This paper examines the concept “career politician.” It seeks to clarify, systematize, and measure this ambiguous multidimensional concept in order to facilitate testing theories and hypotheses associated with it. We argue that career politicians are full-time politicians who lack significant experience in the wider world and have other distinguishing attributes for which they are both appreciated and criticized. From claims and critiques put forward by political scientists, journalists, publics, and politicians, we extract four principal dimensions: Strong Commitment, Narrow Occupational Background, Narrow Life Experience, and Strong Ambition. These dimensions and their indicators fit Wittgenstein’s family-resemblance conceptual structure, which is how we analyze, measure and validate them with data from a longitudinal study of British MPs spanning 1971–2016.

In recent years, populist radical right parties (PRRPs) have continued to establish themselves in parliaments across Europe. However, there is little research on party responses in parliaments. This article explores how mainstream parties have dealt with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in state parliaments. Its contribution is twofold: theoretically, it links the existing literature on party responses to the parliamentary arena and proposes a comprehensive framework for analyzing party responses in parliament, distinguishing between the formal and the policy level. Moreover, it tries to understand the variation of responses by emphasizing three important factors: party ideology, the government–opposition divide, and the federal structure of parties. Empirically, the article explores the crucial variation of response patterns toward the AfD at the subnational level, which is often neglected in the study of PRRPs. The results show that party responses reflect an ongoing learning process with no ‘magic formula’ in sight. Overall, the article underlines the importance of party responses in the initial phase for the PRRPs’ impact and offers substantial theoretical and empirical impetus for future research.

How ambitious are MPs in European parliaments and how does progressive ambition affect their strategies? We argue that progressively ambitious members of parliament try to generate individual visibility and seek the support of party leaders who decide on promotion while at the same time ensuring reelection by adjusting to electoral system incentives. Using novel data from a 15-country MP survey we show that progressive ambition is widespread in Europe and Israel. As hypothesized, progressively ambitious MPs are more likely to favor personal rather than party-centered electoral campaigns and to address the national or regional party leadership instead of their local party. Electoral system features and party ideology also have the theoretically expected effects.

The global increase in inequality raises concerns among scholars and policy-makers. However, limited evidence exists to identify how inequality affects citizens’ behavior. This study explores the effects of economic inequality on participation in civil society associations by testing hypotheses derived from resource and conflict theories. Using a multilevel Poisson model in 18 post-communist countries, this study finds that inequality has a nonlinear effect on civil society. Economic inequality has a drastically demobilizing effect on associational participation in countries with lower income inequality; meanwhile high inequality has a slightly weak mobilizing effect on associational participation. Further tests show that the effect of inequality varies across different socioeconomic groups, but that the poor are most affected.

Defence cooperation between Western European countries has increased considerably since the end of the Cold War. An analytical distinction can be made between political and economic cooperation, the latter having been neglected by political scientists. This study advances the debate on economic cooperation by identifying sources of variation in the European Union (EU)-15 countries’ membership rate in cooperative armaments fora aimed at restructuring the demand side of European defence from 1996 to 2006. By combining six models from three different schools of thought, the risk of confirmation bias through intra-paradigmatic reasoning is reduced. At the same time, fuzzy-set analysis opens up the space for data-driven combination effects. Two distinct combinations form sufficient paths leading to high rates of membership. Most importantly, intentions to create collective defence technological and industrial benefits combine with trust in partners’ ability and integrity to form an essential combination of conditions for governments to pursue cooperation on armaments.

Ever since Lazarsfeld and his colleagues’ (1944) seminal study, it has become common wisdom that election campaigns, if anything, serve the activation of voters’ fundamental predispositions. However, disagreement emerges on the role of partisan orientations. Although some authors consider them as fundamental predispositions, which are activated during the campaign and subsequently act as filters for incoming information, others argue that party attachments are simple running tallies of political assessments, which are constantly updated in response to campaign events, or decision shortcuts for voters innocent of substantial information. In this study, we scrutinize the role of partisan orientations in a direct-democratic campaign using data from a panel survey fielded during the run-up to the 2006 Swiss asylum law referendum. We find that, as voters accumulate knowledge in the course of the campaign, vote intentions dramatically converge on pre-campaign partisan orientations. Moreover, voters, whose earlier issue-specific and partisan orientations collide, tend to resolve their ambivalence in favour of their partisan leanings. These results corroborate the view of partisanship as a fundamental predisposition.

If decisions are made in democracies in open procedures, the rhetoric of There is no alternative (TINA) raises certain questions. Tracing back the idea of necessity to symptomatic discourses, this article analyzes TINA as a political strategy in contexts such as Thatcherism, Third Way politics, and European crisis management, and sheds light on the specific characteristics of politics in the name of TINA. The analysis identifies distinct models of ‘one way’ discourses, reflecting political cultures and institutional settings and providing discursive trajectories. We examine the motivation for invoking necessity to justify unpalatable and normatively intricate policy decisions, and understand TINA politics in its double effect: as facilitating certain policies yet obstructing democratic and deliberative procedures. This allows us to address the question of whether the politics of our time shows a disposition to TINA as a means of responding to the rise and fall of political steering optimism.

While expert information and information on public preferences are seen as key resources that interest groups provide to policymakers, little is known about the resources that are necessary to acquire such information. Existing scholarship argues that financial resources enhance a group’s ability to supply information, which could be problematic as it suggests that resource poor groups are disadvantaged when lobbying policymakers. Applying a resource perspective to informational lobbying, this paper argues that different information types require different resources and that financial means are less important than assumed. The predictions are tested using a new dataset and survey of 383 advocates active on 50 specific policy issues in five West European countries. The results show that while economic resources are indeed associated with a higher amount of expert information, political capacities allow a group to provide both expert information and information on public preferences. This suggests that groups can rely on other than economic resources for information provision.

The literature on Public Utilities has increasingly shown that the adoption of corporate governance tools for the management of public services in local policy-making has given rise to a considerable reshaping of political strategies and practices. Corporatisation should be understood as not merely a policy instrument, but also as a new opportunity for local politicians to adjust their preferences, to deal with various interests, and to build unusual coalitions. Corporatisation may (and does) influence the concrete operation of local political systems. Today, the boards of municipal enterprises, as well as the public–private partnerships stemming from this emerging tendency towards corporatisation, can be conceived as both actors of local policy-making and arenas in which a number of functions traditionally associated with the mechanisms of electoral representation are performed: inter- and intra-party bargaining, recruitment of élites, and negotiation with local and ‘external’ stakeholders. The paper illustrates the impact of corporatisation on local representation mechanisms in Italy, considering its opaque side with specific reference to the problem of democratic accountability and control, and the creation of new local oligarchies. Empirical evidence is provided from research on municipal enterprises in six different Italian regions. Statistical data on companies (amount of social capital, fields of activity, private and public shareholders, etc.), as well as qualitative data, are analysed in order to show how corporatisation has provided local actors with unusual (and often non-transparent) channels of political representation and public–private bargaining.

We compare gender gaps in attitudes towards redistribution and social spending across generations in the USA and Britain. We show that the US context, characterized by lower welfare provision, results in consistent or even widening gender gaps for generations born post-1925. On the other hand, the British context, characterized by higher welfare provision relative to the USA, exhibits a narrowing and closing of the gender gap for younger generations, for two out of three indicators of spending preferences. These findings provide some, albeit mixed, evidence that women are more consistently in favour of social spending and redistribution than men in contexts characterized by low welfare provision such as the USA. Where there are higher levels of social support, we argue women could become increasingly more likely to express a preference for levels of spending and redistribution that is similar to men's, narrowing the gender gap among younger generations.

Over the last decade, the EU’s fundamental values have been under threat at the national level, in particular among several Central and Eastern European states that joined the EU since 2004. During this time, the European People’s Party (EPP) has been criticized for its unwillingness to vote for measures that would sanction the Hungarian Fidesz government, one of its members, in breach of key democratic principles since 2010. In this paper, we seek to understand how cohesive the EPP group has been on fundamental values-related votes, how the position of EPP MEPs on these issues has evolved over time, and what explains intra-EPP disagreement on whether to accommodate fundamental values violators within the EU. To address these questions, we analyse the votes of EPP MEPs across 24 resolutions on the protection of EU fundamental values between 2011 and 2019. Our findings reveal below-average EPP cohesion on these votes, and a sharp increase in the tendency of EPP MEPs to support these resolutions over time. A number of factors explain the disagreements we find. While the EPP’s desire to maintain Fidesz within its ranks is central, this explanation does not offer a comprehensive account of the group’s accommodative behaviour. In particular, we find that ideological factors as well as the strategic interests of national governments at the EU level are central to understanding the positions of EPP MEPs, as well as the evolution of these positions over time. These results further our understanding of the nature of the obstacles to EU sanctions in fundamental values abuse cases, and the role of partisanship in fuelling EU inaction especially.

This article analyses whether the European Union’s (EU) Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has been underpinned by a policy paradigm. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the debate on the existence and importance of paradigms in policy-making. It uses a causal mapping technique to reconstruct the beliefs behind three key policy documents in the SGP’s development, assessing to what extent these beliefs conform to two dominant economic policy paradigms. The analysis shows that the policy beliefs behind the SGP have been a mixture of economic policy paradigms, in which the emphasis placed on each paradigm has changed over time. This implies that internally coherent mixtures of policy paradigms are possible. This is likely also to be the case in many other areas of (EU) policy-making. Our findings have important implications for the debate on policy-change, as they suggest that paradigmatic change is likely to proceed more through gradual changes within mixes of paradigms than through radical paradigm shifts.

This article examines the conditions under which governments increase spending on active labor market policies (ALMPs), as the European Union and the organization of economic co-operation and development recommend. Given that ALMPs are usually expensive and unlikely to win a government many votes, this study hypothesizes that an improving socio-economic situation is a necessary condition for increased spending. On the basis of the data of 53 governments from 18 established democracies between 1985 and 2003, the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis shows that there are different combinations of conditions, or routes, toward activation and that an improving socio-economic situation is needed for each of them. Specifically, the analysis reveals that governments activate under decreasing unemployment combined with (1) trade openness, or (2) the absence of corporatism in the case of leftist governments, or (3) the presence of corporatism in the case of rightist governments. These findings advance our understanding of the politics of labor market reform.

Why do social democrats choose neoliberal labor market policies? Since social democrats are typically punished for welfare state retrenchment and because these policies do not equate well with social democratic egalitarian principles, it is difficult to see what they gain from it. We argue that, depending on the intra-party balance of power between activists and leaders, some parties are office-seeking, whereas others are policy-seeking. This behavioral difference explains why some parties are responsive to environmental incentives such as the economy and public opinion (office-seeking parties) and others are responsive to policy-motivated activists (policy-seeking parties). Using three case studies of social democratic parties (Germany, the Netherlands and Spain) in the period 1980–2010, we analyze when and why these parties introduced neoliberal reforms. The study shows that office-seeking parties introduce neoliberal measures if the risk of losing votes due to an underperforming economy becomes larger than the risk of losing votes due to the mobilization of unions and opposition parties. Policy-seeking social democrats retain a social democratic ideology, unless prolonged failure to win office empowers pragmatic leaders to push through office-seeking strategies.

This article provides a comprehensive theoretical model for analysing the influence of European party federations (Europarties) on their Central and Eastern European (CEE) partner parties. It draws on the concepts of Europeanization and party change and is, in principle, applicable to similar processes of party enlargement elsewhere. In the process of their Eastern enlargement, Europarties have searched for suitable CEE partner parties on which they have tried to exert influence. Thus far, little is known about the precise mechanisms involved and the actual impact of these processes. We argue that Europarty influence leads to party change on the side of the CEE partners, which brings about ‘West-Europeanization’. Europarties are expected to apply a double strategy that consists of a process of political exchange based on a largely asymmetric power relationship in favour of Europarties and a socialization strategy in which Europarties try to socialize their partners and convince them of the appropriateness of change. We present the theoretical and analytical tools for the analysis of the arguably largest extension of transnational party organizations, which provides ample testing ground for more general theories on party change. Furthermore, we present preliminary empirical evidence on the two most important cases, namely the European People's Party and the Party of European Socialists, which indicates that Europarties played an important role in the development of CEE parties and party systems in general.

Discontent is seen as a critical driver for the appeal of populism, yet studies have typically focused on cases of populism in opposition. We argue that scholars’ emphasis on populism in opposition led them to overlook the roles of elite messages and partisanship in the adoption of populist attitudes. Drawing on theories of elite-driven public opinion, we contend that populist attitudes do not need to be rooted in discontent. In cases of populism in power, those who are more satisfied politically and economically, and partisans of the ruling party should display higher levels of populist attitudes. We provide observational and experimental survey evidence in this direction from Turkey, where a populist party has long been in power. We also find that the dominant characteristic of support for populism in power is an emphasis on popular sovereignty at the expense of institutions of horizontal accountability.

Amidst the European sovereign debt crisis and soaring unemployment levels across the European Union, ambitions for European unemployment policies are high on the political agenda. However, it remains unclear what European taxpayers think about these plans and who is most supportive of European unemployment policies. To contribute to this debate, we conducted a survey experiment concerning solidarity towards European and domestic unemployed individuals in the Netherlands and Spain. Our results suggest that (1) Europeans are less inclined to show solidarity towards unemployed Europeans than towards unemployed co-nationals, (2) individuals with higher education, European attachment, and pro-immigration attitudes show more solidarity towards unemployed people from other European countries, but (3) even they discriminate against foreigners, and (4) finally, economic left-right orientations do not structure solidarity with unemployed people from abroad.

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 examines all Western European democracies from 1849 until 2017, the current article attempts to provide an explanation. In particular, our analyses examine three alternative explanations put forward by the literature: economic, institutional, and sociological. Our results show that it is not economic performance but both institutional and sociological change which together can help to understand the current wave of support for APEp.

Recent decades have seen a surge in women occupying positions of political power. This has been welcomed in part as a means of achieving better policy outcomes for women. We interrogate this proposition, developing a “gendered accountability” framework to explain when and how female representation promotes the implementation of policies that women prioritize. Our empirical analysis applies this framework to sub-Saharan Africa, home to the largest recent expansion in women’s political representation. We find that increased female representation in the legislature is robustly associated with reduced infant and child mortality as well as greater spending on health. Effects are magnified when women are more active in civil society and appear primarily in countries that have gender quotas and proportional electoral systems. Thus, while female representation can lead to improved policy outcomes for women, the process is not automatic and is unlikely to occur absent key institutional and societal conditions.

Since the 1990s, observers have seen globalization impairing labor’s rights. We take Charles Tilly as an exemplar of this view, subjecting his 1995 article to critical appreciation. We argue that Tilly, known for his work on the National Social Movement, overlooked the fact that some unions under pressure from global neo-liberalism can employ a protest repertoire employing their citizen rights, while others continue to use labor rights. We use port workers, who are directly exposed to globalization, to show how different political opportunity structures and different strategic choices influence these choices. In Sweden, our exemplar of a neo-corporatist system, we find that the employment of labor rights continues to be robust; in the USA, our exemplar of a fully-fledged neo-liberal system, we find much greater recourse to a repertoire calling on citizen rights. Finally, in Australia and Great Britain, countries undergoing a shift to neo-liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, we show that strategic choice influences how effectively unions adapt to shifts towards neo-liberalism: Australian unions effectively used citizen rights while the British port unions failed to make this strategic shift.