3,206 research outputs found
International populism: the radical right in the European Parliament
No full textThe 2014 European Parliament elections were hailed as a populist earthquake with parties like the French Front National, UKIP and the Danish People's Party topping the polls in their countries and commentators warning about the consequences of a large radical right populist bloc in the Parliament. But what happened after the elections? Based on policy positions, voting data, and interviews conducted over more than four years with senior figures from fourteen radical right populist parties and their main partners, this is the first major study to explain these parties' actions and alliances in the European Parliament. International Populism answers three key questions: Why have radical right populists, unlike other ideological party types, long been divided in the European Parliament? Why, although divisions persist, are many of them now more united than ever? And how does all of this inform our understanding of the European populist radical right today? Arguing that these parties have entered a new international and transnational phase, with some attempting to be respectable radicals while others have instead embraced their shared populism, McDonnell and Werner shed new light on the past, present and future of one of the most important political phenomena of twenty-first-century Europe
BPI873102_appendix – Supplemental material for Representation in Western Europe: Connecting party-voter congruence and party goals
No full textSupplemental material, BPI873102_appendix for Representation in Western Europe: Connecting party-voter congruence and party goals by Annika Werner in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations</p
Voters' preferences for party representation: Promise- keeping, responsiveness to public opinion or enacting the common good
No full textThe functioning of representative democracy is crucially dependent on the representative behaviour of political parties. Large parts of the party representation literature assume that voters expect parties to fulfil the promises of their election programs. What voters actually want from parties, however, remains largely unclear. Within the Australian context, this article investigates the preferences of voters regarding three ideal party representative styles: ‘promise keeping’; ‘focus on public opinion’; and ‘seeking the common good’. Using a novel survey tool, this study finds that voters value promise keeping highly when it is evaluated individually. However, they rate seeking the common good as most important when the three styles are directly compared. A multinomial logistic regression analysis shows that, in particular, voters who have been involved in party grassroots activities prefer promise keeping. These findings have wider implications for our understanding of how representative democracy can and should work.Griffith Business School, School of Government and International RelationsFull Tex
Representation in Western Europe: Connecting party-voter congruence and party goals
No full textOne of the most common critiques of political parties is that they no longer represent the interests of their voters. On one hand, representation literature tasks all parties equally to ensure high ideological congruence with their voters. On the other hand, party behaviour literature acknowledges that parties have legitimately different primary goals, in particular vote-maximisation or policy-seeking. Thus, this article analyses whether ideological congruence depends on the general goals that parties pursue. Furthermore, this article proposes a novel, distribution-based measure of party-voter ideological congruence that reduces the loss of voter information stemming from the many-to-one data relationship. This measure is applied to 470 data points from parties in 10 Western European countries from 1970 to 2009. The article finds that vote-maximising parties create higher levels of congruence than policy-seeking parties. On this basis, the article calls for evaluations of party behaviour considering party-type specificity
Party responsiveness and voter confidence in Australia
No full textNumerous studies have shown that Australians have little confidence in their political parties. This article presents the results of a study investigating whether the responsiveness of Australian parties to what their voters want drives this lack of confidence. It analyses two aspects of party responsiveness: programmatic responsiveness in electoral manifestos and perceived responsiveness that centres on Australian voters’ assessment of how well their parties meet their demands. The analysis finds that programmatic responsiveness has no significant influence. Instead, how Australians perceive their parties to be responsive has a modest effect on their confidence in those parties. The study suggests that, however, it is incumbency which has the most powerful effect on voter confidence.Griffith Business School, School of Government and International RelationsNo Full Tex
IPS787330_Appendix – Supplemental material for Voters’ preferences for party representation: Promise-keeping, responsiveness to public opinion or enacting the common good
No full textSupplemental material, IPS787330_Appendix for Voters’ preferences for party representation: Promise-keeping, responsiveness to public opinion or enacting the common good by Annika Werner in International Political Science Review</p
What voters want from their parties: Testing the promise-keeping assumption
No full textHow should party governments make representative democracy? Much of the democracy representation literature assumes that voters prefer parties to fulfill the promises of their election campaigns, with higher preference for promise-keeping placed on the party a voter supports. That voters agree with these assumptions, however, remains largely unclear and this is the main hypothesis of this article. Within the context of Australia, this article investigates voter preferences regarding three ideal party representative styles: promise-keeping, focus on public opinion, and seeking the common good. Furthermore, it tests whether voters prefer their party – over other parties – to keep their promises. Based on novel and innovative survey data, this study finds that, generally, voters care least about parties keeping their promises and their preferences are unaffected by their party support. These results, if confirmed in other contexts, not only challenge the primacy of promise-keeping, but also the assumed ubiquitous party effect.Griffith Business School, School of Government and International RelationsFull Tex
IPS787430_French_and_Spanish_abstract – Supplemental material for Voters’ preferences for party representation: Promise-keeping, responsiveness to public opinion or enacting the common good
No full textSupplemental material, IPS787430_French_and_Spanish_abstract for Voters’ preferences for party representation: Promise-keeping, responsiveness to public opinion or enacting the common good by Annika Werner in International Political Science Review</p
The Kurz affair has uncovered the Trumpian dimension of Austrian politics
No full textOn 9 October, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz resigned following a corruption scandal. Reinhard Heinisch and Annika Werner explain why the rise and fall of Kurz has parallels with the presidency of Donald Trump in the United States – and why, like Trump, we may not have seen the last of him as a key political figure
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