Suchergebnisse

In the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of July 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky's new party, Servant of the People (SN) won a majority of seats in the context of what had been a 'frozen cleavage' dividing party voters along a single geo-cultural dimension: pro-West/anti-Soviet versus anti-West/pro-Russian positions. Analysing a unique set of surveys of public and expert opinion, we find that its unprecedented success stems from the extreme weaknesses of the existing and often discredited parties rather than ideological shifts. Our findings also question whether challenger parties in other contexts, including consolidated democracies, must compete on new issue dimensions in order to succeed electorally.

With Vladimir Putin having commenced his second term, the issue of the constitutional limit of two successive terms for the president has again become politically salient in Russia. In this article, two specialists of Russian politics investigate public support in 2018 for term limits. They address three questions. Why does the issue of term limits matter? To whom in Russia does it matter? Is opposition to abolishing terms limits likely to be politically divisive? Their findings point in general to a shift in the level and character of support for term limits since 2012. Opposition to term limits has grown over time, and while in 2012 support for term limits was drawn from supporters of more authoritarian leadership, today it includes engaged democrats with negative views of the economic situation. They also find that supporters of term limits remain more likely to support political protest.

While newly contested issues connected with internationalism, such as European integration and migration, have become more politically salient, much of the literature sees these as largely the domain of ideologically extremist and challenger parties. By contrast, building on work by Kriesi et al, this paper argues that international issues are far more embedded in party stances across the leftright spectrum than the niche and extremist models or Kriesi et al suggest. Accordingly, we develop a typology for categorising parties according to their stances on left-right ideology and their positions on integration. Our analysis employs expert surveys on the stances of all electorally significant parties conducted in 24 European countries in 2013. The results have important implications for understanding the impact of international issues on how parties now appeal to voters.

We start from the premise that the content of political competition is regularly remade by shifting contexts and by the strategic activity of political actors including parties. But while there are naturally thousands of potential issues on which politics can be contested, there are in practice and for good reasons ways in which structure and limits come to reduce the competition to more cognitively manageable and regularized divisions – in short, to issue dimensions. It is highly timely to return to these questions since, we argue, the social, political and economic turbulence of recent years raises the possibility that the ideological structure to how parties present themselves to voters may be radically shifting. The papers in this special issue, therefore, each tackle an important aspect of the shifting character of the issues that underlie party competition in various European settings. In this article, we provide an overview of the relevant 'state-of-the-art' on issue dimensionality and how the subject is situated within the broad framework of understanding party competition.

Ukraine's 2014 parliamentary election, which took place in the aftermath of the Maidan revolution of February 2014 and at the height of war in the East of the country, appeared to produce significant party political realignment. In particular, support for parties that had represented the Russian element of the ethno-linguistic/geo-political cleavage that had dominated electoral competition in Ukraine since independence collapsed. The paper considers whether 2014 was a 'critical' or 'realigning' election for Ukraine. Our argument is that the 2014 election lacked the conditions that critical elections theory posits as necessary and that, on the contrary, there are strong theoretical reasons to expect cleavage stability in these volatile electoral circumstances. We offer evidence for this continuity drawn from surveys undertaken among Ukrainian voters from 1995 to 2014.

Drawing on surveys conducted in Russia from 2001 to 2014, this article considers citizens' conceptions of the nation in the Putin period; whether views of the nation have been shaped by political, economic and social developments over this 15 year period; and the correlates of these national perspectives in terms of regime support and political mobilisation. We find, first, that understandings of the nation are multidimensional at the mass level, and in part reflect the main nationalist discourses in Russia. Second, we describe how contextual changes over this period - political, economic and social – relate to the ways in which the nation is understood. Third, we consider how different understandings of the nation connect to political attitudes and behaviours. The findings of this research have implications for how we should analyse nationalism and its bases of support in Putin's Russia.

Most studies of public opinion regarding constitutional change focus on 'winners' and 'losers' in established democracies, but in comparative terms most institutional change takes place in unstable political contexts. We contend that mass preferences towards institutional choices are likely to differ significantly in turbulent contexts as compared to stable polities. In this article, we consider the issue of public preferences towards proposals for regional decentralisation in the context of post-Soviet Ukraine, a society that has been in the throes of political uncertainty for the last decade. Using surveys conducted in war-torn Ukraine in 2014, we find that under conditions of political uncertainty the institutional preferences of citizens are connected to group identities and ideological orientations rather than instrumental concerns.

While the 'critical citizens' literature shows that publics often evaluate democracies negatively, we know much less about 'critical parties', especially mainstream ones. This paper develops a model to explain empirical variation in parties' evaluations of democratic institutions, based on two mechanisms: first, that parties' regime access affects their regime support which, second, is moderated by over‐time habituation to democracy. Using expert surveys of all electorally significant parties in 24 European countries in 2008 and 2013, the results show that parties evaluate institutions positively when they have regular access to a regime regardless of their ideology and a regime's duration. Moreover, regime duration affects stances indirectly by providing democracies with a buffer against incumbent's electoral defeat in the immediate past elections. Our findings point to heightened possibilities for parties to negatively evaluate democracies given the increased volatility in party systems in Europe.

Given the rise of EU-scepticism in Germany and elsewhere, spatial models suggest that the SPD and the CDU/CSU have incentives to move towards a more critical position about integration. However, mainstream parties have developed a pro-integration reputation over several decades so it is difficult for them to adopt a stance reflecting outright opposition to Europe's integration. A comparison of party positions in 2008 and 2013 shows that the SPD hardly changed its policy stances on EU issues, whereas the CDU/CSU moved noticeably to a more EU-critical stance. However, situating German parties within the West European universe of party families shows that both remain quite positive about integration. The upshot of this is to illustrate the 'blind corner' of party representation on integration issues in the German party system which created electoral opportunities for the Euro-sceptic AfD.

SINCE THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION, RUSSIAN POLITICS HAVE BEEN IN A STATE OF FLUX AND NEW MEANINGS HAVE BEGUN TO EMERGE FOR THE TERMS "LEFT WING" AND "RIGHT WING." IN THIS ESSAY, THE AUTHOR DISCUSSES HOW RUSSIANS UNDERSTAND THE TWO TERMS, WHAT KINDS OF PEOPLE ARE LEFT WING OR RIGHT WING, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF IDEOLOGICAL SELF-PLACEMENT IN PARTISAN POLITICS.

Data drawn from national surveys (total N = 431) carried out in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, & Hungary in 1994 were used to explain the difference in performance between political parties in the three countries. The Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP) is in government, the Slovak Party of the Democratic Left (PDL) has a stable vote of around 15%, & the Communist Party of Bohemia & Moravia is in decline. The positions of successor-party supporters are similar across the three countries in respect to economic issues; however, the perceptions of the parties' ideological position varies from extremist in the PDL to centrist in the HSP. These perceptions reflect national variations in economic preferences resulting from differing economic experiences. It is concluded that the future of the successor parties may depend more on the success of market transition than the historical ideology of the parties. 3 Tables, 2 Figures, 1 Appendix, 19 References. J. Lindroth

THE AUTHORS OFFER A GENERAL CHARACTERIZATION OF THE MAIN DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL COMPETITION AND ANALYZE THE IDEOLOGICAL FACTORS THAT DETERMINE A VOTER'S CHOICE OF PARTY. THEY SHOW THAT THE HUNGARIAN PARTY SYSTEM IS STRUCTURED MAINLY BY ISSUES OF SOCIAL LIBERALISM, PREJUDICE, AND ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE POSITION OF HUNGARIANS ABROAD. DISTRIBUTIVE QUESTIONS ALONG WITH NATIONALISM COMPRISE A SECONDARY DIMENSION OF VOTERS' PARTY CHOICE. CHURCH ATTENDANCE IS THE STRONGEST PREDICTOR OF PARTY PREFERENCE, ALTHOUGH AGE, EDUCATION, SEX, AND CLASS ALSO PLAY A ROLE; HOWEVER, NOT ALL IDEOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES CAN BE EXPLAINED BY REFERENCE TO SOCIAL DIVISIONS. THE AUTHORS USE RECALL INFORMATION TO EXAMINE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HUNGARIAN PARTY SYSTEM AND TO EVALUATE CLAIMS ABOUT SHIFTS IN PARTY SUPPORT BETWEEN 1990 AND 1994. THEIR ANALYSIS DOES NOT SUPPORT THE VIEW, ADVANCED BY MANY SCHOLARS, THAT THE SOCIALIST FAILURE IN 1990 WAS DUE TO DEFECTIONS AMONG THOSE IDEOLOGICALLY CLOSE TO THE PARTY, PARTICULARLY WORKERS; NOT DOES IT FIND EVIDENCE THAT, BECAUSE THE HUNGARIAN DEMOCRATIC FORUM DREW ITS SUPPORT FROM THIS SOCIAL GROUP IN 1990, IT WAS DISPROPORTIONATELY LIKELY TO SEE ITS SUPPORT DRIFT TO THE SOCIALISTS IN 1994. RATHER, THE STRONG SHOWING OF THE SOCIALIST PARTY IN 1994 WAS DUE TO ITS IDEOLOGICAL APPEAL TO VOTERS ACROSS THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SPECTRUM.

How did the Russian government deal with popular dissatisfaction from the effects of COVID-19 and the policies it adopted in its wake? And how successful was President Vladimir Putin in evading blame given that Russia is de facto highly politically centralized under the president? We analyze data from a national probability sample of Russians conducted following the first wave of the pandemic in July/August 2020. Our results indicate that Putin's blame-deflecting strategy appears to have been broadly but not entirely successful.