Endre Borbáth

We’ve just released the Youth Wing Membership Survey (YOUMEM) dataset:
dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/ha...

It’s the largest comparative study of party youth wing members ever conducted, with survey responses from over 5,000 members of 12 centre-left and centre-right youth wings in 6 countries. 🧵

For the FES, I wrote a short brief about how mainstream party strategies have fueled far-right success. They move toward more anti-immigration positions to win voters back. This does not work, but shifts public opinion to the right. Parties then react to shifts in public opinion. A vicious cycle.

Are the Politically Active Better Represented? - Political Behavior Political participation is considered an important path for people to influence politics. However, whether those who participate actually see more of their preferred policies implemented remains an op...

🧵I am happy to announce a new article in Political Behavior @polbehavior.bsky.social, “Are the Politically Active Better Represented?”, co-authored with @jenny-oser.bsky.social, @rdassonneville.bsky.social, @professormpersson.bsky.social, and Anders Sundell.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

now open access :)

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The paper is part of our special issue with Chendi Wang
and Argyrios Altiparmakis on "Electoral mobilisation in turbulent times".

I write a separate thread on the issue once all papers are online. Until then, you can already read our introductory article: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I show where change comes from: established parties have routinized, distinct profiles, while new parties expand the agenda by politicizing conflicts that were previously less emphasized. Bottom line: even with high party turnover, cleavage theory still helps explain how competition stays structured

❓What structures competition?

Economic and cultural conflicts matter across the region, but cultural conflicts gain importance, especially where democratic backsliding intensifies (notably 🇭🇺🇵🇱). Romania looks different: cultural issues are least salient there, and its overall structuration is weaker

Main finding: programmatic competition is substantial and (mostly) stable over time, but it varies across countries.

Latvia comes out as the most programmatic system, Hungary and Poland remain fairly programmatic even under erosion, while Romania is the clear laggard.

🔍 To get at this, I zoom in on what voters actually see during campaigns. I analyze Hungary, Latvia, Poland, and Romania from the 1990s to the early 2020s.

📊 I use the PolDem National Election Campaign Dataset, hand-coded newspaper coverage from two daily papers per country.

🚨New publication on cleavages in party competition in Central and Eastern Europe 🚨

CEE party systems are famously volatile, but does that mean that they are unstructured?
❓I ask whether competition has become programmatically organized around enduring cleavages

🔗 doi.org/10.1177/1354...

Thread 👇

Research associate – doctoral candidate (75%) (ID 377) The Manifesto Project analyses parties’ election manifestos in order to study parties’ policy preferences. To this end, the project conducts conte...

📣 Come work with us! The @wzb.bsky.social Center for Civil Society Research is looking for a research associate/doctoral candidate (75%) for a 3 year period, starting on Apr 1, 2026. The researcher will work in the Manifesto Project. More:
wzb.hr4you.org/job/view/428...

Apply by Jan 25, 2026! 🗓️

Thank you! :)

Our latest paper on party brands in Europe is outin @poppublicsphere.bsky.social! More to come as the brilliant @eborbath.bsky.social and I finalize a book manuscript that brings together insights on party names, action repertoires, organizational adaptations, and how voters respond to them.

On a personal note, this has been the paper I have worked on the most of everything I have published. I have learned a lot along the way as the paper matured. We are grateful to everyone who commented on various iterations.

We are currently writing a book on these topics, so stay tuned for more 😊

The paradox: name changes don’t buy much. In the experiments, party-name labels have tiny effects (a “movement” label is only ~+1pp vs no label). Voters react more to signals about how parties organize (e.g., ties to civil society) and they tend to punish established parties that rebrand.

Who drives this change? Mostly newer parties, parties on the right, and often parties in opposition, with the radical right especially prone to adopting “movement”-like branding. The shift is also stronger where party systems are more unstable (higher electoral volatility).

Big supply-side takeaway: since the 1960s, parties increasingly drop “party” and classic ideology words. By the early 2020s, nearly 2/3 of parties no longer identify as “parties” in their official name; “movement” references rise in waves (e.g., post-2008).

Demand side: we ran two conjoint survey experiments (2023) in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Hungary, one on branding of a new party, one on rebranding an existing party, to see whether “nonclassical” labels actually help.

Supply side: we built a ballot-paper party-name dataset by manually coding name changes across 616 parties, 28 European countries, between 1945-2023 (or from the first competitive election). This lets us track how party labels evolve across decades and party systems.

🔔 New paper on party brands with @swenhutter.bsky.social in @poppublicsphere.bsky.social

We study the supply (how parties call themselves) and demand (what voters reward) sides. We pair a new European dataset of party names with conjoint experiments on voter reactions

OA 👉 doi.org/10.1017/S153...

My wish for 2026 is that Europeans will be as critical and vigilant about authoritarianism and racism in their own country as they are about them in the U.S. and that Americans will be as critical and vigilant about authoritarianism and racism in the U.S. as Europeans are.

NOW OUT ON FIRSTVIEW!!

Brand Transformation in #European #Politics: The Rise and Limits of #Nonclassical #Names

By @eborbath.bsky.social & @swenhutter.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1017/S153...

This is a fantastic dataset for studying the evolution of political attitudes and party preferences in Germany.

Here's a mosaic plot of vote choices in 2025 by vote choices in 2021 (as reported back then).

One striking observation is the high volatility behind the overall gains of the Left Party.

This is a brilliant piece on the restructuring of political competition in Western Europe and goes far beyond the question of populism. Great also for teaching.

It is almost 10 years since Hanspeter Kriesi published his seminal article on the politicization of European Integration @jcms-eu.bsky.social.

A short thread on how things stand as of 2024, with @chesdata.bsky.social, looking at salience, clarity, and unity of party positions towards the EU 🧵:

Heute vor 4 Jahren ist der große #Politikwissenschaft ler Klaus von #Beyme gestorben.
Wir gedenken seiner wieder mit einer Vorlesung an der @uniheidelberg.bsky.social, diesmal am 15. Januar, 18 Uhr in der Aula. Sprecherin: Prof. @andrearoemmele.bsky.social von der @hertieschool.bsky.social.

A blog post giving a more thorough take on survey experiments and the credibility revolution: cyrussamii.com?p=4168

This is an interesting paper.

I continue to sense that we as a field have concluded, either you have an identification strategy as defined here, or you don’t have a valid causal claim. And that is really not true.

When and why protests reinforce institutional politics on the far right? "Protests of the Far Right" ed. with @pietrocastellig.bsky.social & @andreapirro.it is under contract @oxfordunipress.bsky.social with a terrific lineup of contributors who helped us covering & comparing 14 countries.

We're looking for a colleague (postdoc) 📢 @politikuhh.bsky.social
3+3 years
Doing your own research while teaching 2.5 courses per semester
Research agenda with links to our team (democracy, digital politics, political competition/behaviour)
DL 🗓️ 05/01
stellen.uni-hamburg.de/jobposting/6...