The 2018 regional elections in Andalucía marked the end of Spain’s exceptional status as a country with a party system free from the radical right. The electoral success of the radical right-wing challenger, Vox, who gained 11% of the vote and 12 seats in the regional parliament, brought this exceptionalism to an end. This paper analyses the individual-level determinants that explain the electoral success of Vox and the emergence of the radical right within the Spanish party system. The results indicate that concerns over devolution, likely engendered by the Catalan separatist crisis, predominantly explain voters’ preferences for the right-wing challenger. This is true both amongst the general electorate as well as amongst the former voters of other right-wing parties. Significantly, against popular assumptions and empirical observations explaining the rise of radical right-wing parties across much of Western Europe, the results display no empirical link between immigration and electoral support for Vox.

The electoral success of the new populist radical right-wing party, VOX, which achieved an unprecedent electoral result in the Spanish general elections of April 2019, brought an end to Spain's exceptional status as a country free of the radical right. This article asks: who votes for VOX? Empirically, we present the first assessment of electoral support for VOX at the national level. Relying on national post-electoral survey data, our results show that the electoral profile of VOX's supporters differs from that of populist radical right-wing parties from the rest of Europe. Support for VOX, much like the voters of their European contemporaries, tends to be markedly higher amongst males; economic status, however, has the reverse effect than that observed elsewhere on the continent, with individuals on the higher end of the income distribution more likely to have voted for VOX in the April 2019 general elections. Importantly, we establish that national identity plays a large role in explaining support for the new radical rightwing challenger and that the effect of identity is conditioned by negative evaluations of the political situation in Spain.

Do parties in Spain use Instagram and for what purpose? What characterizes posts that are effective at engaging the electorate? This article examines the use of Instagram during the Spanish general elections of 2015 and 2016. Content analysis of party publications on Instagram was carried out to test whether parties use the application to broadcast their policy positions, mobilize voters, or to promote their main party candidate. Regression estimation models are then used to explain the varying levels of user engagement with party posts. The findings illustrate that the new challenger parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos, use the social media app in a systematic way that is distinct from the traditional mainstream parties in Spain. Moreover, party newness, attempts at mobilization, and the promotion of the main party candidate are found to be important explanations for party success on Instagram.

Are lesbian, gay and bisexual voters in Western Europe europhile globalists or eurosceptic nativists? The recently established 'sexuality gap' between lavender voters and heterosexuals in Western Europe shows that LGBs are more likely to support left-leaning parties and identify ideologically with the left than their heterosexual peers. We know very little, however, about how this gap plays out in the multidimensional space in Europe where cultural concerns like immigration and EU integration are increasingly important. In this paper, we use data from eight rounds of the European Social Survey (2002Survey ( -2017 to investigate the impact of LGB status on support for EU integration and immigration. The results show, in line with theoretical expectations regarding the socialising effect of the LGB experience in encouraging support for social liberalism, that lavender voters in Western Europe are significantly more pro-integrationist and pro-immigration than comparable heterosexuals.

In many European democracies, political punditry has highlighted the attempts of political parties on the left to court the 'lavender vote' of lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals. This article examines the presence of a gay vote in Western Europe with a focus on assessing the role of sexuality in shaping individuals' political preferences and voting behaviour. Empirically, the effect of sexuality on both ideological identification as well as party vote choice is analysed. Using a cumulative dataset of eight rounds of the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2017, this article demonstrates that partnered lesbians and gay men are more likely than comparable heterosexuals to identify with the left, support leftist policy objectives and vote for left-of-centre political parties. The analysis represents the first empirical cross-national European study of the voting behaviour of homosexual individuals and sheds new light on the importance of sexuality as a predictor of political ideology and voting behaviour within the Western European context.

An increasingly salient policy innovation pursued by LGBT+ rights groups and socially liberal policy entrepreneurs is the right of trans people to bring their legally recorded sex in line with their lived gender by way of self-identification. In response to these moves toward trans inclusion, a unique coalition of trans-exclusionary (gender critical) feminists and traditionalist conservatives has emerged to challenge these reforms. This coalition of policy opponents, mirroring historical issue frames that present homosexuals as predatory sexual deviants, campaign on a salient issue frame that presents transgender individuals and the expansion of trans rights as an inimical threat to the security, safety, and welfare of (cisgender) women, particularly in singlesex spaces. In this paper, we address two questions. First, we ask: do trans-exclusionary "protect women" issue frames over the alleged threat of trans persons to (cis) women shape mass public opinion? Second, we ask: in a relatively LGBT+ friendly policy environment, who supports the right to self-identification for trans individuals? We answer these questions via an original pre-registered survey experiment embedded within the 2021 Scottish Election Study. We find that trans-exclusionary issue frames appealing to (cis) women's safety significantly depress support for trans rights, particularly among women respondents. Highlighting these concerns is an effective means of increasing already robust opposition to reforms designed to improve the welfare of transgender individuals, which should be of concern for proponents of self-identification policies.

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This paper presents and addresses a simple, yet overlooked, research question: is there a sexuality gap in political engagement and participation between sexual minority individuals and the heterosexual majority in Western Europe? To answer this question, we employ a recently applied method of identifying lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) individuals using data on the gender composition of cohabiting partner households from the European Social Survey. Relying on a total sample of more than 110,000 individuals across 12 different countries with an identified sample of 1542 LGB individuals, we test the divergence in political interest and political participation, both electoral and non-electoral, between LGB and non-LGB individuals. The results of our empirical analyses conform with our expectations. Theorising that LGBs, as a marginalised social stratum, are incentivised to participate and ‘vote like their rights depended on it’, we find empirical evidence of a significant and positive ‘sexuality gap’ in levels of political interest, turnout and other forms of political participation in Western Europe over and above what can be determined by socio-economic determinants of political participation.