Studying European Radical Left Parties since the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1990–2019): A Scoping Review

Abstract

The 2008 economic crisis brought an increasing support for some European radical left parties (RLPs) and renewed academic attention to this party family. This article retrospectively assesses the literature on RLPs by conducting a scoping review under the following research question: How have European radical left parties been studied since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989)? Using an adapted version of the PRISMA framework, it analyzes 197 articles published between 1990 and 2019 to show that, despite the growing scholarship, significant gaps persist in the literature. Important aspects of RLPs have yet to be explored (e.g. party organization, policy impact), while uneven geographic coverage has left some relevant countries and parties in the background. By providing an overview of the field, it identifies new avenues for future research on the topic and shows how scoping reviews can be a method of interest also for political scientists.

What has become of Podemos? The elites of a radical left party and their evolving dynamics of recruitment

“…This political evolution has been analysed by a growing body of literature, covering aspects as diverse as ideology and the growing appeal of the populist rhetoric within the left (Gomez, Morales, and Ramiro 2016;Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis 2019;Ramiro and Gomez 2017;Visser et al 2014), political platforms and communication (Casero-Ripollés, Sintes-Olivella, and Franch 2017; Krause 2020), membership (Gomez and Ramiro 2019;Tsakatika and Lisi 2013) and electoral dynamics (March and Rommerskirchen 2015) of RLPs. To the date however, party organization and internal party life remain some of the main shortcomings in RLP research (March and Keith 2016;Lourenço 2021;March 2017) and, in particular, almost no systematic study has been undertaken on the sociology of these parties' elites. This may be linked to a series of recent but dominant political and scientific framings of new RLPs: these new political forces have tended to be analysed as "movement parties" (Della Porta et al 2017) or as plebiscitarian machines of power (Cervera-Marzal 2021).…”

Dealing with the Facts of Life: The Management of Intra-Party Factionalism in the Iberian Radical Left Parties

“…Charalambous and Ioannou 2020; March and Keith 2016), some areas remain underexplored. One of these is their intra-party dynamics, not least in terms of managing factionalism (Lourenço 2021; March 2013). This article thus seeks to answer the following research question: how do radical left parties manage intra-party factionalism?…”