How radical right populist parties use the representation of women as an electoral tool

Although radical right populist parties in Europe are still predominantly led by and supported by men, there has been a marked increase in the number of women with high profile roles in these parties. Drawing on a new study, Ana Catalano Weeks, Bonnie M. Meguid, Miki Caul Kittilson and Hilde Coffé ask whether we should view this trend as a genuine step toward better representation for women

Why Parties Narrow their Representative Profile: Evidence from Six European Democracies

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this recordIn this paper, we analyse the conditions under which political parties narrow their representative profile (defined by the scope of the issues or the constituencies they represent). This strategy has been neglected in the party literature, which is mainly focused on the adoption of catch-all strategies among mainstream parties or the tendency to stick to core issues among niche parties. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework that includes central external and internal drivers of party change and we empirically test this framework using novel survey data covering 121 parties across six European democracies: The United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Ireland.European Commissio

Bringing Government Back to the People? The Impact of Political Decentralization on Voter Engagement in Western Europe

This paper examines how political decentralization affects levels of voter engagement. Political actors have often justified processes of political decentralization as means to “bring government back to the people.” While these claims are consistent with scholarly theories on voter turnout, aggregate-level analysis does not reveal the expected net shifts in voter attitudes and behavior in decentralized countries of Western Europe. Rather than signaling the relative unimportance of constitutional reform for voter engagement, this study finds that decentralization differentially affects members of the electorate. Using survey data to examine pre- and post-decentralization voter participation in Scotland, I determine that partisans of the regionalist, Scottish National Party are more receptive to the effects of this institutional change than affiliates of the national, mainstream parties. This paper suggests, therefore, that institutions do not necessarily have an independent effect on voter behavior; their impact is mediated by the individual-level characteristics of those voters