Luke March

Out of left field? Explaining the variable electoral success of European radical left parties

European radical left parties (RLPs) are gradually receiving greater attention. Yet, to date, what has received insufficient focus is why such parties have maintained residues of electoral support after the collapse of the USSR and why this support varies so widely. This article is the first to subject RLPs to large-n quantitative analysis, focusing on 39 parties in 34 European countries from 1990 to 2008. It uses the ‘supply and demand’ conceptual framework developed for radical right parties to identify a number of socio-economic, political-cultural and party-system variables in the external environment that might potentially affect RLP support. The article finds the most persuasive variables to include political culture (past party success), the level of unemployment, Euroscepticism and anti-globalization sentiment, the electoral threshold and competition from Green and radical right parties. The findings suggest several avenues for future research and provide a framework that can be adapted to explain the electoral success of other party families.

From Moldovanism to Europeanization? Moldova's Communists and Nation Building*

The Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM) has been a highly controversial actor since its election in February 2001. The party initially governed under a hail of domestic and international criticism for its East-leaning foreign policy and authoritarian domestic politics. Yet, although with a diminished vote share, it was re-elected on 6 March 2005 in broadly free and fair elections on a proEuropean platform with relations with Russia at a nadir. Nowhere was the party more criticized than in its attitude to ethno-political questions. Proposals to introduce new school history courses and make Russian a second official language provoked the largest street demonstrations since Moldovan independence in Moldova’s capital, Chişinău, from January to April 2002. Many North American and European observers saw such policies as evidence of a neoSoviet approach to interethnic relations, with an explicit Russocentric, Romanophobic and anti-Western emphasis. Yet even this emphasis could be questioned. One result of the 2005 elections was a “pro-European” partnership between the PCRM and the instigator of the 2002 protests, the pro-Romanian Christian Democratic Popular Party (PPCD) against “pro-Russian” forces, an arrangement that helped PCRM leader Vladimir Voronin secure re-election as president by the Moldovan parliament. Here we put the PCRM’s approach to ethno-political questions at the centre of analysis, concentrating on its views of history, language and culture, where its neoSoviet slant is said to be most evident. We focus on the following main questions: (a) is there any consistency at all behind the party’s approach to ethno-politics? (b) How justified are the allegations of re-Sovietization? (c) Has the apparent volte-face in the party’s approach to Europe been accompanied by any substantive revision to the PCRM’s understandings of Moldova’s history and culture? (d) Finally, we concentrate on the effects of the party’s policies on the ethno-political situation in Moldova. For example, has the PCRM exacerbatedMoldova’s status as a “bipolar” society where linguistic, ideological, and ethnic disagreements have significantly complicated both Moldova’s national identity and its transformation into a democratic, sovereign state? We will argue that a consistent strategy behind the PCRM’s policies can certainly be discerned. Rather than simply pursuing Soviet restorationism per se, the party has

Russian parties and the political internet

THE VIRTUAL POLITICKING OF political actors is emerging as one of the more interesting fields of study in Western academic literature. Yet academic interest has threatened to outflank practical effect, and successive elections even in the most developed democracies appear to have advanced e-xaggeration more than e-democracy. Indeed, after the 2001 UK election, the third ‘internet election’ since 1992, some 77% of domestic internet users (a third of the population) said that the net was ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ important in influencing their voting behaviour. Furthermore, the burgeoning literature on parties’ use of the internet appears to confirm a sober view of a sideways stumble rather than a quantum leap into cyberspace politics. Party adoption of new internet and communication technologies (ICTs) has generally been seen as reactive and ad hoc rather than strategic, stylistic and supplementary rather than fundamental, and top-down, administrative and information-heavy rather than interactive or participative, in stark contrast to the potential ascribed to ICTs. However, the growing sophistication of some parties’ and candidates’ web strategies and evidence of far greater internet savviness among younger voters still offer hope for more incremental, if piecemeal, party ‘e-volution’. Detailed study of such party ICT strategies has to date been largely limited to the US, UK and other Western democracies, where the relatively large internet audience and established political parties make this focus a logical choice. Yet, as Semetko & Krasnoboka note, the political internet in societies in transition has not received the academic attention that the critical role institution building and information provision play in democratising societies might suggest. By focusing in detail on political parties and the internet in Russia this study addresses this deficit in the literature. As a state with its party system in a most precarious position, contemporary Russia offers an instructive comparison with past studies of the opportunities and constraints facing parties’ adoption of ICTs. Many analysts have lately noted that national context may be a significant factor in parties’ uptake of ICTs. Indeed, Russia might seem to be an ideal case for showing the role of institutional, cultural and structural constraints. If even long-standing political parties in countries where regular use of the internet approximates 50% of the population have used it relatively peripherally, then one might expect Russian political parties’ use of the internet to be far more negligible and insignificant, for the following reasons. Most obviously, Russia’s internet audience is comparatively small, some 12 million people in total, and 4.3 million weekly users according to the most generous estimates. Russia is currently 15th in global level of overall ‘internetisation’.

Chechnya: Has Moscow Won?

The image of Chechnya in the West remains one of radicalisation and conflict, unresolved secessionist ambition and Russian brutality. But far more than is generally acknowledged outside Russia, Moscows policies towards Chechnya have succeeded in their aims. The republic is now relatively peaceful; reconstruction is gaining momentum; and Chechnyas leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has been both an effective and seemingly faithful servant of Russia in the North Caucasus. However, it would be unwise to assume this represents a long-term solution to the problems in the North Caucasus.

State–society relations in contemporary Russia: new forms of political and social contention

Much existing analysis of Russian state–society relations focuses on public, active forms of contention such as the “opposition” and protest movements. There is need for a more holistic perspective which adds study of a range of overt, “co-opted”, and hidden forms of interaction to this focus on public contention. A theoretical and empirical basis for understanding state–society relations in todays Russia involves broadening the concept of “contentious politics” to include models of “consentful” as well as “dissentful” contention. A diffused model of contentious politics can situate claim-making along the axes of consentful and dissentful motivations, and compliant and contentious behaviours.

Left and right populism compared: The British case

This article represents one of the few systematic comparisons of left-wing populism with other populisms. Focussing on the manifestos of six British parties in 1999–2015, the findings confirm that left-wing populists are more socio-economically focussed, more inclusionary but less populist than right-wing populists. The article makes four main substantive contributions. First, empirically, it shows that the much-touted populist Zeitgeist in the United Kingdom barely exists. Second, methodologically, it provides a nuanced disaggregated populism scale that has advantages over existing methods because it can effectively distinguish populist from non-populist parties and analyse degrees of populism. Third, theoretically, it shows that host ideology is more important than populism per se in explaining differences between left and right populisms. Fourth is a broader theoretical point: what is often called ‘thin’ or ‘mainstream’ populism’ is not populism but demoticism (closeness to ordinary people). Therefore, analysts should not label parties ‘populist’ just because their rhetoric is demotic.

Power and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union The Communist Parties of Moldova and Russia

Much of the literature on communist successor parties has concentrated far more on East-Central Europe than the former Soviet bloc and on the ‘social-democratic’ successors than those of a neo-communist hue. This article aims to extend the comparative impact of studies of such successor parties by analysing two of the principal ‘neo-communist’ successor parties in the former Soviet Union (FSU): the Russian CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) and PCRM (Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova). I argue that legacy-based approaches, which focus on the ‘patrimonial communist’ history of the FSU, explain much of the general context for party origins, political profile and the political capital possessed by the neo-communists, but are far less persuasive at explaining both the timing and extent of party return and their longer-term trajectory and electoral success than previously accounted for in the literature. In particular, differences in the political environment (such as the role of presidentialism versus parliamentarianism) and (especially) the role of political agency are seen to have greater importance.

The Russian Duma ‘opposition’: no drama out of crisis?

Why did the post-2008 economic crisis in Russia fail to become a political crisis before the 2011 parliamentary elections? One key reason is the failure of Russian political parties to become the aggregators of growing popular discontent, particularly the three national-level ‘opposition’ parties, the Liberal Democratic Party, Just Russia, and Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Analysing the rhetoric of these three parties towards the authorities and their anti-crisis programmes shows that the Duma opposition parties do articulate a potentially radical critique of contemporary Russian politics and economy. However, their inability to translate rhetoric into action is best explained by informal ‘rules of the game’ that limit their practical opposition activities to lobbying the Kremlin in private and maintaining public deference to the federal authorities.

Seven Year Itch? The European Left Party: Struggling to Transform the EU

Abstract Its an apposite moment to analyze the European Left Party (EL), one of the newest transnational parties (TNPs) founded in 2004, which gathers a large number of radical left parties situating themselves to the left of social democracy. Despite the ostensibly beneficial crisis environment across the EU, radical left parties as a whole have so far failed to make significant gains. The ELs third congress in Paris in 2010 recognized significant future challenges in order to react to the adoption of the Lisbon treaty and to ‘build a Europe of social change’. In this paper we examine this relatively under-analyzed TNPs organizational development and cohesiveness by focussing on the interaction between national parties, the party at European level and the GUE/NGL (European United Left/Nordic Green Left) European parliamentary group. The ELs 2010 congress showed it struggling to combine the ‘deepening’ of its organizational cohesion with the ‘widening’ of its political representation. Although the ELs development to date marks a significant intensification of radical left European co-operation in historical terms, it remains ill-equipped to become an organizationally and strategically effective organization.

Problems and perspectives of contemporary European radical left parties: Chasing a lost world or still a world to win?

This paper provides an overview of the key European radical left parties, their ideological stances, their supporters and electoral performance, their links with social movements, policy impact, and reaction to the post-2008 economic crisis. The radical left is increasingly a stabilized, consolidated and permanent actor on the European political scene and has become a principal challenger to mainstream social democratic parties, although it has not fully overcome its own communist-era crisis and its failure so far demonstrably to exploit propitious economic conditions indicates severe weaknesses (particularly the absence of sufficiently electorally attractive strategic vision, the persistence of historical stigma in Eastern Europe, and still-persistent ideological and strategic conflicts). Should such problems be addressed, the contemporary socio-economic and political environment in Europe is only likely to increase the future appeal of the radical left, although radical left parties face significant challenges from Greens, radical right parties and the new European protest movements over which they, as yet, have little influence.