Fernando Casal Bértoa
Biographic Data
| ID | 318674 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fernando Casal Bértoa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fernando Casal |
| FAMILY NAME | Bértoa |
| SIGNATURE | BÉRTOA F C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9494-4621 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 532 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
The Oxford Handbook of Polish Politics
Structured in fifty-six chapters, this Handbook explores Polish politics in depth since the country’s independence in 1918, with a particular focus on the post-communist period (1990–2023). It presents an extensive collection of studies on Polish political history, the nation’s political institutions, electoral politics, governance, and foreign relations, including its interactions with the European Union. The volume discusses Poland’s processes …
Measuring and Explaining the Robustness of Party Ethics Self‐Regulation
Over the past two decades, political parties have undertaken a series of intra‐party reforms aimed at reinforcing ethical standards and restoring public confidence. These regulatory developments have been insufficiently studied and remain a blind spot in the literature. The purpose of this article is to explain, drawing on existing theories of regulation, not only why political parties engage in ethics self‐regulation, but also why the robustness…
Party research and party support aid: Conflicting visions of how parties function
Recent decades have witnessed substantial expansion in both international efforts to support the development of political parties as healthy organizations, and in academic comparative studies to understand how parties’ organizational choices affect political outcomes. Despite the similarities of the concerns, the overlap of these efforts has been modest. This article considers why these developments have failed to converge, pointing to different …
Building party resilience: Improving party aid in an age of democratic decline
Building from below: The role of political parties in fostering resilience in an age of democratic decline
Blessing or curse? A critical review of the paradoxical consequences of direct public funding for political parties
Direct public funding (DPF) is a crucial resource for political parties in many of the world’s democracies. While research into the consequences of DPF has grown in prominence since the turn of the century, few efforts have been made to synthesize its findings. This article takes the first steps in doing so. Viewing DPF as an independent variable, we assess the impacts that party subsidization has on electoral competition, party organizations, pa…
Mobilizing Fear in the 2023 Polish General Elections: Immigration Anxiety as a Populist Strategy for Re-election
This article analyzes how Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) weaponized migration anxiety as a populist strategy during the 2023 general elections. Using a comparative qualitative case-study approach (George and Bennett 2005), the article examines how PiS leveraged anti-immigration rhetoric to mobilize voters, deepen social polarization, and legitimize its governance. The study draws comparisons with Hungary’s 2016 referendum on European Union (EU) r…
Does institutional design matter? Constitutional regime types and party system closure in Asia
Classifying Asian party systems: Sartori’s typology in comparative perspective
Almost 50 years have passed since Sartori introduced to the world one of the most famous innovations in the history of political science: a new party systems typology. Despite many criticisms and refinements since then, Sartori's typology still constitutes, as stated by Peter Mair in 1990, “the most effective and exhaustive framework within which to contrast the properties of different party systems”. In the current research note, and taking into…
Classifying Asian party systems: Sartori's Typology in Comparative Perspective – Corrigendum
Gullimair travels east: Drivers of party system institutionalization in Asia in comparative perspective
In this article, we apply Mair’s concept of ‘party system closure’ to Asian party systems, with particular comparison with his native continent, Europe. Building on Mair’s (2001) conceptualization and Casal Bértoa and Enyedi’s (2021) operationalization of party system institutionalization (PSI), which demonstrates the importance of looking at the supply-side of PSI and the superiority of closure over electoral volatility as a measure of PSI, this…
The Ball That Failed to Curve: The 2023 “Populist Polarizing” Referendum in Poland
In October 2023, Poland’s illiberal right-wing government held a referendum modeled after the one held in Hungary one year earlier. Organized in conjunction with the parliamentary elections under the pretext of “saving costs,” the 2023 Polish referendum constitutes the most recent example of how populists can use direct democracy to mobilize their electorate. However, unlike Hungary’s experience a year earlier, this referendum highlights how “pop…
Do political finance reforms really reduce corruption? A replication study
In their 2021 article published in the British Journal of Political Science, Calla Hummel, John Gerring, and Thomas Burt (henceforth Hummel et al.) examine the relationship between political finance reforms and corruption, concluding that state funding of political parties reduces corruption by diminishing reliance on private financing. Our replication study challenges this conclusion based on data accuracy and operationalization issues of their …
Can financial transparency help parties institutionalize and save democracy
Presidential Elections and European Party Systems (1848–2020)
Political scientists have long been concerned that a popularly elected presidency may destabilize competitive party systems. We develop and test a new theory holding that the impact is more immediate and severe than previously assumed. Coexisting legislative and presidential coalitions first and foremost impede the evolution of predictable party interactions at the executive level, which is the domain of the cabinet. This quality has become acces…
Party and Party System Institutionalization: Which Comes First
Parties and party systems are treated as separate phenomena in theory, but not in research practice. This is most clearly so in the literature on the institutionalization of party politics, where the party level and the systemic levels are often analyzed through combined fuzzy indices. We 1) propose separate indicators for measuring institutionalization at the party and at the party system level, 2) demonstrate their different dynamics in twentie…
Party system closure and the liberal dimension of democracy: A Double-Edged Sword
An institutionalized party system is often regarded as a precondition for a well-functioning democracy. Recent recesses in democracy and, in particular, in the liberal dimension of democracy in relatively established party systems, however, warrant a fresh look into how party system institutionalization shapes liberal democracy. We use a dataset that covers 58 European party systems over more than a century to assess how party system institutiona…
The problem of party system change revisited: The 2022 Peter Mair Lecture
Like with Haute Couture, in political science there are also fashions. In the 1990s party system change was the flavour of the day, and Peter Mair its uttermost pontiff. The popularity of the topic fadde away with the new century, especially after the 2008 Great Recession made buzzwords like populism and democratic backsliding, among others, more fashionable. Departing from Mair’s, 2001 book chapter on the topic, and using Mair’s conceptual and m…
Response to Mihail Chiru’s “Review of Party System Closure: Party Alliances, Government Alternatives and Democracy in Europe”
Response to Mihail Chiru’s "Review of 'Party System Closure: Party Alliances, Government Alternatives and Democracy in Europe' by Fernando Casal Bértoa and Zsolt Enyedi
Paying for appeasement: On the moderating role of public subsidies in East Central European party politics
Focusing on the relationship between the access of political parties to direct public funding and electoral support for anti-political-establishment (e.g. populist, extremist) parties (APEp), this article tries to fill an important gap in the literature. Whereas previous contributions, mostly focused on the United States or established democracies in Western Europe, have presented contradictory findings, our study of 19 new democracies in East Ce…
On the causes of electoral volatility in Asia since 1948
Electoral stability has been viewed as an essential condition for the healthy functioning of representative democracy. However, there is little agreement in the literature about what shapes the stability of the electorate in general nor much attention paid to that of the Asian electorates in particular. We propose historical legacies, uniquely testable in Asia, as central determinants, but also test for conventional factors examined in other regi…
The future is not what it used to be: The Failure of Bipolarisation
Arguably, the most fundamental question one can ask about a party system is whether it is bipolar or not. Based on theoretical conjectures and on tendencies one observed during the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as reflecting the position of the academic community at the time (e.g. [Bale, T. (2003). Cinderella and Her ugly sisters: The mainstream and extreme right in Europe's bipolarising party systems. West European Politics, 26(3), 67–90; Mülle…
Party System Closure: Party Alliances, Government Alternatives, and Democracy in Europe
The Introduction starts with some examples of pairs of old and new democracies, some larger, some smaller, some in the East, some in the South, and illustrates how party system development can differ despite very similar background conditions. We then proceed to identify four main factors that differ within each pair, as possible explanations of the way party politics in general, and partisan interaction in particular, evolved in different countr…
Polarization: What Do We Know and What Can We Do About It
Polarization is not new in Europe. Looking at electoral support for radical political forces after the Second World War, one can observe how polarization has been on the rise since the 1960s. Still, it is in the 1990s, with the thaw of European party systems and the subsequent emergence of (populist) radical parties, that the percentage of votes for anti-political establishment parties reached unprecedented levels. In this article, we not only sh…
Who governs Europe? A new historical dataset on governments and party systems since 1848
Comprising 172 years of European history (from 1848 to 2020), the Who governs dataset provides comprehensive and highly detailed information on the partisan composition of European governments, matching these data with information on those aspects of party politics that can either help to understand the dynamics of the governmental arena or are under the direct influence of the composition of governments. Most of the variables represent fundament…
Party systems and cleavage structures revisited: A sociological explanation of party system institutionalization in East Central Europe
Since Lipset and Rokkan (1967) published their seminal work on the importance of social cleavages for the ‘freezing’ of party systems more than forty years ago, much has been written on the field demonstrating or discrediting the original hypothesis. In the current article, I examine how cleavage formation and development have influenced the different levels of institutionalization in four new post-communist party systems (i.e. Visegrad). Analysi…
Party system closure and openness: Conceptualization, operationalization and validation
The degree of closure of the governmental arena is a central aspect of the stabilization of party systems, and yet little systematic effort has been devoted to its operationalization. The article proposes a new index, examines its reliability and validity, and reports the ranking of 60 party systems. By redefining the units of measurement we suggest new indicators that are uniform and transparent in their logic of construction, can be applied bot…
Political parties or party systems? Assessing the ‘myth’ of institutionalisation and democracy
No matter the region of the world under study, party (system) institutionalisation has been traditionally considered to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the survival of democracy. Despite being one of the most quoted statements in the democratisation literature, the few studies looking at the relationship between institutionalisation and democratic endurance have found no evidence of the ‘almost magical’ powers of the former. Thi…
Institutionalization and De-institutionalization in Post-communist Party Systems
This article is part of the special cluster titled Parties and Democratic Linkage in Post-Communist Europe, guest edited by Lori Thorlakson, and will be published in the August 2018 issue of EEPS In an article written in 1995 titled “What Is Different about Postcommunist Party Systems?” Peter Mair applied the method that he called “ ex adverso extrapolation.” He matched his knowledge of the process of consolidation of party systems in the West wi…
The volatility of volatility: Measuring change in party vote shares
The world upside down: Delegitimising political finance regulation
Political finance regulation is often praised in terms of its ability to introduce equality among political parties, to create more transparent political parties and to lower the influence of affluent donors on the political decision-making process. Little examination exists, however, of the effectiveness of this type of regulation. This article aims to fill this gap by addressing whether and to what extent different types of public funding regul…
Party decline or social transformation? Economic, institutional and sociological change and the rise of anti-political-establishment parties in Western Europe
The rise in support for anti-political-establishment parties (APEp), especially since the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession, has put democracy in peril. Some scholars have warned us about the negative implications the recent rise of APEp might have for the development of democracy in Western Europe. For that reason, it is important we begin to understand what generates APEp’s electoral success. Drawing on a new comparative dataset that examin…
Restrained Change: Party Systems in Times of Economic Crisis
The recent global financial crisis has been a serious stress test for representative democracies. Voter support has supposedly become more volatile, fragmented, and polarized, leaving elites with an intricate mix of economic and political challenges. However, a closer look at a new data set of European party systems during three major crises (1929, 1973, and 2008) reveals that the reality is less dramatic than the popular impression suggests. We …
Parties between thresholds: State subsidies and party behaviour in post-communist democracies
Much has been written about what makes political parties form, persist, change and die. One factor often brought into this discussion is the availability of resources in general and of state financing of political parties in particular. However, an empirical link at the aggregate level is difficult to establish because of various issues of conceptualization, operationalization and measurement. Working at the party level and taking into considerat…
Post-Communist Politics: On the Divergence (and/or Convergence) of East and West
Adopting Ionescu's qualitative approach to political science, and building on Sartori's definition of party system, this article examines the degree to which European (both East and West) party systems have developed since the collapse of communism in 1990 in all three major areas of partisan competition: parliamentary, governmental and electoral. In this context, this article constitutes, paraphrasing Sartori (1969), an attempt to go ‘from polit…
Parties, regime and cleavages: Explaining party system institutionalisation in East Central Europe
Party system institutionalisation has traditionally been viewed as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the healthy functioning of democracy; yet the question of why some of these competitive party systems managed to institutionalise at the end of the second decade of party politics while others have not has not received the necessary attention. In order to begin to fill this gap, this article tackles the above-cited issue by trying to …
Party regulation and party politics in post-communist Europe
Recent years have seen a considerable increase in the scope and magnitude of party regulations. Despite the increased propensity of the modern democratic states to intervene in the activities, organisation and behaviour of parties, the phenomenon of party regulation has received relatively little systematic and comparative scholarly attention. In order to fill part of the existing gap in the literature, we concentrate on the regulation of politic…
Who governs Europe? A new historical dataset on governments and party systems since 1848
Comprising 172 years of European history (from 1848 to 2020), the Who governs dataset provides comprehensive and highly detailed information on the partisan composition of European governments, matching these data with information on those aspects of party politics that can either help to understand the dynamics of the governmental arena or are under the direct influence of the composition of governments. Most of the variables represent fundament…
The Antiestablishment Challenge
Over recent decades, democracies have seen a decline in support for traditional political parties. In parallel, the vote shares of populist and other antiestablishment forces have increased dramatically, especially during the last decade. As maintained elsewhere, the latter development is the consequence of the former, with its negative consequences for the functioning of democracy. This article shows that only the regeneration of traditional par…
The Three Waves of Party System Institutionalisation Studies: A Multi- or Uni-Dimensional Concept
Since Mainwaring and Scully’s resurrection of the concept in 1995, party system institutionalisation has become something of a buzzword to which many refer without a proper definition. Indeed, most scholars simply assume that its meaning is clear and unproblematic, focusing all subsequent efforts on developing operational indicators, but without really concerning themselves with its conceptual refinement. However, an in-depth literature review of…
Are Anti-Political-Establishment Parties a Peril for European Democracy? A Longitudinal Study from 1950 till 2017
That political parties are in a deep crisis is nothing new. The number of works foreseeing the decline of representative democracy is copious. However, studies that empirically examine the relationship between support for anti-political-establishment parties and liberal democracy are almost a rara avis. This article tries to fill a gap in the literature by answering this essential, and notably current, research question. In order to do so, it mak…
Polarization: What Do We Know and What Can We Do About It
Polarization is not new in Europe. Looking at electoral support for radical political forces after the Second World War, one can observe how polarization has been on the rise since the 1960s. Still, it is in the 1990s, with the thaw of European party systems and the subsequent emergence of (populist) radical parties, that the percentage of votes for anti-political establishment parties reached unprecedented levels. In this article, we not only sh…
The Carrot and the Stick: Party Regulation and Politics in Democratic Spain
Party regulation in new democracies in general, and in the Spanish political system in particular, has not been a matter of concern until very recently. The empirical part explores the impact such regulation has had on the Spanish party system as well as on the life of its party organisations
Party and Party System Institutionalization: Which Comes First
Parties and party systems are treated as separate phenomena in theory, but not in research practice. This is most clearly so in the literature on the institutionalization of party politics, where the party level and the systemic levels are often analyzed through combined fuzzy indices. We 1) propose separate indicators for measuring institutionalization at the party and at the party system level, 2) demonstrate their different dynamics in twentie…
Prescribing democracy? Party proscription and party system stability in Germany, Spain and Turkey
When democracies ban political parties, one of the central issues that usually emerges in both public and academic debate concerns the effects of proscription. Some argue that proscription may lead to radicalisation, a growth of militancy and readiness to use violence. Others argue that, in the long run, banning parties may damage the foundations of a democratic polity as the ban may be interpreted as a silent weakening of democratic rights in th…
Party Regulation in Post-Authoritarian Contexts: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective
Despite its increasing importance, the phenomenon of party regulation has hitherto received relatively little systematic and comparative scholarly attention. The contributions to this special issue fill part of this lacuna by evaluating the various dimensions of party regulation and their impact on the parties and the party systems in post-authoritarian Southern Europe. This introduction discusses the main sources of party regulation – Constituti…
Regulating Polish politics: Cartel” Parties in a Non-Collusive Party System
In the first stage of democratic transition, like in most post-communist countries, Poland adopted a more laissez-faire stance towards the regulation of political parties. These regulations, like the one adopted in 1990, were a natural response to the former Communist system and represented a rejection of its restrictions and a fear of a one-party system that could harass the opposition. By the mid-1990s, however, Polish political elite started t…
Paying for appeasement: On the moderating role of public subsidies in East Central European party politics
Focusing on the relationship between the access of political parties to direct public funding and electoral support for anti-political-establishment (e.g. populist, extremist) parties (APEp), this article tries to fill an important gap in the literature. Whereas previous contributions, mostly focused on the United States or established democracies in Western Europe, have presented contradictory findings, our study of 19 new democracies in East Ce…
Regulating party politics in the Western Balkans: The legal sources of party system development in Macedonia
Party regulation in general and its systemic consequences in particular have not been a matter of concern for scholars until very recently. Despite recent efforts to study how political parties are regulated in post-authoritarian democracies and in conflict-prone societies, the question of how party legislation affects party formation and party system development in the Western Balkans still remains a mystery. Adopting a multi-disciplinary (that …
The calm before the storm: Explaining the institutionalization of Southern European party systems before the great recession
This article looks at the development of Southern European party systems between the moment of their independence (Malta and Cyprus) and democratisation (Portugal, Greece and Spain) and before the beginning of 2012, at the highest point of the global financial and economic crisis. In particular, it constitutes the first attempt since Morlino's path-breaking study, published 20 years ago, to try to understand why some Southern European party syste…
The politics of party funding
Parties, regime and cleavages: Explaining party system institutionalisation in East Central Europe
Party system institutionalisation has traditionally been viewed as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the healthy functioning of democracy; yet the question of why some of these competitive party systems managed to institutionalise at the end of the second decade of party politics while others have not has not received the necessary attention. In order to begin to fill this gap, this article tackles the above-cited issue by trying to …
Post-Communist Politics: On the Divergence (and/or Convergence) of East and West
Adopting Ionescu's qualitative approach to political science, and building on Sartori's definition of party system, this article examines the degree to which European (both East and West) party systems have developed since the collapse of communism in 1990 in all three major areas of partisan competition: parliamentary, governmental and electoral. In this context, this article constitutes, paraphrasing Sartori (1969), an attempt to go ‘from polit…
Party Regulation in Post-Authoritarian Contexts: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective
Despite its increasing importance, the phenomenon of party regulation has hitherto received relatively little systematic and comparative scholarly attention. The contributions to this special issue fill part of this lacuna by evaluating the various dimensions of party regulation and their impact on the parties and the party systems in post-authoritarian Southern Europe. This introduction discusses the main sources of party regulation – Constituti…
Party regulation and party politics in post-communist Europe
Recent years have seen a considerable increase in the scope and magnitude of party regulations. Despite the increased propensity of the modern democratic states to intervene in the activities, organisation and behaviour of parties, the phenomenon of party regulation has received relatively little systematic and comparative scholarly attention. In order to fill part of the existing gap in the literature, we concentrate on the regulation of politic…
Regulating Polish politics: Cartel” Parties in a Non-Collusive Party System
In the first stage of democratic transition, like in most post-communist countries, Poland adopted a more laissez-faire stance towards the regulation of political parties. These regulations, like the one adopted in 1990, were a natural response to the former Communist system and represented a rejection of its restrictions and a fear of a one-party system that could harass the opposition. By the mid-1990s, however, Polish political elite started t…
The Carrot and the Stick: Party Regulation and Politics in Democratic Spain
Party regulation in new democracies in general, and in the Spanish political system in particular, has not been a matter of concern until very recently. The empirical part explores the impact such regulation has had on the Spanish party system as well as on the life of its party organisations
Party systems and cleavage structures revisited: A sociological explanation of party system institutionalization in East Central Europe
Since Lipset and Rokkan (1967) published their seminal work on the importance of social cleavages for the ‘freezing’ of party systems more than forty years ago, much has been written on the field demonstrating or discrediting the original hypothesis. In the current article, I examine how cleavage formation and development have influenced the different levels of institutionalization in four new post-communist party systems (i.e. Visegrad). Analysi…
The world upside down: Delegitimising political finance regulation
Political finance regulation is often praised in terms of its ability to introduce equality among political parties, to create more transparent political parties and to lower the influence of affluent donors on the political decision-making process. Little examination exists, however, of the effectiveness of this type of regulation. This article aims to fill this gap by addressing whether and to what extent different types of public funding regul…
Limits of regulation: Party law and finance in Slovakia 1990–2012
This article, a detailed analysis of the content of the legislation on political parties in postcommunist Slovakia, constitutes one part of a broad-based attempt to discover the extent to which changes in the patterns of party regulation have affected party system formation and development. In Slovakia the answer is “not much”, but the process by which this answer emerges can help explain broader patterns. Party organisational and finance regulat…
Party system closure and openness: Conceptualization, operationalization and validation
The degree of closure of the governmental arena is a central aspect of the stabilization of party systems, and yet little systematic effort has been devoted to its operationalization. The article proposes a new index, examines its reliability and validity, and reports the ranking of 60 party systems. By redefining the units of measurement we suggest new indicators that are uniform and transparent in their logic of construction, can be applied bot…
Regulating party politics in the Western Balkans: The legal sources of party system development in Macedonia
Party regulation in general and its systemic consequences in particular have not been a matter of concern for scholars until very recently. Despite recent efforts to study how political parties are regulated in post-authoritarian democracies and in conflict-prone societies, the question of how party legislation affects party formation and party system development in the Western Balkans still remains a mystery. Adopting a multi-disciplinary (that …
The Regulation of Post-Communist Party Politics
Political parties or party systems? Assessing the ‘myth’ of institutionalisation and democracy
No matter the region of the world under study, party (system) institutionalisation has been traditionally considered to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the survival of democracy. Despite being one of the most quoted statements in the democratisation literature, the few studies looking at the relationship between institutionalisation and democratic endurance have found no evidence of the ‘almost magical’ powers of the former. Thi…
Prescribing democracy? Party proscription and party system stability in Germany, Spain and Turkey
When democracies ban political parties, one of the central issues that usually emerges in both public and academic debate concerns the effects of proscription. Some argue that proscription may lead to radicalisation, a growth of militancy and readiness to use violence. Others argue that, in the long run, banning parties may damage the foundations of a democratic polity as the ban may be interpreted as a silent weakening of democratic rights in th…
The volatility of volatility: Measuring change in party vote shares
It's Been Mostly About Money! A Multi-method Research Approach to the Sources of Institutionalization
Although much has been written about the process of party system institutionalization in different regions, the reasons why some party systems institutionalize while others do not still remain a mystery. Seeking to fill this lacuna in the literature, and using a mixed-methods research approach, this article constitutes a first attempt to answer simultaneously the following three questions: (1) What specific factors help party systems to instituti…
Institutionalization and De-institutionalization in Post-communist Party Systems
This article is part of the special cluster titled Parties and Democratic Linkage in Post-Communist Europe, guest edited by Lori Thorlakson, and will be published in the August 2018 issue of EEPS In an article written in 1995 titled “What Is Different about Postcommunist Party Systems?” Peter Mair applied the method that he called “ ex adverso extrapolation.” He matched his knowledge of the process of consolidation of party systems in the West wi…
The calm before the storm: Explaining the institutionalization of Southern European party systems before the great recession
This article looks at the development of Southern European party systems between the moment of their independence (Malta and Cyprus) and democratisation (Portugal, Greece and Spain) and before the beginning of 2012, at the highest point of the global financial and economic crisis. In particular, it constitutes the first attempt since Morlino's path-breaking study, published 20 years ago, to try to understand why some Southern European party syste…
The Three Waves of Party System Institutionalisation Studies: A Multi- or Uni-Dimensional Concept
Since Mainwaring and Scully’s resurrection of the concept in 1995, party system institutionalisation has become something of a buzzword to which many refer without a proper definition. Indeed, most scholars simply assume that its meaning is clear and unproblematic, focusing all subsequent efforts on developing operational indicators, but without really concerning themselves with its conceptual refinement. However, an in-depth literature review of…
The Integrity of Political Finance Systems in Asia: Tackling Political Corruption
Enhancing the integrity of political finance systems is one of the main ways to address political corruption. In Asia, the comprehensiveness of political finance systems and the level of implementation vary significantly across countries. This policy paper draws on the 2018 data of the International IDEA Political Finance Database and covers South Asia, South East Asia and
Are Anti-Political-Establishment Parties a Peril for European Democracy? A Longitudinal Study from 1950 till 2017
That political parties are in a deep crisis is nothing new. The number of works foreseeing the decline of representative democracy is copious. However, studies that empirically examine the relationship between support for anti-political-establishment parties and liberal democracy are almost a rara avis. This article tries to fill a gap in the literature by answering this essential, and notably current, research question. In order to do so, it mak…
Restrained Change: Party Systems in Times of Economic Crisis
The recent global financial crisis has been a serious stress test for representative democracies. Voter support has supposedly become more volatile, fragmented, and polarized, leaving elites with an intricate mix of economic and political challenges. However, a closer look at a new data set of European party systems during three major crises (1929, 1973, and 2008) reveals that the reality is less dramatic than the popular impression suggests. We …
Parties between thresholds: State subsidies and party behaviour in post-communist democracies
Much has been written about what makes political parties form, persist, change and die. One factor often brought into this discussion is the availability of resources in general and of state financing of political parties in particular. However, an empirical link at the aggregate level is difficult to establish because of various issues of conceptualization, operationalization and measurement. Working at the party level and taking into considerat…
Party decline or social transformation? Economic, institutional and sociological change and the rise of anti-political-establishment parties in Western Europe
The rise in support for anti-political-establishment parties (APEp), especially since the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession, has put democracy in peril. Some scholars have warned us about the negative implications the recent rise of APEp might have for the development of democracy in Western Europe. For that reason, it is important we begin to understand what generates APEp’s electoral success. Drawing on a new comparative dataset that examin…
Politics (45 works) · Political science (42 works) · Law (41 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (35 works) · Law (35 works) · Political economy (33 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Democracy (26 works) · Economics (25 works) · Populism, Right-Wing Movements (21 works)