My research asks how party competition in Western Europe has changed now that the far right is an established competitor, and how what parties say and show shapes what voters perceive, prioritize, and choose. Most of it builds new measures from large-scale text and image data.
As climate change effects become increasingly salient, the need for stringent climate policies becomes more pressing. The implementation of such policies is often met with resistance from the public due to their perceived costs and distributional implications. Scholars have mostly focused on material compensations to increase public support among policy losers. This article goes beyond the existing literature by showing how what we term symbolic policies can enhance support for costlier policies. We define symbolic policies as policies sending meaningful messages to the public but having low material impacts. We argue that without changing the material costs that climate policies impose, symbolic policies increase public support by altering the message that costly policies convey. We demonstrate our argument using survey experiments and qualitative interviews conducted in France, showing that symbolic policies can significantly increase support for costly climate policies and increase perceptions of fairness, elite behavior, and government credibility.
Tallent, T., Jan, M., & Sattelmayer, L. (2026). More than Symbols: The Effect of Symbolic Policies on Climate Policy Support. American Political Science Review, 120(3), 1106–1126. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055425101408
@article{tallent2026more,
title = {{More than Symbols: The Effect of Symbolic Policies on Climate Policy Support}},
author = {Tallent, Théodore and Jan, Malo and Sattelmayer, Luis},
journal = {American Political Science Review},
year = {2026},
volume = {120},
number = {3},
pages = {1106--1126},
doi = {10.1017/S0003055425101408}
}
Understanding how parties compete by shaping agendas and promoting issue priorities is central to the study of party competition. Existing research relies heavily on manifestos, limiting analyses to election periods and offline contexts, while newer datasets lack cross-national breadth, temporal depth, and conceptual harmonization. We introduce a comparative dataset of party issue agendas derived from 4,600,000 social media posts for 219 parties across 18 European countries on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Using supervised text classification aligned with the Comparative Agendas Project, we generate monthly measures of salience over more than a decade, providing conceptually standardized, cross-platform, and cross-nationally comparable indicators of issue attention. We validate our measures through comparisons over time, across party families, major political shocks, and existing databases, and illustrate the dataset's leverage by showing how mainstream parties' immigration attention is associated with radical-right support gains. This dataset substantially expands the empirical infrastructure for studying dynamic issue competition.
Jan, M., & Sattelmayer, L. (2026). Issue Competition on Social Media: A New Comparative Dataset on Parties' Issue Agendas. West European Politics. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2026.2734520
@article{jan2026issue,
title = {{Issue Competition on Social Media: A New Comparative Dataset on Parties' Issue Agendas}},
author = {Jan, Malo and Sattelmayer, Luis},
journal = {West European Politics},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1080/01402382.2026.2734520}
}
What motivates political parties to use social media, and how does this usage correlate with outcomes such as party success? As social media platforms have become increasingly important for political communication, these questions have gained prominence in the literature on both party politics and social media politics. In this paper, we contribute to these discussions by introducing a new dataset on the social media activity of 498 political parties across 37 countries on four platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, from account creation to the end of 2023. The dataset provides rich aggregated data on posting volume and timing, enabling the study of long-term patterns in platform adoption, communicative patterns, and parties’ online activity. The paper presents the data, provides descriptive and inferential findings on how political parties engage with social media, and outlines several research avenues enabled by this dataset.
Jan, M., & Sattelmayer, L. (2025). PartySOME: A Comprehensive Dataset on Political Parties' SOcial MEdia Activity. Party Politics. https://doi.org/10.1177/13540688251388763
@article{jan2025partysome,
title = {{PartySOME: A Comprehensive Dataset on Political Parties' SOcial MEdia Activity}},
author = {Jan, Malo and Sattelmayer, Luis},
journal = {Party Politics},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1177/13540688251388763}
}
Under review
Muddle Instead of Music: Positional Dispersion and the Electoral Decline of Mainstream Parties
Luis Sattelmayer
Mainstream parties are in electoral decline. This paper argues that this is not simply the result of shifting voter preferences, but stems from internal ideological complexity undermining clear communication. The paper reconceptualizes party positions as distributions of positions expressed by internal actors. This allows to capture how internal heterogeneity affects message clarity and electoral performance. Contrary to accounts of strategic ambiguity, positional dispersion within mainstream parties is often a byproduct of internal incoherence rather than a deliberate strategy. The paper combines expert survey data with an automated analysis of Tweets by German parliamentarians, using Large Language Models to measure position dispersion over time. It shows that mainstream parties exhibit greater positional dispersion on cross-cutting issues. Their unclear communication negatively impacts their electoral support, while issue salience does not amplify this effect. This highlights how mainstream parties are ill-equipped to compete on cultural issues contributing to their overall electoral decline.
Diversity and Democracy: Muslim Minorities and the Support for Democracy in Western Europe
Jan Rovny, Elena Cossu, and Luis Sattelmayer
Can diversity and democracy coexist? This article studies the democratic support of Muslim minorities in western Europe. Departing from past studies, it argues that ostracized ethnic minorities — viewed as a cultural or political threat by significant portions of the majority — have an incentive to support democratic institutions in order to seek legal equality and civil liberties. This search for democracy is attenuated by religious particularism and cultural conservatism. Using European Social Survey (ESS Round 10) data, we pair a transparent linear regression baseline with EconML’s Double Machine Learning estimators (LinearDML and DR Learner) to flexibly adjust for observed covariates via cross-fitting and orthogonalization. The article demonstrates that more secular or liberal Muslim minorities are significantly more likely to support democracy than the majority. Religious or conservative Muslims do not differ from the majority. These findings suggest that, overall, western European Muslims are an asset for liberal democracy.
Working papers
United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Mainstream Party Agreement and Vote Switching to Competitors
Luis Sattelmayer
Competition Between Equals: From Normalization to Conditional Issue Diversification on the Radical Right
Luis Sattelmayer
Radical right parties have become enduring competitors across Western Europe, transforming what was once a competition between unequals into a competition between equals. This raises the question of how they compete once established. I argue that issue diversification is a conditional strategy in this new environment. Immigration remains the core of RRPs' appeal, and these parties concentrate on it while it carries them, but broaden their agendas when it does not. The paper bridges research on niche parties, mainstreaming, and issue competition by treating normalization and diversification as successive stages in the radical right's evolution. It draws on a longitudinal dataset of millions of social media posts from 14 Western European countries between 2012 and 2023. Posts are classified into Comparative Agendas Project categories using multilingual Transformers, which allows a fine-grained view of how parties distribute attention across issues over time. I find that RRPs remain less diversified than their competitors but broaden their agendas as they consolidate. Yet this broadening is conditional on electoral weakness, since they widen their focus when they are down in the polls and return to immigration when they recover. Descriptive evidence further suggests that the issues they add tend to arrive through exogenous shocks that offer natural opposition potential against established mainstream parties.
Looking Elsewhere: How Voters Form Perceptions of Party Positions under Ambiguity
Felix Lehmann and Luis Sattelmayer
Parties frequently shroud their policy positions in ambiguity. While this ambiguity can be electorally advantageous, it invites voter misperceptions and makes informed voting difficult. Previous research has mostly examined how voters perceive and evaluate ambiguous parties in isolation. However, parties compete in a broad information environment, which they only partially control. We thus argue that voters are not completely lost when confronted with an ambiguous party. Instead, they turn to alternative sources of information. We study how rival parties and the media shape voters’ perceptions and evaluations of ambiguous parties with a factorial survey experiment on a representative sample in Germany (N = 3,000). We find that, under party ambiguity, voters increasingly rely on rival and media cues. This affects where they locate ambiguous positions in the policy space and has important downstream consequences for voting. Voters are far less likely to vote for an ambiguous party when the information environment indicates that the party does not align with their preferences. Our findings imply that, by remaining ambiguous, parties surrender control over how voters perceive and evaluate them.
Who Listens to the Party? How Political Parties Shape Voters' Issue Priorities
Felix Lehmann, Malo Jan, and Luis Sattelmayer
Theories of issue competition assume that parties compete to influence the issue priorities of voters. Yet, empirical work testing this core assumption is scant and theoretically limited. We develop and test a novel theory of when “attention cues” work. Our central argument is that partisanship and party-issue linkages shape the ability of parties to influence voters’ issue priorities. Building on theories of partisan elite cueing, we argue that parties have the strongest influence on the priorities of their own supporters. However, when parties unexpectedly increase their attention to specific issues, they can exert a broader influence on the electorate. We test our theory with individual-level panel data from 4 European countries, matched with novel fine-grained measures of party issue attention based on social media data, classified using multilingual Transformer models. We find that parties have a substantial influence over the priorities of their partisans and, to a lesser degree, over the general electorate. Unexpected engagement appears to play a more limited role. The findings provide support for a key theoretical assumption and broaden our understanding of how elites lead the public.
Not in the Picture: Representation and Gender Gaps in Parties' Visual Communication
Malo Jan, Noémie Piolat, and Luis Sattelmayer
Research on women's political representation measures who holds office. Yet few citizens have an accurate picture of a party's parliamentary composition, and what they encounter far more directly are the images parties circulate. Party imagery is also less constrained than institutional inclusion since portraying women requires no nomination and takes no seat from anyone else. We study how parties represent women in their own visual communication, examining how often women appear (presence), in what thematic contexts (placement), and how visually foregrounded they are when they do (salience). Using computer vision on 273,000 images posted by 175 parties on Instagram across 18 countries from account creation to the end of 2023, we detect and gender-classify every face, identify party leaders using visual embeddings, and match images to the captions' policy domains. We find that women account for only 21% of all detected faces. Visual presence of women is correlated with parties' institutional gender composition but consistently remains lower. It varies across party families, and is higher under women leaders even when the leader's own face is excluded, though it reaches only a third at its highest. Where women appear, their placement is clearly gendered by policy domain, and their faces are larger and more central than men's. Parties show women prominently and centrally, but rarely. This has implications for how representation is measured and studied. In the visual communication that parties send to the public, we find a visual gender gap in which women are largely absent.
Education or Ethic? The Long-Term Impact of Protestantism on Electoral Behaviour in France
Duarte Amaro and Luis Sattelmayer
Can a centuries-old religious divide still shape the political map of a secular republic? This paper examines the long-term impact of the Protestant Reformation on electoral behaviour in France. It revisits two competing legacies of Protestantism: an education mechanism, linking literacy and human capital to progressive political preferences, and an ethic mechanism, rooted in values of individual responsibility but also, in the French context, minority protection and constitutional liberalism. We use newly assembled, commune-level data on the Protestant population in France derived from an 1839 government-mandated survey of the non-Catholic churches. To our knowledge, this is the earliest available dataset on the Calvinist population in France at this level of granularity. This is combined with historical and contemporary data, including election results. Our findings show that the historical size of the Protestant population is negatively associated with support for the Radical Right, even controlling for education. This paper connects research on human capital and the Radical Right with recent work on how minority status can foster liberal commitments while also contributing to broader debates on the persistence of historical institutions and religious legacies.
Picking Up the Cordon Sanitaire at the Ballot Box: The Vote Against the Far Right in the 2024 French Legislative Elections
Malo Jan and Luis Sattelmayer
The cordon sanitaire is traditionally understood as an elite-level strategy to isolate the far-right. Its effectiveness at the ballot box, however, depends on whether voters across the ideological spectrum are willing to vote against the far-right, even if this requires supporting non-preferred candidates. This article examines the electoral dimension of the cordon sanitaire during the 2024 French legislative snap elections, held under a two-round runoff system. Using post-electoral survey data, we analyze how voters responded when their preferred candidate was eliminated in the first round, facing the choice of supporting the far-right, backing another candidate, or abstaining/casting a blank or invalid ballot. The results show that left-wing voters consistently supported ideologically distant candidates to block the RN, whereas centrist and right-wing voters often abstained or chose invalid ballots rather than support the left, and a non-negligible share even defected to the far-right. The presence of the radical-left party LFI further weakened the cordon sanitaire, as centrist elites promoted a double cordon sanitaire that extended the logic of exclusion to the radical left and effectively released centrist and moderate voters from the obligation to vote strategically against the far-right. Overall, the findings reveal that the cordon sanitaire is both fragile and asymmetrically enforced across the ideological spectrum.