How populist are populist parties in France? Understanding parties’ strategies within a systemic approach

Causes and consequences of the rise of populist radical right parties and movements in Europe

This article reviews three strands in the scholarship on the populist radical right (PRR). It covers both political parties and extra-parliamentary mobilization in contemporary European democracies. After definitional issues and case selection, the authors first discuss demand-side approaches to the fortunes of the PRR. Subsequently, supply-side approaches are assessed, namely political opportu...

Left Parties and Trade Unions in France

Historically, the supposed independence of unions from parties in France has been a myth, with the development of close relations between the CGT and the PCF on the one hand, and looser ones between the CFDT in particular, and the PS on the other. These links weakened from the 1980s on, but appeared to be re-established, with some changes, when unions backed François Hollande in the 2012 presid...

How many political parties are there, really? A new measure of the ideologically cognizable number of parties/party groupings

We offer a new measure of the ideologically cognizable number of political parties/party groupings that is intended to be complementary to the standard approach to counting the effective number of political parties – the Laakso–Taagepera index (1979). This approach allows the possibility of precise measurement of concepts such as polarized pluralism or fragmented bipolarism and is applicable to...

The Future of Populist Parallelism

Book Review: Populist Systems: A General Introduction