European Journal of Political Research最新文献

Previous scholarship suggests that rising inequality in democracies suppresses trust in institutions. However, the mechanism behind this has not clearly been identified. This paper investigates the proposition that income inequality leads to increased democratic distrust by depressing perceptions of external efficacy. Based on time-series cross-sectional survey data from the European Social Survey, we find that changes in income inequality have a negative effect on changes in political trust and external efficacy. Causal mediation analysis confirms that inequality affects trust through lower efficacy. Further analyses show that this efficacy-based mechanism does not depend on political orientation. As a direct effect remains among left-wing respondents, our empirical results indicate that inequality affects trust via both a mechanism of substantive output evaluation and a process-based evaluation that measures of external efficacy can capture. These findings highlight the empirical and theoretical relevance of this so far neglected mechanism and provide a potential solution for the puzzle that inequality depresses trust also among those for whom inequality is not politically salient.

Despite the huge amount of studies on cleavages, scholars have never elaborated a dynamic model to conceptualize and measure the stages of electoral development of the class cleavage and, specifically, the stage corresponding to its full electoral structuring. To fill this gap, by combining some key electoral properties of the class cleavage, I build a model that returns, for each country in each election, the current stage of electoral development of the class cleavage. I test this model in 20 Western European countries from the late 19th century to 2020. Results show that an electorally structured class cleavage has characterized most of Western Europe's electoral history. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not merely a product of socio-structural factors that have been experiencing an irreversible decline. Conversely, its demise or resilience is a matter of the national political context, as it mostly depends upon specific party system characteristics.

Political parties in office generally incur a cost of ruling among the electorate. This article considers the broader implications of this phenomenon for democratic governance. We argue that the electoral cost a party incurs in office entails that its individual legislators become more inclined to vote against the party line as a way to distance themselves from the deteriorating party brand. We test and support several observable implications of this argument using time series data including all members of parliament in the British parliament between 1992 and 2015 coupled with monthly opinion poll data. The well-established electoral cost of ruling thus translates into a legislative cost of ruling by reducing incumbent party legislators’ loyalty to the party line. We discuss how the legislative cost of ruling complicates effective governance but may also strengthen democratic accountability by reducing legislative capacity of governing parties that have lost their electoral mandate.

Political parties are typically seen as conservative institutions which rarely change. Despite this common perception, parties do change, and on occasion, transform themselves by changing features such as the party name and logo, or their policy program. How can we conceptualize these kinds of changes, and what are the electoral consequences for parties which change in these ways? In this paper, I argue that feature changes and policy changes are instances of party rebranding, or situations where a party attempts to overhaul its entire image. I then test the electoral consequences of feature and policy rebrands on a dataset of 239 political parties from 1945 to 2019. The results indicate that feature rebrands increase party vote share for the election after the rebrand, while policy rebrands have no effect. These findings have implications for our understanding of parties themselves and the kinds of party signals that voters respond to.

Are political attitudes a stable feature of individuals or a rational response to changing circumstances and contexts? This question has long been a feature of political science and underpins our theories of how political attitudes are formed and what their consequences might be. In this paper, we explore this perennial question with a focus on the case of political trust, a fundamental indicator of democratic legitimacy and a long-standing topic of debate. Theoretically, we devise a framework that highlights how different theories of political trust assume different levels of stability or volatility and the implications that this has for those theories and their normative consequences. Empirically, we study within-individual stability of political trust using six panel studies that cover five countries between 1965 and 2020. Our results consistently point to trust being stable in the long term, with potential for short-term volatility in response to changing political contexts, and for substantial changes between people's formative years and their adulthood. Even over a period of 19 years, most people's responses to trust questions are remarkably similar between surveys and significant life events such as unemployment and going to University do not significantly influence trust. Changes in the political environment, like incumbent government turnover, have larger effects but these appear to return to equilibrium in a few years. The exception to this general finding is individuals who are first surveyed when they are under the age of 18, who appear much more likely to change their trust levels in subsequent waves. Overall, our results complement previous research on attitude stability, indicating that trust is approximately as stable as other attitudes, such as towards immigration and redistribution. These findings have fundamental implications for our understanding of the nature of political trust and attitude formation more broadly.

When member states of the European Union face serious international threats, does this serve as a catalyst or obstacle for European integration in the security and defence domain? To gain purchase on this question, this paper examines public opinion from a common instrument fielded in 24 EU member states (and the United Kingdom) with a total sample size of more than 40,000 respondents. We argue that theoretical accounts of perceived threat produce rival hypotheses. Threats might have either uniform or differential effects on different groups of citizens and could lead to either convergence or divergence of public opinion. We show that perceptions of foreign threats are associated with more favourable views on integration in the security and defence domain. Importantly, this association is as strong among Eurosceptics as among Europhiles. The findings presented here are consistent with the view that functional pressures may temporarily convince Eurosceptics to accept integration in the foreign and security domain.

Does austerity influence incumbent support? Existing studies struggle with conceptualizing the evolution of austerity's impact over time, estimating a causal effect, and analysing the reactions of different voters. This study theorizes that the effect of austerity on electoral preferences is not immediate, but gradual, as voters find out about the measures' consequences via the media. It leverages a survey in the field at the time of the austerity announcement in Romania in 2010, additional survey data collected immediately after this event and comprehensive daily media coverage to show that austerity measures do not have an immediate impact on incumbent support, anticipated turnout and expressing a vote preference. Instead, there is a gradual effect that is associated with increased media attention to budgetary cuts. This natural experiment allows the estimation of the immediate causal effect of austerity on electoral intentions. Difference-in-differences (DID) models show that the announcement triggered a massive loss of support for the incumbent among those who had voted for the party in power only a few months before. Austerity also led to the demobilization of the governing party's supporters. There is no evidence that those most directly affected by the spending cuts are more likely to punish the incumbent party.

Recent political changes in established democracies have led to a new cleavage, often described as a juxtaposition of ‘winners’ and ‘losers of globalization’. Despite a growing interest in subjective group membership and identity, previous research has not studied whether individuals actually categorize themselves as globalization winners or losers and what effect this has. Based on survey data from Germany, we report evidence of a division between self-categorized globalization winners and losers that is partially but not completely rooted in social structure and associated with attitudes towards globalization-related issues and party choices. We thereby confirm many of the assumptions from prior research – such as that (self-categorized) losers of globalization tend to hold lower levels of education and lean towards the radical right. At the same time, the self-categorizations are not merely transmission belts of socio-structural effects but seem to be politically consequential in their own right. We conclude that the categories of globalization winners and losers have the potential to form part of the identity component of the globalization cleavage and are important for understanding how political entrepreneurs appeal to voters on their side of the new divide.

Global warming is not only a serious threat for humanity but increasingly structures political competition in Western Europe. The rise of green (niche) parties and public awareness of the issue pressure mainstream parties to emphasise climate protection. Yet, while scholars reflect on the factors influencing mainstream parties’ environmental agendas, we know little about what triggers climate standpoints and about the role public opinion plays in this process. This study measures the salience of climate protection in 292 election manifestos of mainstream parties in 10 Western European countries since the 1990s and estimates the impact of different factors on their climate agenda using OLS regressions. The findings suggest that green parties are not the driving factor, and that it is the public salience of environmental issues and pressure from the Fridays for Future movement influencing mainstream parties’ agendas. Accordingly, mainstream parties seem to be responsive to public opinion pressure adopting climate protection stances. The study further proposes a different measure of niche party success than that used in previous studies.

A large number of young adults still live with their parents because they have difficulties entering the job market, because of low wages, or the cost of housing. Despite much research in social science on the consequences of this salient social trend, we lack an understanding of its implications for public opinion. This research note fills this gap by investigating whether such living arrangements between working age children and their parents is correlated with household members' political stances. Specifically, I expect that the anxiety induced by seeing their children having difficulties to become independent will lead parents to hold more negatives political stances, while the same outcome is expected from working age children who failed to fly the nest compared to their independent peers. Using data from the European Social Survey in 32 countries covering the period between 2002 and 2016, I show that, for both parents and young adults, cohabitation is associated with negative evaluations of the national economy and of the government's performance. Studies that do not take into account the situation of other household members might miss an important part of the opinion formation puzzle.