‘SYRIZA and Podemos, we shall overcome’? Left transnational cooperation in times of crisis

The Eurozone crisis and its austerity-centred management opened up a fertile ground for the so-called ‘radical left parties’ (RLPs) and their anti-austerity agenda. Moreover, it provided a unique opportunity for this party family to enhance its rather underdeveloped transnational cooperation. Sharing several objective and subjective features, SYRIZA (Greece) and Podemos (Spain) – arguably the two most prominent European RLPs today – seemed particularly well-placed to develop a strong transnational cooperation. However, the current literature has hardly addressed whether such expectations have been borne out. Indeed, despite a recently increased interest in the radical left, there are still very few studies focusing on the transnational cooperation among RLPs. Building on documentary research and qualitative elite interviews covering the 2014–2017 period, the article has two main objectives: first, to map the cooperation between SYRIZA and Podemos by identifying the key channels and actors of this process; second, to assess their cooperation over said period, with a focus on the factors fuelling and obstructing it. The article argues that the relationship between the two parties reached its peak around SYRIZA’s electoral victory in January 2015 but declined following its deal with the ‘Troika’ 6 months later, which blatantly contradicted SYRIZA’s anti-austerity programme. It is shown that while the main incentives behind their cooperation have been their shared opposition to neoliberalism, the European Union’s (EU) reaction to the crisis, and the similarities in their countries’ economic situations, the main obstacles hindering that cooperation have been the primacy of national politics and the diverging views on the EU. The findings arguably provide useful insights for the wider left transnational cooperation today, in a time of renewed global capitalist crisis, when such cooperation is perhaps more relevant than ever.

No Strong Leaders Needed? AfD Party Organisation Between Collective Leadership, Internal Democracy, and “Movement-Party” Strategy

This article analyses the formal and lived organisation of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany). We show that the party is exceptional among what is usually understood as the populist radical right (PRR) party family, at least from an organisational perspective: The AfD sharply contradicts the “standard model” of PRR party organisation, which emphasises “charismatic” leadership and the centralisation of power as key features. Instead, studying the AfD’s efforts to adopt some elements of a mass-party organisation and its relatively decentralised decision-making underlines the importance of “movement-party” strategy, collective leadership, and internal democracy—concepts that are usually associated with Green and left-wing parties. Our analysis shows how the party’s organisation is essential for understanding its development more broadly as it reflects and reinforces sharp intra-party conflict. From this perspective, the case of the AfD sheds new light on the relationship between PRR party organisation and electoral success, indicating the importance of strong ties to parts of society over effective internal management as long as demand for anti-immigration parties is high. We conclude that even though AfD quickly built up a relatively inclusive organisational structure, the role of both its leadership and its rank-and-file is still a matter of controversy.

Political and ideological normalization: quality of government, mainstream-right ideological positions and extreme-right support

This article aims to explain the variation in the electoral support for extreme-right parties (ERPs) in Europe. The extant literature on the far-right party family does not answer this question specifically with regard to the extreme-right variants for two main reasons. Firstly, theories did not expect the electoral success of these parties in post-war Europe due to their anti-democratic profiles and association with fascism. Secondly, despite the fact that they acknowledge the differences between the parties under the far-right umbrella – namely, the extreme and the radical – they normally do not take these differences into account, and if so, they focus on the radical-right parties. This article shows that electoral support for ERPs is associated with low quality of government and highly conservative mainstream-right parties. The former creates political legitimization for anti-democratic parties and the latter ideological normalization of extreme right.

Social Democratic Party Exceptionalism and Transnational Policy Linkages

ABSTRACT Political parties learn from foreign incumbents, that is, parties abroad that won office. But does the scope of this cross-national policy diffusion vary with the party family that generates those incumbents? The authors argue that party family conditions transnational policy learning when it makes information on the positions of sister parties more readily available and relevant. Both conditions apply to social democratic parties. Unlike other party families, social democrats have faced major competitive challenges since the 1970s and they exhibit exceptionally strong transnational organizations—factors, the authors contend, that uniquely facilitate cross-national policy learning from successful parties within the family. The authors analyze parties’ policy positions using spatial methods and find that social democratic parties are indeed exceptional because they emulate one another across borders more than do Christian democratic and conservative parties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of political representation and of social democratic parties’ election strategies over the past forty years.

Love and Anger in Global Party Politics

The reactions feature of Facebook provides an opportunity to explore emotional responses to political messages across the globe on a common platform. In this article, we describe this new measure and present a dataset of over two million posts from the Facebook pages of 690 political parties in 79 democracies. We study Love and Angry reactions to these posts, their potential use as measures of emotional response, and party-level variation in the frequency of these reactions. We find that parties receive systematically different proportions of Love and Angry reactions depending on their ideology, party family, and populist orientation. More extreme parties tend to elicit relatively greater emotional responses. Nationalist, populist, and right-leaning parties in particular elicit a higher proportion of Angry reactions and emotional polarization.

Assessing the fourth wave of the populist radical right: Jair Bolsonaro’s voters in comparative perspective

The determinants of the vote for the populist radical right (PRR) have been thoroughly studied especially in Western and Eastern Europe. However, the PRR has become a global phenomenon. At this point, comparative studies are essential in order to advance in the understanding of the success of this party family. For this reason, in this paper, we analyze the individual factors that help to understand the support for Jair Bolsonaro in the last 2018 Presidential elections in Brazil at the light of the findings for the PRR in Western Europe. The aim is twofold. First, we contribute to the comparative literature on the determinants for the vote for the PRR in a non-European country. Second, we also assess, if any, the peculiarity of the vote for the PRR in Latin America and specifically in the Brazilian case. In order to carry on our analysis, we used the European Election Studies (EES) dataset for Western European parties and data from the Estudio Electoral Brasileño for Brazil (ESEB). The main results show that religion (evangelists), race (white), income (high), and, above all, negative views of the main opposition party (Partido dos Trabalhadores [PT] – Worker’s Party), i.e., antipetismo, are the main reasons to understand the vote for Bolsonaro in the 2018 Presidential elections.

Ethnoregionalist Parties in the EU: The European Free Alliance Phenomenon

The article is focused on the structure and ideology of the European Free Alliance. The research aims at identifying resources and possibilities of the institutionalized transregional and supraregional cooperation of ethnoregionalist parties at the European level. The research was conducted predominantly in the paradigm of structural functionalism, while employing the methods of institutional analysis, QDA (exemplified by program documents and key actors’ rhetoric), network analysis (based on the data of the EU databases). The research resulted in the following conclusions. The EFA has not succeeded in becoming an entirely representative europarty for the respective party family, due to deep discrepancies between ethnoregionalist parties in the domain of ideology, goals, attitude towards European integration, and domestic political opportunities. The attempts to create an integrative ideological platform based on “creative eurofederalism” and “progressive nationalism” may hardly be called successful. Besides, big ethnoregionalist parties prefer to cooperate with bigger and more influential europarties and political groups of the European Parliament. However, in the EP-2019, “Greens-EFA” political group improved its position, even in spite of Brexit. This happened not because of the EFA achievements, but because of the growth in representation of the European Green Party. Though influence and capacities of the European Free Alliance are lower than those of other europarties, it has a significant symbolic meaning as a structure unifying different ethnoregionalist actors.

Party guests or party crashers? Non-members’ political engagement across party organizations

Over the past decade, many parties have created new possibilities for affiliating and involving citizens, often rivalling the classic conception of party membership. So far, the existing literature has mainly focused on classifying these new and different types of affiliates. However, little attention has been paid to what these “non-full-membership” options imply in terms of formal rights and obligations. We explore here the opportunities that parties offer to non-members to participate and get involved in intra-party activities and we contrast them with the rights and obligations of full, fee-paying, traditional members. This article addresses this gap based on an original database consisting of membership rules in 68 parties in 13 established democracies. We not only map the current landscape of rules managing the involvement of non-members within parties, but also explore potential factors- party family and size- explaining the variation across parties. We find a strong association between party family and the range of possibilities for non-members’ involvement with parties on the left and environmental parties providing more space for the participation of non-members. We also find that smaller parties tend to involve more non-full-members by allocating more rights to them. Our findings and new database provide a first step for future research to study the regulation of the involvement of non-members in intra-party activities, what determines it, and how it affects the traditional concept of party membership and societal linkage.