We conduct a global, large-N analysis of proportionality in the partisan distribution of cabinet portfolios. Formulated in the context of postwar Western European parliamentary democracy, Gamson’s Law predicts that parties joining a coalition government will receive cabinet ministries in direct proportion to the seats they are contributing to the coalition on the floor of the legislature. Using a sample of 1551 country-years of coalitional government in 97 countries from 1966 to 2019, and comparing all main constitutional formats (parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential), we find that Gamson’s Law does not travel well outside its context of origin. Among the constitutional predictors of cabinet proportionality, we find that pure presidentialism is a major outlier, with an exaggerated form of formateur advantage. Introducing party-system and assembly-level predictors to the debate, we find that party institutionalization tends to increase fairness in portfolio allocation within parliamentary systems only.

This research note contributes updated and extended point estimates of the ideological positions of Brazilian political parties and novel estimates of the positions of all presidents since redemocratization in 1985. Presidents and parties are jointly responsible for the operability of Brazil’s version of coalitional presidentialism. Locating these key political actors in a unidimensional left–right space over time reveals rising challenges to the institutional matrix, particularly since 2013. Ideological polarization among parties has sharply increased, presidents have become more distant from Congress, and the political center has become increasingly vacated. Coalitional presidentialism is being subjected to unprecedented ideological stress as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva begins his third term in office.

There is a boom in the power of right-wing parties that are becoming government parties in Latin America and Europe. It has been pointed out that these are distinguished from traditional right-wing parties by their common ideology that transcends national contexts, which is why they have been grouped as New Right-wing parties. This article questions whether these parties share ideological themes or whether they are heterogeneous and obey national interests. This study systemizes the New Right-wing parties’ programs and classifies them to answer the question. This corpus is then studied through frequency, network, and principal component analysis. Two conclusions are reached from this. First, these parties agree on issues such as provider States and nationalist claims, and, second, their programs have diverse themes that do not show the formation of an identifiable transnational ideological agenda in their programs. Consequently, grouping these parties as an ideologically homogeneous phenomenon can make invisible the fact that they are parties that adjust to particular demands of their political environment, in a logic that obeys more catch-all parties than ideological and dogmatic parties.

Political parties face a crucial trade-off between electoral and partisan goals: should they put electoral goals first, pursuing the policies they think will win them the most votes in the next election, or should they put partisan goals first, pursuing the policies their members, activists, and most loyal voters prefer? In this paper we argue that main political parties make different choices depending on the information environment they are in. They have strong incentives to follow the median voter when the median voter's position is well known, but when there is more uncertainty they have strong incentives to adopt policies they prefer for partisan reasons, since uncertainty makes party leaders more willing to bet that the party's preferred policies are also vote winners. We develop an empirical analysis of how the main parties on the left and the right in twenty democracies have changed their platforms from election to election since the 1960s.

This article demonstrates that deindustrialization increases ethnonational mobilization. We maintain that levels of mobilization of ethnonational movements are to an important extent a residual to the class cleavage, that is, to the degree the class conflict dominates political competition. Since in the context of Western Europe industrialism is the main force behind the class cleavage, deindustrialization weakens this cleavage and allows instead for mobilization along ethnonational divisions. In order to empirically test our argument, we analyze levels of electoral mobilization of ethnonational party blocs among 15 Western European minorities between 1918 and 2018. Our analysis clearly reveals that levels of industrialization are negatively related to ethnonational mobilization. However, this is only true for regions with historically high levels of industrialization and if the ethnonational movement is unified. The article contributes to the comparative literature on the electoral performance of ethnonational parties and the literature on deindustrialization and nationalism.

Do parties relegate female ministers to portfolios that are politically less important for them? This research note contributes to this debate and examines whether the issue salience of parties for specific policy areas has an effect on the nomination of a female minister. Previous theoretical work assumes that party leaders will be more likely to select men for those portfolios that are highly salient for the party. To test this assumption empirically, the paper analyzes the appointment of women cabinet members in the German states between 2006 and 2021. Notably, the findings contradict the theoretical expectations as well as previous empirical results from a cross-national study: On the German sub-national level the nomination of a female minister is more likely if the respective portfolio is highly salient for the governing party. Parties and their policy-preferences seem to be an important factor in explaining the share of women in sub-national cabinets.

According to partisan theory, variations in policy choices and outputs originate from the party composition of the government studied. In this study, we take a novel approach to address such assumptions by linking changes in municipal taxes with local government changes. We also add a baseline scenario in which we examine whether the composition of the local government affects tax levels. Drawing on a dataset that contains official Swedish statistics from 1994 to 2018, we find convincing support for the partisan effect. Tax levels are higher under left-wing rule, and more specifically, tax cuts particularly occur when left-wing governments are replaced by right-wing ones. These results do not vanish when controls are accounted for, while it can be particularly noticed that the condition of the municipal economy influences partisan ambitions. These findings thereby contradict prior theoretical assumptions that the local arena is free from ideological battles.

A substantial body of research has found biased recruitment in a variety of societal spheres. We study selection in the judiciary, a domain that has received less attention than the economic and political spheres. Our field experiment took place in the midst of a Swedish government campaign encouraging ordinary citizens to contact local parties, which are responsible for recruiting lay judges (jurors) and put themselves forward as lay judge candidates. Parties’ responsiveness to citizen requests does not seem to favor their own sympathizers, does not vary at all with signals of gender, and is only marginally affected by ethnicity and age. Given the potential importance of ideology and identity in judicial decision-making, the finding that there is little bias with respect to these factors at this first stage of the recruitment process is reassuring from the perspective of impartiality.

The metal-mining boom Latin America experienced in recent decades precipitated highly contentious anti-mining social movements in Central America. In this context, El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban all metal mining by law. In contrast, policy in nearby Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua remained pro-mining. These cases are compared using a most similar systems design. Comparison reveals the importance of three variables: how national economic-elite networks and interests relate to multinational corporations; national movement coordination and goals, specifically in relation to prohibition; and how parties and leaders relied on popular bases or capital. These factors shaped the contention between elites and movements that influenced state actions around mining and led to this ‘least likely case’ of extractive policy change in El Salvador.

This article explains why only some post-neoliberal populists successfully keep themselves in power, thereby dominating political systems over the long term. Based on cross-regional dual paired comparisons of ‘crucial’ cases in the Andes and Central Europe, it advances a theory emphasizing societal reactions rooted in prior neoliberal critical junctures. I argue that where well-established and programmatic social democratic parties engaged in bait-and-switch reforms, subsequent populists mobilized extensive electoral coalitions with core support from former leftist constituents, based on which they built organizational capacities for the provision of national public goods that reinforced their popularity over the long term. By contrast, where personalistic leaders politicized regionally based divides through identity-priming appeals and then disproportionately hurt core supporters through bait-and-switch reforms, subsequent populists mobilized more segmented electoral coalitions, built less cohesive parties and provided limited public goods, which undermined their popularity as incumbents. By underscoring parallels in two different world regions, the article challenges institutionalist accounts of populist domination and offers a novel societally focused perspective.