European Journal of Political Research最新文献

What is the purpose of lengthy negotiations when a coalition government forms? Do they make a difference in coalition policy-making? Negotiations that produce policy agreements between coalition partners have been suggested to strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms. We argue that bargaining time, regardless if it results in a written policy agreement or not, is an investment in future government reform productivity. Longer negotiation periods indicate that the bargaining parties have negotiated deals over conflicting policy issues and have allowed parties to build trust between them and gain support for future policies within the party organization, promoting reform productivity. Further, we expect that longer negotiation periods can mitigate problems of policy conflict within cabinets, thereby resulting in higher reform productivity. We evaluate our theoretical expectations using a data set on economic reform measures introduced in 10 Western European countries (1978–2017), based on a coding of more than 1000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The results show support for our expectations, demonstrating that economic reform productivity is higher in coalition governments that have bargained for a longer time when forming. We also find support for the claim that bargaining time mitigates the negative effect of intra-cabinet ideological conflict on reform productivity.

For decades, political scientists have hotly debated longitudinal trends in political trust rates. An important undercurrent in the debate is that any decline in political trust might signal a legitimacy crisis. Yet, descriptive figures are unable to distinguish between two interpretations of these downward trends: (i) declines that can reasonably be expected as a reflection of declining political trustworthiness (i.e., procedural or output performance) and thereby reflect critical citizens who monitor their democratic institutions; and (ii) downward trends that are not warranted by democratic performance and thereby suggest a more fundamental disconnect between citizens and their democratic institutions.

This research note argues that residuals to multilevel models of political trust allow us to distinguish between these two types, and thereby provide a better understanding of trends in political trust. These residuals do not only reveal short-term aberrations to the explanatory model (often reflecting short-lived, country-specific events), but also the extent to which a country's trust rate systematically underperforms in the middle- to long-term. To the extent that declining trust rates are lower than explanatory models predict, the residuals express excessive distrust. To the extent that declining trust rates are in line with the explanatory models, the residuals reflect critical, monitoring citizenship.

We outline the approach of residual analyses as a tool to better understand trends in political trust. We illustrate the use of these residual analyses on a cross-national, longitudinal data set (the Eurobarometer), covering 15 Western and Southern European countries between 1999 and 2019. While political trust rates fluctuate in all these countries, we only find evidence for a structural decline in two of these countries. In France and Spain political trust failed to recover in line with improving economic and institutional performance after the Great Recession. We then test the versatility of the tool to different conditions, including retests on an alternative set of countries (11 Central and Eastern European countries between 2004 and 2019) and an alternative dataset with different measures and time points (the European Social Survey).

Finally, we elaborate on the two main conditions under which residual analyses offer a useful tool to the trend debate in political trust research: (1) a firm understanding of the object-driven determinants of political trust, and (2) a detailed coverage of country-wave combinations to separate structural trends from short-term fluctuations.

This article analyses how high-level bureaucrats evaluate the leadership of technocrat and partisan cabinet ministers in different roles of policymaking. The argument is that bureaucrats perceive ministers with policy expertise to have a central role in policymaking, especially in policy-directing tasks. Despite their essential contribution to coalition formation, ministers with political experience are negatively evaluated in all policymaking roles. The article presents evidence based on an endorsement experiment conducted with the high-level bureaucracy in Brazil. The results show that ministers with policy experience receive positive evaluations from the bureaucracy in policy formulation and implementation roles but not to carry out political coordination activities with the presidency or the legislature. Ministers with a partisan profile receive negative evaluations in all tasks of the policy process. Exploring the mechanism, we show that the negative assessment of ministers with a partisan profile is maintained even when the profile of the bureaucrat is considered. These results show the negative attitudes of high-level bureaucrats towards partisan ministers in contexts of substantial patronage and corruption and contribute to the debate on ministerial appointments and their implications for policymaking.

Stringent policies that significantly increase the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO$�{}_2$, are increasingly necessary for mitigating climate change. Yet while richer individuals in society generate the most CO$�{}_2$ emissions and thus will face the largest absolute cost burden, they also tend to be more supportive of stringent environmental policies. In this paper, we examine how information about the distribution of carbon emissions by income affects support for carbon taxation. While carbon taxation is widely advocated as the most efficient policy for mitigating climate change, it faces significant political hurdles due to its distributional costs. Using original survey data, with an embedded experiment, we find that providing information about the actual distribution of household CO$�{}_2$ emissions by income significantly changes individuals' support for carbon taxation. These effects are particularly pronounced at the bottom of the household income distribution, leading to increased support for costly climate policies. However, individuals who believe that carbon taxes will reduce their income continue to hold their level of support for carbon taxation. Our findings have significant implications for understanding the public's response to the distributional consequences of the green transitions and ultimately their political feasibility.

Whether countries and their publics are responsive to the international legal commitments they make is the source of long-standing academic debate. Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought real-world significance to these debates. While Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the invasion raised the prospect that other NATO members could be targeted and that Article 5 collective security commitments would be invoked. While recent research suggests that emphasizing mutual defence treaties can increase public support for defending an ally, prior work focuses on US opinion in a less fraught political environment. We constructed and fielded a survey experiment in Italy in the initial weeks of the Ukraine invasion to probe support for defending a NATO ally, the relevance of the Article 5 legal commitment on support for defending an ally, and the potential moderating influence of gender and political party. Our findings show that the Article 5 commitment significantly increased support for defending an ally. Consistent with past research, we find a significant gender gap, with men being more supportive of defending an ally than women; however, both men and women responded to the Article 5 commitment to virtually the same degree. The estimated treatment effect was larger for supporters of right-wing parties than for the left; however, the difference was not statistically significant.

In information environments characterized by institutional distrust, fragmentation and the widespread dissemination of conspiracies and disinformation, citizens perceive misinformation as a salient and threatening issue. Especially amidst disruptive events and crises, news users are likely to believe that information is inaccurate or deceptive. Using an original 19-country comparative survey study across diverse regions in the world (N = 19,037), we find that news users are likely to regard information on the Russian war in Ukraine as false. They are more likely to attribute false information to deliberative deception than to a lack of access to the war area or inaccurate expert knowledge. Russian sources are substantially more likely to be blamed for falsehoods than Ukrainian or Western sources – but these attribution biases depend on a country's position on the war. Our findings reveal that people mostly believe that falsehoods are intended to deceive them, and selectively associate misinformation with the opposed camp.

A close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. However, legislators cannot be responsive to all voters at all times with regard to the policies the latter favour. We argue that legislators use their speaking time in parliament to offer compensatory speech to their constituents who might oppose how they voted on a policy, in order to re-establish themselves as responsive to the public's wishes. Leveraging the case of Brexit, we show that legislators pay more attention to constituents who might be dissatisfied with how they voted. Furthermore, their use of rhetorical responsiveness is contingent on the magnitude of the representational deficit they face vis-à-vis their constituency. Our findings attest to the central role of parliamentary speech in maintaining responsiveness. They also demonstrate that communicative responsiveness can substitute for policy responsiveness.

Past research has long documented that voters dislike parties and leaders who reverse their policy positions. But would they tolerate (principled) policy U-turns if they are motivated by external events, such as a large-scale crisis or scientific evidence? In this study, we explore whether the motivation behind positional shifts affects voter evaluations of political parties. To do so, we seek to connect the causes and consequences of policy shifts, a synergy still unexplored in the literature. We suggest that, while U-turns, in general, can be damaging to a party's reputation, principled changes brought about by new scientific evidence or major crises should not necessarily have negative implications, because these changes can be necessary for the public good. We conducted a nationally representative survey experiment in Germany (n = 3127) featuring two classes of policy reversals: strategic and principled. Surprisingly, however, we find that voters by and large hold negative views of different types of policy U-turns, thus including when external circumstances suggest change may be necessary. Interestingly, our empirical analysis reveals intriguing patterns. First, voters are willing to tolerate all sorts of policy reversals if the party ends up adopting their positions, suggesting that proximity matters even in the event of exogenous events. Second, voters with high levels of political trust tolerate different types of policy reversals, even when the party changes for mere strategic office-seeking motivations. Coming from the premise that political and societal change is imperative, these findings have direct implications for democracies.

A large literature studies whether, and under what circumstances, voters will electorally punish corrupt politicians. Yet this literature has to date neglected the empirical prevalence of transnational dimensions to real-world corruption allegations, even as corruption studies undergo a ‘transnational turn’. We use a survey experiment in the United Kingdom in 2020 to investigate whether voters differentially punish politicians associated with transnational corruption and test four different potential mechanisms: information salience, country-based discrimination, economic nationalism and expected representation. We find evidence suggesting that voters indeed differentially punish transnational corruption, but only when it involves countries perceived negatively by the public (i.e. a ‘Moscow-based firm’). This is most consistent with a mechanism of country-based discrimination, while we find no evidence consistent with any other mechanism. These results suggest that existing experimental studies might understate the potential for electoral accountability by neglecting real-world corruption allegations’ frequent transnational dimension.

While scholars have closely examined the intensification of negative affect across party lines during elections, less is known about the decline of partisan hostility in the aftermath of election campaigns. Synthesizing insights from research on electoral rules and political psychology, we theorize and empirically test two such mechanisms of post-election negative affect decline. The first is that of winners' generosity: the expectation that self-perceived election winners will express warmer feelings towards political opponents. The second is that of co-governance, which predicts that shared coalition status leads to warmer affective evaluations among governing parties. We provide evidence that these mechanisms operate as pressure valves of negative partisan affect. We also show that while co-governance reduces negative affect between parties who govern together, it fuels negative affect among supporters of opposition parties. The empirical analyses leverage a uniquely uncertain political period following the 2021 Israeli elections, around which we conducted an original panel study. Our findings advance the comparative polarization literature and connect psychological and institutional accounts of temporal fluctuations in partisan affect.