How did the new Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) obtain 9% of the vote in the 2020 Romanian general elections? This article explores the fast rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties by examining the support for the AUR at the locality level in Romania during the coronavirus crisis. The AUR's discourse combined populism, nationalism and anti-masking rhetoric. The findings show great variation across the 3,181 localities, from 0% to 50% support for the AUR, and highlight the significant influence of local cultural and political factors, while economic explanations were not confirmed. The vote for the AUR was high in localities with low ethnic diversity and low voter turnout. This research underscores that national-level explanations obscure important dynamics of PRR support that take place at the subnational level. The rise of the AUR is important beyond the Romanian and European contexts and emphasizes the significance of local responses to global crises.

How does the public support a coalition in which pro-democracy advocates and policy-based protesters join forces in street protests? When policy-based and pro-democracy groups protest together, they create a collective action frame that includes a policy component and a democracy component. In this article, I develop the frame salience theory, arguing that support for a policy–democracy protest coalition depends on which component of the joint frame is perceived to be more dominant. I argue that in authoritarian regimes, the policy component typically dominates the coalition because it is more accessible and available to the public. This perception shifts public support for the alliance towards the baseline level of support for the policy movement. In other words, public support for the alliance defaults to the baseline level of support for the policy movement. I find evidence for my argument using a survey experiment administered to 1,209 Vietnamese respondents. This article highlights a dilemma pro-democracy groups face: joining policy-based movements may boost support, but sustaining democracy after the protest becomes challenging.

In contemporary Europe, far-right parties threaten liberal democratic principles such as pluralism, media freedom and minority rights. Despite the stigma they normally face, far-right parties have experienced electoral breakthroughs even in countries where they remained electorally marginal such as Germany, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. We advance the idea that this happened because the level of stigmatization faced by these parties decreased before their electoral breakthrough. Therefore, we form a theoretical framework based on a threefold mechanism: far-right parties manage to reduce the stigma they face because of a reputational shield or by moderating their message; the media help the far right gain visibility and legitimacy by accommodating its views; established parties accommodate far-right parties without ostracizing them. Then, we test the framework by looking at the electoral breakthroughs of four parties: the results confirm the expectations except for the role of established parties, which is inconclusive.

This study examines the intra-party mechanism that links right-wing populist parties' electoral performance in European elections and their persistence on the national political stage. Nationally marginalized right-wing populist parties have benefited from the second-order character of European elections since the introduction of the direct election in 1979. However, not every right-wing populist party has been able to turn its European victory into a national success. The most similar system comparison of right-wing populist parties in France and the UK shows that only parties that have strategically utilized the resources provided by the European Parliament have persisted in the national political arena.

Social democratic parties have contributed to the development of welfare state retrenchment in many European countries. While numerous studies have attempted to explain this, few have focused on how parties legitimize cuts, given that they are often unpopular with social democratic voters. Examining Sweden, we argue that the Swedish Social Democratic Party has developed a legitimation model that presents welfare cuts as a way of safeguarding the welfare state. This model has been persistently used since the early 1990s and is now central to the party's rhetoric. This has implications for how we should understand the ideological development of Swedish social democracy and suggests that it may be fruitful to study how welfare cuts are justified in other empirical contexts.

This study investigates the link between non-liberal attitudes and adverse exposure to market disturbances during the 2008 global financial crisis, drawing from the premise that anti-liberal sentiments among Western voters stem from economic distress. We delve into three facets of liberal ideology in a Swedish sample: economic liberalism, liberal multiculturalism and liberal internationalism. Using variation in crisis exposure within identical twin pairs, comprehensive longitudinal economic data and detailed survey responses, we find no significant shift in economic or multicultural liberal attitudes with different crisis exposures. However, exposure to increased unemployment risk significantly lowered support for liberal internationalism, increasing scepticism towards global governance and multilateral cooperation.

The digital transition has become a crucial area of ideological contestation, as ongoing debates on digital surveillance and data commodification exemplify. Yet, we know too little about how political parties tap into these confrontations. This article elaborates a critical approach to map the ideological positions that 25 parties in France, Germany, Italy and Spain adopt on platform societies. The empirical analysis classifies parties' positions to uncover how their views on the digital economy and digital politics reshape their core ideologies. While parties are distributed along six ideological positions, most cases populate three types: Platform Neoliberalism, Social Liberalism 4.0 and Platform Socialism. These types represent the tripartite ideological divide on platform societies. Ultimately, this study provides an empirically informed theory of comparative digital politics and the foundation for research agendas on political parties' views on digitalization and the relations between ideologies, public policy and parties' organizational change in the digital age.

Many studies have analysed what could motivate centre-right governments to develop progressive family policies, given their historically traditionalist ideology. Updating classic institutionalist accounts, this article expands the focus beyond centre-right parties formally in charge. It argues that in coalition and minority governments, partisan veto players may act as agenda-setters, design policy reforms and successfully exert pressure to approve them through three mechanisms: agreements for government formation, conditions for government survival and bureaucratic continuity. Drawing on novel empirical data from interviews and document analysis, this article applies deductive process tracing to analyse the German parental allowance reform of 2006 and the Spanish 2017 paternity leave extension. The findings complement existing studies that focus on the agency of centre-right parties as ‘protagonists’ of these reforms, arguing that in some cases they have instead ‘consented’ to reforms proposed and supported by other parties.

The purchase of commercial spyware by at least 43 authoritarian states has drawn attention to the links between the international private technology trade and autocrats. This article sits at the intersection of the literatures on the international relations of authoritarian regimes, digital authoritarianism and the political economy of authoritarianism, asking, what impacts, if any, do the foreign technology trade relations of authoritarian regimes have on authoritarian resilience? Building a four-mechanism model to explain the interaction between the private technology trade and digital authoritarianism, the article then tests the model on a case study of Iran. It argues that while global technology companies lack the ideological or geopolitical interests that drive the engagement between authoritarian regimes and foreign states, an intense overlap in interests still exists between profit-hungry private technology companies and technology-hungry regimes. This facilitates the establishment of mutually beneficial relationships that contribute to authoritarian resilience and survival, however inadvertently.

This article elaborates the notion of hybrid repression, understanding by this modalities of dissidence suppression that involve state and non-state actors interacting in various ways, from fully autonomous to close cooperation. It does so by proposing a framework to scrutinize repressive configurations on the basis of three analytical dimensions – the perpetrator of repression, the tactics used and the threats perpetrators respond to – and using this framework to perform a systematic qualitative analysis of 160 in-depth interviews with human rights activists in four different countries (Colombia, Egypt, Mexico and Kenya). On this basis, the article analytically distinguishes and empirically elaborates four different patterns of hybrid repression, namely: state rogue, corporate, communitarian and non-state armed repression. Our argument challenges the state-centric approach to political repression that still dominates much of the literature on contentious politics and comparative regime analysis, and it invites further research on how hybrid forms of repression manifest and operate in different types of social and political contexts, and in relation to different areas of activism.

What determines why some protest events last only a single day while others can stretch over multiple days? This study presents the first cross-national quantitative analysis of the factors that shape protest event duration. This study argues that protest event duration is the function of factors that increase momentum (e.g. protest size, location and participants) while also examining whether repression attenuates such momentum. Using the Armed Conflict Location Event Data, this study employs two multilevel statistical methods to examine the factors that matter. First, the study examines the day-by-day factors that shape whether a protest will continue the next day. Second, the study examines the overall duration of events. The analyses find strong support that protests in capitals and urban areas, as well as protests featuring students, labour unions and professional organizations, last longer, while repression does truncate events.

Political parties vary in their responses to electoral challenges, including the rise of populist competitors. To address these challenges, they sometimes engage with peripheral issues located outside their ideological comfort zones, and at other times they adhere more closely to their core policies. Although these patterns are well-documented, voters' perceptions thereof remain under-examined. This article argues that voters evaluate parties' claims not just based on the direction of their policy engagement – positive or negative – but also based on the commitment behind these actions, distinguishing ideological commitment from strategic manoeuvres. Employing a pre-registered vignette experiment, the article shows that voters differentiate responses to core versus peripheral issues, regardless of their personal agreement with the policies. Populist attitudes further moderate these perceptions, as voters with such views are typically more sceptical of parties' motives, limiting the impact of party behaviour on perceived commitment primarily to non-populist individuals. This highlights the importance of perceived commitment in elections and the constraints parties face in responding to competition.

This study examines how formal institutions in hybrid regimes, particularly presidentialism, party organization and electoral rules, actively foster and sustain clientelistic networks, leading to particularistic outcomes. While existing literature highlights the weakening of formal institutions and pervasive clientelism as drivers of democratic breakdown, this study uses the concept of neopatrimonialism to analyse how formal institutions themselves consolidate patron–client relationships to maintain power and stability. Focusing on Turkey, the analysis demonstrates that the institutional incentive structure consolidates the president's role as the central ‘patron’, controlling resources and offices, and encourages clientelistic networks to coalesce around the presidency. The discretionary allocation of resources through patron–client relationships sustains neopatrimonial authority as long as clients' loyalty is rewarded. However, this governance increases clients' dependence on the patron, binding them at the expense of representation and responsiveness. The analysis offers insights into how such institutional configurations contribute to authoritarianism and particularistic governance in hybrid regimes.

This article investigates the relationship between intra-party leadership contestations on levels of satisfaction with democracy among party voters, trying to identify the impact of the former on the latter. The article draws on empirical data for a cross-sectional analysis from three different data sets that cover 11 countries, including a more case-specific analysis that utilizes panel data from Germany. Overall, the study aims to capture the dynamics of intra-party politics and the magnitude of its effect on perceptions of democracy among parties' voters. We find that intra-party politics at its probably most competitive version, that is elections for the head of the party, does not seem to exercise any significant influence on voters' satisfaction with democracy.