Western Europe

This article asks whether caretaker governments in parliamentary democracies truly preserve the policy status quo while waiting for new coalition governments to form. Using newly assembled, bill-level data from dozens of cabinets across Western Europe, the author proposes a timeframe-based political definition of the caretaking period and uses descriptive evidence to question the prevailing consensus that caretakers do not engage in policymaking. The piece also flags normative and practical concerns about caretaking rules and their role in coalition bargaining.

Ka Ming Chan (BJPS) asks whether a high-profile far-right insurrection abroad—the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol—can change citizens' support for far-right parties at home. The study speaks to debates about autocratization, party competition, and how cross-border political events reshape democratic attitudes.

This article asks how voters who hold progressive and conservative attitudes across economic and cultural issues—so-called cross-pressured voters—resolve those tensions in Western Europe, and what that means for mainstream parties. Using the growing share of cross-pressured voters as a lens, the study argues there is a stable asymmetry in mass attitudes: having progressive views on both dimensions often associates with left support, but being conservative on at least one dimension tends to push voters to the right. The brief preserves the article’s framing and evidence without extending claims beyond the original abstract.

Simon Davidsson addresses a longstanding puzzle in comparative political history: the timing and process by which parliamentarism became an operative institution in Western Europe. Because formal constitutional texts only loosely track how political actors actually interact, scholars have struggled to chart a continuous, empirically grounded timeline of when parliaments became central to government formation and survival. Davidsson argues that resolving this requires tracing how patterns of government termination changed over long historical horizons.

Does anti-immigrant sentiment correlate with gender conservatism? This study examines immigration attitudes across eleven West European countries and a Dutch panel spanning 2007-2019. It reveals:

Centrist parties across Western Europe face significant electoral disadvantages despite their ideological positioning.

In parliamentary democracies with coalition governments, how do ministerial portfolios influence party preferences and government accountability? This study analyzes over 2000 social and economic reforms across nine Western European nations during two decades (1995-2014), drawing on original data from country reports by the Economist Intelligence Unit and OECD. The findings reveal a clear contrast: strong parliamentary oversight mechanisms effectively limit how much power parties can use to set policy agendas but have less impact on controlling ministerial gatekeeping functions.

This paper seeks to explain why some party leaders remain in office through the end of their term while others depart early, beginning from the moment they are selected or re-selected. The focus is on which characteristics of the leadership race, alone or in combination with other conditions, favor re-selection rather than a more or less forced early exit.

A new study reveals how import competition tied to Chinese trade affects voting behavior in 15 Western European countries between 1988 and 2007.

Low education levels predict anti-immigration sentiment. But is this a cause or just selection bias?

Online radicalization through extremist content has surged globally, with thousands joining ISIS after viewing such material online.

Same-sex couples are sometimes assumed to be politically marginalized. However, this analysis challenges that notion.

A novel method quantifies political relationships by analyzing large-scale event data using latent factor network models.

In Western Europe, redistribution preferences starkly differ between rich and poor countries.

Article Title: Social Structure and Electoral Behavior in Comparative Perspective: The Decline of Social Cleavages in Western Europe Revisited