0000000000114502
AUTHOR
Juan Rodríguez-teruel
Political Parties Transition into the Digital Era
This chapter outlines the main dimensions of analysis for assessing how mainstream and new parties are building their digital platforms and transitioning from traditional (offline) organisations into the digital world. So far, most of the academic attention has been focused on the impact of the use of digital technologies on party competition and campaigning, while the intra-organisational dimensions have been significantly under-researched. However, several parties in Europe and around the world, both traditional and digital native, have increasingly used digital technologies such as online platforms for internal decision-making, funding, communication and membership mobilisation. We provi…
Reducing the gap between leaders and voters? Elite polarization, outbidding competition, and the rise of secessionism in Catalonia
ABSTRACTThe ethnic outbidding thesis explains party polarization as a consequence of political changes amongst voters. We argued instead that party elites’ extreme position on the national identity cleavage can help polarizing strategies to prevail over moderate strategies in a context of increasing political uncertainty, without previous voters’ polarization. We test successfully this hypothesis in Catalonia by analysing the polarization of political parties and people’s demands for self-government in Catalonia since the early 2000s. We also find that the result of this outbidding pattern of competition was a reduction in the gap between elites’ and voters’ views on national identity. The …
Surveying and Observing Political Elites
Surveys and observation are two strategies of inquiry that gather rich amounts of data about political elites’ opinions, attitudes, and behavior. These research techniques have experienced advances benefitting from the development of the Internet and new technological tools. Survey research has evolved from country studies to comparative research with greater amounts of units and cases. However, such studies face important challenges regarding questionnaire design, sampling, interviewing, and data analysis. In particular, problems of representativity and lack of control may threaten comparative analysis. On their side, observation techniques raise the question of accessibility, of potential…
Executive Politics in Spain
The chapter offers an overview of the main features of executive politics in democratic Spain. Adopting a core executive approach, it focuses on the actors and the processes defining the interaction and the power relationship between the prime minister, the ministers, and the cabinet at the national level. The main argument discusses the ‘presidentialization’ thesis in Spain. Instead, it proposes a more complex dynamics based in the exchange of power resources among actors within the government. Although institutional and political factors – like party politics and the personalization of politics – have favoured the prime minister’s predominance, other factors help to counterbalance this tr…
The triumph of partisanship: political scientists in the public debate about Catalonia's independence crisis (2010-2018)
Participation in the public debate constitutes one of the most evident avenues for political scientists to demonstrate the social relevance of the discipline. This article focuses on two questions: the types of roles political scientists adopt in their public interventions and the potential tensions between their public engagement and the epistemic norms regulating academic and research activities. We investigate these questions in the context of very salient political debates, involving a high degree of political confrontation, where basic political beliefs, values, identities, and interests are at stake. Focusing on the case of the public debate surrounding the Catalan inde pendence crisi…
The PSOE's deliberation and democratic innovations in turbulent times for the social democracy
In the midst of the great recession, the Spanish Socialists Worker's Party (PSOE) lost the Government and experienced a process of instability while trying to reconnect with its electorate. The party's strategic response was embracing highly inclusive deliberations on both key institutional and policy issues that eventually sparked tensions and division. These internal debates led to the introduction and implementation of other democratic innovations, such as direct votes and consultations that substantially transformed key features of the PSOE's organizational model. The article discusses the main features and problems of such deliberations and democratic innovations, and their wider conse…
Polarisation and Electoral Realignment: The Case of the Right-Wing Parties in Spain
The article analyses the consequences of elite polarisation at the mass level. We study the electoral re-alignment within the right-wing Spanish electorate in recent years, whereby support for the long-predominant Partido Popular has been eroded dramatically to the benefit of new challengers. Measuring ideological polarisation at the party system level and at the individual level, we show how the polarising strategy implemented by the liberal Ciudadanos - and imitated by PP - to gain support from the right-wing electorate paved the way for a massive transfer of conservative voters to the radical-right Vox. The results provide counter-intuitive evidence about the electoral effects of elite p…
New parties’ linkages with external groups and civil society in Spain: A preliminary assessment
The aim of this article is to assess the linkages between the Spanish new parties with groups and civil society. After outlining a short framework on the new linkages between parties and external groups in times of social and political unrest and discussing the case selection, it brie y introduces the classic patterns of interaction between Spain's mainstream parties, the PP and the PSOE and the main interest groups since the late 1970s. Then, the paper analyses the emerging links of two new parties, Ciudadanos and Podemos, in order to provide a general assessment of the main di erences between their linkages and the ones of the traditional parties, and to discuss its possible implications …
The Digitalisation of Political Parties in Comparative Perspective
This chapter outlines the main findings of the edited book. Through the study of a wide range of political parties from Europe and beyond, this book has explored the different degrees of digitalisation that political parties present, and, at the same time, discussed the main technological, democratic issues and trade-offs that political parties have faced in their digital transition. The most relevant finding is that all political parties operating in the democracies analysed have digitalised their organisations to some extent. Our main finding across several cases shows that the digitalisation of parties does not entail a homogenous process of convergence towards a new mode of managing par…