Our article "Young radicals, moderates and aligned: Ideological congruence and incongruence in party youth wings" was published in European Journal of Political Research a few days ago. [A bit of a thread 🧵 about this article's long journey & findings] ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... - ThreadSky

duncanmcdonnell.bsky.social • 17 days ago

Our article "Young radicals, moderates and aligned: Ideological congruence and incongruence in party youth wings" was published in European Journal of Political Research a few days ago.

[A bit of a thread 🧵 about this article's long journey & findings]

https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1475-6765.70000

Comments

duncanmcdonnell.bsky.social•17 days ago

1) The alignment between parties & their grassroots members has been a topic for political science going back to Ostrogorski, Duverger, May, etc.

Grassroots are seen as more radical. And young grassroots (youth wings) especially so.

But is that the case? And what drives alignment/non-alignment?

duncanmcdonnell.bsky.social•17 days ago

2) To investigate, we went beyond previous work that looked at the grassroots in terms of congruent/incongruent. Instead, we created a typology of 'radicals', 'moderates', and 'aligned'.

Depending on whether you are on the left or right, this works as follows:

duncanmcdonnell.bsky.social•17 days ago

3) We then applied to this our data from the YOUMEM project, which is the first cross-national survey of party youth wing members.

Overall, the distribution of radicals, moderates, and aligned among 12 centre-left & centre-right youth wing memberships in 6 countries (🇦🇺 🇦🇹 🇩🇪 🇮🇹 🇪🇸 🇸🇪) looks like this:

duncanmcdonnell.bsky.social•17 days ago

4) As the figure above indicates, radicals are the largest group in most youth wings. But they are especially characteristic of the centre-left.

We also find radicals tend to have been in the youth wing for longer than aligned members, but are under-represented among politically ambitious members.

duncanmcdonnell.bsky.social•17 days ago

5) Contrary to our expectations, however, recent national election successes do not influence self-perceptions of ideological congruence and incongruence (we thought that a general election win would make members align more, but they don't).

duncanmcdonnell.bsky.social•17 days ago

6) In addition to providing a typology for future research on intra-party cohesion, our study sheds light on opinion structures within political party grassroots and what shapes these.

We hope it'll spur on further studies (e.g. by looking at which issues in different parties drive congruence).

shaunratcliff.bsky.social•17 days ago

Oh great, something else to add to my reading list!

(Joking, congrats, looks interesting!)

duncanmcdonnell.bsky.social•17 days ago

Thanks Shaun!

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply