European Journal of Political Research最新文献

In addition to immigration grievances, research shows that radical right voters grieve societal developments regarding gender equality and sexual freedom. Adding to research treating these grievances separately, this article advances a joint understanding of these grievances. I analyse interviews with voters of the German radical right Alternative für Deutschland for perceptions about discrimination and (dis)advantages of natives versus immigrants, men versus women and cis-hetero versus LGBTQI+ people. I find similar argumentations about these social groups: Most interviewees do not perceive existing structural discrimination. They further perceive zero-sum dynamics between advances for outgroups and losses for ingroups. In doing so, they consider different ingroup and outgroup characteristics, resulting in perceptions of different material and symbolic (dis)advantages for different groups and a hitherto under-researched perception of legal (dis)advantages. Additionally, some interviewees jointly refer to various social groups in an expression of ‘multidimensional’ grievances, and some refer to the intersections between several ingroup and outgroup identities in determining a person's (dis)advantages. The parallels in argumentation and the perceptions of multidimensional and intersectional grievances highlight the importance of jointly studying different kinds of cultural grievances.

The consequences of economic globalization on electoral outcomes have recently become a prominent topic of research. We complement the emerging literature on this topic by studying whether changes in a subnational region's trade competitiveness affect the incumbent's vote share in that region. Using a novel dataset that relates subnational trade competitiveness to election results in 29 countries over a 20-year period, we show that this is indeed the case. We also show that this effect is most pronounced for elections where the clarity of responsibility is high. Finally, we find mixed evidence for a moderating effect of incumbents' economic ideology as a moderator. These findings also contribute to the broader economic voting literature.

Building on research on cultural threat-induced polarization, we investigate the effect of the individual-level salience of cultural threats on polarization between social liberals and conservatives. In a unique survey experiment conducted with 129,000 respondents nested in 208 regions in 27 European Union (EU) member states, we manipulate the presence of two cultural threats, women's rights, and refugee immigration, to test their polarizing effects on social liberals’ and social conservatives’ support for traditional values. We find that priming the threat of refugee immigration polarizes conservatives and liberals equally. Yet, introducing the salience of women's rights leads to lower preferences for traditional values, particularly among more liberal respondents. Our findings demonstrate: 1) the study of backlash should distinguish individuals by their predisposition to backlash, rather than studying the population as a whole; and 2) social conservatives’ backlash should be studied conjointly with social liberals’ counter-reactions to backlash. Future research may investigate why different cultural threats provoke different reactions.

This research note investigates whether external military crises, short of war, in the neighbourhood of the European Union (EU) affects attitudes toward the EU. Specifically, I explore whether the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 fostered higher levels of trust in the EU and support for deeper integration among European citizens. Methodologically, I exploit the coincidental timing of the Russian annexation of Crimea on 18 March, 2014 with the fieldwork of the Eurobarometer survey (81.2) conducted in the spring of that year. The quasi-experimental evidence establishes that European citizens who were surveyed after the Russian annexation became more trusting of the EU and presented a greater willingness for further European integration, particularly so among EU-15 members. Moreover, the treatment effects were strongly moderated by individuals’ education levels, with the intervention exerting its greatest effect among the higher educated.

In recent years, scholars have observed that political parties’ policy positions frequently fit the preferences of well-to-do voters better than those of the less well-to-do; a phenomenon known as policy congruence inequality. While the existence of inequality in policy congruence is well-established, we currently only have a modest understanding of the causes of it. We develop an argument proposing that the political mobilisation of citizens with low socioeconomic status (SES) both in the parliamentary channel, in the form of high turnout, and in the extra-parliamentary channel, in the form of high union density, is pivotal. Both high turnout and union density force parties to pay more attention to the preferences of the disadvantaged, thereby creating lower policy congruence inequality. To test the argument, we have collected and harmonised election surveys and party manifestos covering 90 elections in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, covering several decades until today, yielding more than 120,000 voter–party dyads. Employing this new dataset, our results confirm that the political mobilisation of citizens with low SES is a strong predictor of policy congruence inequality. This finding nuances the conclusion of extant research by showing that low-SES citizens are not always on the losing side politically. It also implies the important role of maintaining or maybe even increasing turnout and union membership among the disadvantaged in society. Places where either turnout or union density is slipping in these years are likely to witness further increases in policy congruence inequality in the years to come.

We analyse the impact of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programmes on appointing women leaders in ministerial positions. We hypothesize that women leaders are selected after an incumbent government starts an IMF programme to shift accountability to them during political and economic turmoil. This political manoeuvring of appointing women to leadership positions during a crisis is known as the ‘glass cliff’ effect. We demonstrate substantial evidence for such a ‘glass cliff’ effect using data covering all IMF programmes from 1980 to 2018. Our evidence shows that women are more likely to be appointed to austerity-bearing ministerial positions under IMF programmes but not in positions of authority during negotiations with the IMF. This effect is more pronounced when a country displays worse societal gender norms, a higher level of corruption and a government facing a deeper economic crisis. Importantly, we verify that neither women's leadership nor a higher share of women in government predicts a balance of payments crisis triggering an IMF programme. In other words, women leaders do not govern worse; they are appointed to leadership positions in precarious, crisis-ridden conditions.

How does public opinion affect political discourse on issues that parties struggle to deal with? Although scholars tend to analyse party–voter linkages in terms of policy positions, parties can respond to public opinion by changing both the positions and the salience of their policy agenda. Based on original time-series data of party discourse and voter preferences in France, Italy and the United Kingdom (1992–2016), this paper analyses how mainstream parties have changed their political discourse on European integration in response to an increasingly Eurosceptic public. Results show that mainstream parties have adapted their positions to changes in public opinion and have at the same time deemphasized European Union issues in their discourse as the public grew Eurosceptic. Parties did not talk more about Europe even when they followed the tides of public opinion. These findings challenge our current understanding of party responsiveness, have implications for theories of party competition, and contribute to debates on the legitimacy of the European project.

Party system institutionalization (PSI) is regarded as a critical underpinning of democracies, but its role in non-democratic systems has been understudied. In this paper, we evaluate whether the concept has meaningful and perhaps unique implications for the durability of competitive authoritarian regimes. We argue that a modified version of electoral volatility – the most common measure of PSI in democracies – conveys useful information about PSI in competitive authoritarian contexts by signalling the ability of the ruling party to manage the opposition. To this end, we construct an original data set that disaggregates electoral volatility into ruling party seat change and opposition party seat volatility and further divides opposition party volatility into Type-A and Type-B volatility. We find robust results that democratization becomes more likely when decreases in the ruling party's seat share coincide with an increase in opposition party Type-B volatility. This paper demonstrates that the concept of PSI has utility for understanding regime dynamics in competitive authoritarian contexts.

In electoral systems with districts that vary in magnitude, the number of seats to be filled in each district will be even or odd. We argue that such a variation has crucial political consequences, called the ‘odd–even effect’. In low-magnitude districts, elections are more competitive when the district magnitude is odd than even; the incentives for coordination are thus stronger in the former scenario than in the latter. Employing quasi-experimental data from 780 districts in Spain's lower house elections, we show that the number of parties is smaller in low-magnitude districts with an odd number of seats than in low-magnitude districts with an even number of seats. The elite- and voter-level mechanisms driving the odd–even effect are examined using data on mobilisation efforts and wasted votes at the district level.

Political representation does not function well for citizens whose positions on political issues differ from those of elected representatives. In this paper, we argue that opinion incongruence leads citizens to want to bypass elected representatives and place more decision-making power in the hands of the public. We theorise that this is because incongruent citizens are highly dissatisfied with the existing political system and/or think they will benefit from direct decision-making in terms of improved policy responsiveness. Using data from the 2019 Belgian Election Survey (n = 3413) and Party Leadership Survey, we find that greater incongruence between citizens’ positions and those of their elected representatives is related to higher support for direct decision-making. This holds for opinion incongruence with the party voted for and incongruence with Parliament as a whole. This paper contributes novel insights into the consequences of the quality of political representation as well as the drivers of citizens’ support for direct decision-making processes.