A burgeoning literature documents the emergence of a new globalization cleavage in Western Europe, centered around the issues of immigration and European integration. We investigate to what extent the globalization cleavage has crystallized by studying the alignment of preferences regarding open borders, their connection to more fundamental elements in the normative component of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism, and the extent to which this links up to the organizational component through party choice. To do this, we use innovative items tapping into political priorities, values, understandings of democracy, and virtues in a cross-sectional comparative survey in Norway and the UK. We find that the globalization cleavage is significantly more developed in the UK than in Norway but lacks a solidified normative component in both. This implies that considerable opportunities remain for ideological entrepreneurs to either fortify or dilute this cleavage, even in the UK.

This article demonstrates that deindustrialization increases ethnonational mobilization. We maintain that levels of mobilization of ethnonational movements are to an important extent a residual to the class cleavage, that is, to the degree the class conflict dominates political competition. Since in the context of Western Europe industrialism is the main force behind the class cleavage, deindustrialization weakens this cleavage and allows instead for mobilization along ethnonational divisions. In order to empirically test our argument, we analyze levels of electoral mobilization of ethnonational party blocs among 15 Western European minorities between 1918 and 2018. Our analysis clearly reveals that levels of industrialization are negatively related to ethnonational mobilization. However, this is only true for regions with historically high levels of industrialization and if the ethnonational movement is unified. The article contributes to the comparative literature on the electoral performance of ethnonational parties and the literature on deindustrialization and nationalism.

Why is taxing the rich so difficult despite rising inequality and public support for progressive taxation? Recent research has mostly focused on the ‘demand side’ of electoral tax politics, showing that economic crises can increase public demands for progressive taxation in contemporary societies. Complementing this research, we focus on the political ‘supply side’, investigating the conditions under which social democratic parties take up these calls and translate them into policy. Studying wealth taxation in the course of the global financial crisis, we argue that whether parties pushed for taxing wealth crucially depended on intra-party struggles between the (office-seeking) leadership and the (policy-seeking) left wing. Only if the leadership became convinced that redistributive tax policy was electorally promising, did the social democratic parties fight for implementing wealth taxes. We evaluate this theoretical proposition in a comparative analysis of wealth tax policies in Austria, Germany and Spain in 2008–2015.

The article investigates whether and to what extent the welfare policies of Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) vary in diverse government coalitions. Relying on a multidimensional framework differentiating coalitional politics along the welfare size and deservingness dimension, we conduct a comparative case study analysing welfare reforms of the ‘standard’ centre-right/PRRP government coalition ÖVP-FPÖ in Austria and the ‘new’ populist government coalition M5S-Lega in Italy. We find that both PRRPs do not promote pro-welfare policies in general, but rather opt for selective expansion of benefits for ‘makers’, while aiming at retrenching benefits for ‘takers’. This welfare strategy includes pensioners and male breadwinner families but excludes migrants or long-term unemployed. The analysis furthermore shows that the central line of conflict with the centre-right ÖVP is mostly about the size of welfare policies, especially for ‘deserving’ citizens, while with the socially more left-leaning M5S it is rather centred around the deservingness dimension, e.g., benefits for takers. These results offer a more fine-grained understanding of the PRRPs’ welfare agenda and their coalitional welfare politics in office.

According to partisan theory, variations in policy choices and outputs originate from the party composition of the government studied. In this study, we take a novel approach to address such assumptions by linking changes in municipal taxes with local government changes. We also add a baseline scenario in which we examine whether the composition of the local government affects tax levels. Drawing on a dataset that contains official Swedish statistics from 1994 to 2018, we find convincing support for the partisan effect. Tax levels are higher under left-wing rule, and more specifically, tax cuts particularly occur when left-wing governments are replaced by right-wing ones. These results do not vanish when controls are accounted for, while it can be particularly noticed that the condition of the municipal economy influences partisan ambitions. These findings thereby contradict prior theoretical assumptions that the local arena is free from ideological battles.

This paper investigates why some attempts at pacted transitions from non-democratic rule fail, while others succeed. It determines the composition of opposition organizations that enable pacting. The paper draws on a data set compiled by the author comparing forty-five attempts at negotiations. The qualitative comparative analysis shows that those negotiations that include the opposition with strong organizational capacity succeed and end up with democratization. This strong organizational power of the opposition can be drawn from trade unions or the Catholic Church participating in negotiations, even if the initial regime is personalistic.

Most trade agreements are ratified with overwhelming support by legislators throughout the world. This lack of opposition is surprising given the strong distributional consequences of trade and the expectation of conventional political economy theory that parliamentary votes on trade policy should be closely contested between winners and losers of globalization. To analyze the driving forces behind legislators’ voting behavior while avoiding the obscuring effect of party discipline, I analyze under which circumstances legislators decide to rebel against their party’s position when voting on the ratification of trade agreements. I put forward two hypotheses: First, rebellions are more likely when the trade agreement is with a larger trading partner and when the liberalization through the agreement is more comprehensive. Second, legislators will rebel when their party’s position does not align with their constituency’s economic interests. These hypotheses are supported by a series of multinomial regression analyses based on an original dataset comprising votes of several thousand legislators from multiple countries on the ratification of trade agreements.

The revision of sexist laws is complicated not only by disagreements between progressives and traditionalists but also by opposing views held by different types of traditionalists. We design a two-wave list experiment with information treatments to examine public opinion toward reforming the Japanese monarchy’s male-only patrilineal succession rule, focusing on two strands of traditionalism: conservatism and sexism. We show that conservatism, not sexism, is associated with stronger opposition to the ascension of female monarchs. Moreover, opinions toward gendered succession rules are hard to dislodge, because they are rooted in deep-held values. Treatments that highlight the capability of female heirs, the rarity of current practices in peer nations, and the perils posed by succession crises fail to change respondent preferences. Our study reveals the discordance within traditional values, and how this can impede efforts to reform statutory gender discrimination.