Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.

The mass media is conventionally assumed to play an important role in welfare state politics. So far, however, we have very little systematic theorizing or empirical evidence of when and how the mass media reports on welfare state reforms. Building on news value theory and the welfare state reform literature, we develop a set of hypotheses about mass media reporting on welfare state reforms. We argue that mass media attention is conditioned not only by the direction of reforms, with cuts getting more attention than expansions, but also by the election platform that the incumbent party ran on in the last election as well as by the policy reputation of the government. Drawing on a new dataset including about 4,800 news articles in British, Danish and German quality newspapers from 1995 to 2014, we find supporting empirical evidence of our expectations.

How do political parties speak about education? While struggles over education played a foundational role in structuring modern partisan cleavages, scholars debate the extent to which parties still adopt distinct rhetorical stances on education. Existing data, however, is limited to studying broad public support or opposition to educational expansion, restricting both our empirical knowledge of the politicisation of education and our ability to theorise parties’ incentives to speak publicly about it. This paper provides the first systematic examination of the post‐war evolution of partisan rhetoric about education in advanced democracies. We develop a novel dataset (Education Politics Dataset EPD) based on hand‐coded manifesto speech of the largest centre‐left and centre‐right parties for 20 countries in Europe and beyond, from 1950 to the present. The EPD distinguishes nine educational issues, grouped under the three fundamental policy dimensions of distribution, governance and curricular content. We theorise that parties use educational speech both to signal competence to a broader electorate and to signal credibility to a narrower base. The result is three distinct patterns of speech: consensual, differentially salient and polarised. Where education policies cross‐cut existing cleavages, parties devote similar attention to issues and adopt similar stances, creating a consensual pattern. We find this pattern for issues of participation and quality in education. Where education policies are universal but offer specific benefits to a partisan base, we find patterns of differential salience: some parties devote more rhetorical attention to the issue than others, but parties adopt common stances. We find this pattern for questions of spending and access. Finally, where education policies align with broader political cleavages and provide targeted electoral benefits to partisan bases, parties adopt distinct public stances leading to more polarised rhetoric. We find this pattern for issues related to academic tracking and traditional curricular content. In developing the first multidimensional theorisation and measurement of partisan rhetoric on education, the paper provides insight into parties’ evolving approaches to an area increasingly crucial to electoral and social life.

In Germany, like in other countries, the notions of volunteering and civic action altogether describe a wide diversity of activities. Often, this wide spectre is put together under ‘civic engagement’, reaching from civic action that is sometimes overtly ‘political’ over to engagement as volunteering in areas like sports or culture. Yet in academic contributions that use such a wide concept, nothing much can be found about a convincing differentiation of the diverse forms of engagement that figure under such a wide cover. Is there a clear line separating voluntary and civic action? In line with the introduction to this special issue, the paper takes up these questions by proposing that a proper understanding of differentiations in the wide field of civic engagement calls for a historical approach that gives a key role to discourses and politics. Looking from such a perspective at historical constellations in German history, four decisive historical concepts get sketched. It shows that kinds of differentiation between voluntary and civic action are very much dependent on discourses and politics and not only the repercussions of socio-economic and cultural changes and megatrends. The kind of approach chosen shows as well that older concepts, notions and attitudes do not simply melt away in the light of new ones. The label ‘civic engagement’ appears as an umbrella notion in front of a diversity of forms and understandings of engagement. Understanding this diversity calls for tracing the historical roots, notably the ordering imaginaries and strategies wherein these forms and understandings took shape and function today.

Party institutionalisation is a central problem in political science. The literature tends to understand it as a syndrome and therefore has difficulty explaining variations. This article suggests a new approach based on the transaction between a legislative party and its deputies, the failure of which is observable in party switching. Three routes to institutionalisation are identified by appealing to the vote‐seeking, office‐seeking or policy‐seeking motivations of deputies. Poland has had a large volume of party switching, along with wide variation in the incentives facing differently‐motivated deputies. Survival analyses of switching in four Polish parliaments find that vote‐seeking is the most likely route to institutionalisation for Polish parties. Moreover, in this article a concrete hypothesis is established for comparative testing: legislative parties can survive as long as their popular support exceeds 40 per cent of their share in the previous election.

In democratic theory and practice, it has become a popular view that designed deliberative mini‐publics can effectively counteract failures of representative democratic institutions. But when should mini‐publics be deployed, and how should they be designed? This article develops a framework for thinking about these questions. It argues that when representative democratic institutions ensure the empowerment of inclusions, enable the formation of collective agendas and wills, and are capable of translating those agendas into binding decisions, mini‐publics should be used sparingly and as complementary initiatives; the less representative institutions are able to serve these functions, the more mini‐publics should gain independence and standing to correct these problems. The article shows how this can be operationalised in light of two key institutional design issues – coupling and authority – and discusses some empirical examples that foreground the empirical leverage offered by the suggested framework.

Welfare is the largest expenditure category in all advanced democracies. Consequently, much literature has studied partisan effects on total and policy‐specific welfare expenditure. Yet, these results cannot be trusted: the methodological standard is to apply time‐series cross‐section regressions to annual observation data. But governments hardly change annually. Thus, the number of observations is artificially inflated, leading to incorrect estimates. While this problem has recently been acknowledged, it has not been convincingly resolved. This article proposes mixed‐effects models (also known as ‘multilevel models’ or ‘hierarchical models’) as a solution, which allows decomposing variance into different levels and permits complex cross‐classification data structures. It is argued that mixed‐effects models combine the strengths of existing methodological approaches while alleviating their weaknesses. Empirically, partisan effects on total and on disaggregated expenditure in 23 OECD countries in the period 1960–2012 are studied using several measures of party preferences and revealing several substantially relevant findings.

Doctoral candidates in political science have a universe of potential career options to choose from. These include not only academia, but also the non-governmental sector, political consulting, and government work. When I obtained my doctoral degree in 1993, little did I imagine that within fifteen years I would have tried my hand in all of these fields, including serving as a cabinet minister. In this article, I reflect on how this professional whirlwind came about, how each field helped and/or hindered the others, what these wanderings taught me about post-communist democratic politics, and particularly what lessons a political scientist learned from entering, albeit briefly, the ‘real world’ of politics.

This article examines legislative waffling behavior—where legislators reverse their position between bill sponsorship and floor voting—in the South Korean National Assembly from 2004 to 2020. Using multilevel logistic regression analysis of 21,292 bill-legislator observations across four legislative terms, we develop a novel theoretical framework that disaggregates waffling into three distinct strategic types: dissent (voting against), abstention, and no-show (strategic absence). Our findings challenge US-based theories by revealing that minority party members in Korea exhibit significantly higher rates of waffling across all types, with the effect particularly pronounced when bills are passed as chairman’s substitutes in majority-controlled committees. We demonstrate that ideologically extreme legislators are more prone to waffling, while main sponsors maintain greater consistency throughout the legislative process. The analysis of committee control structures reveals complex dynamics where minority party members face heightened waffling pressures even in committees they control, suggesting that formal institutional authority cannot fully overcome broader power imbalances in consensus-based systems. These findings highlight how Korea’s distinctive institutional features—including proportional distribution of committee chairs, mixed electoral system, and consensus-oriented legislative culture—create fundamentally different incentive structures for legislative behavior compared to majoritarian systems, underscoring the importance of developing context-specific theoretical frameworks for comparative legislative studies.

Moldova’s geopolitical position, caught between Russia and the West, presents a critical, yet often oversimplified, lens through which to understand its post-Soviet development. This article problematizes the assumption, arguing that Moldovan party politics demonstrates a more fluid and contested landscape than commonly portrayed. Through a qualitative analysis of 31 party electoral programmes between 2001 and 2024, we map the evolution of ‘geopolitical codes’ – how parties articulate foreign policy – and examine their impact on consensus-building and strategic choices. The findings reveal nuanced ideological distinctions within both pro-Russian and pro-European factions, and adaptive codes shaped by both domestic competition and transnational pressures. Crucially, we demonstrate how inter-party dynamics – beyond simple geopolitical alignment – mediate external influences and shape Moldova’s foreign policy. This research contributes to the literature by moving beyond deterministic geopolitical frameworks, highlighting the agency of domestic actors in peripheral states, and offering a deepened understanding of how party competition shapes geopolitical orientation and consensus formation.

Liberal and Conservative federal governments engage in nation-building within official languages governance, seeking to align social and political norms with partisan principles. This article compares the Chrétien, Harper and Justin Trudeau governments’ instrumentalization of Canadian identity in the five action plans and roadmaps for official languages developed since 2003. These documents are comprehensive five-year outlines of the governments’ approach to official languages, interspersed with priorities, funding commitments and minister statements. This analysis is facilitated by a novel interpretive framework, drawing attention to the use of a national narrative, values and affect. Our analysis reveals the Chrétien government to have translated the Liberal, civics-based depiction of Canadian identity to suit an international focus. The Harper government portrayed Canadian identity as true to settler roots, rebuking the Liberal model. Finally, the Trudeau government established a pluralist Canadian narrative to justify Liberal civics as a means for protecting and promoting equity and diversity.

How do citizens evaluate lesbian and gay (LG) party leaders? While recent scholarship has provided a window into how individuals evaluate openly gay legislative candidates, few studies have examined voter evaluations of LG individuals in executive positions, where voters may have different expectations of political leaders. This study assesses public perceptions of LG party leaders, with a focus on leader deservingness, competency, and electoral viability. Results from a conjoint experiment in the United Kingdom indicate that LG leaders receive lower leadership evaluations than straight leaders on all dimensions. Additionally, we find that gay women and men face similar penalties. This finding holds regardless of the leader’s level of legislative experience. Thus, LG party leaders face a significant disadvantage compared to their straight counterparts when seeking the top position within their party.

Over the past 20–30 years, women’s parties have consistently formed across Europe, aiming to improve women’s substantive representation by politicizing gender issues. Despite their potential impact on the policy agenda, empirical knowledge of the full range and scope of issues these parties mobilize is limited. This paper presents a novel mixed-method text analysis of the issue concerns in an original dataset of European women’s parties’ manifestos spanning a 30-year period. I find that parties across contexts share concerns in social justice and social policy. However, two subtypes of women’s party can be differentiated based on issue focus and framing. Essentialist women’s parties predominantly represent women’s material interests, whereas feminist parties additionally tackle structural gender inequality issues, including gender-based violence and human security. These findings provide a foundation for incorporating women’s parties into growing research on party competition over gender issues.

This article presents a novel framework for analysing the politics of eco-social policies, focusing on the political conflicts surrounding this third generation of social risks. We distinguish two key dimensions of conflict: an ideational approach dimension, which focuses on conflicts among political actors over the possible synergies and trade-offs between social and ecological goals and their potential integration through eco-social policies, and a design dimension with several sub-dimensions related to the formulation and implementation of eco-social policies. To illustrate the merit of this analytical framework, we apply it to the analysis of party manifestos for the 2021 German federal election. Our findings reveal a striking divergence in the first dimension: While most parties emphasise the synergy potential of eco-social policies, albeit to varying degrees, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) stands out by opposing this narrative. The second dimension largely reflects established welfare positions, with centre-left and left-wing parties advocating state involvement and social consumption (the Social Democratic Party of Germany [SPD], the Greens, and The Left) and selective/needs-oriented measures (SPD and The Left) to a greater extent than centre-right parties (Christian Democratic Union of Germany [CDU]/Christian Social Union in Bavaria [CSU] and Free Democratic Party [FDP]). Furthermore, pro-growth approaches dominate, but there are signs that positions on degrowth policies may emerge as a significant conflict line in the future. Our analysis shows that eco-social policy conflicts are multidimensional, partly reshaping the political landscape around welfare policies, and are about not only how eco-social policies should be designed but whether they can and should be pursued at all.

Leaders decide to engage diplomatically with their foreign peers for various reasons but, given their limited time and resources, they have to choose which peers to prioritize. As such, the study of international diplomatic visits helps shed light on a government's foreign policy approach and better understand its priorities in how it conceives and builds foreign relations. While the literature on diplomatic engagements has largely debated its drivers and effects, the role of domestic influences, in particular of party politics, has remained understudied. We address this gap and investigate the party politics of diplomatic engagements leveraging a new dataset on Italy's high-level international bilateral diplomatic visits in 2000–2023. Our findings show that partisan differences influence not only the overall frequency of such engagements, following curvilinear left–right patterns, but also the political regimes that left- and right-wing governments prioritize in such endeavours, exposing the lower importance right-wing parties assign to democratic principles when managing their countries' foreign relations, as these governments are systematically more likely to interact with authoritarian regimes than with democracies.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine raised for many parties the question of how to position themselves in view of urgently requested arms deliveries. Since, the topic of arms trade, which has hitherto rarely been addressed, has become a heavily politicized and divisive issue and partly even polarized public opinion. A major prerequisite for parties’ position-taking is to anticipate how voters react to such arms transfers and, more specifically, whether their respective attitudes are structured along the predominant left-right axis. Based on a large-scale survey experiment with French and German voters ($N = 6617$) in the year before the Russian invasion, we are able to focus on the relationship between ideological predispositions, vote intentions, and issue attitudes in a non-politicized period. Using both vignette and conjoint experiments, we demonstrate that voters’ attitudes on military transfers can be subsumed remarkably well under the left-right scale. Differentiating the impact of normative and economic considerations, the former is stronger among the left, while the latter also affects the attitudes of rightist citizens. However, normative considerations are the most important concern along the whole political spectrum. The turn of the German Green Party in 2022 to assist countries that are being aggressively attacked (because of the Responsibility to Protect), was not reflected in our data.