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Research indicates that affective polarization pervades contemporary democracies worldwide. Although some studies identify party leaders as polarizing agents, affective polarization has been predominantly conceptualized as a product of in-/out-party feelings. This study compares levels of party affective polarization (PAP) and leader affective polarization (LAP) cross-nationally, using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Applying like–dislike scales and an identical index to both concepts, we reveal that while the two strongly correlate, LAP is systematically lower than PAP. The United States emerges as an exceptional case, being the only country where LAP significantly exceeds PAP. Drawing on regime input/output and institutions as theoretical building blocks, we explore cross-national variations and show that the relative strength of LAP vis-à-vis PAP is increased by presidential regime type, poor government performance, and low party system fragmentation. The findings of this study contribute to the thriving research on affective polarization and personalization of politics.

Do populist radical right (PRR) parties fuel affective polarization? If so, how and under which circumstances? Based on a comparative cross-country analysis covering 103 elections in 28 European countries and an examination of longitudinal data from the Netherlands, we show that PRR parties occupy a particular position in the affective political landscape because they both radiate and receive high levels of dislike. In other words, supporters of PRR parties are uniquely (and homogeneously) negative about (supporters of) mainstream parties and vice versa. Our analyses suggest that these high levels of antipathy are most likely due to the combination of these parties' nativism and populism – two different forms of ingroup–outgroup thinking. Our findings also suggest that greater electoral success by PRR parties reduces dislike towards them, while government participation appears threatening to all voters except coalition partners.

Radical right populist (RRP) parties are often described as Männerparteien, predominantly led by, represented by, and supported by men. Yet recently, these parties have elected more women. Under what conditions do we see this increase in women MPs? This paper presents a novel argument of strategic descriptive representation: electorally struggling RRP parties with large gender gaps in voter support increase their proportion of women MPs to attract previously untapped women voters. To test this argument, we develop the most comprehensive dataset to date on women MPs and gender differences in voter support across Europe and over time, covering 187 parties in 30 countries from 1985 to 2018. Our analyses confirm that RRP parties engage in strategic descriptive representation when they are both struggling electorally and suffering from a gender gap in support. Additional models reveal that this tactic is largely unique to RRP parties.

In recent years, the attention of political scientists investigating political polarization has turned from the ideological aspects of polarization to its partisan and affective aspects. This recent turn implied that this area has experienced an urgent need to create appropriate polarization indices that are backed with high-quality data across time and countries to carry out comparative research. This paper argues that existing polarization indices mostly fail to adequately include the most important aspect of polarization, that is, bimodality. To fill this gap, it proposes a partisan polarization index using European Social Survey data on government satisfaction of partisan camps, which is available for 32 European countries between 2002 and 2020 for all in all 214 country-years. That is, the paper offers an insight into trends in partisan polarization for these 214 cases. The analysis of cases shows that in the last two decades polarization hit mostly Southern European countries and some East-Central European ones, like Cyprus, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Poland and especially, Hungary. Within the realm of possibilities, the paper compares the newly constructed index to other polarization indices.

In this article, we argue that party-system polarization and subjective perceptions of ideological party differences are conceptually and empirically distinct phenomena that affect electoral participation differently. Looking at 84 elections worldwide, we show that party-system polarization, and the sharp conflicts associated with it, depresses turnout because many citizens are put off by extreme party positions and unrewarding polemics. By contrast, the individual perception of differences between parties increases turnout because more citizens can find a party that is close to their own position and identify others as being further away. These opposite effects are possible because party-system polarization leads only some individuals to perceive differences between parties but leads others to avoid the emotionalized political arena. Moreover, individuals' ability to recognize differences between parties is not necessarily a consequence of party-system polarization. The contradictory findings in previous research are due to a conceptual and empirical blurring of these two essentially different aspects.

Social democratic parties have experienced considerable electoral decline recently, which has often been attributed to their rightward policy movement. This paper advances this literature by examining who benefits from this moderation strategy and who is abandoning the social democrats. It does so by analyzing aggregate-level election results and individual-level Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data, on a sample of 21 advanced democracies, over 327 elections, from 1965 to 2019. I find little support for the assertion that social democrats are defecting to one party. However, in agreement with the spatial theory of party competition, results reveal that the radical left increasingly and significantly benefit from social democratic economic rightward positions, which is magnified when combined with rightward sociocultural positions. This predominantly occurs because left-leaning voters migrate to the radical left. The findings provide notable ramifications for party strategy and contribute to explanations for the rise of challenger parties, at the expense of mainstream parties.

Je décris ma conception et ma pratique de la recherche dans mon domaine d’expertise, l’analyse des comportements politiques. Faire de la recherche est pour moi une œuvre collective qui se réalise en équipe. Cette recherche porte d’abord sur des questions descriptives fondamentales. Pour l’analyse des causes des relations de causalité, on a intérêt à utiliser, lorsque c’est possible, des devis expérimentaux ou quasi-expérimentaux. L’aspect le plus pénible mais aussi le plus crucial est la rédaction des manuscrits, qui est plus facilement supportable à petites doses et à tous les jours. La partie la plus réjouissante est la création de l’instrument de recherche, au moment où on peut encore caresser l’illusion que notre recherche sera « la meilleure au monde ».

What explains the lack of electoral consequences for corrupt politicians? Building on studies of motivated reasoning and asymmetric partisan bias, this article highlights the importance of partisan differences in how voters interpret corruption convictions and make voting decisions. I contend that in post-authoritarian democracies, supporters of authoritarian legacy parties (ALPs) are less likely to punish corrupt copartisan incumbents compared to supporters of other parties faced with equally corrupt copartisan incumbents. While voters of all kinds appear likely to ignore corruption among copartisan incumbents, supporters of authoritarian legacy parties are particularly likely to do so. Using original datasets from South Korea, this study shows empirical evidence of the lack of corruption voting for ALP partisans across three legislative elections. This article further finds partisan discrepancies and a striking lack of corruption voting among authoritarian legacy partisans.

Why have moderate electorates elected and reelected leftist governments in Latin America over the last twenty years? Scholars who rely on the classic Downsian logic of the median voter theorem have observed a process of ideological moderation among the most salient left-wing parties in the region. However, there have been no systematic attempts to evaluate the moderation thesis at the comparative level, either across Latin America or within cases over time. This article uses a directional model in the spatial modeling tradition to argue that the success of the left rests on the provision of clear leftist programmatic cues to voters. Data coming from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems for five Latin American countries during 1994 and 2014 show that left-wing parties won on left-wing platforms across the region, while an in-depth study on Brazilian elections reveals that leftist voters of the Workers’ Party in 2002 were driven by programmatic cues that largely disappeared during the 2010 elections. ¿Por qué los electorados moderados de América Latina han elegido y reelegido gobiernos de izquierda durante las últimas dos décadas? Investigaciones basadas en el teorema del votante mediano sostienen la existencia de un proceso de moderación ideológica en los partidos de izquierda, orientados a competir y alcanzar el gobierno. Sin embargo, no existe ninguna evidencia sistemática a nivel comparado que avale esta hipótesis. Por el contrario, este artículo hace uso de un modelo direccional en la tradición de modelos espaciales para argumentar que el éxito electoral de la izquierda se asienta en la provisión de claras señales programáticas de izquierda a los votantes. Datos provenientes del Comparative Study of Electoral Systems para cinco países de América Latina durante el periodo 1999-2014, muestran que los partidos de izquierda han ganado sobre bases ideológicas de izquierda, mientras un estudio en profundidad sobre Brasil, muestra que los votantes del Partido de los Trabajadores en 2002 estuvieron guiados por bases programáticas de izquierda que desaparecieron durante las elecciones de 2010.

This study examines the relationship between ideology and resistance to the government's apology to Asian victims of Japan's colonial rule policy, which varies according to political knowledge. Based on existing research, because only a limited percentage of voters consider politics to be ideology based, it is expected that the association between ideology and resistance to intergroup apologies by one's own government differs according to their level of political knowledge. We selected three issues of political apologies: colonial rule in Asian countries, comfort women, and the massacre of Korean people based on false rumors at the time of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake; thereafter, we conducted an online survey of a panel selected by Nikkei Research Inc. The results suggest that the relationship between ideology and resistance among voters to political apologies varies with the level of political knowledge, as expected. On the contrary, social dominance orientations (SDO) were associated with resistance to apology, regardless of their level of political knowledge. We then tested the reproducibility of this finding by conducting a follow-up test on registered users of a crowdsourcing service after conducting a preregistration. In addition, we also measured general attitudes toward personal apologies and neighboring countries victimized by Japan's colonialist policies as factors that might predict resistance to apologies even among the politically uninformed. The association between ideology, SDO, and resistance to governmental apologies was generally replicated in this study.