European Journal of Political Research最新文献

A growing body of research theorizes that partisanship can undermine democracy as citizens prioritize their political interests over abstract norms and values. We argue that crises might counteract intense partisanship by giving citizens clarity on the threats posed by rule of law violations. Examining the differential application of a law – a breach of democratic norms – we draw on an experiment embedded in representative surveys of Germany, the United States, Hungary and Poland to examine citizens’ sense of appropriate punishment for elites’ violation of a municipal mask-wearing ordinance. We find evidence of partisan bias in citizens’ willingness to support punishment in all four countries. But, in the two consolidated democracies, we find that concern about the Covid-19 crisis diminishes partisan biases in punishment preferences: citizens who are most concerned about the crisis also model the most consistency in their willingness to hold copartisans into account.

While cross-sectional research has consistently shown graduates are less Eurosceptic than non-graduates, little is known about the causal role of university study in determining these attitudes, as few longitudinal studies have explored this. This study does so, providing robust causal estimates of higher education's effect on Euroscepticism through applying individual- and sibling fixed-effect modelling techniques to British Household Panel and Understanding Society data from 1999–2022. Both specifications provide consistent results; suggesting university study does little to decrease Euroscepticism in the short-run but has substantial long-run effects. This alludes to an ‘allocation’ effect, whereby it is largely not the experience of obtaining a degree itself, but the opportunities afforded by virtue of doing so that shape attitudes towards Europe. Our novel findings not only demonstrate that within-sibling estimates of higher education's effect can be generalised to the wider British population but also advance our understanding of the mechanisms linking education with Euroscepticism.

This study presents the results from a series of conjoint experiments evaluating how the various components of political systems affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). Compared to earlier studies, our approach is unique in that we were able to disentangle the effects of otherwise highly collinear variables corresponding to three defining features of any political system, namely (1) access to power, (2) the policy-making process and (3) performance. We fielded identical conjoint experiments in countries with significant variations across the key independent variables: France, Hungary and Italy. Overall, our study supports the view that citizens are more satisfied with democracy in consensus systems than in majoritarian democracies, while it also contributes to identifying the respective weight of the specific components of political systems. Respondents across all countries recognize that proportionality and party system fragmentation magnify their voices by creating a more representative political climate. With regard to output legitimacy, we find that respondents identify good economic performance and public probity as important features of a well-performing democracy. The positive effect of the legislators’ constituency orientation on SWD is a particularly noteworthy result that is currently understudied in the literature. Moreover, the state of the economy has by far the biggest impact on SWD, which indicates a highly materialistic view of democracy in all three countries.

This article analyses whether and how fairness considerations affect citizens’ support of European Union (EU) policies and integration. While past literature has revealed that perceptions of procedural and substantive fairness impact on public opinion at the level of the nation state, we know less about the fairness-support nexus when it comes to international cooperation. We here make use of the case of differentiated integration (DI) to experimentally dissect normative and utility-oriented considerations in the evaluation of EU policies. DI as an instrument to overcome heterogeneity-induced gridlock has been linked to both autonomy and dominance, and it can generate winners and losers in the EU. Our experiments reveal that citizens largely support DI. However, they are opposed to forms of DI which impose negative externalities on a subgroup of EU member states. This holds irrespective of the affectedness of citizens’ own member states. We take these findings as a first experimental confirmation that citizens, indeed, care about the fairness of the EU and its policies.

Do salient episodes of state violence affect citizens' willingness to pay taxes for different social purposes in the long run? In this article, I answer this question using an original dataset that geolocates individuals who were seriously injured during the anti-communist Romanian revolution of 1989. Using the number of casualties within different regions as a source of quasi-exogenous variation, I show that the places from which more casualties come have systematically lower levels of tax morale. I argue that these results arise because there has been no clear break with the authoritarian past in Romania, and many citizens still associate the current political elites with the former communist rulers who perpetrated the violence of December 1989.

Studies have repeatedly documented the cost of ruling: governing parties generally suffer electoral defeats. We approach this empirical law of political science from the perspective of another empirical law: the incumbency bonus, the fact that incumbents get more media attention than the opposition. Our claim is that the bonus constitutes an electoral liability because it reflects the critical approach of media to government power. News featuring incumbents is therefore associated with a more negative tone than news featuring the opposition. This incumbency burden in turn affects government support negatively. Empirically, we draw on an extensive news corpus covering four European countries over two decades, combined with monthly poll data. Analyses show that the incumbency burden in political news is an empirical reality, and that variations in the burden contribute substantially to predictions of government support. Finally, the negative burden effect is stronger for single-party cabinets, but stable throughout government tenure.

The free movement of people is a fundamental principle of the European Union (EU) that has led to an increase in EU-internal migration. This study investigates the impact of increased immigration to Germany resulting from the 2004 and 2007 eastern enlargement of the EU on concerns about immigration within the German population. By merging 20 years of annual migration statistics with panel data on individual attitudes and exploiting exogenous variation in the gradual enlargement of the free movement policy, we examine the causal effects of EU-internal migration on immigration concerns. Our findings suggest that the influx of immigrants from new member states did not have a clear average effect on concerns about immigration, but increased concerns among German natives with materialist-survival values. The study provides insights into the societal division caused by opposition to immigration as part of the European integration process.

Radical-right parties have gradually penetrated the political mainstream in many liberal democracies, marking a trend of ‘democratic backsliding’. We propose that women's increasing visibility as representatives of radical-right agendas makes democratic backsliders, their policies and their parties seem more legitimate, and may help explain their growing public acceptance. Our studies provide the first systematic examination of this hypothesis in three countries – Israel, Germany and the United States (N = 7203). In Studies 1a-c, we show that voters perceive democracy-eroding policies through a gendered lens – they attribute gender stereotypes to the parties promoting these policies and to the public supporting these policies. In Studies 2a-c, we experimentally demonstrate the effect of politicians’ gender on public acceptance of democracy-eroding policies, politicians and parties, and demonstrate the role of gender stereotypes in mediating this effect. Finally, we show that the audiences susceptible to the mainstreaming effect of politicians’ gender are precisely those that are often particularly repelled by radical-right agendas and their perceived masculine image: Women and left-wing voters.

In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to allow over a million asylum seekers to cross the border into Germany. One key concern was that her decision would signal an open-door policy to aspiring migrants worldwide – thus further increasing migration to Germany and making the country permanently more attractive to irregular and humanitarian migrants. This ‘pull-effect’ hypothesis has been a mainstay of policy discussions ever since. With the continued global rise in forced displacement, not appearing welcoming to migrants has become a guiding principle for the asylum policy of many large receiving countries. In this article, we exploit the unique case study that Merkel's 2015 decision provides for answering the fundamental question of whether welcoming migration policies have sustained effects on migration towards destination countries. We analyze an extensive range of data on migration inflows, migration aspirations and online search interest between 2000 and 2020. The results reject the ‘pull effect’ hypothesis while reaffirming states’ capacity to adapt to changing contexts and regulate migration.

Do individuals with right-wing populist ideologies have higher violence-justification attitudes than those supporting different political ideologies? While the literature has confirmed the association between political violence and populism, research on which components of populist ideologies relate to individual attitudes towards political violence is relatively scarce. Based on 18 European democracies, this research note examines whether right-wing populist individuals are more likely to justify political violence to pursue their political goals. The analyses reveal that right-wing populists are generally more likely to justify political violence compared to mainstream voters and non-voters. Additionally, left-wing populist voters also support political violence, although the effect size is comparatively smaller. This indicates that voters’ radicalisation depends on populist ideologies rather than left-right ideological distinctions. The effect among right-wing populists depends on city residence, gender and immigration status. Subsequent analyses suggest that right-wing populists’ attitudes towards violence are not conditional on nativism or anti-immigration perceptions. These findings contribute to the general understanding of the nature and consequences of populism.