Against a long trend decline in the membership of political parties in Western democracies, there has been an unexpected surge in the UK since 2015. Interestingly, this phenomenon has also been observed amongst British expatriates, despite their historically very low levels of engagement. Our paper explores this development using a multi-methods approach to investigate its impact across the three main parties, comparing the relative importance of supply-side and demand-side factors in each case. We show that the creation and development of British parties abroad are the result of two contrasting dynamics: a top-down one, which gives legitimacy and structure and in some cases, resources, and a bottom-up one, which gives purpose but also networks. Our survey of British expatriate party members reveals a diversity of triggers and motivations for membership, making an original contribution to the wider literature on party membership and on the political engagement of emigrants.

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This article introduces our themed section on The Left(s) and Nationalism(s), which provides a comparative analysis of the relationship between nationalism and different leftwing parties in Western Europe. It highlights the innovative comparative perspectives offered by this themed section, which not only concerns a series of different geographical cases studies but also involves the ideological plurality of the Left. The larger research question that our contributors address is how different left-wing parties have dealt with the inherent ideological tension between the universality claimed by the Left and the particularism inherent in nationalism, as a doctrine and a principle of political legitimacy. The article stresses three main contributions of our themed section: (1) Western European left-wing parties do engage with the themes of nationalism and nationhood, but they often rely on convenient silence to solve some of the contradictions with their progressive ideology. (2) None of these parties have formulated thick versions of the respective national identities. (3) State-wide left-wing parties have used instrumental conceptions of nationhood to address the challenge of separatist parties, but only with mixed results.

This paper argues that parties abroad are the actors of a new arena for citizenship and party politics. The proliferation of overseas voting and the development of representative institutions for emigrants has transformed and reinforced the civic and political links between sending-states and their diaspora. This has also created new opportunities for political entrepreneurs and political parties tasked with reaching out to citizens living abroad. Yet research on political parties and on transnationalism has almost never crossed paths. This has created a gap in our knowledge on political parties abroad, demonstrating the timeliness of a special issue on political parties abroad. This paper introduces this special issue and presents an overview of the main theoretical questions and debates addressed in the articles. We emphasize existing gaps in the literature and stress the importance of a better understanding of the growing phenomenon of political parties abroad. We also explain why a comparative approach is necessary to tackle the issue of political parties abroad, offering a theoretically-minded framework. Our summaries of the papers in this special issue highlight how they relate to the more general questions discussed in our introduction.