Despite abundant copper deposits, the deep history of copper mining in Iberia has not been as extensively studied as in other European ore-rich areas. Here, the authors present new radiocarbon dates that demonstrate Late Bronze Age copper mining at Las Minillas, near Granja de Torrehermosa (southern Spain). Extensive mining infrastructure and abundant stone tools further identify Las Minillas as one of the largest Late Bronze Age copper-mining complex securely dated in Spain. The authors argue for a re-evaluation of links between southern Iberia and other European copper-producing and consuming regions, highlighting its potential as a major Late Bronze Age copper-producing hub.

Ceramic amphorae provide clues to the movement of foodstuffs within the Roman Empire and can therefore act as a useful proxy for economic productivity. Here, the authors present the results of a large-scale quantitative analysis of amphora frequency data from 254 excavations conducted across the Western Roman provinces. By examining the distribution of 20 of the most common amphora types, which primarily served as olive-oil, garum and wine containers, they assess economic trends and temporal shifts in supply and consumption previously identified through other economic proxies, emphasising the role of state supply, regionalisation and the potential use of alternative containers.

Water is not kind to iron, as demonstrated by the ‘rusty treasure’ uncovered at Deinham in Upper Austria, now revealed as the largest assemblage of bipyramidal iron bars yet found in Europe. While similar bars are generally attributed to the Early Iron Age (eighth–fifth centuries BC), the authors here argue that the Deinham bars are a new variant, radiocarbon dated to the Late Iron Age (fourth–first centuries BC). Discovered in a silted-up branch of the Danube River, the bars were likely lost in a shipwreck, permitting speculation as to the purpose and exchange value of this weighty cargo.

Using original survey data from seven Western European countries, this article investigates which social conflicts populist radical right parties (PRRPs) represent. Methodologically, it innovates by measuring individuals’ positions within conflicts combined with the importance they attach to them, capturing both attitudinal alignment and salience. The analysis tests whether traditional cleavages or new conflicts related to globalisation and cultural value change better explain PRRP voting. Findings show that PRRPs predominantly represent new conflicts – individuals opposing cosmopolitanism, LGBTQ+ rights and environmental sustainability – rather than class or territorial divides. While socio-structural traits such as being a production worker or rural resident predict PRRP voting, supporting these groups does not. This decoupling of structure and conflict positions suggests working-class and rural voters are motivated more by culturally reframed grievances than by class- or place-based solidarities. These results highlight the weak link between classic cleavages and PRRP voting, underscoring the centrality of cultural demarcation in today’s political conflict.

In parliamentary democracies, coalition government formation often takes a certain amount of time, during which the outgoing incumbent government remains in office as the “caretaker” until the new government can be formed. While the literature has reached a consensus that caretaker governments retain the policy status quo, empirical evidence remains limited. This article uses original data on government bills from 238 cabinets in 11 Western European countries as descriptive evidence to challenge this long-standing assumption. I propose a timeframe-based, political definition of the caretaking period within the coalition lifecycle and discuss the normative issues with its presence. The over-generalization of the prevalent policy status quo assumption raises critical issues concerning practical caretaking rules, as well as coalition governance and bargaining.

Younger generations’ attitudes and behavior increasingly diverge from those of older individuals. To better understand these political differences, it is relevant to analyze whether younger citizens also disagree about “what matters” in politics. However, this assumption of younger voters’ different salience perceptions has rarely been tested for a large range of issues. Thus, this paper argues that younger and older citizens differ in issue salience and specifically suggests that younger generations perceive cultural issues as more salient. To test this, I use novel survey data collected in Germany (N = 2,509) and Switzerland (N = 2,494) and apply rating tasks and a pairwise choice experiment, looking at young and older respondents’ salience regarding six political issue areas and a selection of 42 political issues derived from widely used voting advice applications in the respective countries. The results show that issues related to gender equality and certain age-related socioeconomic policies, such as rent prices, are more salient for younger than older respondents, whereas immigration is more important for older generations. This points to both value change and self-interest that divides salience assessments. Overall, these findings can help understand diverging political perceptions and the resulting electoral differences between younger and older generations.

The polymetallic origins and non-linear development of metallurgy have only relatively recently attracted more scholarly attention. Within this framework, the identification of three lead-smelting slag nodules in early second-millennium BC contexts at Minferri (Catalonia, Spain) provides what is currently the earliest direct evidence of lead smelting in Iberia. These materials are linked to previous indirect evidence of lead smelting in the area from the early third millennium BC. Despite the persistence of lead smelting across the Pyrenees in southern France, it was abandoned in north-east Iberia after the mid-second millennium BC, highlighting divergent sociotechnological pathways even in areas of close cultural contact.

Although thousands of prehistoric standing stones have been recorded across Iberia, the lack of associated detailed contextual data allows ongoing debate about their possible functions. Following the chance discovery of a ‘diademated’ stela in 2018, excavations at Las Capellanías (Cañaveral de León, Huelva), in south-west Spain, led to the discovery of two more stelae and facilitated the compilation of vital contextual information. Here, the authors explore the association between these stelae, Bronze and Iron Age burials and an ancient routeway, revealing reuse, temporal persistence, geographical connectivity and cultural hybridisation in the widening networks of prehistoric Iberia.

Parties in all European countries at least partially rely on private donations to finance their activities, but gender gaps in donations remain underexplored. Investigating gaps in donation frequencies and amounts, as well as which parties are likely to receive donations from women, is crucial, as parties represent the interests of donors more than the interests of non-donors, opening an avenue of potential underrepresentation of women’s interests. This study addresses this gap, leveraging data from party finance reports from Italy, the UK, and Finland over time to investigate gender gaps in donation amounts, frequencies, and recipient parties. The results highlight that while gender gaps in donation frequency exist, these differences in how often women and men donate to parties do not directly translate into how much money they donate. Rather, there is large variation in donation amounts over time and across countries. Particularly in Finland, a highly gender-equal country, differences in donation amounts are marginal. Finally, the expectation that green and left parties are most likely to receive donations from women does not hold across all cases – while in all three countries green parties are most likely to receive donations from women, right-wing parties are not the least likely to receive donations from women in Finland and Italy.

While modern scholarship defines Etruscan Veii as a symbol of success, it interprets its later transformation into a small Roman town as a failure. Yet both written and archaeological records reveal that Veii’s Roman community invested in urban life, albeit on a smaller scale. This article argues that such developments are better understood through the lens of resilience than through binary categories of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. It invites broader reconsideration of how archaeologists apply these labels—often reflecting modern biases more than past realities—when studying historical settlements.

The Covid-19 pandemic widened public awareness of the close links between socioeconomic status and resilience in the face of infection, yet this interplay was already well established in archaeological discourse. Here, the authors combine osteoarchaeological, stable isotope and pathogenomic analyses with archival research to explore the formation of multiple, or ‘plural’, burials at an early hospital in Basel, Switzerland. Identification of a stamped clay pipe, Yersinia pestis DNA and a high proportion of subadults link the burials to an outbreak of plague in 1665–1670, while physiological stress, dietary and pathological insights contribute to our understanding of prior experiences affecting differential mortality.

The WEAR project is developing integrative methods to analyse and predict use-related shape transformation of Neolithic stone tools from Central Europe through experimental archaeology and computational modelling.

Debates concerning the roles of sensory perceptions and responses in past societies are increasingly gaining traction in the archaeological discipline, but European medieval archaeology has only recently begun to engage with them. Moving beyond previous approaches in medieval studies that focused on the five physical senses, this article investigates material culture through the conceptual lens of sensory regimes. Drawing on case studies from the sixth to seventeenth centuries and examining diverse archaeological evidence—including artefacts, burial practices and urban environments—the author argues that material culture can facilitate or oppose social, political and religious regimes through sensory practices.

The history of games is obscured by our inability to recognise indicators of play in the archaeological record. Lines incised on a piece of rounded limestone found at the Roman site of Coriovallum in Heerlen, The Netherlands, evoke a board game yet do not reflect the grid of any game known today. Here, the results of use-wear analysis are used to inform artificial intelligence-driven simulations based on permutations of rules from historic Northern European games. Disproportionate wear along specific lines favours the rules of blocking games, potentially extending the time depth and regional use of this game type.

Despite a growing literature on niche parties, little is known about whether and how these parties are responsive to policy competition. Drawing upon data on regionalist parties’ programmatic strategies across Western Europe from 1971 to 2009, I find that these niche parties are more ideologically flexible than previously posited when facing governmental policy appeasement. While they do not shift to a more extreme issue position following increases in a region's decentralization level, regionalist parties do broaden their issue agenda. Issue diversification, however, is limited to those parties whose goals are being met; dissatisfied secessionist parties do not expand their issue emphases after decentralization reforms short of independence. Supported by emerging evidence of similar agenda diversification among appeased green and radical right parties, these analyses further our understanding of niche parties as strategic actors and offer new explanations for variation in the effectiveness of mainstream party tactics towards them.

When and why do parliamentary majorities in Europe suppress parliamentary minority rights? This article argues that such reforms are driven by substantive policy conflict in interaction with existing minority rights. Government parties curb minority rights if they fear minority obstruction due to increased policy conflict and a minority‐friendly institutional status quo. Empirical support is found for this claim using comparative data on all reforms in 13 Western European parliaments since 1945. A curbing of minority rights is significantly more likely under conditions of heightened policy conflict and these effects are stronger the more the institutional status quo favours opposition parties. Contrary to frequent claims of consensual rule changes from single‐country studies in Europe, these findings demonstrate the importance of competitive strategies in explaining institutional reform in European parliaments. The conditional impact of the status quo provides interesting theoretical links to historical institutionalist arguments on path dependence.

Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.

Veto player theory generates predictions about governments’ capacity for policy change. Due to the difficulty of identifying significant laws needed to change the policy status quo, evidence about governments’ ability to change policy has been mostly provided for a limited number of reforms and single‐country studies. To evaluate the predictive power of veto player theory for policy making across time, policy areas and countries, a dataset was gathered that incorporates about 5,600 important government reform measures in the areas of social, labour, economic and taxation policy undertaken in 13 Western European countries from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐2000s. Veto player theory is applied in a combined model with other central theoretical expectations on policy change derived from political economy (crisis‐driven policy change) and partisan theory (ideology‐driven policy change). Robust support is found that governments introduce more reform measures when economic conditions are poor and when the government is positioned further away from the policy status quo. No empirical support is found for predictions of veto player theory in its pure form, where no differentiation between government types is made. However, the findings provide support for the veto player theory in the special case of minimal winning cabinets, where the support of all government parties is sufficient (in contrast to minority cabinets) and necessary (in contrast to oversized cabinets) for policy change. In particular, it is found that in minimal winning cabinets the ideological distance between the extreme government parties significantly decreases the government's ability to introduce reforms. These findings improve our understanding of reform making in parliamentary democracies and highlight important issues and open questions for future applications and tests of the veto player theory.

Earlier research has shown a strong connection between anti‐immigration attitudes and political trust in Western Europe. In this research note, we examine if nativists’ low levels of specific political support translate into a more general scepticism about democracy as a system of government. Using comparative data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the European Values Study (EVS), we investigate the relationship between nativist attitudes and several indicators of principled, or diffuse, support for democracy. The findings testify to a nativist divide in diffuse political support. We find a systematic and significant difference in support for democracy between strong nativists and other citizens. West European nativists are less likely than other citizens to view their country as democratic. They also tend to perceive living in a democracy as less important than people with a more positive outlook on immigrants. Moreover, and maybe more worrying, nativists express lower levels support for democracy in relation to non‐democratic regime alternatives, that is, they are less likely to be “principled” democrats. The found negative associations remain also after controlling for nativists’ levels of specific support, which indicates that there may be a more fundamental opposition between nativism and diffuse support for democracy than previously acknowledged. We believe that these findings have important implications for research trying to understand challenges to liberal democracy in a time when nativist parties have been successful in politicizing immigration and continue to score electoral victories all over Europe.

Environmental issues are an important aspect of party competition and voters’ political preferences. Yet political behaviour research often considers environmental attitudes as a component of a broader ‘second-dimension’ and either subsumes it into this or omits it. Using data from the fifth wave of the European Values Study, we demonstrate through factor analysis that environmentalism loads as a separate dimension across Western Europe, that environmentalism has somewhat different social predictors and that it has important associations with party preference that differ from those of other second dimension issues. Our findings have crucial implications. Firstly, not accounting for environmentalism in studies of political behaviour misses an important part of the picture. Secondly, subsuming environmentalism into a broader ‘cultural’ dimension may lead to incomplete conclusions about both social predictors and the electoral consequences of political attitudes and values. Thus, allowing for a separate environmental dimension opens up novel perspectives on political representation in Western democracies.