SISP Conference 2022

The personalisation of politics has been widely studied in the past few decades, especially in the Western European context. This phenomenon has been analysed from several viewpoints, from the electoral to the party-centred one, from the governmental to the media-related one. Nonetheless, very few contributions have focused on the determinants of personalisation, even if this latter process might be linked to more general – and much relevant –societal, institutional, or party-related phenomena. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by proposing a novel framework to explain the evolution of the personalisation of politics in Western Europe between the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s. We depart from data collected in the first expert survey on the personalisation of politics (the PoPES), which has allowed us to systematically gather information on this phenomenon for a series of Western European countries between 1985 and 2016. We investigate the effect of three sets of possible determinants: societal changes (the decrease in the strength of the class cleavage or the diffusion of TV); institutional factors (the presence of presidential elections or personal-vote-driving electoral systems' features); and party-related changes (the organisational decline of Western European parties). Regression analyses test whether the abovementioned determinants have contributed – and to what extent – to shape the personalisation of politics in Western Europe in the past few decades.

Previous research has found that types of party formation have an important impact on new party success. However, less is known regarding the association between party organizational models and the performance of newcomers. The first decades of the twenty-first century represent an ideal context to examine this relationship. On the one hand, the digitalization of politics and the dissemination of populist rhetoric have changed party organizations, in particular the way they mobilize and integrate citizens, as well as their decision-making processes. On the other, the economic crisis has spurred the emergence of a great variety of challenger or anti-system parties, which have obtained a varied degree of success. The paper aims to explore the association between new party success and type of organizational models by combining two datasets. The first relies on original data collected between 2000 and 2020 on the electoral success of new parties in Europe. The second is based on the Political Party Database project, which gathers relevant information on key dimensions of intra-party functioning. The main argument developed in the paper is that leadership autonomy is a key factor associated to the success of new parties. Moreover, we expect a stronger impact of organizational characteristics in Western Europe than Eastern European countries, and more in right-wing parties than left forces. We test these expectations on a set of new parties from both advanced and more recent democracies. The findings have important implications not only for the study of party transformations of European parties, but also for party system change and political representation.

Studies on the organizational dimension of Italian parties at the local level are, in recent years, rather limited, or at least not systematic. It is not easy to return a general snapshot of the functioning of parties as territorial actors. That is, a picture that takes into account the organizational models designed in the national level but also those, which are extremely differentiated, of the local level. A reflection in this direction had been initiated in 2013 with the volume "Not Only Rome. Parties and Ruling Classes in the Italian Regions" (Ignazi-Bardi-Massari 2013), but to date we do not possess similarly systematic studies that would allow us to elaborate, from a comparative perspective, on the organizational status of parties in large Italian cities or metropolitan areas of the country. Or studies that explain what are the criteria for the selection of the party ruling classes in the different local levels, or the different profiles of elected officials, managers and voters We have studies, even very recent ones, that analyze the transformations of Italian parties (Pizzimenti, 2020) or the evolution of some parties in the national dimension, but little that allows us to reason about the actual functioning of the local machines in a systematic way. Here we will summarily talk about Rome, and in particular about its "last party" (Natale-Fasano, 2017) in the center-left area, if it is true that the Democratic Party remains the only political force in that field to show a minimum of organizational continuity. Suffice it to say that the PD electoral symbol is the only one in the entire center-left area that was always present in the municipal elections of 2008, 2013, 2016 and 2021. While it appears much easier to have an accurate snapshot of its changing electoral settlement (Diletti-Gritti 2016; Tomassi 2018), studies and analyses on the Roman Democratic Party as an organizational phenomenon are practically absent, with the exception of the 2015 research - #mappailpd - that the Democratic Party itself commissioned from Fabrizio Barca's research team following the zeroing of the local PD leadership, downstream of the so-called "Mafia capitale" scandal. The evolution of the Roman Democratic Party must be understood within the broader framework of the evolution of the Democratic Party and Italian parties. The hypothesis that will be argued for this specific local case is that of the "party that was never born" (Diletti 2016), that is, a party that, by an accident peculiar to the history of the Roman party, never managed to find a functional internal balance, that is, one that would allow it to consolidate a certain degree of organizational development. It should be pointed out that the definition of "never-born party" was first used by two members of the ruling class of the Roman center-left, namely Francesco Rutelli and Walter Tocci: although not born in an academic environment, the definition is rather suggestive and may come in handy for our work. This is a hypothesis that we should attempt to confirm through further research, but which we will try to account for here anyway. The Roman PD seems never to have found a sustainable equilibrium capable of allowing a functional operationalization of its organization, neither in the dimension of the franchise party (Carty 2004) nor in that of "party of the boss" (Bordignon 2014), to remain a fragile - and ungoverned - "network party" (Heidar-Saglie 2003). "The muscles of the party" (Ignazi-Bordanini 2018), to use a catchy definition through which the role of middle managers has been described, seem never to have found an opportunity to work in a coordinated way and overcome the phase of atrophy, except in the purely electoral phase. First of all, an element that characterizes the history of the Roman Democratic Party should be recalled in a very peculiar way. To the process of integration of ruling classes, organizational legacies and political cultures of the national level (with uncertain results), corresponds a process, unexpected, of implosion in the local level. In 2007 Walter Veltroni becomes national secretary of the Democratic Party; in 2008 his designated successor/predecessor - Francesco Rutelli - will lose the election in the local election in which the PD is present in the polls for the first time. This double move, moreover laden with symbolic value, since the Roman leadership is also a protagonist in the organizational evolution of the national level, has left the Roman PD ruling class without the glue of leadership, but also lacking an operational software for managing internal pluralism. That is, of a leadership capable of organizing an orderly access to resources, guaranteed first and foremost by the patronage and spoil system mechanisms connected to the control of the municipal administrative machine (which failed); capable of an equally orderly territorial reorganization, capable of managing the summation of leadership groups, circles and collateral organizations linked to the Democrats of the Left and Margherita, the two main formations behind the birth of the PD. Reconstructing the political and journalistic chronicle of the PD's early years (summarized in the 2015 #mappailpd Report), the Roman Democratic Party is recounted by its own leaders as "lacking in amalgam": there is "space for two DS currents, two Margherita currents, a current for civic lists (...). The loss of city government makes more evident the absence, and perhaps the impossibility, of political leadership, the possibility that it is formed far from the control of administrative levers (...). The party remains heavy in the construction of personal consensus and the dynamics of continuous counting, that is, town hall and municipal preferences, national, regional, city primaries, for secretaries and for elective offices, parliamentary primaries, but light in outward projection" (#mappailpd 2015, p. 35). The paper is the result of a preliminary analysis, conducted through the study of the Democratic Party's election results in Rome, organizational data such as budgets and membership, documents from the assemblies of its governing bodies, and about 20 in-depth interviews with its leadership.

The European economic crisis that started in 2009 brought several changes in the European party systems, particularly towards the end of the second decade of the 2000s. In these times new challenges emerged for traditional party families, particularly but not exclusively for the left. Indeed, traditional left-wing parties have been facing a complex crisis across Europe, both in terms of electoral results or capacity to mobilise members and/or sympathisers, with traditional left-wing parties often registering relevant losses. On the other hand, we also witnessed the crisis of other traditional parties, often in parallel with the rise of challenger populist parties. In Europe we can also observe the presence of four main traditional welfare models (Mediterranean, Continental, Liberal, post-communist), which responded differently to the economic crisis and policy changes. Thus, are these phenomena affecting all in the same way or can we see some differences among ‘blocs’ or ‘political families’ and across the welfare models? This paper aims to be a comprehensive assessment of these phenomena, showing how the various blocs faced in front of the crisis in the various welfare systems. Which of the traditional ones proved more resilient, and who gained more? This research is based upon a work studying the specific impact of the economic crisis and welfare expenditure on left wing parties, which is now expanded to assess the impact across the main political blocs. In this context, we aim to provide a comparative analysis of the relevance of the different welfare models on the electoral results of the various parties from the left, centre left, centre right, far right, populist and green blocs in the 27 EU countries, plus Norway, Switzerland and the UK. We take into account their electoral results at the lower chamber between the first election prior to the European economic crisis (2009) and the most recent legislative elections. Our research aims to look at the correlation between welfare models, changes in the welfare systems and electoral results for parties across the political spectrum. In other words, we aim to assess if changes in welfare policies, considered with regard to social expenditures, can be a relevant variable for explaining electoral shifts, and in particular the role of contenders that endorse forms of welfare chauvinism (radical-right populist parties). On the other hand, this analysis has further exploratory value in assessing the relevance and resilience of political blocs. Our analysis is based on largely quantitative research examining electoral data and macroeconomic variables, plus data on political orientation of parties (GALTAN positions and economic left-right) from the CHES. The research is exclusively focused on the supply side and does not take into account the voters’ perspective. In doing so, in the first part, provide a general assessment of the relationship between social policies and electoral results for the various blocs and formulate our expectations. The second part is dedicated to a preliminary analysis of the data, with a focus on potential differences connected to parties that are in government or in opposition, variations among different welfare state models, and the role of the main contenders (welfare chauvinists, populist, greens).

Electoral defeat very often represents an important turning point in the life cycle of any political party. It becomes the cause of either just adjustments, sometimes changes and even reforms in its functioning (Janda 1990, Deschouwer 1992, Gauja 2017). What corrective decisions and procedures it introduces can have key, significant consequences in the next election that it can fundamentally change the party's fate. We examined 73 political parties from 28 European countries that suffered electoral defeat between 2011 and 2017 and analysed what was the depth and extent of changes introduced after the unfavourable election result. And then we checked what their fate was in the next elections, already after the defeat we analysed. In our paper, we will show whether and how the depth and type of changes introduced after electoral defeat correlate with the results in subsequent parliamentary elections. Our theoretical assumption is that the deeper the extent of the changes introduced after defeat, the greater the electoral success in subsequent elections. We analyse change in political parties along five dimensions: change of leadership; party decomposition; change of power balance in the party; programme changes; structural changes. Then we examine what result the political parties achieved in the next election after defeat and whether there was any correlation between the variables. To do this, we explore whether the political groupings: entered government; increased its holdings: in the number of votes and in the number of seats in parliament, but did not get into government; lost votes and seats, i.e., suffered another defeat or maintained it position. To verify our theoretical conjecture, we try to answer some research questions: Is there a link between changes made to a political party after a defeat and its performance in subsequent elections? Do the extent and depth of change affect electoral success? Is the depth of change related to the scale of electoral success?

Party brands and labels are commonly used in political science to distinguish and identify the objects of political science research. Indeed, party labels are informative brands that can be useful to orient the voters’ evaluation; they also play a signaling role allowing us to assess parties’ preferences and ideology or intrinsic values. In recent years, due the declining role of ideologies, parties often adjust their labels, usually as an attempt to appeal to a broader audience. This trend is particularly evident in countries with a fluid party system, like Italy. Taking the cue from this, the present paper analyzes the changes in the party labels over time to identify which elements are associated with the process of party rebranding. On the one hand, we focus on the idea of brands as informational cues and we investigate how changes in the party brand are associated with changes in the ideology or in the policy contents expressed by one party. On the other hand, we dig into the value of the party brand, putting it in relation with a party’s valence reputation. In this regard, we try to evaluate whether changes in the party brand are associated with the attempt to produce more clear-cut statements, in order to improve the clarity of the brand and boost the party reputation, as well as with a political language characterized by the usage of a more positive tone, so that voters will associate a successful, intriguing and forward-looking spin to the brand. We test our hypotheses taking advantage of a new dataset build by transcribing more than 7,000 speeches delivered by politicians during 112 congresses of Italian parties from 1980 to 2020. Using a combination of different techniques of automated text analysis, which allow us to dig into the political debates of these parties to discover changes in the political language over time, linking them with changes in the party brand the paper will evaluate the dynamics behind party rebranding.

The discussion on the alleged decline of political parties has been around for many years now, both in the academic literature and in the public discussion. Much of this debate has revolved around the relationship between parties and the environment in which they operate, such as societies and institutions: in this vision, parties should be responsive to changes in the social sphere, and when failing to do so in a satisfactory manner, citizens would feel disconnected to parties, leading to their decline. Among the scholars who were dedicated to such research, this vision of the relationship between parties and societies culminated with the formulation of a plethora of models of party organization which would explain said relations. This suggested that parties were moving towards shared trajectories and strategies, while the empirical data testing these assumptions failed to give a clear picture of the issue of the emergence of such models. Moreover, despite their usefulness in identifying possible patterns of party change, this line of research has left a lot of questions unanswered. The aim of this contribution, which is part of a broader research effort, is to empirically investigate some of the said questions regarding party organizations, namely: are parties becoming more alike? How can we provide a valid method for testing this assumption? Is it possible to identify one or more patterns of organizational change? Are the differences between parties mostly dependant on external pressures coming from the socio-economic system, technological advances, or cultural shifts in the society? Or are they mostly dependant on political factors such as party family, party age, socialization to government, or the features of the political system? After a theoretical discussion on the advantages and the shortcomings of past attempts at measuring party change and on the debate on party models, we will advocate for a research strategy more focused on analysing and measuring single, observable features of party organizational profiles, such as that brought on by the recent approach of the Political Party Database Project (PPDB). This approach, in line with the earlier attempts from Katz and Mair, enables us to empirically test the research questions which we briefly outlined. Using data from the PPDB and the Political Parties Data Handbook by Katz and Mair, as well as other datasets such as World Bank’s, OECD’s, and the European Values Survey, our paper tries to answer these preliminary research questions by combining a large amount of data coming from different sources on seven Western European countries at three time markers (the 1970s, 1990s and 2010s). By comparing data on single parties, we will be able to build an index of Party Organizational Variance (POV) for each country and period which will be then used as our main dependant variable for our models, where we will compare the impact that different variables and potential stimuli have on increasing – or decreasing – similarities between parties of the same country. Indeed, while we are not denying the importance of supranational variables, we are convinced that domestic factors, especially of a political nature, play a significant role in shaping party organizational profiles. For this reason, different possible explanations will be tested against each other to improve our understanding of the causes of parties’ increasing or decreasing dissimilarities.

According to the riding-the-wave hypothesis, a great(er) emphasis by voters on a certain topic should “mechanically” translate into a higher salience by parties on that same issue during an electoral campaign. The literature has tried to focus on which factors could strategically mediate these mechanical pressures, identifying them in certain specific party characteristics. However, with only few exceptions, existing literature does not take into account the political context in which a particular target party competes. In such a context, a party not only responds to the issue priorities of the general public, but it also adopts distinctively strategic behaviour according to the moves of other parties. By matching parties’ manifestos and survey data, we aim to isolate the “strategic” component behind the riding-the-wave hypothesis by means of spatial econometrics. Focusing on the environmental issue, our analysis largely points at the existence of spill-overs effect elicited by other parties’ choices on a target party’s decision with respect to its issue competition strategy. Such an effect is however mediated by the relative ownership displayed by the environmental issue itself. Our findings have several consequences with respect to the large literature on issue competition.

Populist radical right parties that have emerged - at least in part as part of a backlash against the trend toward cosmopolitan, social liberalism on the left of politics in an era of mass migration - have attracted considerable support. Some of that has come from voters who might otherwise have supported more mainstream right parties, obliging those parties to reassess their positions. This paper asks whether while this reassessment might have some benefits, encouraging those parties not to forget so-called 'left-behind' citizens, it may also risk going too far, eroding those parties' commitment to norms and standards that liberal democracy cannot afford to see diluted.

Parties are in crisis! Membership decline and state finance have left them without serious roots in society. This general proposition in the literature is – in my view - not supported by the evidence. In this paper, I argue that party linkage is still in operation in - at least - some advanced democracies. I will look at the Nordic parties, and in more detail at Norwegian parties, to sustain this argument. Party linkage works through two different channels. First, the linkage through the electoral markets driven by open competition for the voters. In this paper, I look at the second channel which works through the party organization where the voters link up to the parties through the party members. I argue that the Nordic experience of party change show that the linkage through the members is still operative. IN other words, one cannot generalize on this point. I also argue that the focus on declining membership numbers is misleading and that the voters’ trust in parties also is a shaky indication on linkage decline. Finally, I argue that there are comparative differences left to be explored, in that party change in countries like Italy, Spain and France tells a different story compared to party change in Northern Europe.

Democracies have been evolving, especially in the last 20-30 years, to such an extent that some refer to democracy shifting from being solely 'vote-centred' to something increasingly 'voice-centred'. Perhaps most significant among the reforms has been the growing use of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs), which bring citizens into the heart of discussions over constitutional reforms and policy development. A question to consider is where these fit within our existing system of representative democracies, and most particularly vis-a-vis the linkage role traditionally performed by political parties. Arguably this is an area that has tended to be somewhat neglected by party scholars (a point stressed by van Biezen and Saward in 2008). Even among those scholars who do pay attention to the 'deliberative wave' there is a tendency to dismiss developments in this areas as limited (Achen and Bartels 2016), 'exclusive' (Mair, 2006), or 'not integrated' (Pateman, 2012) -- in other words, as largely insignificant. The purpose of this presentation will be to review this debate and to develop the argument that, on the contrary, this deliberative wave is already quite significant and becoming ever more so. This has implications for political parties both externally, in terms of the policy process that parties are key players in, and internally, in terms of the decision-making processes within parties.

For several decades many established democracies have supported the democratization processes in newer democracies. One focus for these efforts is the support for the development of political parties and party systems; IPA (International Party Assistance). IPA was included rather late in democracy promotion programs. The paper discusses why IPA has become part of democracy promotion and some of the challenges involved in doing so. There are many different ways IPA has been implemented. I identify six dimensions of IPA: the objectives of IPA, organizational model, financial model and scale of intervention, modes of intervention, timing of intervention, geographic focus. For each of the dimensions I present how different IPAs have functioned and identify the findings and challenges of IPA., based on how IPA-organizations have been evaluated and what political science research of this topic has found. The results of IPAs seem to be moderate. Nevertheless, in the conclusion I discuss why IPA should be continued - in spite of moderate success.

The presentation will focus on leadership change within political parties on the executive level and its implication for political representation and democratic governance.

This paper will revisit the question of the effects of the rules of the political game (the constitution and electoral rules in particular) on political parties, using the case of France. It will argue that the recent decline of the Socialist Party and the Republican Right, the two parties that have dominated the party system since the late 1970s, in favour of personal parties (Emmanuel Macron's République en Marche, Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France insoumise, but also Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement national) is partly the result of the reduction of the presidential term of office from 7 to 5 years and the inversion of the electoral calendar which puts the presidential election before the legislative elections voted in 2001. This change in the rules of the political game has led to the marginalisation of legislative elections, which have become ratification elections, which was far from being the case until now, as we shall recall. It has transformed the president of the Republic into the sole head of the executive power. This strengthening of the power of the president and the attractiveness of the presidential mandate has fuelled conflicts within the dominant parties. These parties have divided into coteries. To avoid implosion, the two dominant parties decided in 2011 and 2016 to use open primaries to choose their candidate for the presidential election. These primaries were a success in terms of mobilisation, with several million supporters participating. But the choice of supporters resulted in the designation of candidates who did not enjoy strong majority support within their own party. The designation by open primaries gave them a legitimacy that allowed them to distance themselves from their party's programme and to disregard internal power relations in the composition of their government, once elected. The conflict between President Hollande and his parliamentary group between 2012 and 2017 will be studied in particular. The thesis is that the personalization of political competition in France has increased considerably since 2002 due to the hegemonic position of the presidential election and that the recent success of personal parties is only the result of this process. However, these personal parties are still weak organisations. They have few territorial relays and find it very difficult to recruit strong candidates in local and legislative elections. The 'old parties' therefore continue to dominate local elections to a large extent and may not have said their last word.

Ambiguity seems to be a widespread characteristic in the realm of politics, therefore understanding what are the determinants that actually make parties more ambiguous is a relevant research puzzle. While many authors have attempted to answer this question, they have primarily relied on electoral incentives that look at voters' preferences. In this paper, we argue that to fully understand the conditions that determine the use of ambiguity, we should consider parties not as unitary actors but as groups of individuals with heterogeneous preferences. Indeed, ideological ambiguity should be a viable strategy in order to balance the different voices within the party. Our results support the idea according to which a party increases its ideological ambiguity when facing supporters with heterogeneous preferences. More interestingly, the heterogeneity among candidates also seems determinant in explaining more ambiguous ideological stances; however, a strong party leadership can make the party's ideology clearer. While the paper's primary contribution concerns the inclusion of intra-party dynamics, it also raises some methodological issues that question the different operationalisations of ideological ambiguity proposed by the literature.

Vox in Spain and FDI in Italy are two emerging far-right political parties which share similar views and have experienced comparable political histories. Both have never been in government before and are run by charismatic founding leaders. They also share a vivid scepticism of national media and political opponents because of their potential ideological links with their dramatic authoritarian pasts. This article highlights the similarities and differences between these two parties and focuses on their relationships with fascism and Francoism. This paper subsequently finds that, despite media speculation which involved party members, in their official manifestos both parties prefer to avoid the topic, not addressing it at all. This strategy has proven to be successful, but not on its own: FdI and Vox tend to avoid the stigma of extremism because public opinion perceptions of fascism and Francoism are so remarkably evolved and what was considered a stigma until a few years ago, is now not so much.

In the most recent (2022) parliamentary elections, the united opposition won all but one of the eighteen single member constituencies (SMDs) in the Hungarian capital, and just two out of eighty-eight in the rest of the country. Democratic Hungary has always shown the presence of an urban-rural cleavage shaping its party system and electoral behaviour, with the capital and urban areas favouring social-liberal parties against a largely conservative countryside. However, this has been magnified in recent years, particularly since the watershed election of 2010, which brought Viktor Orbán back in power with a supermajority, something that he managed to retain to these days. Indeed, the results of the 2014, 2018 and 2022 parliamentary elections, as well as the 2019 local elections, all seem to confirm the presence of two ‘Hungaries’, one represented by the capital Budapest (and a few other urban areas) and the other by the rural areas of the country. This paper aims to be a comprehensive up to date assessment of this phenomenon. Political cleavages are a key aspect of the research, which explores and highlight the relevance of an (apparent) political cleavage that is shaping Hungarian politics: the urban/rural cleavage, or rather the cosmopolitan/traditional divide, along with other external and institutional factors that are reinforcing such a strong divide (i.e. access to free media, education, electoral law). Confronting the evolution of the electoral behaviours of Hungarians in the capital and in the rest of the country in the Orbán era, the research contributes to studying the general structure of political competition in Hungary and the relevance of cleavages in contemporary politics. This research is also relevant with regards to the assumption of a ‘freezing’, of the Hungarian political competition along the urban rural or the cosmopolitan/traditional divide. The paper covers both national and local elections between 2014 and 2022. In the first part, this paper illustrates the background and explores the applicability and evolution of political cleavages in Hungary. The second part is dedicated to the analysis of empirical data, assessing the diachronic evolution of electoral results, outlining the voting behaviour of the capital and main urban areas upon which we formulate our initial assumptions.

In the last decade the scholarly interest in Europe’s radical left parties has been relatively on the rise, leading the literature on the European radical Left to consolidate. Yet, there is an important area of research that remains mostly omitted in the existing scholarship, namely how the radical Left engages with national belonging and identity. Despite being largely overlooked in academia, this is a relevant aspect when studying radical left parties’ identity and concrete politics, because it intersects with their ideological positioning, their strategic reflections and their interaction with the political arena they operate in. It is an academic shortcoming that this paper tackles by focusing on the patriotic discourse of the Portuguese Communist Party, a radical left party that was founded in 1921 and is currently present in the Portuguese national parliament. Although there is scholarly consensus that national pride is far from being a common trait of the European radical Left (March and Keith 2016; Damiani 2016; Chiocchetti 2017), there are some actors of this party family that do lay claim to patriotism (e.g. Custodi and Caiani 2021; Chazel and Dain 2021). Among them, Portugal’s Communist Party stands out for being a relevant parliamentary force that has historically displayed a clear-cut patriotic discourse (e.g. Neves 2010), as their long-standing party slogan “for a patriotic and leftist politics” already evocatively indicates. Moreover, their patriotism strengthened after the 2008 financial crisis, binding with the party’s hard opposition to the European Union and the austerity measures (Lisi 2020). But how exactly does the party frame its patriotism? What are the meanings that Portuguese pride and identity assume in its radical left discourse? As nationalism studies indicate, national pride is not univocal, as its meanings can change, and be contested, according to different political articulations (Anderson 1996; Finlayson 1998; Laclau 2003; De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2021). Accordingly, this article deploys a thorough qualitative discourse analysis in order to study how the Portuguese Communist Party engages with patriotism and frames national pride and identity in its political communication. The corpus is based on a set of forty selected leaders’ speeches and party’s official communications. In the selection, I prioritized the speeches that party leaders gave at mayor party events and at opening or closing rallies of the general election campaigns, as well as specific texts where they were discussing nationalism and issues related to nationality. As the empirical analysis indicates, the party displays a social patriotism that frames the Portuguese nation in inclusionary terms and empathises the close bond between social policies and national sovereignty. It is a type of patriotism that finds its political legitimization in the legacy of the left-leaning 1974 Carnation Revolution, as well as in the national tradition of Portuguese communism. In the party communication, national interest coincides with the interest of the working people, which can only be achieved through patriotic left-wing policies. This notwithstanding, the patriotism of the Communist Party remains more sedimented and ritualized than politicized: national belonging emerges more as a shared sense of community rather than as a terrain of identitarian conflict against political adversaries. Cultural, symbolic and political references to Portuguese identity are frequent in the party narrative, yet they remain scarcely confrontational and thus fit into a context of low politicization of Portuguese identity. It is an outlook that share similarities with the patriotism of some 20th-century Western communist parties in the years of the antifascist struggle and in the first democratic years after the Second World War, when they emphasized their national character and their full belonging to the national community. Anderson, Benedict. 1996. ‘Introduction’. In Mapping the nation, edited by G. Balakrishnan (Ed.), 1–16. Verso. Chazel, Laura & Vincent Dain. 2021. ‘Left-Wing Populism and Nationalism’. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 15(2): 73–94. Chiocchetti, Paolo. 2017. The Radical Left Party Family in Western Europe, 1989-2015. Routledge. Custodi, Jacopo & Manuela Caiani. 2021. ‘Populismo Di Sinistra e Nazionalismo. Il Caso Spagnolo’. Comunicazione Politica, 1/2021: 79–101. Damiani, Marco. 2016. La sinistra radicale in Europa: Italia, Spagna, Francia, Germania. Donzelli Editore. De Cleen, Benjamin & Yannis Stavrakakis. 2021. ‘Avancées Dans l’étude Des Connections Entre Le Populisme et Le Nationalisme’. Populisme, La Revue, 1(1): 1–9. Finlayson, Alan. 1998. ‘Ideology, Discourse and Nationalism’. Journal of Political Ideologies, 3 (1): 99–118. Laclau, Ernesto. 2003. ‘On Imagined Communities’. In Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson, edited by Pheng Cheah & Jonathan D. Culler. Routledge. Lisi, Marco. 2020. ‘All Quiet on the European Front? Assessing the Impact of the Great Recession on Euroscepticism in Portugal’. South European Society and Politics, online first, https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2020.1797308. March, Luke & Daniel Keith (Eds). 2016. Europe’s Radical Left From Marginality to the Mainstream?. Rowman & Littlefield. Neves, José. 2010. Comunismo e nacionalismo em Portugal: política, cultura e história no século XX. Tinta-da-China.

Extant research has provided different theoretical perspectives and mixed empirical evidence as regards the interplay between populism and political participation in Europe. In light of democratic challenges characterizing the region, Central and Eastern Europe is a particularly relevant context to study these phenomena. Starting from the “threat or corrective” debate regarding the impact of populism on democracy, the present contribution focuses on the Visegrád area (V4), studying the relationship between populist voting and non-electoral political participation in comparison with Western Europe, and taking into account three different dimensions of participation: institutional; non-institutional; and the sum of these two, “general” participation. Using a twelve-countries dataset – the four Visegrád countries, plus an eight-countries Western European benchmark: Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Ireland – from the 9th Round of the European Social Survey, at first we test whether a “positive” link between populist parties’ constituencies and political participation exists. Results show that the positive effect of being part of the populist parties’ electorate is weak in general, and negative if we isolate the Visegrád area. This difference is mainly explained by a different impact on non-institutional participation, which sees a significant and positive effect of being part of populist parties' constituency in Western Europe but a negative one in the Visegrád area. The results of the study put into question the efficacy of populism as “corrective” for the democracy, and show how its impact is context-specific. Implications of the study are considered to be relevant for the literature on populism and political parties, for their connection to citizens' engagement, as well as for the study of democracy in the political environment of post-communist Europe.

Italy has traditionally been considered an exemplary case of labor market dualism: a system where extreme peaks of generosity for workers permanently employed in highly unionized sectors (insiders) coexist with weak or even no subsidization for the atypically employed, unemployed, or employed in the informal economy (outsiders). However, recent developments in the international scene and correlated domestic reforms have weakened employment protections for insiders while liberalizing atypical employment. As a result, the divide between permanent and atypical workers has blurred and precarity has become the new normality for larger and larger shares of the workforce. This contributed to the emergence of new social risks while challenging the explanatory power of existing theories of political representation in dualised societies. We are thus in need of new theoretical frameworks for understanding the political implications of precarization. In this article, we provide an overview of the major labor market reforms approved in Italy since the late 1990s, showing that in the 2013-2018 legislature the Democratic Party embraced the flexibilization agenda and shifted from defending to undermining insiders’ interests, while the Five Star Movement worked to present itself as the party for the precarious workers. We then rely on data from the Italian National Election Studies association to investigate the effect of these strategic choices on the relationship between precarity and party preferences in the 2018 election. The results of the analysis show that the Five Star Movement successfully gathered the support of those who, regardless of their formal employment status, perceive their condition as insecure, while the Democratic party lost support among both insiders and insecure workers.

In recent years, a growing body of literature has revived its interest in left parties, emphasizing their allegedly irreversible crisis in Western Europe. However, all such accounts focus solely on electoral results, thus neglecting governmental power, the decisive factor to realize left parties’ policy goals. To address this gap, the article tests whether the decline of the left is confirmed in terms of governmental power, for which an index that remedies the limitations of existing measures is employed. Through comparative longitudinal analysis on 20 Western European countries and more than 500 legislatures between 1918 and 2021, the article finds that whereas the electoral decline of the left is confirmed, its governmental power has remained fundamentally the same as in the golden age of class politics. Consequently, in recent decades an increasing number of left parties in different national contexts has secured relevant government positions despite their declining electoral performance.

With the disappearance or the erosion of the traditional cleavages on which political parties were formed during the 19th and 20th centuries, West European democracies have been going through a phase of profound, radical transformation for several decades. The same 'revolutions' that had given shape and structure to nation-states in Europe no longer seem able to explain either the new lines of competition or the new forms of cooperation among contemporary political parties. This paper aims to elaborate an analytical scheme for the reconfiguration of West European party systems by identifying those ‘critical junctures' that, over the past three decades, have led to the emergence of new cleavages and, thus, a different configuration of the relationship between voters and parties. Leveraging the same theoretical and conceptual apparatus elaborated by Stein Rokkan between the 1960s and 1970s, this paper aims to show that it is possible and useful to imagine a post-Rokkanian politics for current party systems in Western Europe.