This framing paper introduces the symposium on gender and the radical right. With the exception of a few recent studies, gender issues have received little attention in research on the European radical right. The purpose of this symposium is to address that and examine (1) whether radical right parties are still 'men's parties' -parties led and supported primarily by men and ( 2) to what extent and how women and women's concerns have been included by these parties. It argues that radical right parties have changed their appeal since their origins in the 1980s. There is now evidence of the fact that radical right parties, at least in some countries, exhibit an active political involvement of women and engage in some representation of women's concerns. This puts them in a more 'standardised' political position vis-àvis other parties. Given the current lack of focus on this topic, and given the recent gendered changes in radical right parties, this symposium stresses the academic and political importance of studying gender relations in radical right politics.

Despite the growing amount of party regulation, we still have a limited understanding of the effect that party laws have on party systems and political competition. Notwithstanding predictions that incumbent parties adopt rules which favour their own position, found in both the cartel party thesis and the rational actor view of politics, we continue to witness the frequent appearance of new political parties, some of which successfully enter parliament. Using comparative electoral data and a newly built dataset on party regulation in post-war Europe, we trace the changes in the rules governing political parties and explore the effect of party regulation on the number of successful new entrants. Overall, we find that more regulation significantly decreases the number of successful new entries, while high electoral volatility and the legacy of post-communism increase the amount of successful new party entries in the legislature. Our nalysis further shows that the existence of public funding and the payout threshold have no effect on the permeability of party systems.

Political finance regulation is often praised in terms of its ability to introduce equality among political parties, to create more transparent political parties and to lower the influence of affluent donors on the political decision-making process. Little examination exists, however, of the effectiveness of this type of regulation. This article aims to fill this gap by addressing whether and to what extent different types of public funding regulation have improved the legitimacy of political parties by improving their image in terms of corruption. Towards this end, and focusing on both European and Latin American democracies, this article investigates whether a relationship indeed exists between the perceived corruption of political parties and the regulation of political finance. It finds such a relationship does exist, although not in the direction commonly stipulated by the advocates of party finance regulation.

In an era where millions of people live elsewhere than their country of birth and many hold multiple nationalities, the questions of who and how represents these people becomes imperative. The traditional manner of representation is through political parties, yet the form in which parties have historically existed is within state bounds. Throughout time, we have witnessed the transition from cadre to cartel parties and through them the changing role of the political party. This article argues that with the vast expansion of the movement of people around the world, which has been influenced by the enlargement of the European Union, by globalisation, migration and most recently by the refugee crisis, political parties are reshaping their structures both domestically and internationally, and we are witnessing the development of a ‘new modus operandi’ of political parties—the party abroad. The party abroad is viewed as a natural evolvement of the functions of domestic political parties in their response to a changing civil society and changing competitive space. The article provides a theory of the party abroad, it discusses how it relates to previous models of political parties and offers a framework based on which we can study it.