Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution

Talking Europe: The UCL European Institute podcast

Allan Sikk, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, and Philipp Köker, Lecturer Political Science at Leibniz University Hannover join ‘Talking Europe’ to discuss their new book on political parties, how they change, and what this has to do with the people who make them up. Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution is published with Oxford University Press, and available in hard cover, e-book and audiobook. In conversation with Claudia Sternberg of the UCL European Institute, Allan and Philipp discuss why party systems have changed so radically across Europe, what we can learn from looking at parties in Central and Eastern Europe, and in what ways their analysis of 200,000 electoral candidates from over 60 elections across nine CEE democracies helps us to understand party change more broadly, including candidate turnover, party fission and fusion, programmatic change, and party leadership change.