Rejecting representation? Party systems and popular support for referendums in Europe

This article analyzes the growing impoverishment and marginalization of the Roma in Bulgarian society and the evolution of Bulgaria’s post-1989 policies towards the Roma. It examines the results of the policies so far and the reasons behind the “poor performance” of the policies implemented. It is believed that Post-communist Bulgaria has successfully re-integrated the ethnic Turkish minority given both the assimilation campaign carried out against it in the 1980s and the tragic events that took place in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This Bulgaria’s successful “ethnic model”, however, has failed to include the Roma. The “Roma issue” has emerged as one of the most serious and intractable ones facing Bulgaria since 1990. A growing part of its population has been living in circumstances of poverty and marginalization that seem only to deteriorate as years go by. State policies that have been introduced since 1999 have failed at large to produce tangible results and to reverse the socio-economic marginalization of the Roma: discrimination, poverty, and social exclusion continue to be the norm. NGOs point out to the fact that many of the measures that have been announced have not been properly implemented, and that legislation existing to tackle discrimination, hate crime, and hate speech is not implemented. Bulgaria’s political parties are averse in dealing with the Roma issue. Policies addressing the socio-economic problems of the Roma, including hate speech and crime, do not enjoy popular support and are seen as politically damaging.

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Dilemmas of Inclusion

10.23943/princeton/9780691172590.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Rafaela M. Dancygier

Keyword(s):

Political Parties ◽

Domestic Politics ◽

Electoral Politics ◽

Party Systems ◽

Political Incorporation ◽

Party Positions ◽

Trade Offs ◽

And Gender ◽

Muslim Communities ◽

Equality And Diversity

As Europe's Muslim communities continue to grow, so does their impact on electoral politics and the potential for inclusion dilemmas. In vote-rich enclaves, Muslim views on religion, tradition, and gender roles can deviate sharply from those of the majority electorate, generating severe trade-offs for parties seeking to broaden their coalitions. This book explains when and why European political parties include Muslim candidates and voters, revealing that the ways in which parties recruit this new electorate can have lasting consequences. The book sheds new light on when minority recruitment will match up with existing party positions and uphold electoral alignments and when it will undermine party brands and shake up party systems. It demonstrates that when parties are seduced by the quick delivery of ethno-religious bloc votes, they undercut their ideological coherence, fail to establish programmatic linkages with Muslim voters, and miss their opportunity to build cross-ethnic, class-based coalitions. The book highlights how the politics of minority inclusion can become a testing ground for parties, showing just how far their commitments to equality and diversity will take them when push comes to electoral shove. Providing a unified theoretical framework for understanding the causes and consequences of minority political incorporation, and especially as these pertain to European Muslim populations, the book advances our knowledge about how ethnic and religious diversity reshapes domestic politics in today's democracies.

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Federal and Subnational Elections in Russia: Coherence and Divergence in Electoral Outcomes

Russian Politics ◽

10.30965/24518921-00503004 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 329-353

Author(s):

Rostislav Turovsky ◽

Marina Sukhova

Keyword(s):

Party System ◽

Party Systems ◽

Strong Connection ◽

Regional Parties ◽

Electoral Outcomes ◽

Electoral Authoritarianism ◽

Subnational Elections ◽

Effective Number Of Parties ◽

Number Of Parties ◽

Regional Elections

Abstract This article examines the differences between Russian voting at federal elections and regional legislature elections, both combined and conducted independently. The authors analyse these differences, their character and their dynamics as an important characteristic of the nationalisation of the party system. They also test hypotheses about a higher level of oppositional voting and competitiveness in subnational elections, in accordance with the theory of second-order elections, as well as the strategic nature of voting at federal elections, by contrast with expressive voting during subnational campaigns. The empirical study is based on calculating the differences in votes for leading Russian parties at subnational elections and at federal elections (simultaneous, preceding and following) from 2003, when mandatory voting on party lists was widespread among the regions, to 2019. The level of competitiveness is measured in a similar way, by calculating the effective number of parties. The study indicates a low level of autonomy of regional party systems, in many ways caused by the fact that the law made it impossible to create regional parties, and then also by the 2005 ban on creation of regional blocs. The strong connection between federal and regional elections in Russia clearly underlines the fluid and asynchronic nature of its electoral dynamics, where subnational elections typically predetermine the results of the following federal campaigns. At the same time, the formal success of the nationalisation of the party system, achieved by increasing the homogeneity of voting at the 2016 and 2018 federal elections, is not reflected by the opposing process of desynchronisation between federal and regional elections after Putin’s third-term election. There is also a clear rise in the scale of the differences between the two. At the same time, the study demonstrates the potential presence in Russia of features common to subnational elections in many countries: their greater support for the opposition and presence of affective voting. However, there is a clear exception to this trend during the period of maximum mobilisation of the loyal electorate at the subnational elections immediately following the accession of Crimea in 2014–2015, and such tendencies are generally restrained by the conditions of electoral authoritarianism.

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NGOs in Kenya: Increase State Legitimacy or Undermine Popular Support?

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.1643358 ◽

2010 ◽

Author(s):

Jennifer N. Brass

Keyword(s):

Popular Support ◽

State Legitimacy

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Tribunes and Patricians: Fringe Parties in the 21st Century

Canadian Journal of European and Russian Studies ◽

10.22215/cjers.v7i1.2471 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Harry Nedelcu

Keyword(s):

Financial Crisis ◽

Political Parties ◽

21St Century ◽

Full Text ◽

Debt Crisis ◽

Party Systems ◽

Radical Right ◽

The Political ◽

Political Spectrum ◽

Structural Shifts

The mid and late 2000s witnessed a proliferation of political parties in European party systems. Marxist, Libertarian, Pirate, and Animal parties, as well as radical-right and populist parties, have become part of an increasingly heterogeneous political spectrum generally dominated by the mainstream centre-left and centre-right. The question this article explores is what led to the surge of these parties during the first decade of the 21st century. While it is tempting to look at structural arguments or the recent late-2000s financial crisis to explain this proliferation, the emergence of these parties predates the debt-crisis and can not be described by structural shifts alone . This paper argues that the proliferation of new radical parties came about not only as a result of changes in the political space, but rather due to the very perceived presence and even strengthening of what Katz and Mair (1995) famously dubbed the "cartelization" of mainstream political parties. Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v7i1.210

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Understanding Populism and Why It Matters

10.1093/oso/9780198807872.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Paul D. Kenny

Keyword(s):

Quantitative Analysis ◽

Liberal Democracy ◽

Political Ideology ◽

Party Systems ◽

Negative Consequences ◽

Political Movement ◽

Electoral Success ◽

The Media ◽

Or Organization ◽

Populist Party

This chapter discusses the concept of populism in greater detail and also describes how party systems are measured and classified. Rather than conceive of populism as a type of thin political ideology, this book understands populism as a distinctively personalistic type of political movement or organization in which charismatic leaders look to directly mobilize mass constituencies through the media and other means. The chapter next distinguishes between programmatic, patronage, and populist party systems, based on which type of party is most common. Finally, the chapter provides a quantitative analysis of the consequences of populist electoral success for democracy across a number of indicators. It shows that populist rule has generally negative consequences for the functioning of liberal democracy, which makes the effort to understand populist electoral success all the more pressing.

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The Puzzle of Populism

10.1093/oso/9780198807872.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Paul D. Kenny

Keyword(s):

Latin America ◽

Eastern Europe ◽

Western Europe ◽

Party Systems

This chapter sets out the puzzle at the center of the book: what explains the success of populist campaigners in India, Asia, and beyond? It summarizes the existing literature on populist success both in Latin America and Western Europe and argues that these explanations do a poor job of explaining Indian and Asian cases in particular. Populists win elections when the institutionalized ties between non-populist parties and voters decay. However, because different kinds of party systems experience distinct stresses and strains, we need different models of populist success based on the prevailing party–voter linkage system in place in any given country. The chapter then sets out the rationale for concentrating on explaining populist success in patronage-based party systems, which are common not only to Asia, but also to Latin America and Eastern Europe.

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