains underdeveloped as random samples are difficult to conduct among political activists. This paper proposes a novel procedure to sample different parties over time and space by utilizing the advertising option of the social media webpage Facebook. As this method allows for quotas and the collection of large samples at relatively low cost, it becomes possible to improve the representativeness through poststratification and subsample robustness checks. Three examples illustrate these advantages of Facebook sampling: First, a Facebook sample approximated intraparty decisions and the outcome of a leadership contest of the Alternative for Germany. Second, a weighted Facebook sample achieved similar estimates as a representative local leader survey of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Third, by evaluating subgroups of key demographics for parties with unknown population parameters, two Facebook samples show that the color-coded conflict in Thailand was driven by different concepts of regime type, but not by a left–right divide on economic policy-making. Facebook sampling appears to be the best and cheapest method to conduct time-series cross-sectional studies for political activists.

SummaryEmpirical studies show that government ideology has hardly influenced welfare expenditures since the 1990s, casting doubt on the general ability of national governments to design economic policies according to their programmatic appeals. This study takes a comprehensive view on policy‐making by using a modified version of the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Index. I focus on the aspects of economic freedom that provoke party polarization and that national governments are capable of influencing. The results suggest that government ideology still matters in the early 21st century: The empirical analysis of 36 OECD or new European Union member states from 2000 to 2012 shows that left‐wing governments are associated with significantly lower economic freedom. Economic freedom continues to be the guiding principle that divides left and right in economic policy‐making because the left still promotes relatively higher levels of government spending and regulation.

Summary Empirical studies show that government ideology has hardly influenced welfare expenditures since the 1990s, casting doubt on the general ability of national governments to design economic policies according to their programmatic appeals. This study takes a comprehensive view on policy-making by using a modified version of the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Index. I focus on the aspects of economic freedom that provoke party polarization and that national governments are capable of influencing. The results suggest that government ideology still matters in the early 21st century: The empirical analysis of 36 OECD or new European Union member states from 2000 to 2012 shows that left-wing governments are associated with significantly lower economic freedom. Economic freedom continues to be the guiding principle that divides left and right in economic policy-making because the left still promotes relatively higher levels of government spending and regulation.

Parties and social movements play an important role in many theories of political science. Yet, the study of intraparty politics remains underdeveloped as random samples are difficult to conduct among political activists. This paper proposes a novel procedure to sample different parties over time and space by utilizing the advertising option of the social media webpage Facebook. As this method allows for quotas and the collection of large samples at relatively low cost, it becomes possible to improve the representativeness through poststratification and subsample robustness checks. Three examples illustrate these advantages of Facebook sampling: First, a Facebook sample approximated intraparty decisions and the outcome of a leadership contest of the Alternative for Germany. Second, a weighted Facebook sample achieved similar estimates as a representative local leader survey of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Third, by evaluating subgroups of key demographics for parties with unknown population parameters, two Facebook samples show that the color-coded conflict in Thailand was driven by different concepts of regime type, but not by a left–right divide on economic policy-making. Facebook sampling appears to be the best and cheapest method to conduct time-series cross-sectional studies for political activists.