Radical left parties (RLP) have been significant actors in many Western European party systems since the expansion of mass democracy. In some cases, they have been very relevant forces in terms of popular support. Despite this fact, they have not received a great deal of attention in past decades from a comparative perspective. Through examination of the role of an important set of factors, this article provides, for the first time, a cross-national empirical account of the variation in voting for RLPs across Western Europe, based on individual-level data. It evaluates the effect of key socio-demographic and attitudinal individual-level variables on the RLP vote. The findings point to the continuing relevance of some social and political factors traditionally associated with votes for RLPs, and to the relevance of attitudinal variables.

The 2008 Great Recession has altered party allegiances in many countries. This has been very visible in some of the countries hardest hit by the crisis, such as Spain. The Spanish case stands out as the only one in which a fully newly created radical-left populist party, Podemos, has attracted sizeable support. Its success is more intriguing given its capacity to attract many former supporters of the established radical left, Izquierda Unida. This article analyses what factors explain the support for the new radical-left populist party Podemos, identifying the individual-level features that lead voters to support it rather than an already established anti-austerity radical-left party. As the results show, Podemos supporters do not correspond to the conventional descriptions of populist voters, the losers of 'globalisation' and the economic crisis. Instead, a combination of elementsprotest, anti-mainstream sentiment and unfulfilled expectations -distinguishes Podemos supporters from the established radical-left electorate.

Radical left parties (RLPs) are a diverse lot and several RLP subtypes have been distinguished in the literature. However, the degree to which these subtypes are associated to significantly different policy proposals has not been analysed. At the same time, little is known about whether these predicated subtypes are associated to differences in their voters' characteristics. In this article, we analyse the policy positions of RLPs across a number of issues using manifesto and expert survey data, allowing us to assess the nature of the differentiation between types of RLPs. We find that RLPs differ in the extent to which they adopt New Politics issues, and we propose a classification of Traditional and New Left RLPs. Using cross-national survey data coming from the European Election Studies series and multilevel multinomial models, we also examine the ideological, policy and social differences in the electorates of the various types of RLPs. We find socio-demographic and attitudinal differences between the voters of Traditional and New Left RLPs that are consistent with the programmatic differences of the parties.

In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, new and challenger parties have enjoyed electoral gains in some European countries. Political and economic disaffection have been pointed out as the main drivers of their electoral support. This article proposes voter’s stealth democracy attitudes, as defined by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, as an additional driving force to account for this electoral change. We examine the case of Spain with a survey conducted after the far-reaching transformation of the party system, which has led to the emergence of two new parties:Ciudadanos(on the center-right) andPodemos(on the radical-left). We find that stealth democracy attitudes are positively related to the support for the former and negatively related to the support for the latter. Additionally, we provide evidence of this relationship being conditional on voters’ ideology. The study illustrates how an unexplored attitudinal dimension contributes to party system change, and how the relevance of these attitudes might go beyond the temporary political discontent caused by the economic crisis.

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The increasing introduction of organizational innovations has changed the notion of party membership. Some political parties now offer multiple kinds of formal affiliation, whereas others offer a varied repertoire of modes of engagement in party activities without formal membership distinctions. However, little is still known about the consequences of these changes. This article studies the case of Podemos, a party that has adopted a considerably innovative approach to membership. Through an analysis of Podemos voters and affiliates, we find that the gap in resources between members and voters recurrently found in the literature remains relevant despite organizational innovation. Moreover, we investigate how members make use of the expanded options of involvement offered by the party. Findings suggest that even in extreme cases of organizational innovation members can still be grouped into concentric categories based on the intensity of their involvement. These categories, which are consistent with the patterns found in traditional party organizations, seem to be explained by members’ ideological commitment rather than resources.

Western publics show a sizable support for experts’ involvement in political decision making, that is, technocratic attitudes. This article analyzes two key aspects of these attitudes: technocratic attitudes’ stability and the heterogeneity in the demand for experts depending on the context. We first analyze how technocratic attitudes have been affected by an external event, the COVID‐19 pandemic, that has placed experts’ role at the forefront of the public debate; this allows us to analyze the stability or change in these attitudes. Second, given that the pandemic quickly evolved from being a public health issue to becoming a political issue combining economic and public health dimensions, we examine whether framing the COVID‐19 pandemic exclusively as a public health problem or as including a prominent economic dimension as well affects the type of public officials who are preferred to lead the political management of the crisis (independent experts with diverse professional skills or party politicians belonging to different parties and with a specialization in different policy fields). We pursue these two research goals through a panel survey conducted in Spain at two different time points, one before and another during the pandemic, in which we measure technocratic attitudes using an exhaustive battery; and through a survey experiment combining a conjoint design and a framing experiment. Results show that, first, technocratic attitudes have significantly increased as a consequence of the coronavirus outbreak; second, people's preference for experts prevails against any other experimental treatment such as party affiliation; and, finally, preferences for the type of experts vary depending on the problem to be solved. In this way, this paper significantly increases our knowledge of the factors that affect variation in public attitudes towards experts’ involvement in political decision‐making.

Many parties have updated their recruitment strategies and offer softer routes for joining their ranks. In some parties, registered sympathizers are given virtually the same rights as traditional members with substantially lower costs. This begs the question, why would somebody take the further step of joining such parties as full members rather than sympathizers? This article analyzes this question by using membership surveys from three left-wing Spanish parties. As such, it explores the usefulness of the general incentives model (GIM) for explaining the decisions of these two groups of affiliates. We find that full members and sympathizers differ in the motives they have to join the party and in their evaluations of the diverse types of incentives included in the GIM. Candidate selection incentives seem particularly important for sympathizers, whereas selective outcome incentives, selective process benefits, collective outcome benefits and altruistic motivations play a more significant role for members.