The recent increase of democratic declines around the world - "the third wave of autocratization" - has sparked a new generation of studies on the topic. Scholars tend to agree that the main threat to contemporary democracy arises from democratically elected rulers who gradually erode democratic norms. Is it possible to identify future autocratizers before they win power in elections? Linz (1978) and Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) suggest that a lacking commitment to democratic norms reveals would-be autocratizers before they reach office. This article argues that the concept of anti-pluralism rather than populism or extreme ideology captures this. We use a new expert-coded data set on virtually all relevant political parties worldwide from 1970 to 2019 (V-Party) to create a new Anti-Pluralism Index (API) to provide the first systematic empirical test of this argument. We find substantial evidence validating that the API and Linz's litmus-test indicators signal leaders and parties that will derail democracy if and when they come into power.

During campaigns, parties must defend their reputation of competence on issues to persuade citizens to vote for them (issue ownership). Consequently, what are the most effective strategies to achieve this? I argue that direct (advertising) and indirect (media coverage) communication strategies have different effects on citizens' perception of party competence. To analyze the impact of campaign dynamics on citizens, I use three data sources: an individual rolling cross-section panel, a media coverage analysis, and a parties' advertisements analysis. I link those data on a daily basis to capture the dynamics of parties' communication and citizens' opinion. The results show that advertisements help parties to win and maintain their issue ownership, while media coverage only helps parties to maintain their ownership. The study has scientific and practical implications with regard to party strategy, campaigns, and citizens' perceptions of parties.

Datasets on subnational election results in Europe frequently do not match with regional statistics available for cross-national research, mainly because territorial statistical units change over time and do not map onto the national electoral districts. This hinders consistent comparative research across time. This research note introduces EU-NED, a new dataset on subnational election data that covers national and European parliamentary elections for European countries over the past 30 years. EU-NED's major contribution is that it provides election results on disaggregated levels of the statistical territorial units used by Eurostat with an unprecedented consistency and temporospatial scope. Moreover, EU-NED is integrated with the Party Facts platform, allowing for a seamless integration of party-level data. Using EU-NED, we present first descriptive evidence on the European electoral geography and suggest avenues of how EU-NED can facilitate future comparative political science research in Europe.

What effect has the COVID-19 pandemic had on the political donations gender gap in Canada? Drawing on data from two national surveys conducted in May and August 2020, as well as Elections Canada data from 2019 and 2020, we find an overall decline in contributions to political parties and a reduced but still significant gender gap, with women less likely to donate to political parties than men.

Government formation in multiparty systems requires election winners to strike deals to form a coalition government. Do voters respond and how do they respond to coalition government deals? This paper examines the short-term consequences of coalition government formation on voters in European democracies relying on survey panel data and original content analysis of coalition agreements. It tests theoretical expectations that deal with both the actual and perceived ideological shifts parties make when joining coalition deals as well as the effect of a much simpler heuristic cue based on preferences. The findings indicate that coalition deals have consequences on party preferences, but voter perceptions play a much stronger effect than the actual content of coalition deals. These results have important implications for our understanding of public opinion and provide important insights into the current difficulties and challenges of government formation and representative democracy.

This study analyses how information provided by different types of interest groups influences the ability of members of parliament (MPs) to accurately perceive the preferences of those citizens who voted them into office. To study how information provision by interest groups affects MPs' perceptions, we combine unique data from a citizen survey and face-to-face meetings with 151 federal MPs in Switzerland, thus enabling a comparison of actual voter preferences with MPs' estimations of these preferences. Ties to citizen groups, as self-reported by MPs in our survey, relate to more accurate perceptions by MPs, even when controlling for MPs' partisan affiliation. Ties to business groups, as declared in the official registry, relate to less accurate perceptions. These findings suggest that interest groups can both tighten and weaken MPs' link to their party voters, which might have repercussions on substantive representation and democratic accountability.

This paper examines the validity of three approaches to estimate party positions on the general left-right and EU dimensions. We newly introduce party elite data from the comprehensive IntUne survey and cross-validate it with existing expert survey and manifesto data. The general left-right estimates generated by elites and experts show a higher congruence than those derived from party manifestos; neither measure clearly materializes as more valid regarding EU positions. We identify which factors explain diverging estimates. For instance, disagreement among experts has greater impact than their mere number. The substantial centrist bias of the manifesto estimates persists even when alternative documents are used to substitute manifestos. Low response rates among elites have no systematic detrimental effect on the validity of party position estimates.

While a rich literature addresses legislative agenda-setting in multiparty democracies, relatively little is known how members of parliament disseminate the legislative agenda beyond the parliamentary floor. Drawing on content analyses of 110 legislative debates and 5,847 press releases from Austrian MPs (2013-2017), we test whether legislators are more likely to send press releases on issues that are salient to their party () and to other parties in the party system (). MPs should also communicate more on issues that fall within their area of expertise () and when they have given a speech on that issue during the legislative debate (). While we find empirical support for all these expectations, communication of the legislative agenda largely rests on each parties' issue specialists and their speakers in plenary debates. Importantly, there is no significant discrepancy overall between the actual parliamentary issue agenda and the agenda communicated by party MPs.

Party competition in advanced industrial democracies is generally characterized as a two-dimensional space consisting of an economic and non-economic dimension. This study examines (a) the extent to which parties strategically place more emphasis on one of these dimensions vis-à-vis the other, something we coin , and (b) the extent to which voters perceive such shifts in relative emphasis. Our specific focus here is on government parties. We expect government parties to shift emphasis away from the economic to the non-economic dimension when economic conditions deteriorate. In doing so, they aim to reduce the importance voters attach to the economy and the degree to which voters attribute responsibility for the economy to the government. By combining expert data for 232 parties with survey data for roughly 30,000 individuals in 28 European countries in 2014, our analysis shows that while government parties generally pay more attention to the economic dimension, they shift attention to the non-economic dimension when economic conditions deteriorate. In contexts where government parties have shifted attention away from the economic to the non-economic dimension, voters overall attach less importance to the economy and attribute less responsibility to the government for the state of the economy.

This study presents an innovative approach to hand-coding parties' policy preferences in the relatively new, cross-sectoral field of climate change mitigation policy. It applies this approach to party manifestos in six countries, comparing the preferences of parties in Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom over the past two decades. It probes the data for evidence of validity through content validation and convergent/discriminant validation and engages with the debate on position-taking in environmental policy by developing a positional measure that incorporates 'pro' and 'anti' climate policy preferences. The analysis provides evidence for the validity of the new measures, shows that they are distinct from comparable measures of environmental policy preferences and argues that they are more comprehensive than existing climate policy measures. The new measures strengthen the basis for answering questions that are central to climate politics and to party politics. The approach developed here has important implications for the study of new, complex or cross-cutting policy issues and issues that include both valence and positional aspects.

Traditional analyses of grass roots involvement in political parties have focussed almost exclusively on formal members. However, recent analyses across a range of democracies have shown that non-members (supporters) are playing important roles within political parties, including election campaigning, candidate and leader selection, online policy deliberations and even policy formation. The growing literature on this topic suggests that the involvement of supporters may be a function of party structure and availability of online recruitment. Using new data collected at the 2015 British general election, this article extends the examination of supporter involvement but challenges these assumptions. It shows that supporter activity is better explained by responses to electoral factors and that the focus on online recruitment seriously underplays the enduring importance of human contact.

There is growing evidence that voter and party positions on economic items do not conform to a left-right dimension. This article proposes that in Northern Eurozone states voter policy positions on economic issues are characterized by two dimensions: A redistribution dimension that consists out of views on income equality and a reform dimension that divides those who favour reform of the welfare state to ensure its long-term sustainability and those who oppose such reforms because they would hurt those who need the welfare state now. It examines to what extent voters positions on economic issues conform this two-dimensional pattern, employing the 2012 Dutch Election Survey; to what extent positions on these dimensions reflects voters' attitudes on other issues and demographic characteristics; and to what extent these two dimensions help to understand voting behaviour. It shows that indeed a multidimensional approach to economic issues is justified; that voters who oppose reforms are characterized by higher levels of Euroscepticism; and that this reform dimension helps to understand voting behaviour, in particular preferences for the socialist, social-democratic and social-liberal party.

Negative campaigning presents parties with a collective action problem. While parties would prefer to have their competitors attacked, potential backlash effects from negative messages mean that individual politicians typically lack the incentives to carry out such attacks. We theorize that parties solve this problem by implementing a division of labour that takes into account the incentives of individual office holders, their availability for campaign activity, and media relevance. Drawing on these arguments we expect that holders of high public office and party leaders are less likely to issue attacks, leaving the bulk of the 'dirty work' to be carried out by party floor leaders and general secretaries. Examining almost 8000 press releases issued by over 600 individual politicians during four election campaigns in Austria, we find strong support for our theoretical expectations.

The concept of the niche party has become increasingly popular in analyses of party competition. Yet, existing approaches vary in their definitions and their measurement approaches. We propose using a minimal definition that allows us to compare political parties in terms of their 'nicheness'. We argue that the conceptual core of the niche party concept is based on issue emphasis and that a niche party emphasizes policy areas neglected by its rivals. Based on this definition, we propose a continuous measure that allows for more fine-grained measurement of a party's 'nicheness' than the dominant, dichotomous approaches and thereby limits the risk of measurement error. Drawing on data collected by the Comparative Manifesto Project, we show that (1) our measure has high face validity and (2) exposes differences among parties that are not captured by alternative, static or dichotomous measures.

Despite comprehensive reform () and recent review (Phillips Review in 2007) of party finance in Britain, public opinion of party finance remains plagued by perceptions of corruption, undue influence from wealthy donors, carefree and wasteful spending and, more generally, from the perception that there is just 'too much money' in politics. In this article we argue that knowledge of and attitudes to party finance matter, not least because advocates of reform have cited public opinion as evidence for reform. However, because attitudes to party finance are part of a broader attitudinal structure, opinion-led reforms are unlikely to succeed in increasing public confidence. Using data generated from YouGov's online panel (N=2,008), we demonstrate that the public know little of the key provisions regulating party finance and attitudes to party finance can be explained along two underlying dimensions - and . As such, we consider whether parties and politicians should be freed from the constraints of public opinion in reforming party finance.