European Journal of Political Research最新文献

Populist ideology centres around a supposed clash between the ‘honest and upright people’ and the ‘evil and corrupted elite’. Yet, which groups are perceived to constitute ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ likely varies across parties. This research note investigates which factors explain how inclusive or exclusive the conceptions of these two core groups are. Why do some parties define the people in cultural terms, whereas others rely on economic considerations? And why do some parties consider CEOs as elites, whilst others consider academics as elites? We argue that parties’ degree of populism in combination with their ideological orientation allow us to understand these dynamics. In order to investigate these questions systematically, a new wave of the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey (POPPA) was collected in 2023. Covering 312 political parties in 31 European countries in 2023, a novel module allows us to understand how parties define ‘the people’ and ‘elites’. We find that parties' populism and host ideology are important drivers of their people/elite conceptions. The higher a party's level of populism the more exclusionary its conception of the people is. Nativism is, moreover, associated with the exclusion of societal groups on cultural grounds, while left-wing economic ideology drives the exclusion of societal groups on economic grounds. With respect to elites, populism is the most important determinant for parties' conceptions of the elite. By contrast, party ideology plays a subordinate role in parties' elite conceptions. This investigation has important implications for our understanding of populist parties, what the nature of their populist appeal is, and how they seek to mobilize in the political arena.

Can communicative interventions by the government influence political trust and increase public compliance during crises? This study examines the impact of a televised speech by German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using an unexpected-events-during-survey-design, we find that the speech led to a 7-percentage point increase in trust in the federal government and up to a 25-percentage point decrease in citizens' mobility. We also observe demographic variation in susceptibility to speech. We explore the underlying mechanisms by comparing Merkel's speech with similar televised addresses by Mark Rutte and Boris Johnson, where we observe no comparable effects on attitudes. We suggest that specific content, such as an emphasis on solidarity and positive sentiment, may have played a role in mobilizing public support. Our findings indicate that effective leader communication can be a powerful tool for sustaining public support and ensuring compliance with crisis measures.

Do border closures affect political attitudes? While a large body of research has discussed the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on nationalism and outgroup hostility, much less is known about how one of the main policy responses to stop the virus, closing the national borders, has impacted political attitudes. We argue that the sudden and unprecedented closures of national borders in the COVID-19 crisis decreased EU support and increased hostility towards immigrants. These closures signalled that people from across the border are a threat to public health and showed little trust in European governance. We have collected fine-grained regional data on COVID-19-related border closures in Germany that we matched with survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. We rely on a difference-in-differences design to estimate the causal effect of closed borders on European identity and outgroup hostility. While we find that border closures decrease EU support and increase hostility towards immigrants, these effects fade away relatively quickly. Hence, our study suggests that border closures have only limited impact on political attitudes. Our findings have important implications for the growing literature on border politics in the EU and elsewhere.

Measuring affective polarization, defined as the liking for one's political ingroup and the dislike for political outgroups, poses methodological challenges in multiparty systems: evaluations of seven, 13 or even more parties in a survey are costly, time-consuming and demanding. Some studies therefore use subsets of parties to create brief affective polarization measures. However, it is unclear how this affects the construct and predictive validity of these brief measures, potentially causing problematic inferences. Across 39 countries ($��N�=�66�,�880�$), we demonstrate that brief measures that include ratings of only three to five parties can maintain acceptable validity, as illustrated by strong correlations with full measures and consistent associations with political correlates. The construct and predictive validity of brief measures are best when selecting a set of large, ideologically diverse parties. We provide specific recommendations for the effective measurement of affective polarization in different multiparty systems.

Online public consultations are an instrument frequently used by governments to invite citizens and interest organisations to participate in the formulation of public policies. A key feature of the consultation design is the prerogative of policymakers to send formal invitations to consultations with stakeholders. The extent to which these invitations shape the patterns of stakeholder participation in online consultations is a relevant theoretical and empirical research puzzle that remains largely overlooked in the literature on participatory governance and bureaucratic policymaking. Our study addresses this gap in research and asks: Do government invitations to consultations increase the levels and diversity of stakeholder participation in online public consultations? We explain when and why the number of government invitations is systematically associated with higher levels of participation and diversity of stakeholder interests and how this systematic co-variation is conditional upon the policy act type on which the government consults. We test our argument on a new dataset containing information about 251,153 instances of stakeholder participation in 4062 online public consultations organised by the Norwegian government across all policy areas during 2009–2023. We find that a higher number of government invitations is systematically associated with significantly higher stakeholder participation, higher diversity of interests represented and a higher likelihood of and more frequent citizen participation. This positive association is, however, moderate in size and is also conditional upon policy act type. Invitations increase participation and stakeholder diversity more in consultations on legislative acts and government reports relative to all other acts. These are acts on which the demand for stakeholder participation successfully meets stakeholders’ interest in supplying it. Our study underscores the importance of government invitations as a relevant feature of consultation design that shapes patterns of participation in public consultations while accounting for the impact of the policy context in which consultations are organised.

Recent studies suggest that citizens are unlikely to trade off free elections for other desirable outcomes, such as economic growth. However, while free elections are central to democracies, today democracy is not often undermined by abolishing elections. Our study shifts the focus to citizens' willingness to trade off the more granular democratic principles frequently eroded in backsliding processes – such as judicial independence, media freedom or horizontal accountability – for higher incomes. Through a seven-country conjoint experiment, we analyse how citizens prioritize among these principles and estimate their ‘willingness to pay’ – or the additional income needed to persuade citizens to give these principles up. We find that while citizens do not relinquish free elections easily, they are more open to forgo liberal principles undermined in backsliding processes, especially when these principles are eroded gradually, one at a time. These findings help explain why democratic backsliding may be often tolerated by citizens.

Voting advice applications (VAAs) have proliferated in recent years. However, most VAAs only match their users with parties, at least in part because creating a VAA matching voters to individual candidates tends to be more labour-intensive. This could be an important missed opportunity. Candidates may deviate from the party line, but voters are often unaware of the policy platforms of individual candidates and therefore rarely hold them accountable for their issue positions in candidate-based elections. VAAs providing information on issue congruence with individual candidates could help to rectify this. We evaluate the potential of candidate-level VAAs by integrating a randomized experiment into a real-world VAA whereby users were exposed either to candidate-level VAA advice or to more standard party-level VAA advice. Our results suggest that candidate-level VAAs are worth the extra effort: they help voters distinguish candidates from parties and cast votes that are more in line with their policy preferences.

Do attacks against politicians exacerbate the political underrepresentation of marginalized groups? Existing research suggests that candidates and officeholders from underrepresented groups are more likely to become targets of political violence, but little is known about the consequences of indirect exposure to political violence for descriptive representation and political ambition. Focusing on the case of women in politics, we study how the prevalence of political violence affects both the descriptive representation and the political ambition of women in Germany – Europe's largest democracy. Combining an analysis of observational data measuring crimes against politicians with evidence from original and pre-registered survey experiments, we first demonstrate that attacks on political elites are not associated with fewer female candidates on party lists for local elections. Examining political ambitions and underlying microfoundations with different samples of respondents varying in their likelihood of considering political candidacy, we provide survey-experimental evidence that information about the prevalence of political crime does not reduce willingness to run for office or engage in politics among female respondents with high political interest but may do so among those with low political interest. Taken together, this study highlights the resilience of underrepresented groups in the face of increasing political violence. However, we also show that political violence may create a pipeline problem if it deters the wider population of women from even considering to run for office.

Though many empirical analyses on affective polarization demonstrate that women hold a higher level of affective polarization than men in industrialized democracies, a theoretical explanation for the gender difference is hardly discussed in the literature. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (Module 3) and a causal mediation analysis model, we find that women's higher level of affective polarization in Western Europe is substantially and significantly explained by their stronger disapproval of populist radical right-wing parties as well as their greater concern for issues around gender and the natural environment. On the one hand, the results confirm that the mediation role of issue politics found in the United States is also observed in Western Europe. On the other hand, the results imply that affective polarization in Western Europe is connected with the politics of the populist radical right.

A well-established body of research has highlighted the importance of geographic representation in party-centred political systems. In party-centred systems, geographic ties are commonly expressed through non-binding legislative instruments such as parliamentary questions. While this literature has advanced our understanding of representation in parliamentary systems, there are notable gaps in the existing research. Most importantly, previous studies have almost exclusively analysed geographic representation in national politics, where legislators represent comparatively large electoral districts. In contrast, this study focuses on patterns of geographic representation at the local level to understand whether and how specific neighbourhoods are represented in local politics. By studying parliamentary questions in 12 German city councils, we assess party efforts to represent their electoral strongholds. Methodologically, we go beyond existing research on geographic representation by building comprehensive dictionaries to assess geographic representation based on geolocated data from Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. The results show that geographic representation is a common feature of local politics and that parties tend to focus on areas where they are electorally strong, particularly when they are incentivized to do so by the electoral system and when their electorate is highly localized.