Endre Borbáth

Polarisation over cultural issues and the emergence of radical, often populist, challenger parties indicate a fundamental restructuring of political conflict in Western Europe. The emerging divide crosscuts and, in part, reshapes older cleavages. This special issue introduction highlights how the transformation of cleavage structures relates to the dynamics of polarisation and political participation. The contributions to the special issue innovate in two ways. First, they adapt concepts and measures of ideological and affective polarisation to the context of Europe’s multi-party and multi-dimensional party competition. Second, they emphasise electoral and protest politics, examining how ideological and affective polarisation shape electoral and non-electoral participation. Apart from introducing the contributions, the introduction combines different datasets – the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the European Social Survey – to sketch an empirical picture of differentiated polarisation with types of polarisation only weakly associated cross-arena, cross-nationally and over time.

The political participation literature has documented a long-term trend of the normalization of noninstitutional participation that is often equated with the conventionalization of engagement in protest politics. Less is known on the extent to which noninstitutional forms are differentiated by their mobilization context. Population surveys find it difficult to contextualize individual engagement, and on-site surveys point to effects that are hard to generalize. This study fills this gap by emphasizing differentiation and distinguishing participation according to the issue of engagement. It introduces a conceptual distinction between political insiders and outsiders, defined based on the extent to which they are embedded in the organizational landscape of the dominant cleavage dimension. Using an original survey conducted in Germany during the Covid-19 crisis, the analysis demonstrates that general-population surveys are fit to examine issue-specific participation patterns. The results expose an insider and outsider divide, captured by the effect of attitudinal and behavioral indicators, and demonstrates that the two groups are equally likely to participate in noninstitutional forms. However, insiders engage on the established issues of climate and anti-racism, whereas outsiders engage on the new issues of Covid-19 related economic assistance and civil liberties restrictions. In addition, dynamic models reveal that noninstitutional participation is rooted in volatile issue preferences. Overall, the paper argues that participation during the Covid-19 crisis has furthered the trend towards a differentiated protest arena.

This article revisits the phenomenon of postcommunist successor parties – defined as the formal successor organizations of state-socialist ruling parties – in Central and Eastern Europe three decades after the transformative events of 1989–91 and two decades after the most recent period of sustained academic interest in the topic. The article begins with a critical reexamination of the late 1990s and early 2000s comparative politics literature on postcommunist successor parties, noting in particular its reliance on path dependency as well as subsequent empirical developments that cannot be explained by established approaches. From here, this article argues that major changes in the electoral fortunes of numerous successor parties since the mid-2000s require instead a relational perspective on party competition and interactions with competitor parties in the respective party systems, allowing for the identification of realigning elections in which successor parties are programmatically outflanked or crowded out on one or more issue dimensions by competitors or vice versa. The article applies this perspective to reexamine successor parties in six countries that exhibit a pronounced explanatory deficit vis-à-vis the previous literature: Czech Republic, (the former East) Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. In doing so, it draws on expert survey (ches) data and postelection studies on voter flows in addition to qualitative case analyses in order to demonstrate these interactions at work in critical phases of successor-party decline or growth.

The chapter examines political participation by citizens who bridge electoral and nonelectoral action forms. While often studied separately, we argue for integrating our understanding of political participation across the two main arenas of mass politics: the electoral and protest arena. We review the scholarly literature, focusing on individual-level drivers and the mobilization context of political participation. We argue that individual-level characteristics do not sufficiently explain variation in the extent of arena bridging. Analyzing voting and attending demonstrations on the individual level in Europe shows that nonelectoral, protest participation complements electoral participation. However, on the macro level, their co-evolution depends on political context conditions and strategies of political parties and social movements. Importantly, the link tends to be closer in moments of crisis and profound cleavage transformation. We back up the literature review with illustrative empirical results about the interplay between electoral and nonelectoral participation based on mass surveys and protest-event analysis.