Although the post-crisis politicisation of the ECB is widely acknowledged, little empirical evidence exists about how this important non-majoritarian institution has responded to public contestation. This article starts filling this gap by investigating whether and how public opinion affects ECB communication. Based on automated text analysis of the speeches delivered by Executive Board members (2001-2017), the article shows that negative public opinion is associated with an expansion of the scope of ECB communication and a reduction in the salience attributed to monetary policy issues. These results challenge the view according to which the ECB conceives of its sources of legitimation based almost exclusive on the achievement of its mandate. In particular, our findings suggest that increased politicisation leads the ECB to reassess the sources of its legitimation strategy from a strategy based on output achievement towards one based on participation to broader policy debates.

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The personalization of politics has been extensively studied from different angles and in different national contexts. Nonetheless, an easily comparable and longitudinal study of the personalization of politics at both the country and the party levels is still missing. In this article, we fill this gap by presenting data from an expert survey on the personalization of politics for around 110 parties and a series of Western European countries from the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s. The dimensions analyzed concern the impact of the personalization of politics in general elections, and also party leaders' room for maneuver in candidate selection, the definition of the party's policy-making agenda, and party leaders’ intra-party control. Different reliability tests confirm the goodness of the data collected. At the same time, first descriptive analyses show that there has not been a homogenous diffusion of this phenomenon in Western Europe, and diverging personalization trends are present for different groups of countries or different dimensions of this phenomenon.

This study investigates whether and to what extent political factors drive disagreement within the allegedly consensual monetary committee of the European Central Bank. Absent voting data, the article assesses disagreement based on the semantic distance between the policy positions publicly articulated by the European Central Bank President and the central banks of Eurozone member states. The empirical analysis shows that the disagreement articulated by national central bankers is affected by the ideological inclinations of the governments of the countries they represent. Our findings thus suggest that central bankers’ position-taking is shaped not only by economic conditions but also by domestic political considerations. This result challenges the European Central Bank’s projected image of itself as an institution whose members are impermeable to domestic political pressures as a way to defend the independence of the institution to which they belong.

Even if the non-unitary nature of parties has come back into the party politics agenda, many of its features are still largely understudied. Specifically, an encompassing explanation of individual faction membership and of the role of party fusions in fostering faction membership is still missing. By performing a diachronic analysis, this article proposes a new approach to study the determinants of faction membership, highlighting the fundamental role of ideological, policy- and career-related factors. Moreover, the article uses as an explanatory factor a key element that has hitherto never been taken into account in intra-party analyses: psychological social identity, a variable that strongly conditions party members’ behaviour in situations where parties are merging. The analysis also shows the crucial role of party fusion in shaping individual faction membership determinants, highlighting that the effect of these determinants varies considerably the more time has elapsed since the party’s merger.