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This edited collection, in honour of the late political scientist Peter Mair, contains original chapters that are directly linked to his theoretical and/or methodological ideas and approaches. Peter Mair demonstrated that political parties have traditionally been central actors in European politics and an essential focus of comparative European political science. Though the nature of political parties and the manner in which they operate has been subject to significant change in recent decades, parties remain a crucial factor in the working of European liberal democracies. This volume analyses recent developments and current challenges that European parties, party systems and democracy face. The volume will be of key interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, democracy studies, political parties, and European politics and European Union studies.--

Election campaigns in modern democracies are increasingly affected by the rise of Internet-based information and communication technologies. Here, one of the most significant developments concerns the rapidly spreading 'voting advice applications' (VAAs). VAAs help online users to find their parties by matching a series of party positions with the positions taken up by the users themselves. This article analyses whether such tailor-made campaign information affects the party preferences of voters. It hypothesizes that the impact of the VAA-produced information is dependent on the 'representative deficit', a concept which captures the part of political preferences of a user that are not reflected by any party in the political system. The empirical analysis is conducted using a dataset stemming from users of the 'EU Profiler', a VAA produced for the 2009 European Parliamentary elections campaign. We find that less than one out of five users matches best with her initially preferred party. While a large majority of those users who are advised to vote for a better-fitting party are hardly affected by the VAA output, 8 percent of these do change their first preference to the party proposed by the VAA. Switching party preferences can be explained by the size of the representative deficit: the higher the deficit, the lower the probability that the initial party preference will be changed. This finding shows that users of VAAs are responsive to the match calculated by the online tool. They do not blindly follow the personalized suggestions but do so only when they are shown convincing levels of overlap between their views and the best-ranked party's positions.

This Report is a follow-up study on "How to create a transnational party system" (2010); it illustrates recent challenges and opportunities at EU level concerning the emergence of: i) transnational parties and a transnational party system; ii) constraints and opportunities for representative democracy. The main areas addressed in the report are: (a) voting coherence of the EP Party Groups after the Euro-crisis; (b) regulation of political parties at European level (PPELs);(c) role of political foundations at European level (PFELs). ; Republished version of EP Study 2014/PE 509.983