Party Politics, Ahead of Print.
An increasing amount of literature has demonstrated that party leaders affect voting behavior in parliamentary elections. However, the electoral impact of female leadership of political parties has been under-researched. The gender affinity hypothesis suggests that when women run for presidential or prime ministerial office, women are more likely than men to vote for them. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project, we tested gender affinity effects between female voters and female party leaders in mixed-sex legislative elections, that is, elections involving at least one female party candidate for prime minister, in parliamentary and semi-presidential systems. We analyzed 50 elections held from 1996 to 2016 in 24 countries. The results showed that female leaders were better evaluated by women and that women were more likely than men to vote for them. However, the gender affinity effects were small and not largely conditioned or not conditioned at all by other factors, such as some voters’ characteristics and electoral setting.

Party Politics, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 389-390, March 2024.

Party Politics, Ahead of Print.

Party Politics, Ahead of Print.
The multidimensionality of the Israeli political system is expected given Israel’s electoral system and cleavage structure. We introduce a new dataset and measurement of party positions in Israel and provide evidence that Israel’s party system is comparable to other multiparty systems in Europe (CHES-EU) and Latin America (CHES-LA). We argue and provide evidence that the most important dimension in the Israeli party system, similar to other multiparty systems, is the general Left-Right continuum, which combines both economic and cultural policy issues. Yet, unlike other established democracies, parties’ positions on the Left-Right continuum are closely related to their positions on policies related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. We also discuss Israeli-specific issues which structure the Israeli party competition. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it allows scholars of party competition to include Israel as a comparative case in their research. Second, it is the first study that provides valid and reliable measurement of Israeli parties’ positions across multiple issues.

Party Politics, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 387-388, March 2024.

Party Politics, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 392-393, March 2024.

Party Politics, Ahead of Print.
Does Green party electoral success lead to increased climate change commitment, and if so how? Drawing on a new OECD database on climate change outlays, we probe indirect influence from Green electoral success as mediated by inter-party competition, and direct mechanisms of influence from elected Green representatives. Our headline finding is that EU membership functions as a contextual catalyst for inter-party competition, with EU governing parties responding to Greens’ strong electoral performance by increasing climate change outlays to appeal to environmentally motivated voters. We also find evidence that, both across the OECD cohort and the EU sub-grouping, Green coalition presence is associated with increased climate spending over a political cycle. While direct Green influence through coalition presence is widespread, indirect influence mediated by inter-party competition is conditional on EU membership. Findings fit with literature highlighting systematic difference between EU members’ climate performance, and that of other advanced-industrialised states.

Party Politics, Ahead of Print.
In this research, we explored how foundational issues can become subtext in political discourse by studying how statehood was debated in social media prior to two plebiscites in Puerto Rico. Historically in Puerto Rico, local parties are divided on this issue instead of along the more common conservative versus liberal division that is found in most parts of the United States. We collected the corpus of Twitter communication by members of Puerto Rico’s Legislature for the term of 2017-2021. Using latent topic modeling techniques, we classified the political discussion along party lines. Surprisingly, statehood was not a major topic in our model when using the full corpus of data. However, when we filtered the data to include only those tweets discussing statehood and sub-sampled them by major party, the sub-topics within statehood communication became clear and coherent as was the partisan divide. Ultimately, while there is a clear division about statehood between the parties, the issue has become so intrinsic to the political sphere in Puerto Rico that it no longer commanded significant attention in the political discourse during this period.

Party Politics, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 388-389, March 2024.

Party Politics, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 390-391, March 2024.