European Journal of Political Research最新文献

Social media platforms offer MPs the opportunity to directly signal attention to their local voters in the constituency. And while previous research has linked the strategic use of such local cues in social media posts to electoral motives, we know very little about their effectiveness. In this study, we trace the impact of local cues in social media posts in three steps. First, we revisit the claim that MPs are electorally motivated in their use of local cues by analysing 1,316,458 Tweets by Swiss and German national MPs (2009–2019). Second, we use survey experiment data (N = 16,597) to gauge whether voters reward local cues in social media posts with a higher likelihood of voting for a politician. Lastly, we investigate whether MPs' use of explicit local cues in Tweets leads them to obtain more preference votes in Swiss National Council elections (2011–2019). The overall image that emerges from these results is that while politicians use local cues particularly when campaigning, they are not directly electorally rewarded: both the results based on experimental and observational data do not provide evidence for the idea that adding local cues to social media posts comes with an electoral advantage.

This study examines the ideological alignment of beliefs within opposing partisan camps in Europe. Integrating multiple types of research, I hypothesize that partisans on the ideological left exhibit greater alignment in their beliefs compared to those on the right – an asymmetry that extends across various issues. I argue that on the scale of ideological contention, it matters if partisans on one ideological pole are more aligned in beliefs than those on the other. Only the less ideological of opposing camps determines the extent of mutual disagreement. Utilizing conventional methods and innovative belief network modelling, I analyse survey data from the fourth and eighth waves of the European Social Survey (2008, 2016). To test the hypothesis, I match partisans with the data on their party's ideology, covering partisans from 131 parties in 15 European countries to test this hypothesis. My findings reveal that, both at the European level and within national contexts, there is a broad and substantive asymmetry between the right and the left across ideological dimensions and issues. However, the study also uncovers the limits of this asymmetry, highlighting a significant shift in ideological alignment on sociocultural issues on the right, indicating the emergence of a deeper, broader ideological conflict in that dimension. Furthermore, my analysis demonstrates the marginal influence of strategies like position blurring and programmatic nicheness. These insights shed light on the nature of partisan contention in Europe and how it disproportionately depends on ideological alignment on the right.

Research on representation consistently shows that high-income voters see more of their preferred policies implemented than less affluent citizens. However, the mechanisms behind this unequal policy representation remain unclear. This paper examines how voter behaviour, particularly the alignment between vote choices and policy outcomes, contributes to this disparity. Using a large dataset that spans close to 300,000 respondents across 32 European countries and 197 election periods, we analyse public policy preferences, vote choices and policy implementation. We find that high-income voters have higher levels of policy congruence, are more likely to vote, vote more for parties whose positions match their own and are more likely to see their preferred parties in government. Nevertheless, these factors still do not explain the observed inequality in opinion–policy congruence. Hence, unequal representation cannot be attributed to electoral mechanisms. This result has important implications for our understanding of (unequal) policy representation and electoral accountability.

When do politicians debate each other in parliament, and when do they prefer to avoid discourse? While existing research has shown MPs to unilaterally leverage the dialogical nature of legislative debates to their advantage, the circumstances facilitating actual discursive interaction have so far received less attention. We introduce a new framework to study the emergence of discourse in political debates. Applying this framework, we expect ideological differences and government–opposition dynamics to shape politicians' choices about seeking or avoiding discourse. To test these hypotheses, we draw on an original dataset of all 14,595 attempted and successful interventions (Zwischenfragen) – extraordinary, voluntary discursive exchanges between speakers and MPs in the audience – in the German Bundestag (1990–2020), extracted using an annotation pipeline developed specifically for this study. We find that MPs separated by diverging preferences seek discourse with one another more often than their ideologically aligned counterparts. At the same time, these exact attempts do less frequently result in discursive interactions. When considering government–opposition dynamics in this process, we observe very similar patterns: Attempts to initiate discourse are particularly common among opposition MPs facing government speakers, and we find tentative evidence suggesting that government actors are most likely to avoid these invitations to discursive interaction. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of elite behaviour in public environments.

The existing literature debates how war can precipitate shifts in electoral coalitions. However, what remains unclear are the underlying cultural contestations affected by war, including how homo- and transphobia have been weaponized politically as a key social division during wartime elections. We examined original survey data collected before the 2023 Polish parliamentary election, which resulted in the defeat of the anti-LGBTIQ Law & Justice Party (PiS). In that election, competing coalitions led by the centre-right-liberal opposition Civic Platform (PO) and the incumbent right-wing-conservative PiS diverged over values like tolerance of LGBTIQ rights, all amid the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Our survey experiment found that informing voters about the PiS's anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric failed to boost either PiS or PO support. However, the same information coupled with Putin's homo- and transphobic justifications for the Russo-Ukrainian war shifted voter support significantly towards the PO. These findings make an important contribution by showing the limitations of anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric as a once ‘tried-and-true’ electoral strategy and offering a strategy to counter the appeal of political homo/transphobia.

Coalition governments are said to make voters of coalition parties feel more warmly towards supporters of their coalition partners and, hence, reduce affective polarization. However, even countries frequently governed by coalitions commonly experience high levels of affective polarization. We argue that for coalitions to reduce affective polarization, they must be perceived as successful. In coalitions that are perceived as unsuccessful, voters will not develop an overarching coalition identity. Such coalitions fail to change whom voters consider as their in-group, therefore not mitigating affective polarization. We test this argument using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data. We find that the positive effects of coalition membership reported in previous work are exclusively driven by voters who are satisfied with the coalition's performance. Coalitions have no depolarizing effect among voters dissatisfied with their governing performance. These results question whether democratic institutions themselves can mitigate affective polarization and instead demonstrate the responsibility of elites to make inter-party cooperation work.

Have concerns about equal rights and equal chances crowded out economic equality as a priority of left parties? Despite the increased importance of inequality in political science, this contentiously fought debate has been standing on shaky empirical foundations. While voter's equality preferences are well understood, parties’ equality emphases remain uncharted territory. This research note assesses whether the Left has replaced its emphasis on economic equality with a focus on equal chances and equal rights. Based on a new dataset of 300,000 party statements, we use online crowd-coding to map the equality trajectories of left parties in 12 OECD countries from 1970 to 2020. We examine if trade-offs between economic and non-economic aspects of inequality have come to dominate left parties’ equality profiles. Distinguishing social democratic, green and far-left parties, we refute a meritocratic or ‘woke’ crowding out of redistribution. Yet, Social Democrats have indeed forsaken the once complementary link between economic equality and equal rights in favour of a weak trade-off.

Political parties face inherent risks when making election promises, as voters tend to penalize them for unfulfilled commitments. Nonetheless, parties make hundreds of promises. Why do parties engage in such precarious behaviour? I argue that parties employ a policy-committing strategy when they need to increase the credibility of their policy programme and that they do so more today than previously because the political landscape has changed considerably in many Western democracies (time trend). Moreover, I expect parties to use the policy-committing strategy more when they operate in a political arena with more competitors (system-level factor), when they are a mainstream party (party-level factor) and when they have increased the saliency of an issue (issue-level factor). I test these four expectations with a unique, new dataset containing 330,850 quasi-sentences coded from party manifestoes in 11 countries covering several decades of elections. Empirically, I find support for a time trend and show strong effects for the party-level and issue-level factors. However, a more competitive environment at the system level makes parties less, not more, likely to use the policy-committing strategy. These results have important implications for party strategies, issue competition and policymaking in today's democracies.

We examine long-run effects of automation risk on turnout. We expect gendered negative effects because men's turnout is more sensitive to job loss and earnings, but negative effects might be offset by populist right-wing mobilization on economic grievances. We rely on population-wide administrative data to avoid well-known biases in survey data. We find both men and women with high automation risk to suffer in the labour market, but automation risk is associated with lower turnout for men only. The negative association with turnout is weaker where the populist right is stronger, consistent with mobilization on economic grievances. Finally, we show experimentally that priming of automation risk produces null findings, suggesting that risks need to have material consequences to affect political behaviour. Our findings imply that technological change has contributed to the emergence of gender gaps in turnout and populist voting as well as the participation drop among the working class.

Urban–rural divides are large and growing in many national elections, but the sources of this widening divide are not well understood. Recent research has pointed to policy disagreement as one possible mechanism for this growing divide; if urban and rural residents hold increasingly dissimilar policy preferences, this disagreement could produce ever-widening urban–rural electoral divides. We investigate this possibility by creating a synthesized dataset of nearly 1000 policy issue questions across 10 distinct Canadian national election studies conducted between 1993 and 2021 (N = 5.3 million), combined with a measure of the urban or rural character of every federal electoral district. This dataset allows us to measure urban–rural policy disagreement across a much larger range of policy issues and over a much longer time period than has previously been possible. We find strong evidence of urban–rural policy disagreement across a range of issues, and especially in areas of cultural policy, including questions relating to gun control, immigration and Indigenous affairs. We further find strong support for the ‘progressive cities’ hypothesis; in nearly all policy domains, urban residents support more left-wing positions on policy issues than rural residents. However, we find no evidence these urban–rural policy divides have grown since the 1990s. Urban–rural policy disagreement, while large and meaningful, cannot explain the ever-widening urban–rural political divide.