Abstract The party on the ground has traditionally enabled linkage with the party in office along with providing candidates, selectorates, and campaign volunteers. While this still occurs in cities, we do not know how party organisation changes have affected remote areas. To investigate, we examine two remote Australian electorates: the Barkly in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley in Western Australia. Based on interviews with grassroots members, representatives and officials, we conclude that, although parties still exert their traditional functions in some remote areas, in others they have disengaged, rendering membership less meaningful and weakening the chain of democratic legitimacy.
AbstractWhile India's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has become recognized as a populist radical right (PRR) party under the leadership of Narendra Modi, we do not know whether this PRR supply is matched yet by PRR attitudes among its supporters. Using an original survey, we therefore investigate: Do BJP supporters display PRR attitudes? We find that those who feel close to the BJP have stronger populist and nativist attitudes than other Indian citizens. However, authoritarianism is not a distinguishing feature of BJP supporters. We argue that the similarities between the drivers of support for European PRR parties and for the BJP reinforce the idea that radical right populism is a coherent global phenomenon both in terms of supply and demand. Finally, we discuss how our study shows that party support in India is more ideologically rooted than has previously been thought.
AbstractOne of the main supply‐side explanations for women's underrepresentation in politics is the gender gap in nascent political ambition. While this has been examined in terms of electoral ambition, the aspiration to pursue non‐electoral careers within parties has been overlooked. In our study, we therefore investigate whether both types of ambition – electoral and non‐electoral – vary among young women and men participating in a key entry point for political careers in Western democracies: party youth wings. To do so, we surveyed almost 2,000 members of six centre‐left and centre‐right youth wings in Australia, Italy and Spain. We find that while, as expected, women in youth wings display lower levels of electoral ambition, they are almost as likely as men to express non‐electoral ambition. Furthermore, and contrary to our expectations, we show that women in centre‐right youth wings are no less interested in pursuing electoral and non‐electoral political careers than women in centre‐left ones. Our study thus provides new insights into the gendered nature of political ambition, highlighting that women's lower interest in electoral office does not necessarily reflect reduced interest in a political career.
In: International political science review: the journal of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) = Revue internationale de science politique, Band 42, Heft 5, S. 613-630
Sweden and Denmark have presented contrasting relationships between centre-right and populist radical right (PRR) parties. In Sweden, the centre-right has refused cooperation with the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) (SD), even when this cost the centre-right office. However, in Denmark, coalitions led by centre-right parties have cooperated with the Danish People's Party (Dansk Folkeparti) (DF) on multiple occasions. Through a controlled comparison, we examine what explains these different outcomes. Using Chapel Hill Expert Surveys and public opinion data, we firstly look at the policy congruence between parties and the social acceptability of cooperation. We then examine interview material with representatives from centre-right and PRR parties in Sweden and Denmark to see their explanations of cooperation and non-cooperation. We conclude that, while the office goals of Danish centre-right parties, along with the policy focus and uncontroversial past of DF, explain that case, the reputation and past of SD has precluded a similar outcome.
Abstract The Australian House of Representatives contains far fewer women than men. But is this because parties of left and right discriminate against women or because voters do? Using a new dataset comprising 7271 House candidates from 2001 to 2019, firstly, we find that the percentage of women candidates is increasing, but is consistently higher for parties of the left than the right. Secondly, women tend to be selected more by parties of both left and right in unsafe seats. Thirdly, all else being equal, voters reward women running for Labor with over 1400 votes more, are neutral towards those of the Liberals and Greens, but tend to penalise women standing for the Nationals. We conclude that, overall, it is parties, not voters, driving under-representation of women in Australia's lower house.
Political scientists have long asserted that populists use simpler language than their mainstream rivals to appeal to ordinary people and distance themselves from elites. However, there is little comparative evidence in support of that claim. In this study, we investigate the linguistic simplicity of four right-wing populists compared to their principal opponents in the United States, France, United Kingdom, and Italy. We do so by analysing a corpus of approximately one million words from leaders' speeches, using a series of linguistics measures for evaluating simplicity. Contrary to expectations, we find that Donald Trump was only slightly simpler than Hillary Clinton, while Nigel Farage in the UK and Marine Le Pen in France were more complex than their main rivals, and Italy's Matteo Salvini was simpler on some measures but not others. We conclude that the simple language claim is not borne out and that other aspects of the received wisdom about populism should be re-examined.
AbstractConceptualizations and measurements of Euroscepticism tend to assume that, while parties may change positions from one period to another, they unequivocally espouse hard or soft euroscepticism at a given point in time. However, there are good theoretical reasons for some parties not to do so, in order to speak to different audiences and keep their decision‐making options open. Through an analysis of manifestos and leaders' speeches we show how two populist radical right parties, the Italian Northern League and the Austrian Freedom Party, espoused what we term 'equivocal euroscepticism' in the years around the 2014 European Parliament elections. Specifically, these parties articulated a distinct, albeit ambivalent, stance by combining elements of both soft and hard euroscepticism at the same time. We argue that 'equivocal euroscepticism' can give these parties strategic advantages, including the freedom to cooperate both with other radical right, hard eurosceptic, parties at European level and more moderate parties at the national one.
Scholars in recent decades have discussed the emergence of a new leader-dominated party type, variously described as 'personal', 'personalistic' and 'personalist'. However, there has been no original comparative research examining whether (and how) such parties resemble one another organizationally and whether they constitute a distinct organizational type. This article does so by comparing the parties of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Clive Palmer in Australia. Based on interviews with those in the parties and party documents, we find our cases share two distinctive organizational features: (1) the founder-leader's dominance of the party and perceived centrality to its survival and (2) the relationship between the party and members saw active members discouraged and organization at the local level was extremely limited/non-existent. Building on this analysis, we then propose three criteria for identifying other personal parties and point to the existence of a possible subtype. We conclude that the emergence of personal parties requires us to reconsider our understanding of contemporary party organizations in advanced democracies.