Raul Gomez

University of Liverpool | UoL · Department of Politics

Radical left parties (RLPs) are a diverse lot and several RLP subtypes have been distinguished in the literature. However, the degree to which these subtypes are associated with significantly different policy proposals has not been analysed. At the same time, little is known about whether these predicated subtypes are associated with differences in...

Despite the widespread secularization of West European societies, research has only found mixed evidence of a decline in the influence of religion on people's electoral preferences. A relatively recent line of inquiry has adopted a ‘top‐down’ approach to this problem, arguing that the impact of religion not only depends on structural social changes...

While the electoral decline of Social democracy has received considerable attention in the literature, much less is known about how the structural changes experienced by advanced capitalist societies in the past decades have affected support for the mainstream right. In order to fill this gap, this article examines the relationship between seculari...

This article investigates how the systemic politicization of the EU is associated with support for different political parties. We argue that, while politicization involves actions by both Eurosceptic and Europhile parties, it does not affect parties at both extremes of the continuum in the same way. To investigate these differentiated effects, we...

This article is the introduction to the 2023 issue of the 'EJPR Political Data Yearbook'. The issue includes 37 contributions by country experts, presenting political developments and data on 37 countries in 2022. This article presents and analyzes systematic aggregate data, summarizes the main political trends, and discusses the state of democracy...

Job insecurity is a pervasive phenomenon whose effects on support for different parties have attracted increasing attention in the literature. A growing body of research has assessed the relationship between job insecurity and the success of radical parties in Western democracies, but results are still inconclusive due to the complex nature of this...

This article introduces the 2023 issue of the 'EJPR Political Data Yearbook', made up of 37 contributions by country experts on political developments and data on 37 countries in 2022. The introduction summarizes the main trends and presents and discuss systematic data overviews.

Editorial introduction to the 2022 issue of the European Journal of Political Research Political Data Yearbook

To what extent does conventional survey measurement capture the political interest of men andwomen equally well? We aim to answer this question by relying on unique data from a nationalonline survey in Spain, where we combined questions that unpack the standard indicator of politicalinterest. Findings show that gender is relevant in explaining the...

Many parties have updated their recruitment strategies and offer softer routes for joining their ranks. In some parties, registered sympathizers are given virtually the same rights as traditional members with substantially lower costs. This begs the question, why would somebody take the further step of joining such parties as full members rather th...

To what extent does conventional survey measurement capture the political interest of men and women equally well? We aim to answer this question by relying on unique data from a national online survey in Spain, where we used various questions unpacking the standard indicator of political interest. The findings show that men and women nominate diffe...

One of the most striking political developments occurring during the Great Recession has been the growth of the radical left in some European countries. Though the literature is far from conclusive, it has generally been argued that the economy is not a main reason driving people’s support for non-mainstream parties (particularly the Greens and the...

Electoral volatility as measured by the Pedersen index is arguably one of the most popular indicators in political science, but its interpretation is far from clear. Volatility is produced by a mix of party-switching, differential turnout and generational replacement. However, there is virtually no empirical research on which, if any, of the main m...

The increasing introduction of organizational innovations has changed the notion of party membership. Some political parties now offer multiple kinds of formal affiliation, whereas others offer a varied repertoire of modes of engagement in party activities without formal membership distinctions. However, little is still known about the consequences...

Cuando los ciudadanos votan en elecciones municipales, ¿tienen en cuenta solo factores a nivel nacional? O, por el contrario, ¿prestan también atención a elementos de carácter local? En este artículo sostenemos que la evaluación que hacen los ciudadanos de los candidatos a la alcaldía es un factor particularmente importante para explicar el sentido...

The 2014 European Parliament election saw a relatively large increase in the size of radical left parties (RLPs), particularly in Western Europe. This article aims to provide new ways of thinking about the dynamics of radical-left voting by analyzing the changing role of attitudes towards the European Union (EU) in explaining support for RLPs at Eu...

Notwithstanding the improvement in gender equality in political power and resources in European democracies, this study shows that on average declared interest in politics is 16% lower for women than for men in Europe. This gap remains even after controlling for differences in men’s and women’s educational attainment, material, and cognitive resour...

This article is now available free of charge: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0032321716647400 The 2008 Great Recession has had important political effects. In many countries the political consequences of the economic crisis have manifested by altering electoral behavior, party competition and party systems. These effects have been ve...

Amid the literature on members of political parties, surprisingly little has been written on the potential or actual impacts that can be made upon party strategy or policies of a rapid influx of new members. New members may have different outlooks and desires than long-standing members. Although already sympathetic to the party they are joining, ne...

This article looks at the role of economic conditions in shaping people's attitudes to the EU during the Great Recession. In contrast with previous research, findings suggest that in this particular instance support for the EU across member-states was affected by economic factors. In particular, both higher unemployment and higher interest rates we...

Despite political progress in Northern Ireland, the polity may arguably only fully stabilise when its population regards themselves as ‘Northern Irish’ rather than merely as sub-sets of British and Irish parent nations. Power-sharing and relative peace since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement may have offered the possibility of the development of a com...

This article tests contextual and individual-level explanations about the gender gap in knowledge in Latin American Countries .We suggest that the gender gap in knowledge is impacted by political and economic settings through two interrelated mechanisms: gender accessibility (i.e. the extent to which the context provides opportunities for women to...

SUMARIO. 1. Introducción. 2. Resultados, listas, alcaldes y concejales. 3. La fragmentación partidista. 4. La desproporcionalidad electoral. 5. La naciona-lización partidista. 6. La volatilidad electoral agregada. 7. Las transferencias de voto. 8. Conclusiones. 9. Referencias bibliográficas.

Previous studies of the electoral consequences of corruption in Spanish local elections have found that voters do not necessarily punish corrupt mayors. As has been pointed out in the comparative literature, the average loss of electoral support by corrupt incumbents is small and does not prevent their reelection most of the times. What remains uns...

Scholarly work has pointed out that party loyalty develops with age. However, most of the literature has focused on two-party systems and employed party identification as the dependent variable in order to investigate this phenomenon. This article sheds more light on how this process takes place, employing a measure of party utility that is availab...

This article provides a dynamic framework through which factionalism can be examined and the circumstances of individual parties compared in multi-level contexts. We discuss the interaction between factionalism and party structure by setting out a model of factional organization dependent on the tolerance of host parties to dissent and their degree...

This chapter examines the characteristics of party patronage in Spain. Appointments have been extensively used since the transition to democracy by Spanish parties, but the depth of patronage practices is nonetheless limited, mostly due to constitutional constraints and the influence of the bureaucratic corps. Thus, Spain presents a sort of dual sy...

The determinants of the distinct levels of party vertical integration and their influence on internal factions' strategies have been certainly understudied so far, and those few works attempting to do it have focused on statewide political parties. Here we claim that party organization eventually affects the behavior of internal factions, so that f...

Doctor-member candidate in the Juan March Institute and Ph.D candidate researcher in the EUI (raul.gomez@eui.eu). He holds a BA in Law (2002) and in Political Science (2004, University of Murcia), a MA in Political Science (2007, UAM) and a MA in Social Science (2008, Juan March Institute). His main research interests are electoral behaviour, polit...