European Journal of Political Research最新文献

How do welfare systems affect natives' attitudes to immigration? The impact of immigration on public support for welfare and redistribution has received considerable scholarly attention, but we know much less about how welfare policies shape citizens' views about immigration. We focus on two mechanisms: an instrumental channel and a values-based approach. Our empirical strategy is two-pronged. Hierarchical models leveraging variation in immigration attitudes and welfare generosity both between countries and over time (2002–2019) suggest that more comprehensive welfare regimes are associated with more positive views of immigrants. Furthermore, a regression discontinuity design drawing on a natural experiment in Denmark reveals that hostility towards immigrants increased following the announcement of a welfare retrenchment reform. Together, these analyses shed light on how the welfare state influences immigration attitudes.

This paper examines why some ethnic minorities in Europe have successful ethnic parties while others pursue their political interests through mainstream parties. To study differential success of ethnic minorities in establishing successful ethnic parties, I adapt threats-vs-resources approach, comparing relative importance of ethnic threats (acting as motivator for collective political activism) and ethnic resources (providing different opportunities facilitating ethnic mobilization). Empirically, I focus on the post-Cold War period, including ethnic minorities in Western and Eastern Europe. I find that both ethnic threats and ethnic resources matter for success of ethnic parties. I show that increased salience of issues tied to ethnicity, either through promotion of majority ethnonationalism, or through advancement of minority ethnic rights, can foster successful ethnic parties. I also show that the logic behind successful minority political mobilization differs between Western and Eastern Europe.

Democracy and gender equality are increasingly contested in European parliamentary contexts, with the rise of political parties and movements that oppose feminist politics and the rights of women, LGBTI* and racialised people. Existing literature exploring far-right and anti-gender actors in institutional settings has focused on their discourse and impact on parliamentary politics and governments. Yet, limited attention has been paid to the feminist responses articulated in parliamentary contexts that face active opposition to gender and LGBTI* equality. This article addresses this gap by analysing feminist parliamentary responses to such opposition, and the factors that enable and constrain these responses, by undertaking a multi-level comparison between the Catalan Parliament (2021–2024) and the Spanish Parliament (2019–2023), based on content analysis of 21 parliamentary debates and 42 in-depth interviews.

We argue that the capacity of parliaments to respond to anti-gender, far-right opposition to gender, racial and LGBTI* equality is structured by macro-, meso- and micro-level enabling and constraining factors that include the state of democracy and its legacies, state structure, the constellation of anti-gender and pro-equality forces, the institutionalisation of equality, and the role of critical actors. By identifying a range of feminist strategies employed in the Spanish and Catalan parliamentary contexts – including ‘knowledge’, ‘coalition-building’, ‘rule-making’ and ‘everyday pragmatic engagement’ – this article contributes to developing the emerging scholarly field of feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics, thereby advancing the theory of feminist institutionalism, state feminism and anti-gender politics in parliamentary contexts.

The ideological fit between party grassroots and leaderships has long been a concern for political science, with members in general, and young members in particular, thought to be more radical. However, we do not know, first, whether this is still the case and, if it is, what drives members in different ideological directions. To investigate, we propose a new typology of members as radicals, moderates and aligned, and develop a theoretical framework that accounts for how political socialization and party contexts drive congruence and incongruence. We test this using YOUMEM survey data from over 4,000 members of 12 youth wings in six countries. Our results show that while radicals are the largest group in most youth wings, they are more common on the centre-left than the centre-right. They tend to have been in the youth wing for longer than aligned members, but are under-represented among politically ambitious members. Our findings thus shed light on opinion structures within political parties and provide a typology for future research on intra-party cohesion.

This study examines interest groups’ agenda-setting influence, a question extensively theorised but lacking empirical investigation. Specifically, it explores whether business groups are more effective than citizen groups in pushing their ‘dream’ issues on the policy agenda while keeping their ‘nightmare’ issues off. Empirically, I rely on a content analysis of 818 media articles, 37 interviews with public officials and 148 interviews with interest representatives, all involved in 56 EU policy issues. The findings demonstrate that citizen groups are more influential in the agenda-setting stage when compared to their business counterparts, particularly when they garner media visibility. These results bear important implications for democratic governance, offering new insights into the political influence wielded by interest groups.

Experimental research has shown that political parties often, but not always, suffer reputational costs when they change their policy positions. Yet, it is not clear who accepts and who rejects party policy change. Using newly collected observational data from five European countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom), we examine the individual-level determinants of party policy change. We examine support for policy change with a new survey item that directly captures party policy change acceptance. We theorise that acceptance of party policy change varies as a function of individuals' political attitudes such as their level of interest in politics and their ideological positions, as well as their views about democratic decision-making. Although we find that many citizens agree that change is sometimes necessary and understand the conditions and constraints that lead parties to alter their positions, we also show that populist attitudes have a strong negative effect on accepting party policy change. A textual analysis of an open-ended survey item furthermore indicates that those who perceive party policy change negatively, associate change with opportunism and power-seeking. Our results imply that even though parties have some leeway to change their positions when external conditions require them to do so, populist beliefs and anti-elite sentiment make citizens rather sceptical of the motivations that parties have when they alter their positions.

Growing evidence exists about the importance of dark personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in political leaders, broadly leading to heightened political aggressiveness and partisan conflict. Building on this expanding research agenda, we study the possible association between dark personality in politicians and deepened affective polarization – that is, increased affective distance between partisan groups coupled with stronger dislike for out-parties – in the public. We do so by linking a large-scale expert survey (NEGex) and a collection of post-election surveys (CSES), including information for more than 90 leading candidates having competed in 40 elections worldwide. Our results show that the dark personality of top politicians can be associated with upticks in affective polarization in the public – but only when it comes to the personality of in-party candidates (that is, a candidate from voters' preferred party), and only for high levels of ideological proximity between the candidate and the voter.

Past research has often attributed electoral backlash to structural economic change to a lack of compensation and interest group representation for affected groups. Is that backlash then mitigated in contexts where both of these conditions are fulfilled? I argue that perceived economic deprivation fuelling political disengagement as well as disappointment with the issue-owning party are important factors contributing to such a backlash. Using the case of Germany, I empirically analyse the electoral repercussions of a coal phase-out in the presence of compensation for affected groups as well as active involvement of labour and business interests in political decision-making. By employing a series of staggered difference-in-differences models, I investigate whether the closures of coal plants and mines between 2007 and 2022 affected voting behaviour at the municipal level. I find that these closures resulted in an asymmetric backlash in the form of lower vote shares for the issue owner, the Social Democratic Party and higher abstention rates in affected municipalities. With the significant politicisation around fossil fuel-based energy generation, these findings have important implications for the remaining coal phase-outs worldwide.

Partisan-based affective polarization has been posited as a key explanation for citizens' tolerance towards democratic backsliding, with voters more likely to overlook democratic violations conducted by in-party candidates. Our study theorizes and empirically explores the reverse perspective on this relationship: focusing on the role of the opposition, we submit that backsliding may crystallize an affective dislike among opposition supporters towards the governing party and its supporters that stems from a regime divide over democracy itself. To probe the plausibility of this argument, we leverage original survey data collected in Hungary, where democratic backsliding under the Fidesz government has resulted in an extensive remodelling of the political system since 2010. Our results point to a government–opposition divide in partisan affect and show how liberal democratic attitudes, especially among opposition party supporters, play into this dynamic. We suggest that where backsliding persists over a longer period, this process can shift even multi-party systems towards increasing bipolarity along what we term a ‘democratic divide’. Ultimately, our study proposes a novel lens on the dynamics of democratic backsliding by suggesting that affective polarization may play a positive role in backsliding contexts by uniting the opposition around the defence of democracy. Our findings point to a number of future research avenues to further analyse the interactive relationship between democratic backsliding and affective polarization.

In this study we show that on different dimensions of social security (compensation level, maximum duration and eligibility criteria), respondents in Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom prefer their governments to compensate unemployed immigrants less generously than unemployed natives, even after considering potential prejudices about work ethics, job experience, etc. We add to the extant literature in several ways. Based on survey experiments, we identify a strong economic component in welfare chauvinistic sentiments across the three countries. Chauvinism is negatively related to the income level of both immigrants and the respondents. We also find that low income reinforces the effect of chauvinism, a phenomenon we refer to as ‘intersectionality’. Furthermore, by comparing the preferences in the experiments with the actual welfare schemes, we find that the respondents are more generous than their respective governments regarding the level of compensation for natives as well as immigrants. When the comparison is between respondents’ preferences and actual welfare policies rather than between treatment groups, the respondents appear to be more welfare inclusive than welfare chauvinistic.