parties_elections

Leadership Turnovers and Their Electoral Consequences

In this book chapter, we use a novel dataset that covers ten advanced democracies between the early 1990s and 2019 to test whether the decline of social democratic parties can be attributed to party leadership changes and especially to the frequency …

Negative Campaigning and Vote Choice in Europe

Parties spend parts of their campaigns criticizing other parties’ performance and characteristics, such as honesty, integrity, and unity. These attacks aim to negatively affect the target parties’ electoral performance. But do they work? While …

Valence Attacks in Multi-Party Elections

How do political parties attack each other in multi-party systems? While voters in multi-party systems respond to attacks on the honesty, integrity, and competence of political actors, it is unclear whether and how political parties use these valence …

Electoral Contestation: A New Measure and an Empirical Test

The study of electoral competition generally focuses on districts or regions (rather than polities) or a narrow slice of democratic polities. We present a new national-level dataset that registers the performance of the top three parties in elections …