Competing for Loyalists? How Party Positioning Affects Populist Radical Right Voting

As populist radical right parties muster increasing support in many democracies, an important question is how mainstream parties can recapture their voters. Focusing on Germany, we present original panel evidence that voters supporting the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)—the country’s largest populist radical right party—resemble partisan loyalists with entrenched anti-establishment views, seemingly beyond recapture by mainstream parties. Yet this loyalty does not only reflect anti-establishment voting, but also gridlocked party-issue positioning. Despite descriptive evidence of strong party loyalty, experimental evidence reveals that many AfD voters change allegiances when mainstream parties accommodate their preferences. However, for most parties this repositioning is extremely costly. While mainstream parties can attract populist radical right voters via restrictive immigration policies, they alienate their own voters in doing so. Examining position shifts across issue dimensions, parties, and voter groups, our research demonstrates that, absent significant changes in issue preferences or salience, the status quo is an equilibrium.

Impact of Capitalism on the Workforce

This chapter analyzes various aspects of the workforce, both under communism and afterward. It looks at the limitations some people had under communism in terms of choosing their preferred occupations and advancing in their careers, and how those opportunities were impacted by their parents and party loyalty. The chapter also examines how private property was taken by the government during communism, and how privatization worked in the Czech Republic and Hungary after the regime change. Finally, it is thought that the stronger the economy, the more satisfied citizens will be with democracy. To see whether this is the case, the current economies of the Czech Republic and Hungary are examined along with people's feelings about them.

Barbour, the Influential Executive

This chapter discusses how Governor Haley Barbour successfully penetrated the legislatively dominated budget making process. It shows how Barbour did not increase the formal powers of the executive branch of government, but how he did increase the informal executive powers significantly. Chapter 8 explains how Barbour gained budget power through political relationships on the state and federal levels, which ultimately resulted in the state of Mississippi withstanding one of the worst storms in the nation’s history, Hurricane Katrina. Unlike his predecessor discussed in the previous chapter, Governor Barbour did not get a single gubernatorial veto overridden because of the party loyalty that he championed among Republicans.

“A Good Communist Style”

This essay focuses on the history and politicization of radio announcers’ vocal delivery in China during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how Chinese Communist Party leaders used internal party debates, national policies, and broadcasting training to construct an ideal Communist voice whose qualities would ostensibly communicate party loyalty and serve as a sonic representation of political authority.

Who wins preference votes? An analysis of party loyalty, ideology, and accountability to voters

We study the distribution of preference votes across politicians with different behaviors and attitudes. There are two main findings. First, preference votes are concentrated to politicians who are more active in communicating their policy proposals and policy priorities. This suggests that preference voting may incentivize more transparency and communication among politicians, and, hence, be positive for accountability. Second, preference votes are concentrated to politicians who are more—not less—loyal to the party in their voting decisions, and to politicians who’s ideological and policy positions are mainstream—rather than extreme—compared to their party colleagues. Together with the first finding, this suggests that preference voting can strengthen the bond of accountability between voters and politicians without undercutting parties’ ideological cohesion.

Are women more likely to throw the rascals out? The mobilizing effect of social service spending on female voters

This study focuses on gender differences in voter reactions to a corruption scandal in one’s preferred party. We analyze, in a framework of ‘exit, voice and loyalty’, whether women differ from men in terms of turnout (exit), and given that they vote, whether they prefer a clean alternative party (voice) or whether they continue to vote for their preferred party (loyalty) involved in a corruption scandal. We employ sequential logit models using data from the European Quality of Government Index (EQI) survey from 2017, which contains roughly 77,000 respondents from 21 EU countries and 185 regions. We find that women generally are less tolerant of corruption, but that the effect is highly conditional. In areas where social service spending is more widespread, we find that female respondents are more likely to vote for an alternative party. Yet the odds of exit increase among women when social service spending is lower.

Time-dependent legislative behavior and election outcomes

Previous studies find that legislators who adopt a partisan voting record are penalized come election time. To date, these studies examine the electoral effects of aggregate legislative behavior. While useful for identifying macro-level relationships, this approach discards valuable information about the timing of elite partisanship that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between legislative behavior and election outcomes. After all, studies find that recent elite behavior tends to factor more prominently in voters’ decision calculus. We offer a model that more explicitly accounts for the timing of elite partisanship, and we test it using US House elections data from 1956 to 2004. Even when accounting for aggregate party voting, we find that electoral success is significantly dependent on the temporal patterns of members’ party loyalty as elections approach. We attribute this, in part, to voters paying disproportionate attention to legislative activity around elections.