European Journal of Political Research最新文献

Having long shied away from proactively politicizing issues of European integration, the past crisis decade has put generally pro-European mainstream parties under pressure to spell out more clearly which kind of Europe they support. We distinguish two such fundamental ideas of Europe: the redistributive polity, organizing transnational solidarity and the regulatory polity, strengthening national self-reliance. Both notions are integrationist, but they come with distinct policy implications. What determines mainstream party support for either of these polity ideas? We investigate this question on data provided by the ‘EUandI’ voting advice application, which contains party positions on core issues of integration for all EU member states for the four European Parliament elections between 2009 and 2024. Mainstream party support for redistribution, we find, is generally driven by their ideological placement on the economic and cultural dimension. While progressive and left parties tend towards EU-level redistribution, conservative and right parties are wedded to the idea of a regulatory European polity. This general dynamic, however, interacts with parties’ domestic considerations, that is, the public salience of an issue and a country's net-payer status in the EU. We further find that the effect of mainstream parties’ ideological positioning differs across policy domains. While cultural and economic positions drive support for redistribution in fiscal and taxation policy to a nearly equal extent, support for redistribution in migration policy is driven by cultural factors alone, while in matters of security and defence right mainstream parties are more supportive of European solidarity than parties of the mainstream left. Our analysis demonstrates that mainstream parties now compete visibly over EU-level redistribution, but that their stances on transnational solidarity differ depending on the domestic situation and the policy domain in question.

This study examines the impact of cooperation between radical right parties (RRPs) and non-RRPs on the policy attitudes of non-RRP supporters. As RRPs have gained prominence in recent years, particularly for their nativist and anti-immigration positions, this research investigates whether non-RRP partisans adopt similar views when their preferred parties collaborate with RRPs. Drawing on original survey data from Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom in 2019, the findings reveal a notable association: non-RRP supporters are more likely to express stronger nativist attitudes when they perceive their parties as having cooperative relationship with RRPs. These results suggest the potential for ideological diffusion, where voters adjust their beliefs in response to perceived alignment with allied parties. Ultimately, this paper seeks to enhance our understanding of how party cooperation affects voter attitudes, suggesting that alliances with RRPs may normalize exclusionary policies and exacerbate societal divisions.

A growing body of literature shows that the preferences of poorer groups in society are less well represented than the preferences of the rich. This paper scrutinises one possible explanation of inequality in representation: that politicians hold biased perceptions of what citizens want. We conducted surveys with citizens and politicians in four countries: Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and Germany. Citizens provided their preferences regarding concrete policy proposals, and then politicians estimated these preferences. Comparing politicians’ estimates with the actual preferences of different social groups, the paper shows that politicians’ perceptions are closer to the preferences of the richer than to those of poorer people for issues that matter most for economic inequality: socio-economic issues. Further, we find that especially right-wing politicians tend to think about the preferences of richer societal groups when estimating the preferences of their partisan electorates on socio-economic matters.

How do political parties speak about education? While struggles over education played a foundational role in structuring modern partisan cleavages, scholars debate the extent to which parties still adopt distinct rhetorical stances on education. Existing data, however, is limited to studying broad public support or opposition to educational expansion, restricting both our empirical knowledge of the politicisation of education and our ability to theorise parties’ incentives to speak publicly about it. This paper provides the first systematic examination of the post-war evolution of partisan rhetoric about education in advanced democracies. We develop a novel dataset (Education Politics Dataset EPD) based on hand-coded manifesto speech of the largest centre-left and centre-right parties for 20 countries in Europe and beyond, from 1950 to the present. The EPD distinguishes nine educational issues, grouped under the three fundamental policy dimensions of distribution, governance and curricular content. We theorise that parties use educational speech both to signal competence to a broader electorate and to signal credibility to a narrower base. The result is three distinct patterns of speech: consensual, differentially salient and polarised. Where education policies cross-cut existing cleavages, parties devote similar attention to issues and adopt similar stances, creating a consensual pattern. We find this pattern for issues of participation and quality in education. Where education policies are universal but offer specific benefits to a partisan base, we find patterns of differential salience: some parties devote more rhetorical attention to the issue than others, but parties adopt common stances. We find this pattern for questions of spending and access. Finally, where education policies align with broader political cleavages and provide targeted electoral benefits to partisan bases, parties adopt distinct public stances leading to more polarised rhetoric. We find this pattern for issues related to academic tracking and traditional curricular content. In developing the first multidimensional theorisation and measurement of partisan rhetoric on education, the paper provides insight into parties’ evolving approaches to an area increasingly crucial to electoral and social life.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, public opinion regarding restrictions and lockdowns was quickly characterized by significant disagreement. In a societal crisis such as COVID-19, it is important to understand the drivers behind citizens’ attitudes and behaviours. Political disagreement related to COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns has often been interpreted as an ideological or partisan divide along the left-right dimension of political opinion. Here, we argue that there is more to unpack. There is increasing awareness that public opinion is structured by both left-right orientation and trust in the system. In this paper, we examine the divide in COVID-19 attitudes and behaviours and compare the influence of ideology and system trust as drivers across countries and across time during the pandemic. Based on monthly surveys from eight countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, France and Italy) from September 2020 to July 2021 (total sample of 49,414 respondents), we show that citizens with right-wing ideologies and those who do not trust ‘the system’ perceived a lower threat from the coronavirus, were less supportive of government measures against the virus, report having changed their behaviour less and report lower intentions to vaccinate against COVID-19 compared to citizens with left-wing ideologies and those with high system trust. These results are stable across time and across countries. We also find that behavioural differences are larger between those who support the system and those who do not than between those with right- and left-wing ideological outlooks, respectively. This implies that system trust is at least as important as ideology in terms of shaping cleavages in COVID-19 attitudes and behaviours. The results suggest that in order to increase public support for societal responses during a crisis, it is not only important to appeal to both sides of the ideological spectrum, but also to appeal to those who do not trust ‘the system’.

Power transitions among major states have shaped the course of cooperation in the history of the international system. We study this relationship from a public opinion angle by examining the effect of a potential power transition on attitudes towards bilateral trade liberalization. Power transitions can spur political and economic conflict because the rising power gains greater influence over the course of world politics, including trade rules, allowing it to assert its national interest and the interests of its citizens. This implies that citizens in the rising power are more supportive of bilateral economic cooperation than citizens in the declining power. Empirical findings from parallel, survey-embedded experiments in China and the United States lend support to this conjecture. Great Power competition, therefore, interferes with current international economic affairs – an aspect that has received less attention in previous research on trade politics.

Elite ideological polarization is rising in Western democracies. Is this elite ideological polarization associated with mass ideological polarization? I argue that when a party adopts a more extreme position, the masses polarize via two mechanisms. In-partisans should follow the party and adopt a more extreme ideological stance while out-partisans should backlash and move in the opposite direction. To test these expectations, I exploit a real-world sudden party polarization when the Labour Party of the United Kingdom suddenly shifted to the left under new leadership. Using British Election Study Internet Panel data, I find limited evidence that elite polarization leads to mass polarization. Overall, neither in-partisans followed the party, nor out-partisans backlashed to it. Only ideologically out-of-touch in-partisans adjusted their ideological stance to match their party, indicating the effectiveness of partisan cues, nonetheless. These findings provide insight into how the masses react to increasing party polarization, alleviating pundits' concerns that the masses are blind followers and bound to polarize if political parties polarize.

Public support for Brexit has declined since the 2016 referendum. We argue that part of this decline is due to cohort replacement where many older voters (who support Brexit) have passed away, while younger voters (who oppose Brexit) have entered the electorate. Using a series of original YouGov surveys from 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022, each representative of the UK electorate, we first demonstrate the large and stable differences in Brexit support between younger and older voters. Next, we employ demographic decomposition calculations to estimate that cohort replacement alone accounts for approximately one third of the decline in aggregate Brexit support in just 6 years (with two thirds of the decline being explained by within-cohort changes). Furthermore, by combining our data on Brexit support with Office for National Statistics cohort projections up to 2030, we derive testable hypotheses about the pressure that cohort replacement will continue to put on Brexit support over the next decade across a wide range of potential scenarios. Altogether, our study demonstrates the powerful role that cohort replacement plays in shaping British (and European) politics in the post-Brexit world.

Political parties often adjust their policy agendas in response to changing electoral landscapes, balancing the need to appeal to new voters against the importance of retaining loyal supporters. While these patterns are generally well-documented in the literature, the specific impact of voter availability on the electoral market remains underexamined. This article investigates how electoral opportunities – i.e., potential to mobilize new voters – and loyalty – i.e., likelihood of retaining current supporters – influence parties' decisions to expand or narrow their policy focus. To analyze this, the study integrates three decades of population data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and European Election Studies with data on parties' issue focus obtained from the Manifesto Project. The analysis shows that parties strategically balance their focus between core and peripheral issues based on the anticipated utility of each approach. This strategy, however, depends on the stability of voter loyalty: expansion into new issues occurs primarily when voter loyalty is robust, although strong opportunities alone can also encourage agenda broadening. These findings contribute to understanding the calculated risks parties take in adjusting their issue attention and highlight why policy adjustments often backfire; namely, when misaligned with voters' availability on the market. This study speaks to the literature on party competition and representation in Europe, illuminating how electoral dynamics shape parties' policy focus.

Governments around the world are experimenting with deliberative mini-publics as a means of integrating public input into policymaking processes, including as a method for directly creating policy. This raises the important question of when ordinary people will judge the outputs of mini-publics to be legitimate and support their use. We investigate how public support for mini-publics is shaped by: (1) whether the mini-public is held in response to calls from politicians or from the general public; (2) which political party sets up the mini-public; and (3) whether there is partisan conflict surrounding the mini-public's creation. To do so, we use two pre-registered survey experiments fielded in the United Kingdom that focus on climate assemblies, a prominent form of deliberative mini-public. Results are three-fold. First, we find some evidence that assemblies are more positively evaluated when they stem from the demands of local residents rather than partisan actors, but this effect is relatively modest and does not emerge consistently across our analyses. Similar findings are noted with regard to partisanship. Partisan conflict, by contrast, has a more robust effect – leading respondents to adopt more ideologically stereotypical views of the assembly, with left-wing (right-wing) respondents being more supportive of Labour-sponsored (Conservative-sponsored) assemblies.