Despite extensive research on party system stability, the concept is often reduced to the survival of existing parties. This article argues for introducing programmatic stability as a separate dimension and shows how the combination of party replacement and programmatic instability shapes patterns of party competition. Based on their interaction, the article distinguishes four ideal types: stable systems, systems with empty party labels, systems with ephemeral parties, and general instability. The empirical analysis relies on media data and proposes a new measure of programmatic stability to study its interaction with party replacement in fifteen European countries during the period of the economic crisis. As the article shows, the two dimensions shape the transformation of party systems in northwestern, southern, and eastern Europe. Relying on multidimensional scaling, the article analyzes in detail the cases of the United Kingdom, Romania, Ireland, and Latvia to showcase party competition under different conditions of systemic instability.
EJPR
Different worlds of contention? Protest in Northwestern, Southern and Eastern Europe
Despite the voluminous literature on the ’normalization of protest’, the protest arena is seen as a bastion of left-wing mobilization. While citizens on the left readily turn to the streets, citizens on the right only settle for it as a ’second best option’. However, most studies are based on aggregated cross-national comparisons or only include Northwestern Europe. We contend the aggregate-level perspective hides different dynamics of protest across Europe. Based on individual level data from the European Social Survey (2002-2016), we investigate the relationship between ideology and protest as a key component of the normalization of protest. Using hierarchical logistic regression models, we show that while protest is becoming more common, citizens with different ideological views are not equal in their protest participation across the three European regions. Instead of a general left predominance, we find that in Eastern European countries, right-wing citizens are more likely to protest than those on the left. In Northwestern and Southern European countries, we find the reverse relationship, left-wing citizens are more likely to protest than their right-wing counterparts. Lessons drawn from the protest experience in Northwestern Europe characterized by historical mobilization by the New Left are of limited use for explaining the ideological composition of protest in the Southern and Eastern European countries. We identify historical and contemporary regime access as the mechanism underlying regional patterns: citizens with ideological views that were historically in opposition are more likely to protest. In terms of contemporary regime access, we find that partisanship enhances the effect of ideology, while ideological distance from the government has a different effect in the three regions. As protest gains in importance as a form of participation, the paper contributes to our understanding of regional divergence in the extent to which citizens with varying ideological views use this tool.
Party Politics
Protesting Parties in Europe: A comparative analysis:
The article provides the first large-scale study of protest activities by political parties. The empirical analysis draws on original protest event data for 30 European countries based on semi-automated coding of news agencies. The article innovates by (a) proposing a standardized indicator for the extent to which protest and electoral politics relate to each other, (b) showing that parties’ involvement in protests differs across political contexts, and (c) mapping the profile of a typical party-sponsored event and a typical protesting party. Despite long-term trends toward differentiated modes of interest intermediation, the results indicate that a wide range of parties does protest. However, in highly differentiated contexts, the typical protesting party mirrors the outsider image of movement parties: it does not belong to a mainstream party family and has no government experience. By contrast, more strategic factors, such as opposition status, drive parties to the streets in less differentiated contexts.
2019
European Soc.
Challenges from left and right: the long-term dynamics of protest and electoral politics in Western Europe
The paper looks at how protest politics has developed in Western Europe since the 1970s and how these developments are related to changes in electoral politics. We take up arguments on the two-fold restructuration of political conflict and its different impact on protest and electoral politics. Most importantly, we highlight that the second wave of political change sweeping across Western Europe since the 1990s with increasing conflicts over immigration and European integration left different marks on protest politics as compared to electoral politics. We argue that this difference reflects the driving forces of change and their preferences for specific political arenas, as the momentum shifted from the libertarian left to the populist radical right. More specifically, the results indicate that challengers from the left and challengers from the right follow different logics when it comes to the interplay of protest and electoral mobilization. Empirically, we rely on two large-scale protest event datasets as well as on data on electoral results and campaigns from the 1970s to 2015.
2012
Magy. Kisebb.
A nacionalizmus és a liberalizmus történeti-logikai összefonódásai (II.)
Political mobilization in the electoral and protest arenas have long been studied as separate phenomena, following their own, independent dynamic. Parties and protests are rarely examined within the same framework, although the protest engagement of political parties is often assumed to be one of the main driving forces of the wave of protest in southern European countries, those most exposed to the economic crisis. The chapter provides the first large-scale study of protests sponsored by political parties across Europe before and after the Great Recession. It relies on a novel protest event dataset, collected by semi-automated content analysis of news agencies. The data cover protests in thirty countries, from 2000 to 2015. The results show the ’crowding out’ of political parties as the driving force of the protest wave in southern Europe. We find the highest share of party sponsored protest in eastern Europe, where unlike in north-western and southern Europe, right-wing and non-mainstream parties are also active in protest. In line with the overall findings of the book, our results confirm the distinctive dynamic of protest in the three European macro-regions and put the link between social movements and the new challenger parties in perspective.
2019
CUP
Romania - Polity Contestation and the Resilience of Mainstream Parties