This article presents and tests a new approach to early voting that pays attention to its institutional, political and demographic determinants. Using Australia's compulsory voting system as our case, we can compare early voting and election-day voting without having to consider the possibility of voter abstention that arises in voluntary voting systems. The research uses aggregate-level data from six national elections (2004 to 2019), as well as individual-level data drawn from Australian Electoral Study surveys of 2016 and 2019. The results show that institutional factors (density of polling places), political factors (level of competition between parties) and socioeconomic factors (age) all contribute to variations in early versus election-day voting. Levels of early voting are affected not simply by the characteristics of individual citizens but also by the institutional and political contexts within which those citizens vote.

Amongst the ways in which American democracy is distinct, the Weberian anomaly stands out: the United States equates to a classical Weberian state with the routine trappings of bureaucratic power, national organization, stable territorial parameters, a legal code and military power. But it is at best a quasi-Weberian state in respect of state monopolization of legitimate violence. The scope of the Second Amendment means the federal government has control in many instances over the use of physical force but historically this authority coexists with the (explicit or implicit) delegation of political violence to societal actors. In this article I argue that the legitimation of political violence outside the state is endogenous to the American constitutional settlement, a feature which arises from the country's origins and the institutional arrangements adopted in key constitutional clauses and judicial decisions.

In many elections across the world, the regime in power uses violence to influence electoral dynamics and outcomes. What is the effect of such violence on citizens' attitudes to democracy? We argue that the effect of government-perpetrated electoral violence on citizens' democratic commitment will diverge depending on whether the individual supports the ruling or opposition party. While those affiliated with the opposition should become more likely to support democracy in the wake of government violence, we expect those affiliated with the incumbent to support more power concentrated in the hands of the executive. We examine these expectations using cross-national, geo-referenced survey data from the Afrobarometer, alongside event data on electoral violence. We find that while incumbent supporters generally display lower baseline support for democracy in the absence of violence, violent elections do not further erode their democratic commitment. Violence is, however, associated with increased support for democracy amongst opposition supporters.

Unemployed people are relatively rarely studied in political science. Yet, with their economic significance and centrality to many political debates, they can provide insight on many questions, including just how far partisan biases – where opinions and even factual perceptions follow what reflects well on their holder's preferred political party – extend. The economic and emotional costs of joblessness make its evaluation an unlikely seeming case for partisan effects. Surveys in the United States and Great Britain nevertheless show that partisan alignment predicts unemployed individuals' evaluation of their economic situation: unemployed individuals identifying with parties represented in the national executive report more positively on their household finances (and on the national economic situation) than do non-partisans, while those identifying with the opposition report more negatively. These effects are especially substantial among people interested in politics. Even something as personal and affectively intense as unemployment is viewed through a partisan scrim.

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.

Right-wing populists are said to employ distinctive language to differentiate themselves from mainstream politicians. However, we know little about what makes their language distinct. We investigate this by assembling a novel corpus of speeches and using an automated text analysis tool to identify the keywords used by three right-wing populist leaders (Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini) and three of their mainstream opponents (Hillary Clinton, Emmanuel Macron and Matteo Renzi). We then examine the contexts in which those keywords are used. We find that, while Trump and Salvini are stylistically populist in different ways to Le Pen, what distinguishes all of them is the clarity of the populist message (people vs elites and others) compared to their vaguer opponents. Our results have implications for how we understand populism as both ideology and style across linguistic contexts, in addition to how we conceive of its specificity compared to the mainstream.

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.

This article explores women's access to ministerial power in an important but understudied arena of executive politics: cabinet committees. Specifically, we analyse the gendered patterns in the distribution of cabinet committee assignments in two ‘typical’ Westminster cases, Canada and the United Kingdom, and under two prime ministers, Justin Trudeau (2015–2021) and David Cameron (2010–2016), who both made explicit gender-equity pledges. Informed by previous research into gendered allocation of ministerial portfolios, we investigate the overall extent of women's committee assignments, the gendered dimensions of these assignments and the status of assignments, namely the ‘prestige’ of committee remits, whether committees were chaired by the prime minister and the allocation of chairing responsibilities across committees. In both cases, overall assignment broadly matched shares of women ministers at the cabinet level, but less so during the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition in the UK (2010–2015). Women's shares of committee assignments were likely to be lower on ‘masculine’ and ‘high-prestige’ committees compared to ‘neutral’, ‘feminine’ and ‘low-prestige’ committees, but commitment to gender equity is more evident in the Canadian case. While our aim is exploratory and descriptive, we offer several explanations for these patterns, including the supply of women ministers, departmentalism, party branding and the low public profile of cabinet committees.

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.

When democracy is under attack, the hope is often that citizens will punish undemocratic incumbents. However, recent studies show that not all citizens punish governments for their undemocratic actions. In this article, we argue that citizens' understanding of and satisfaction with democracy are sources of heterogeneous reactions. In a survey experiment conducted in Germany and Poland, we show that the importance that citizens attach to specific institutions under threat, as well as their understanding of democracy, can explain much of the variance in citizens' responses to undemocratic actions. Citizens are willing to defend what they consider important for democracy – regardless of whether this reflects theoretical conceptions of democracy. Moreover, in times of democratic backsliding, Polish ‘critical citizens’, those who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works in Poland, are more likely to punish governments for undemocratic actions. Our findings help us understand how to increase citizens' resilience against democratic backsliding.

While comparative research on gender and politics has produced a sizable literature on the appointment of women to cabinet positions in democracies, we know surprisingly little about appointment practices in authoritarian contexts at subnational levels. We address this gap with the resumés of 3,681 political appointees in subnational China (2003–2020). Our analysis reveals that subnational Chinese politics meets most of the criteria scholars put forward as being indicative of gendered institutions: (1) women and men's career patterns are different; (2) women are assigned to more feminine posts, while masculine posts provide more promotion opportunities; and (3) regarding backgrounds, women are younger, better educated and more likely to be ethnic minorities as a result of the implementation of tandem quotas. The findings advance the literature on gender and politics, showing that gender's effect on appointment transcends regime types and the dichotomy of national/subnational politics.

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.

When do politicians dog-whistle conspiracy theories (CTs), and when do they explicitly endorse – or ‘bark’ – a CT? Over time, does the use of dog-whistles shape the degree to which politicians bark? Drawing from the models of mass communication literature, we theorize that politicians who leverage CTs to garner political support have incentives to tailor their communication to their audience. When politicians speak to general audiences, they risk being punished for explicitly endorsing CTs. However, for parties that use CTs to rally their base, dog-whistling a CT may allow politicians to covertly signal support for a CT to party faithful. Conversely, amongst audiences primarily composed of party loyalists or CT believers, politicians have strong incentives to explicitly endorse CTs. We test our theory with data from Poland, where a series of CTs emerged following a 2010 plane crash in Smoleńsk, Russia that killed the Polish president and 95 other top officials. We draw on speeches and tweets discussing the crash from 2011 to 2022 by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which sometimes endorses these CTs. We find descriptive evidence that PiS politicians both dog-whistle and ‘bark’. While they tend to dog-whistle more when the audience is more diverse, they tend to bark when the audience is more uniformly CT-supporting. We find some evidence that politicians bark more and dog-whistle less over time, which suggests that, with sustained use, dog-whistling may become understood by a wider array of audiences.

Analysing how the roles of national parliaments and the European Parliament have changed in European economic governance since the euro crisis, this article argues that their situation has deteriorated in the post-Next Generation EU regime. It identifies structural factors impeding more effective parliamentary engagement, relates these to empirical evidence about the role of domestic legislatures and the European Parliament and mirrors these practices against constitutional interpretations concerning the democratic role of parliaments in budgetary matters. The broader Economic and Monetary Union architecture has grown to encompass a variety of rules and mechanisms, many of which are located outside of the treaties and the budget of the Union. As a result, parliaments lack formal powers that would guarantee them meaningful participation rights in European economic and fiscal governance. The key to more effective parliamentary involvement is ensuring that the parliaments can genuinely shape policies and that a strong link is established between elections and budgetary politics.

Political party think tanks (PPTTs) are important to the performance of parties' core functions. Despite their importance, they have largely escaped academic attention. To understand the role of PPTTs in contemporary politics, we develop a typology of their key functions (distinguishing between political party and think tank functions), and target audiences (distinguishing between internal and external target groups). Based on a comprehensive literature review and 22 in-depth interviews with leading representatives of PPTTs in the Netherlands and Flanders, we identify four types of PPTTs: Party Assistants, Party Supporters, Party Promoters and Party Intellectuals. The characteristics of the four types of PPTTs are illustrated through the analysis of four paradigmatic cases: the Study Centre Open Vld as an example of a Party Assistant, the Scientific Bureau GroenLinks as an example of a Party Supporter, the Renaissance Institute as an example of a Party Promoter, and the TeldersFoundation as an example of a Party Intellectual.

Mainstream parties have taken increasingly restrictive immigration policy positions across Western Europe. Yet the political consequences of this behaviour for citizens' democratic norms and practices are still not well understood. This article focuses on public political trust. Bridging the literatures on immigration-related trust and spatial theory, the spotlight is put on the consequences of mainstream party position-taking on immigration for the interconnectedness of citizens' immigration policy preferences, political distrust and far-right voting. An analysis of data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and European Social Survey across 14 Western European democracies (2006–2018) suggests that tougher immigration positions of centre-right parties in government weaken the link between immigration scepticism and political distrust and, in turn, the relevance of political distrust as a precursor of far-right voting. This has important implications for our understanding of immigration politics and advances the existing literatures on party competition, political trust and far-right voting in several ways.

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.

The government actions of populist radical right (PRR) parties have predominantly been scrutinized at the national level, leaving a critical aspect – their territorial foothold – largely unexplored. Through a comparative ethnographic study of two medium-sized French towns governed by the Rassemblement National since 2014, this article delves into how seizing municipal power has influenced the party's efforts towards mainstreaming. We examine the party's strategy, aimed at institutionalization, which relies on a blend of rhetoric emphasizing proximity, pragmatism, and non-partisan administration while preserving fundamental ideological elements of the radical right. This amalgamation of mainstreaming and radicalism, adaptive to different contexts and audiences, is termed ‘adaptable ideology’. Our study makes significant contributions to two pivotal aspects of the literature: understanding the mainstreaming trajectory of PRR parties and exploring the recent, localist turn in the study of this political realm.

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.