European Journal of Political Research最新文献

Coalition building depends on citizens having a ‘compromising mindset’: they must accept that parties need to compromise in order to gain influence and that this entails deviating from the original policy positions. In this study, we show that European citizens understand that compromise is essential for democratic governance and that they, holding everything else constant, prefer political parties that express a willingness to compromise. This finding appears to be independent from specific forms of coalition politics and to be widespread across different levels of political interest, formal education and even ideological extremity. Our analysis compares observational data from the Austrian National Election Survey (AUTNES) 2020 and an original survey from Denmark in 2021. We also present results from a conjoint experiment fielded in Denmark, which evaluates the effect of willingness to compromise on vote choice. Our finding is good news for European democracies where coalition politics and thus compromise is a necessity for governance. Yet, for vote-seeking politics, the situation is complex as citizens might sometimes punish parties for compromising, but sometimes also punish them for not compromising.

Central theories of public policy imply that lobbying is demand-driven, meaning highly responsive to the levels of access that political gatekeepers offer to interest organizations. Others stress drivers at the supply side, especially the severity of disturbances which affect an organization's constituency. We test these central arguments explaining lobbying activities in a comparative survey experiment conducted in 10 polities in Europe. Our treatments vary the severity of two types of external threats faced by interest organizations: (1) barriers that restrict their access to decision-makers and (2) disturbances that compromise an organization's interests. We operationalize these threats at the demand and supply side of lobbying based on an (at that point) hypothetical second wave of COVID-19. Our findings show that while severe access barriers trigger a flight response, whereby groups suspend their lobbying activities and divert to protest actions, higher disturbances mobilize groups into a fight mode, in which organizations spend more lobbying resources and intensify different outside lobbying activities. Our study serves novel causal evidence on the important dynamic relationship between policy disturbances, political access and lobbying strategies.

Research shows that information cues influence public opinion on international cooperation, yet it is unclear whether all cues are equally effective in the context of a global crisis. This paper sheds light on this issue by analysing how frames in public discourse influence support for multilateral vaccine cooperation during Covid-19. Building on research on in-group favouritism, decision-making under uncertainty, and public support for multilateralism, the paper argues that frames emphasizing vaccine nationalism are more potent than those emphasizing international cooperation and that nationalist political identities moderate these framing effects. An original survey experiment in the United Kingdom confirms this argument and shows that public support for multilateralism is substantial but vulnerable. A vaccine nationalism frame reduces support for multilateralism, while an international cooperation frame has no effect. Moreover, ‘Brexit identities’ moderate this framing effect, with ‘Leavers’ being more susceptible to the detrimental effect of the vaccine nationalism frame than ‘Remainers’.

This article combines the fields of deliberative theory and citizenship studies. Drawing from a deliberative experiment on foreigner political rights with almost 300 German citizens, we find that a short virtual deliberative treatment produced a clarification effect, whereby especially those with already negative views increased their scepticism. Participants in our deliberative treatment displayed higher levels of argument repertoire and integrative complexity, underlining that the treatment led to well-considered opinions. A qualitative analysis of participants’ substantive rationales unravels traces of what De Schutter and Ypi dub ‘mandatory citizenship’, implying that political rights must be attached to obligations. These results have wide ranging implications: They indicate that the practice of deliberation is not quasi-automatically programmed to progressive outcomes (as some have argued) but can have a communitarian dimension (where preferences are determined on the basis of existing communal values and self-understandings); this suggests that participatory practices may not always advance progressive reforms.

‘Welfare chauvinism’ (or ‘welfare ethnocentrism,’ when directed against native-born ethnic minorities) is a declination of nativism within the social policy domain and a common element of populist radical right discourse. Previous studies have shown that this rhetoric can influence how people perceive the deservingness and entitlement of certain groups to welfare rights. In this study, we propose it has additional effects by evoking a purported lack of reciprocity in what concerns benefits from, and contributions to, the welfare system, such rhetoric can also justify and legitimize discrimination against out-groups in other domains that are unrelated to welfare. We use a pre-registered experiment embedded in a survey of a nationally representative sample of the Portuguese population to examine whether individuals who are exposed to the issue of illegitimate ‘takers’ of the welfare system become more likely to express discriminatory intentions regarding an out-group's freedom of movement and establishment. We find that in the Portuguese context, where the populist radical right frequently portrays the Roma minority as welfare abusers, highlighting the issue of reciprocity can trigger a sizeable increase in discriminatory intentions against the Romani even in domains unrelated to welfare rights.

A crucial aspect of elite dominance in modern democracies concerns the degree to which different political elites share similar career paths and shifts between different elite positions. Similarity in career paths and transfers across elite positions are crucial aspects of elite dominance in modern democracies. This paper argues that there are limits to elite career similarity and sector transfer because of varying recruitment criteria and reputational cargo across different political elite groups. We argue that career similarity and transfers across elite positions are lower when recruitment criteria are exclusive. We also argue that acquired reputation may be a career liability limiting transfers into other elite groups. Empirically, we examine career trajectories and transfers across elite groups by mapping the full career of Members of the Parliament, top bureaucrats and interest group leaders in Denmark. We demonstrate that within the Danish political elite, career paths are relatively distinct and transfer few. Career distinctiveness and lack of elite transfers are especially pronounced for the bureaucratic elite, which is guarded by stricter recruitment criteria and on guard against reputations that might taint its image as a pure merit civil service. In contrast to other studies, our results suggest that the shutters between elite sectors are relatively closed. However, the few individuals passing through these most exclusive revolving doors may have a significant political impact.

Accepting defeat in the aftermath of elections is crucial for the stability of democracies. But in times of intense polarization, the voluntary consent of electoral losers seems less obvious. In this paper, I study whether affective and perceived ideological polarization amplify the winner–loser gap in political support. Using multilevel growth curve modelling on pre and post-election panel data from the British Election Study Internet Panel collected during the 2015 and 2019 UK general elections, I show that the winner–loser gap is indeed more pronounced amongst voters with higher levels of affective and perceived ideological polarization. Moreover, the results illustrate that polarized voters experience a stark decrease in their support for the political system following their electoral loss. Given the high and, in some Western democracies, rising polarization levels, these findings have important implications for losers’ consent and the stability of democracies in election times.

Recent research has shown that sexual and/or gender minority voters are prone to mobilizing when LGBT+ issues are on the political agenda. This increased level of political engagement is attributed to the experience of discrimination, understood both in legal and social terms, which spurs LGBT+ individuals to participate with the aim of advancing their rights. However, a crucial question remains unanswered: do these gaps in participation persist in contexts where core LGBT+ rights are protected? Drawing from comprehensive and verified data on the population of Sweden, this study finds evidence of a positive and sustained sexuality-driven voter turnout gap across multiple elections. This gap manifests itself both shortly and a decade after the enactment of same-sex marriage and shows no tangible signs of abating. In addition to improving our knowledge of political participation patterns among sexual minorities, these findings underscore the potential role of minority rights protection as a mechanism to ensure enduring inclusion of social minority groups within democratic processes.

Affective polarization – that is, antipathy towards political opponents – sits high on the academic and political agenda. This is because it is thought to have a multitude of damaging consequences, both for how citizens view and approach each other and for how they relate to the political system. This study investigates some of the most mentioned and worrying potential consequences of affective polarization at the individual level. Zooming in on Europe, it sheds light on the substantive relationship between partisan antipathy and three kinds of norm-breaking escalation in the form of avoidance, intolerance and support for violence against party supporters. Methodologically, it unpacks the affective component of polarization, testing to what extent the traditional feeling thermometer performs as a predictor of these three potential outcomes. It then tests alternative expectations of the antecedents of such escalation derived from the intergroup emotions’ literature and the study of political radicalization. This is done using a broad range of both established and new survey items fielded in nationally representative panels between May and November 2020 in two contexts that score relatively low (Norway) and high (the United Kingdom) on affective polarization. They reveal that avoidance, intolerance and support for political violence can be validly measured, and are manifest, in these two European countries, but that they are only weakly correlated to mere dislike of the outgroup. Instead, more severe forms of norm-breaking escalation depend on the specific nature of the discrete emotions induced beyond dislike (anger, fear or disgust) and are rooted in factors such as relative deprivation, Manicheanism, and dark personality traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism). We discuss the implications for the way polarization is theorized and measured.

The evolution of economic policy in Western countries in the post-1980 era is subject to extensive academic debate, but statistical modelling of its many qualitative aspects can be challenging. I use two sources of textual data from the United Kingdom – policy documents written by executive departments, as well as recently declassified cabinet minutes – together with unsupervised text-as-data methods to examine the evolution of economic policy discourse between 1983 and 2021. The findings challenge the hypothesis of an undifferentiated post-1980 liberal era. Instead, several shifts away from the liberalizing priorities of the 1980s are identified. The first is an increased attention to the public services in the 1990s. The second is a rise of activist approaches focused on state-supported innovation in the 2010s – a claim which has been widely articulated but has not been rigorously tested so far. These discourse-based conclusions are validated through an econometric analysis of detailed spending data.