Do parties with different ideological origins adjust their policies in response to the binding commitments that derive from the European integration process? This paper examines whether party platforms have adapted to the ideological content of EU treaty provisions – based on ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘regulated capitalism’ – across a range of policy areas The analysis builds on existing research which has examined how party families respond to the challenges and opportunities of the integration process. This is the first study that focuses on long-term party policy adjustment across different policy areas by examining whether there has been a shift away from core ideological goals towards the direction of EU policy. The main finding is that there has generally been a shift towards the direction of EU policy across all party families in both member and non-member states. The findings have implications for the quality of representation and functioning of democracy in the member states since the deepening of the European integration process reduces ideologically distinct policy alternatives across party families and can hinder policy innovation

Although the over-representation of working-class members among the electorates of Extreme Right Parties (ERPs) in Western Europe is well documented, previous studies have usually explained this pattern as a result of this voter group's changing political preferences. In contrast to these studies, this article argues that it is not the changing political preferences of the working class that lead them to vote for ERPs, but changes in the supply side of party competition that have caused the re-orientation of these voters from left-wing parties toward the extreme right. Differentiating between an economic and a cultural dimension of party competition, it is shown that both the policy options offered by parties to voters as the salience of the two issue-dimensions have changed dramatically over the last three decades. While the salience of economic issues as well as of party system polarization among these issues have declined in most Western European countries, the very opposite trend can be identified for non-economic issues, including the core issues of ERPs (for example, immigration, and law-and-order). These changes on the supply side of party competition cause working-class voters to base their vote decisions solely on their authoritarian, non-economic preferences and not – as in the past – on their left-wing economic demands. The theoretical assumptions are tested empirically with data from the Eurobarometer Trend File for the period from 1980 to 2002. In contexts where the economic dimension is more polarized or more salient than the cultural dimension, the positive impact of being a member of the working class on the vote decision for an ERP is significantly reduced.

The 2013 Italian general elections produced a largely unexpected and destabilizing outcome. The major surprise came from the Movimento 5 stelle (M5s, Five star movement), a brand new, anti-establishment political force which got more than 25% of the valid votes and turned out to be the largest party list in the domestic arena of the Chamber of deputies. The destabilizing nature of the outcome stemmed from the lack of a real winner which ended up in political stalemate. In fact, the center-left won in the Chamber of deputies, but not in the Senate and could not form a cabinet by itself. In the end, the Partito democratico (Pd, Democratic Party) was left with the only unpalatable option to have to form a ‘grand governing coalition’ with Berlusconi’s Popolo delle libertà (Pdl, People of freedom). Indeed, the widespread expectation was that the center-left would win with a large margin. For a long time before the vote most of the polls had indicated that Bersani’s lead was large enough to make his coalition gain the absolute majority of seats in both chambers either alone or together with the Monti’s coalition. It was not the case. Actually, what really happened in the ballot box on February 24th and 25th is still unclear to some extent. Here we will try to give a brief and preliminary explanation, analyzing the background to the election, the results and the role played by the electoral systems, the aggregate vote shifts between the 2013 and 2008 elections, the geographical distributions of the vote, and, finally, the transformation of the party system.

Utilizing data that allows for the placement of both of the candidates running and voters on the same ideological scale, I model proximity voting in the 2010 House elections. I demonstrate that though the literature predominantly emphasizes partisanship and incumbency, relative distance from the candidates also plays a significant role in the voting decision. Additionally, I show that these proximity effects are conditional upon the type of candidate running and the individual's partisan attachment. In total, these results show that while the rates of partisan voting and incumbent victory are high in House elections, voters do consider ideological proximity and can punish candidates who take positions that are too far out of line.

The left/right semantic is used widely to describe the patterns of party competition in democratic countries. This article examines the patterns of party policy in Anglo-American and Western European countries on three dimensions of left/right disagreement: wealth redistribution, social morality and immigration. The central questions are whether, and why, parties with left-wing or right-wing positions on the economy systematically adopt left-wing or right-wing positions on immigration and social morality. The central argument is that left/right disagreement is asymmetrical: leftists and rightists derive from different sources, and thus structure in different ways, their opinions about policy. Drawing on evidence from Benoit and Laver’s (2006) survey of experts about the policy positions of political parties, the results of the empirical analysis indicate that party policy on the economic, social and immigration dimensions are bound together by parties on the left, but not by parties on the right. The article concludes with an outline of the potential implications of left/right asymmetry for unified theories of party competition.