Matthew E Bergman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3718060 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew E Bergman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew E |
| FAMILY NAME | Bergman |
| SIGNATURE | BERGMAN M E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Vienna |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8879-4615 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 128 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Deserting or disengaging with valence populists
Within 18 months of its second consecutive general election (March 2018) as Italy's largest party, the valence populist 5-Star Movement (M5S) had dropped to polling 4th, halving its 30% + vote-share, behind parties of both the right and the left. In those 18-months, the party participated in two governments: one of the right and one of the centre-left. Two broad explanations for such decline are presented here: party credibility loss related to i…
The power of personalization
Purpose AI-driven marketing is transforming how food brands connect with younger audiences, especially Generation Z (Gen Z). Artificial intelligence has evolved from a trend into a structural norm that influences personalization and persuasion in food marketing. This paper examines how Gen Z engages with AI versus traditional food ads, mapping psychological pathways and their relevance to the EU AI Act. Design/methodology/approach An online surve…
Ethno-Regional Parties Cannot Be Everything to Everyone
This note suggests that should ethno-regional parties broaden their agenda, they could be electorally punished. Literature suggests an electoral incentive to a broader party issue agenda, even for some ‘niche’ parties. However as quintessential ‘niche’ parties due to their limited ability to be competitive with the general electorate, we argue ethno-regional parties can only gain votes by specializing on a narrow, concentrated set of issues. They…
In for a Penny, in for a Pound?” Evidence That Government Support Parties Cannot Dissociate Themselves from the Prime Minister’s Party
The Persistence of Memory
Previous research has demonstrated that citizens use heuristics in their ideological perceptions of the placement of governing partners. Yet what about the perceptions after the government termination from non-government support parties? To what extent is updating evident and is there heterogeneity in the response? We examine these questions using a Spanish Survey Panel over 6 months in 2018–2019 after the termination of the Rajoy II government. …
Years of Niche Parties Being ‘Fundamentally Different
The literature on the concept of niche parties is rapidly growing. Characterized by a narrow electorate with extreme issue positions or salience and their responsiveness to this electorate, debate remains as to their operationalization and multidimensional behavior. This paper explores the variation in definitions used to identify niche parties or “nicheness” and analyzes their implications for the validity of findings about the strategic behavio…
Government ideology and labour policy reform in good times and bad
Which governments implement interventionist or liberalising labour policy reforms, and does the economic context matter? Drawing on the previous literature on government ideology and public policy, we hypothesise that leftist governments are more likely to implement interventionist labour policies. However, we also expect that economic circumstances influence parties’ room to manoeuvre, and we thus hypothesise that the impact of government partis…
Coalition agreements and governments’ policy-making productivity
One of the biggest challenges parties in multiparty governments face is making policies together and overcoming the risk of a policy stalemate. Scholars have devoted much attention to the study of how various institutions in cabinet and parliament help coalition parties with conflicting policy preferences to be efficient in the policy-making process. Coalition agreements are one of many instruments coalition partners can use to facilitate policy …
Party and Leadership Effects on Referendum Voting
Unlike other ballots, referendums do not provide voters a list of parties or candidates to choose from. Here we argue that referendum voting behaviour, however, can be understood through the lends of partisanship and the socio-economic context during the voting period. The personalisation of contemporary politics would also suggest an important role of political leadership in swaying voting decisions. The article applies this theory in analysis o…
Runoff Comebacks in Comparative Perspective
In many countries, the president of the republic is directly elected through popular vote. Most such nations have an electoral system that provides for a double-round of voting. Often termed a two-round system, such elections have a second turn if no candidate obtains an absolute majority in the first round. This article presents an original dataset covering all the presidential and the semi-presidential regimes (73 countries) that have adopted t…
Coalition bargaining time and governments’ policy‐making productivity
What is the purpose of lengthy negotiations when a coalition government forms? Do they make a difference in coalition policy‐making? Negotiations that produce policy agreements between coalition partners have been suggested to strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms. We argue that bargaining time, regardless if it results in a written policy agreement or not, is an investment in future government reform productivit…
Labour market policies and support for populist radical right parties
One of the growing constituencies of populist movements has been those facing labour market risks. These individuals are hypothesized to be the most likely to find themselves in need of government protection or service provision as their occupations face challenges from abroad through global competition, domestically through competition from immigrant labour, or technologically from automation. Nations, however, vary in how their populations expe…
Conflicting messages of electoral protest
The vote NO (a defeat for the proponents) of the 2016 Italian referendum has been broadly attributed to a wave of protest politics sweeping Western democracies. Given that the government of Matteo Renzi proposed and supported the referendum, the resulting vote against government interests raises a crucial theoretical question: to what extent does the referendum vote reflect the characteristics of a protest vote? To disentangle the meaning and imp…
The Party Personnel Datasets
This paper introduces eight country‐level datasets with >50,000 observations that can be used to analyze novel comparative questions concerning party personnel strategies—how parties recruit candidates and allocate members across party, legislative, and cabinet positions. We make these datasets public to inspire comparative research, especially from an electoral systems perspective; electoral systems shape constituency representation and influenc…
Sorting between and within coalitions
How do voters sort within an electoral coalition? Voting literatures on ideology, character valence, and issue ownership provide explanations for inter-coalition or inter-party voting, yet the coalition context remains understudied. Do voters in proportional coalition-based systems use the same ideological and issue-based heuristics ascribed to them in two-party systems that favor single-party government? Voting behavior in Italy in the 2000s is …
Protest against the politicians
Referenda provide the opportunity for voters to express political economic protest and provide additional ways to support parties they vote for in elections. Alternatively, referenda also provide voters a chance to express their policy references in a way that does not affect which party will lead the government. The rejection of the 2016 Italian Constitutional referendum by 60% of voters and the approval the 2020 Italian Constitutional Referendu…
Decades of Party Distrust. Persistence through Reform in Italy
One common feature of the Italian political space over the past half century has been the presence of distrust in political parties and the presence of anti-system parties on both the left and the right. Discontent with existing elites and the political system has taken many forms, including referendums altering the electoral system. Both the character of the main parties and the rules by which they are elected have been reformed 4 times since th…
Broad-appeal agendas
Extant research has focused on the consequences of positional issue shifts that parties associate with their campaigns. Less attention has been paid to the consequences of the breadth of these issue agendas, which we demonstrate is a fruitful avenue for future research. Our analysis compares the effects of "appealing broadly" when employed by mainstream-left and mainstream-right parties and argues that centre-right parties can gain votes by emplo…
Preferential Voting Systems
How do 1/6 of the world's electoral systems function? Preferential voting systems: Influence on intra-party competition and voting behaviour collects electoral data and country-specific information
Issue Diversification
This work proposes an explanation for nationalist party success based on successful issue competition. Niche parties, it has been argued, gain votes by concentrating on their “owned” issues, such as environmentalism for green parties and mono-culturalism for nationalists. We argue that nationalist parties may increase their vote share by engaging in issue competition with mainstream parties and expanding the diversity of issues emphasized in thei…
Rejecting constitutional reform in the 2016 Italian referendum
The rejection of constitutional reform in the 4 December 2016 referendum resulted in the resignation of Matteo Renzi. Numerous potential explanations could be offered for this result, reflecting political discontent, dissatisfaction with the governing coalition or disagreement with the specific referendum proposals. An analysis of the referendum results can thus serve to identify which of these aspects led to the ultimate rejection of the propose…
Mi Piace, ma Non Mi Piaci [I Like It, But I Don't Like You]
The rejection of the Italian Referendum in December 2016 resulted in the resignation of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. National referendums have occurred 68 times from 1975 through 2016, with two previous constitutional referendums in 2001 and 2006 (Pasquino & Valbruzzi, 2017). On December 4, Italians were asked to vote on a series of reforms that would decrease the costs of politics and streamline decision making, centralizing executive power in p…
Insights from the Quantification of the Study of Populism
Research on populist parties and their voters has produced several books, edited volumes, and peer-reviewed articles that examine these in a comparative context. Country and topic experts defined the “populist” parties of study, and great progress has been made in examining the conditions under which these “populist” parties are successful and the socio-demographic nature of their political support. Recently, quantitative scales have been develop…
Patterns of intraparty competition in open-list & SNTV systems
Patterns of intraparty competition in open-list & SNTV systems
Issue Diversification
This work proposes an explanation for nationalist party success based on successful issue competition. Niche parties, it has been argued, gain votes by concentrating on their “owned” issues, such as environmentalism for green parties and mono-culturalism for nationalists. We argue that nationalist parties may increase their vote share by engaging in issue competition with mainstream parties and expanding the diversity of issues emphasized in thei…
Coalition agreements and governments’ policy-making productivity
One of the biggest challenges parties in multiparty governments face is making policies together and overcoming the risk of a policy stalemate. Scholars have devoted much attention to the study of how various institutions in cabinet and parliament help coalition parties with conflicting policy preferences to be efficient in the policy-making process. Coalition agreements are one of many instruments coalition partners can use to facilitate policy …
Sorting between and within coalitions
How do voters sort within an electoral coalition? Voting literatures on ideology, character valence, and issue ownership provide explanations for inter-coalition or inter-party voting, yet the coalition context remains understudied. Do voters in proportional coalition-based systems use the same ideological and issue-based heuristics ascribed to them in two-party systems that favor single-party government? Voting behavior in Italy in the 2000s is …
Broad-appeal agendas
Extant research has focused on the consequences of positional issue shifts that parties associate with their campaigns. Less attention has been paid to the consequences of the breadth of these issue agendas, which we demonstrate is a fruitful avenue for future research. Our analysis compares the effects of "appealing broadly" when employed by mainstream-left and mainstream-right parties and argues that centre-right parties can gain votes by emplo…
Decades of Party Distrust. Persistence through Reform in Italy
One common feature of the Italian political space over the past half century has been the presence of distrust in political parties and the presence of anti-system parties on both the left and the right. Discontent with existing elites and the political system has taken many forms, including referendums altering the electoral system. Both the character of the main parties and the rules by which they are elected have been reformed 4 times since th…
Years of Niche Parties Being ‘Fundamentally Different
The literature on the concept of niche parties is rapidly growing. Characterized by a narrow electorate with extreme issue positions or salience and their responsiveness to this electorate, debate remains as to their operationalization and multidimensional behavior. This paper explores the variation in definitions used to identify niche parties or “nicheness” and analyzes their implications for the validity of findings about the strategic behavio…
Party and Leadership Effects on Referendum Voting
Unlike other ballots, referendums do not provide voters a list of parties or candidates to choose from. Here we argue that referendum voting behaviour, however, can be understood through the lends of partisanship and the socio-economic context during the voting period. The personalisation of contemporary politics would also suggest an important role of political leadership in swaying voting decisions. The article applies this theory in analysis o…
Runoff Comebacks in Comparative Perspective
In many countries, the president of the republic is directly elected through popular vote. Most such nations have an electoral system that provides for a double-round of voting. Often termed a two-round system, such elections have a second turn if no candidate obtains an absolute majority in the first round. This article presents an original dataset covering all the presidential and the semi-presidential regimes (73 countries) that have adopted t…
Coalition bargaining time and governments’ policy‐making productivity
What is the purpose of lengthy negotiations when a coalition government forms? Do they make a difference in coalition policy‐making? Negotiations that produce policy agreements between coalition partners have been suggested to strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms. We argue that bargaining time, regardless if it results in a written policy agreement or not, is an investment in future government reform productivit…
Labour market policies and support for populist radical right parties
One of the growing constituencies of populist movements has been those facing labour market risks. These individuals are hypothesized to be the most likely to find themselves in need of government protection or service provision as their occupations face challenges from abroad through global competition, domestically through competition from immigrant labour, or technologically from automation. Nations, however, vary in how their populations expe…
Conflicting messages of electoral protest
The vote NO (a defeat for the proponents) of the 2016 Italian referendum has been broadly attributed to a wave of protest politics sweeping Western democracies. Given that the government of Matteo Renzi proposed and supported the referendum, the resulting vote against government interests raises a crucial theoretical question: to what extent does the referendum vote reflect the characteristics of a protest vote? To disentangle the meaning and imp…
Mi Piace, ma Non Mi Piaci [I Like It, But I Don't Like You]
The rejection of the Italian Referendum in December 2016 resulted in the resignation of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. National referendums have occurred 68 times from 1975 through 2016, with two previous constitutional referendums in 2001 and 2006 (Pasquino & Valbruzzi, 2017). On December 4, Italians were asked to vote on a series of reforms that would decrease the costs of politics and streamline decision making, centralizing executive power in p…
In for a Penny, in for a Pound?” Evidence That Government Support Parties Cannot Dissociate Themselves from the Prime Minister’s Party
The Party Personnel Datasets
This paper introduces eight country‐level datasets with >50,000 observations that can be used to analyze novel comparative questions concerning party personnel strategies—how parties recruit candidates and allocate members across party, legislative, and cabinet positions. We make these datasets public to inspire comparative research, especially from an electoral systems perspective; electoral systems shape constituency representation and influenc…
Preferential Voting Systems
How do 1/6 of the world's electoral systems function? Preferential voting systems: Influence on intra-party competition and voting behaviour collects electoral data and country-specific information
Rejecting constitutional reform in the 2016 Italian referendum
The rejection of constitutional reform in the 4 December 2016 referendum resulted in the resignation of Matteo Renzi. Numerous potential explanations could be offered for this result, reflecting political discontent, dissatisfaction with the governing coalition or disagreement with the specific referendum proposals. An analysis of the referendum results can thus serve to identify which of these aspects led to the ultimate rejection of the propose…
Insights from the Quantification of the Study of Populism
Research on populist parties and their voters has produced several books, edited volumes, and peer-reviewed articles that examine these in a comparative context. Country and topic experts defined the “populist” parties of study, and great progress has been made in examining the conditions under which these “populist” parties are successful and the socio-demographic nature of their political support. Recently, quantitative scales have been develop…
Patterns of intraparty competition in open-list & SNTV systems
Rejecting constitutional reform in the 2016 Italian referendum
The rejection of constitutional reform in the 4 December 2016 referendum resulted in the resignation of Matteo Renzi. Numerous potential explanations could be offered for this result, reflecting political discontent, dissatisfaction with the governing coalition or disagreement with the specific referendum proposals. An analysis of the referendum results can thus serve to identify which of these aspects led to the ultimate rejection of the propose…
Mi Piace, ma Non Mi Piaci [I Like It, But I Don't Like You]
The rejection of the Italian Referendum in December 2016 resulted in the resignation of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. National referendums have occurred 68 times from 1975 through 2016, with two previous constitutional referendums in 2001 and 2006 (Pasquino & Valbruzzi, 2017). On December 4, Italians were asked to vote on a series of reforms that would decrease the costs of politics and streamline decision making, centralizing executive power in p…
Insights from the Quantification of the Study of Populism
Research on populist parties and their voters has produced several books, edited volumes, and peer-reviewed articles that examine these in a comparative context. Country and topic experts defined the “populist” parties of study, and great progress has been made in examining the conditions under which these “populist” parties are successful and the socio-demographic nature of their political support. Recently, quantitative scales have been develop…
Preferential Voting Systems
How do 1/6 of the world's electoral systems function? Preferential voting systems: Influence on intra-party competition and voting behaviour collects electoral data and country-specific information
Issue Diversification
This work proposes an explanation for nationalist party success based on successful issue competition. Niche parties, it has been argued, gain votes by concentrating on their “owned” issues, such as environmentalism for green parties and mono-culturalism for nationalists. We argue that nationalist parties may increase their vote share by engaging in issue competition with mainstream parties and expanding the diversity of issues emphasized in thei…
Sorting between and within coalitions
How do voters sort within an electoral coalition? Voting literatures on ideology, character valence, and issue ownership provide explanations for inter-coalition or inter-party voting, yet the coalition context remains understudied. Do voters in proportional coalition-based systems use the same ideological and issue-based heuristics ascribed to them in two-party systems that favor single-party government? Voting behavior in Italy in the 2000s is …
Protest against the politicians
Referenda provide the opportunity for voters to express political economic protest and provide additional ways to support parties they vote for in elections. Alternatively, referenda also provide voters a chance to express their policy references in a way that does not affect which party will lead the government. The rejection of the 2016 Italian Constitutional referendum by 60% of voters and the approval the 2020 Italian Constitutional Referendu…
Decades of Party Distrust. Persistence through Reform in Italy
One common feature of the Italian political space over the past half century has been the presence of distrust in political parties and the presence of anti-system parties on both the left and the right. Discontent with existing elites and the political system has taken many forms, including referendums altering the electoral system. Both the character of the main parties and the rules by which they are elected have been reformed 4 times since th…
Broad-appeal agendas
Extant research has focused on the consequences of positional issue shifts that parties associate with their campaigns. Less attention has been paid to the consequences of the breadth of these issue agendas, which we demonstrate is a fruitful avenue for future research. Our analysis compares the effects of "appealing broadly" when employed by mainstream-left and mainstream-right parties and argues that centre-right parties can gain votes by emplo…
Labour market policies and support for populist radical right parties
One of the growing constituencies of populist movements has been those facing labour market risks. These individuals are hypothesized to be the most likely to find themselves in need of government protection or service provision as their occupations face challenges from abroad through global competition, domestically through competition from immigrant labour, or technologically from automation. Nations, however, vary in how their populations expe…
Conflicting messages of electoral protest
The vote NO (a defeat for the proponents) of the 2016 Italian referendum has been broadly attributed to a wave of protest politics sweeping Western democracies. Given that the government of Matteo Renzi proposed and supported the referendum, the resulting vote against government interests raises a crucial theoretical question: to what extent does the referendum vote reflect the characteristics of a protest vote? To disentangle the meaning and imp…
The Party Personnel Datasets
This paper introduces eight country‐level datasets with >50,000 observations that can be used to analyze novel comparative questions concerning party personnel strategies—how parties recruit candidates and allocate members across party, legislative, and cabinet positions. We make these datasets public to inspire comparative research, especially from an electoral systems perspective; electoral systems shape constituency representation and influenc…
Runoff Comebacks in Comparative Perspective
In many countries, the president of the republic is directly elected through popular vote. Most such nations have an electoral system that provides for a double-round of voting. Often termed a two-round system, such elections have a second turn if no candidate obtains an absolute majority in the first round. This article presents an original dataset covering all the presidential and the semi-presidential regimes (73 countries) that have adopted t…
Coalition bargaining time and governments’ policy‐making productivity
What is the purpose of lengthy negotiations when a coalition government forms? Do they make a difference in coalition policy‐making? Negotiations that produce policy agreements between coalition partners have been suggested to strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms. We argue that bargaining time, regardless if it results in a written policy agreement or not, is an investment in future government reform productivit…
Government ideology and labour policy reform in good times and bad
Which governments implement interventionist or liberalising labour policy reforms, and does the economic context matter? Drawing on the previous literature on government ideology and public policy, we hypothesise that leftist governments are more likely to implement interventionist labour policies. However, we also expect that economic circumstances influence parties’ room to manoeuvre, and we thus hypothesise that the impact of government partis…
Coalition agreements and governments’ policy-making productivity
One of the biggest challenges parties in multiparty governments face is making policies together and overcoming the risk of a policy stalemate. Scholars have devoted much attention to the study of how various institutions in cabinet and parliament help coalition parties with conflicting policy preferences to be efficient in the policy-making process. Coalition agreements are one of many instruments coalition partners can use to facilitate policy …
Party and Leadership Effects on Referendum Voting
Unlike other ballots, referendums do not provide voters a list of parties or candidates to choose from. Here we argue that referendum voting behaviour, however, can be understood through the lends of partisanship and the socio-economic context during the voting period. The personalisation of contemporary politics would also suggest an important role of political leadership in swaying voting decisions. The article applies this theory in analysis o…
The power of personalization
Purpose AI-driven marketing is transforming how food brands connect with younger audiences, especially Generation Z (Gen Z). Artificial intelligence has evolved from a trend into a structural norm that influences personalization and persuasion in food marketing. This paper examines how Gen Z engages with AI versus traditional food ads, mapping psychological pathways and their relevance to the EU AI Act. Design/methodology/approach An online surve…
Ethno-Regional Parties Cannot Be Everything to Everyone
This note suggests that should ethno-regional parties broaden their agenda, they could be electorally punished. Literature suggests an electoral incentive to a broader party issue agenda, even for some ‘niche’ parties. However as quintessential ‘niche’ parties due to their limited ability to be competitive with the general electorate, we argue ethno-regional parties can only gain votes by specializing on a narrow, concentrated set of issues. They…
In for a Penny, in for a Pound?” Evidence That Government Support Parties Cannot Dissociate Themselves from the Prime Minister’s Party
The Persistence of Memory
Previous research has demonstrated that citizens use heuristics in their ideological perceptions of the placement of governing partners. Yet what about the perceptions after the government termination from non-government support parties? To what extent is updating evident and is there heterogeneity in the response? We examine these questions using a Spanish Survey Panel over 6 months in 2018–2019 after the termination of the Rajoy II government. …
Years of Niche Parties Being ‘Fundamentally Different
The literature on the concept of niche parties is rapidly growing. Characterized by a narrow electorate with extreme issue positions or salience and their responsiveness to this electorate, debate remains as to their operationalization and multidimensional behavior. This paper explores the variation in definitions used to identify niche parties or “nicheness” and analyzes their implications for the validity of findings about the strategic behavio…
Deserting or disengaging with valence populists
Within 18 months of its second consecutive general election (March 2018) as Italy's largest party, the valence populist 5-Star Movement (M5S) had dropped to polling 4th, halving its 30% + vote-share, behind parties of both the right and the left. In those 18-months, the party participated in two governments: one of the right and one of the centre-left. Two broad explanations for such decline are presented here: party credibility loss related to i…
Political science (22 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Political economy (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Populism, Right-Wing Movements (13 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Public Administration (8 works)