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March 19, 2026
Dear Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) user community,
We are delighted to award the 2025 GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship to “Mainstream partisans’ affective response to (non) cooperation with populist radical right parties”, published in West European Politics. The winning work was authored by Luana Russo of Maastricht University in the Netherlands and Paula Schulze Brock of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Belgium. Congratulations!
The current year’s Selection Committee was comprised of: Andres Reiljan of the University of Tartu in Estonia; Laura Stephenson of Western University in Canada (Chair); and Armin Seimel of the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany. The Selection Committee described their selection of the winning work as follows:
Russo and Brock address two important and timely topics in this paper: the success of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) and the strong negative affect they generate among the rest of the electorate. The authors outline a mechanism through which party elite–level strategies can intensify or temper hostility toward PRRPs. In particular, they examine whether mainstream parties maintain a cordon sanitaire, excluding radical right parties from governing coalitions and any informal cooperation, or instead cooperate with them and allow them to enter government.
Using CSES data, they show that voters of mainstream parties are systematically more positive toward those PRRPs with which other parties cooperate. Interestingly, this effect also extends to supporters of opposition parties, highlighting the broader importance of the normalization of far-right challengers. The authors supplement these findings with LISS panel data, which allows for a longitudinal analysis that better identifies the causal direction in the relationship between mainstream party strategies and (dis)like of PRRPs. Their main finding – that participation in government increases affect toward PRRPs – is supported, although they do not replicate the effect among opposition party supporters. Moreover, the study shows that this increase in affect is not necessarily stable, as it declines once cooperation ends.
In sum, the paper makes excellent use of CSES data to demonstrate how elite-level behavior can serve as an important cue for citizens’ opinions and attitudes toward PRRPs, with potentially significant consequences for democracy. The findings contribute significantly to several highly relevant strands of political science literature, including affective polarization, negative partisanship and the normalization of the far right in Western democracies.
The CSES would like to thank the Selection Committee for their work and the many persons who nominated works for consideration. We furthermore thank the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences for their sponsorship and support of the prize since its establishment in 2011.
Russo, Luana; Schulze Brock, Paula (2025). Mainstream partisans’ affective response to (non) cooperation with populist radical right parties. West European Politics, 48(6), 1389–1427. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2024.2336436
The CSES is currently accepting nominations for the 2026 GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship with a deadline of April 22, 2026. If you are interested in submitting a scholarly work for consideration, the criteria and nomination process are detailed in the call for nominations on the CSES website. We look forward to your nominations!