Volume 39, Number 3, April 2007

Competition between two stable multiparty coalitions has dominated electoral and legislative politics in post-Pinochet Chile. However, several scholars dispute the argument that a fundamental change has realigned the party system. The point of contention is whether a bipolar pattern has replaced the traditional three-way split (tres tercios) in political competition. These alternative hypotheses about the cohesion of parties and coalitions in the legislative arena can be tested through an analysis of the voting records of Chilean deputies. Coalition membership rather than partisan positions dictate legislative behavior. Therefore, the Chilean electoral coalitions are not merely electoral pacts. Rather, they constitute two distinct policy-based coalitions.

Political science has never paid much comparative attention to what Schattschneider called the “conflict of conflicts.” However, this question is becoming increasingly important as the conflict structure in many western countries is breaking up. Is the ability to link an issue to an already existing conflict in the party system crucial for it to become a political issue? This question is addressed through a study of the issue of euthanasia in Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Euthanasia became a political issue in the Netherlands and Belgium because it was linked to the religious/secular conflict in the party system. As a consequence of the politicization, the Netherlands and Belgium have legalized euthanasia.

Economic insecurity is commonly held to be the key psychological mechanism underpinning the relationship between rapid economic change and the size of welfare states. Transformations like deindustrialization and globalization are held to create winners and losers, and the latter demand greater governmental protection against the forces undermining their economic insecurity. This individual-level relationship has been assumed rather than specified and tested. Economic insecurity can take more than one form. Moreover, its different forms vary not only in their socioeconomic roots, but also in their relationship to support for enhanced social protection. A comparison of the United States and Australia highlights the variability of economic insecurity’s impact of welfare preferences and the need to unpack the complexity of their relationship.

Election pledges are made on important issues and on the policy themes parties emphasize most. Pledges made by parties that enter the government after elections are more likely to be enacted than those made by parties that do not. Substantial differences in rates of pledge enactment can be found among majoritarian, coalition, and bicameral systems. New evidence on elections in Ireland, where coalition governments are common, is compared with the Netherlands, the U.K., the U.S., Canada, and Greece. Ireland and the Netherlands are crucial cases for theories of cabinet governance that feature the coalition agreement and the allocation of ministerial portfolios.

How do governments respond to the demands of different social movement organizations? They respond selectively, embracing some movement groups as acceptable bargaining partners, while sidelining or repressing others. Thus, they create uneven political opportunity structures that prompt organizations to pursue divergent protest strategies. Selective engagement is a double-edged sword. Groups that forge a closer relationship with state actors can benefit from increased access, but they also face shorter time horizons to deliver change and risk alienating their members. Over time, these side effects can minimize the worth of “desirable” groups to governments, while making it possible for organizations previously left out of the process to increase their clout and demand entry.

Much like earlier studies of the far right, recent scholarship asks why far right parties advanced in some West European democracies but not in others, but its answers differ. Socioeconomic explanations, which dominated earlier studies, are now only the starting point to explain the electoral trajectories of the far right. Recent scholarship lays more emphasis on the domestic political setting, examining the effects of party competition, organization, and appeals. Moreover, it attempts to correct the earlier neglect of electoral institutions. Its findings do not yield firm conclusions about the drivers of far right performance, but the theoretical implications are too important to miss. Future scholarship must pay closer attention to temporal variation in far right performance.