Two interrelated trends have narrowed the class backgrounds of policymakers over the past decades: a decreasing share of working-class MPs and a parallel rise of highly educated ‘career politicians’ with little occupational experience outside politics. Although these trends risk aggravating representational inequality, we know little about their causes. Focusing on parties as the main gatekeepers to parliament, we analyse how the class background of political candidates influences the chances of being nominated in electorally safer positions. Based on original data on MPs’ backgrounds and the German GLES Candidate Study, we show that candidates with a working-class background have lower chances to be placed in safe positions, especially in center-right parties. Careerists, in contrast, enjoy systematic advantages in the nomination process, at least in left-wing parties. Lacking individual resources is thus not the only obstacle to working-class representation, but political parties are important actors in shaping the class composition of parliaments.

Sanseitō is a fringe Japanese political party founded during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that has won several seats in the National Diet since 2022. Initially coming to prominence as a promoter of anti-vaccine narratives, the party has since promoted a conspiracist worldview that connects to more conventional right-wing nationalism and addresses a much broader range of issues and beliefs. In this article we outline the core tenets of this worldview and examine how attention to its construction as a participative political ideology sheds light on the party’s political actions and motivations.

This research note traces the evolution of Sartori's theoretical reflection on the party system, primarily by describing the relationship between “format and mechanics” to assess its explanatory power. The main conclusion of the analysis is that Sartori's framework has all the elements of an empirical party system theory. A systemic theory of party relations does not have to explain party behaviour but only the combined effect, in terms of the system's mechanics, of all party actions. Thus, the theory states that the number of parties and their positioning in the unidimensional competitive space cause the system's mechanics. The dependent variable is ordinal, about the quantitative and qualitative distribution of power among the parties. This detracts from the parsimony of the theory and requires other independent or at least intervening variables besides the number of parties: ideological distance and direction of competition. This difference notwithstanding, we can still accept Sartori's framework as a general party system theory. Appropriate mid or lower-range theories could supplement the general one in explaining sub-systemic phenomena. Irrespective of whether we call it a classification, a framework or a theory, Sartori's contribution remains a fundamental milestone in the study of parties and party systems.

The history and practice of party polarization in Congress is a gendered concept. Men have comprised the overwhelming majority of legislators from both parties, served as their party’s leaders, and dominated the party caucuses. As women and women of color have increased their presence in the institution, particularly among Democrats, gender and race have emerged as important themes in understanding party polarization in contemporary congresses. In an analysis of legislative activity of members in the 104th to the 117th Congresses, I find the two most distinct groups of partisans, Democratic women and Republican men, are prominently featured in the opposing party’s negative messaging to constituents and voters. The prominence of Democratic women as the focal point of negative messaging from the opposition has significant consequences for this group of officeholders. This study enhances our understanding of how gender dynamics inform party polarization in legislatures.

Despite a long tradition of research on dominant party systems (DPS), comparative analysis remains limited by conceptual ambiguities, regional and historical biases, and the absence of accessible data. This research note introduces the Global Dominant Party Systems (GDPS) Dataset, which includes 187 cases of executive dominance across 106 independent countries from 1900 to 2024, addressing the regional and historical biases that have traditionally plagued the literature. Drawing on foundational theories and refined concepts, the dataset differentiates between dominant parties and DPS and develops the minimal definition of DPS that focuses on executive arena and at least minimally contested elections. The dataset identifies cases with mechanical properties typical of DPS, that is those in which one party (or coalition) consistently monopolizes executive power and electoral competition fails to produce changes in government leadership. Despite setting permissive minimal criteria, the dataset also offers a broad range of variables on democracy, corruption and institutional features which can be used to set different criteria for case selection and conduct robustness checks. The dataset also includes variables on ethnic and opposition fragmentation, voter turnout, economy and population size, enabling researchers to investigate the institutional and socio-economic foundations of dominance across regime types and world regions. Finally, the proposed model of DPS evolution and change can serve as a useful guide for qualitative research on unpacking causal mechanisms. While limited to positive cases of dominance, the dataset offers new potential for cross-regional hypothesis testing and theory development on executive power, party system change, and democratic resilience.

As global migration continues to intensify, legislatures in liberal democracies increasingly feature policymakers with direct experiences with immigration. Concurrently, scholars often argue that electoral accountability creates incentives to appeal to public opinion, which in the context of immigration policymaking favors restrictions over admission. In this paper, we study these competing dynamics among these immigrant legislators. We theorize that political institutions—particularly political parties—impede the sincere expression of legislative preferences among legislators that come from immigrant backgrounds. To begin, we present stylized facts about legislative behavior drawing on roll-call votes from the Canadian, British, and American legislatures. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with representatives, we find strong evidence that the threat of political party sanction and individual concerns about legislators’ own parties affects legislative decision-making. These findings contribute to our understanding of legislative accountability and highlight how the trend of increasing immigration to democratic polities does not directly translate to political representation.

Political parties in EU member states are situated in a complex multilevel polity, having to engage with their domestic political reality together with EU politics and international linkages with fellow European parties. But how do these parties organize? This research intends to understand how competing, though not mutually exclusive logics of political behaviour can help explain the variations in how parties apprehend this multilevel context. Relying on a rich empirical strategy with 68 semi-structured interviews with European and national party elites in 19 national political parties from Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, supplemented by a party statutes investigation and data gathering in the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we conduct a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). It starts from the broad assumption that parties’ multilevel organization needs to be contextually understood, relying on both past and current party dynamics, as well as the actions of the (senior) individuals populating party organizations. Our analysis shows that parties’ different multilevel organization is the result of an interaction between various factors, crucially party genetics and individual agency.

This research note examines the evolving nature of political parties in the contemporary era, with a particular focus on the trend of movementization, defined as the process by which political parties adopt organizational, strategic, and discursive elements of social movements to revitalize their declining structures and reconnect with society. While early studies on this phenomenon primarily focused on movement parties—challenger actors that positioned themselves at the intersection of institutional and contentious politics, blending conventional and unconventional repertoires of action—recent developments suggest that movementization is no longer confined to movement-parties only. Instead, it is becoming a broader trend affecting both challenger and mainstream parties across the entire ideological spectrum. This research note aims to review and critically assess the existing literature on movementization, identifying key theoretical and empirical contributions while highlighting unresolved questions and methodological gaps. Although substantial work has been done on individual case studies, the field remains fragmented and lacks systematic comparative analysis. To advance the study of movementization, this note calls for a shift from case-centric approaches toward comparative frameworks, integrating quantitative indicators and cross-national perspectives to better assess the prevalence, drivers, and consequences of this transformation. By doing so, it seeks to contribute to a more structured and generalizable understanding of how movementization is reshaping contemporary party politics.

Are shifting party-union relationships impacting the vote intentions of union members in Canada? By analyzing voting intentions within the Canadian labour movement, the findings illuminate the complexity of union members’ electoral behaviour and the strategic opportunities for parties vying for their votes. The authors find that while union members continue to be more likely than the average voter to support the NDP, this support is nuanced by factors such as union type, gender, education, age, and income. Notably, the study finds that the Conservatives have made significant inroads among construction union members and those with college education, challenging traditional assumptions about Canadian labour politics.

LGBTQ+ people remain underrepresented in politics, leading scholars to examine a variety of barriers to office. Based on work on women in politics, this paper focuses on one possible barrier: political finance. Is there a political financing gap between straight cisgender and LGBTQ+ candidates? Are there inequalities among LGBTQ+ candidates? If so, what explains them? This article explores these questions by combining a dataset of out LGBTQ+ candidates in the 2015–21 federal elections with political donations data from Elections Canada. When we examine bivariate financing gaps, we find LGBTQ+ candidates receive less money than their straight cisgender counterparts. These gaps are gendered: queer cisgender women, transgender, and nonbinary candidates receive the least money. When we adjust for other variables, we still find LGBTQ+ candidates in the Conservative Party and transgender and nonbinary candidates across parties receive less money. This article contributes to work on gender and identity in campaign finance and LGBTQ+ representation.

The literature on vice presidencies fails to explain the women’s inclusion as vice-presidential candidates, as the strategies of ticket balancing predict a higher number of female running mates than what is observed. Based on theories of gender representation, this study develops hypotheses about the inclusion of women as vice-presidential candidates and tests them using an original dataset comprising 471 presidential tickets from Latin America (1978–2022), a region where women’s representation has expanded. The analysis reveals that small and left-wing parties nominate more women as vice presidents than major and right-wing parties. Although female vice-presidential candidates tend to have less political experience than their male presidential counterparts, they often add a diverse and complementary policy expertise to the ticket. The findings underscore that women’s inclusion as vice-presidential candidates depends mostly on partisan calculations, since gender quotas rarely apply to the vice presidency.

This research note introduces the Canadian Vote Intention Dataset, a new, integrated, publicly available database of nearly eight decades of public opinion surveys from Gallup, Environics, Pollara, the Canadian Election Study and the Consortium on Electoral Democracy. The dataset contains 1,019,639 responses on Canadians’ federal vote intention as well as a suite of demographic and geographic variables, including age, gender, religion, language, education, union membership, occupation, community size, province and region. We describe the dataset and custom survey weights, as well as the R package and interactive online application we developed to accompany the dataset. We then demonstrate the dataset’s utility through new analyses of the long-term evolution of gender, education and community size gaps in Canadian party support from 1945 to 2022.

The early 1970s was a tumultuous time for abortion law and policy in North Dakota where the defeat of an abortion liberalization initiative in 1972 was quickly followed by Roe v. Wade in 1973. The resulting political and cultural circumstances strongly favored the North Dakota Right to Life Association, which saw much of its agenda passed by the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support. This study uses a political culture perspective to examine the development of North Dakota abortion law and policy in the years after Roe. It illustrates how the state legislature, interest groups, the bureaucracy, and the courts reacted to a series of disruptions in abortion policy. The resulting policies made abortion a continuing source of tension within North Dakota politics.

US politics is living a tense period of transformation. Approaching the presidential elections of 2024, many commentators question the fate of the US representative democracy and its political system. Political scientists have largely contributed to the critical analysis of the US case. A special mention goes to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The two scholars have marked the last two decades of US political science with a brilliant reconstruction of the American crisis and some of its key trends: the progressive increase of inequality; the mounting role of business lobbies; the decline of the US political economy and the erosion of the federal institutions. The present research note reviews three key books that shed light on contemporary US political economy through a typical political science approach. The value of these books goes well beyond the originality of the analysis of US politics. The books remind us the importance of three theoretical domains that marked political science and that merit to be further developed: interest group theory, neo-institutionalism and historical theories of democratization. Then, they shed light on the current dramatic tensions over representative democracies, well beyond the US exceptionalism. Hacker and Pierson provide an illuminating analysis of democratic tensions and give insights for the future research agenda of scholars of western political economies (including Italy and Europe). The books eventually outline some interesting methodological lines of future research.