European Journal of Political Research最新文献

This paper examines the qualities of governments that influence their perceived trustworthiness, presenting the first experimental study of the distinct roles of ‘competence’, ‘benevolence’ and ‘integrity’ (CBI) in shaping trust in government. We empirically test the effects of these three dimensions of trustworthiness through conjoint experiments conducted in five countries: Britain, Croatia, Spain, Argentina and France. The results indicate that benevolence – government acting in citizens' interests – is the most significant determinant of trust judgements across individuals and nations. Competence and integrity have a secondary, approximately equal effect. Building on recent advances in analyses of conjoint experiments, we explore how these attributes are conditional on each other, and how respondent characteristics moderate those effects. The findings reveal that the effects of attributes are generally consistent, although respondent left-right ideology moderates the impact of government competence.

Women are not a demographic minority, but they certainly are a minority in politics. Most legislative bodies across the world are still overwhelmingly male. Female candidates cite lack of resources as one of the main deterrents to run. Using data on candidates encompassing twenty-eight elections in sixteen countries between 2006 and 2017, we examine the role of electoral institutions, partisanship and candidates’ political profile in mitigating – or aggravating – the gender resource gap. We find that female candidates systematically avail of significantly lower campaign budgets. This is true across different electoral systems and on the left as well as on the right. The gap is larger in size among incumbents. It is also wider in parties that use voluntary quotas and put forward more female candidates. Moreover, the budget composition of male and female candidates varies considerably. Male candidates tend to use higher proportions of their own resources, while female candidates rely on proportionally higher party contributions, that are, however, smaller in size.

Representative democracy is perceived to be in crisis in many Western countries. Increasing citizen participation is often considered to be a remedy to close this gap between government and the people. Which instruments should be used to realize this remains, however, open for discussion. In this article, we compare attitudes of citizens, politicians and civil servants towards a number of participatory instruments. We assess to what extent these attitudes are influenced by ‘interests’ (operationalized as the formal position one takes: either politician, citizen or civil servant) and ‘ideas’ (measured as ideological beliefs), while holding the institutional context constant (the local level in Flanders [Belgium]). Analyses based on a large-scale survey (N = 4,168) show that although the ideological position of the respondents to some extent affects attitudes towards particular participatory instruments, especially their formal position has a considerable impact on how participatory instruments are appreciated. Indeed, different stakeholders distinctly advance different instruments as the best way to enhance citizen participation. This raises questions about the potential of citizen participation to narrow the gap between citizens and policymakers, as diverging attitudes towards particular instruments might create a new gap rather than closing one.

Populist parties have been increasingly successful in European politics over the last decade. Although research suggests that nostalgic deprivation – a perceived loss of economic, political or social status — is linked to support for populist parties, the generalizability of this argument across voters and national contexts remains unclear. In this research note, we leverage original representative surveys across 19 European countries to demonstrate that perceptions of declining status are a consistent predictor of populist support. Decomposing nostalgic deprivation into different dimensions, we find that while social, economic and power deprivation have different antecedents, each predicts populist attitudes and voting behaviour. Moreover, we find that nostalgic deprivation predicts support for populist platforms among both left-wing and right-wing respondents, as well as across Eastern and Western Europe. While the antecedents differ across contexts, these findings confirm that perceptions of downward mobility are associated with the rise of populism in Europe.

The paper introduces a deep-learning model fine-tuned for detecting authoritarian discourse in political speeches. Set up as a regression problem with weak supervision logic, the model is trained for the task of classification of segments of text for being/not being associated with authoritarian discourse. Rather than trying to define what an authoritarian discourse is, the model builds on the assumption that authoritarian leaders inherently define it. In other words, authoritarian leaders talk like authoritarians. When combined with the discourse defined by democratic leaders, the model learns the instances that are more often associated with authoritarians on the one hand and democrats on the other. The paper discusses several evaluation tests using the model and advocates for its usefulness in a broad range of research problems. It presents a new methodology for studying latent political concepts and positions as an alternative to more traditional research strategies.

Government responsiveness is a key feature and justification for democracy. Yet, previous studies show that the ability of governments to deliver responsive policies critically depends on the availability of resources. This study suggests that the shadow economy hurts democratic responsiveness because it reduces government revenues and decreases the reliability of economic statistics. Governments facing lower resources then respond to wider economic constraints and not to their publics. Using Eurobarometer data to evaluate public opinion in 15 European democracies and data on welfare generosity to measure policy outputs, this study finds that larger submerged economies correspond to less responsive governments. Additionally, the empirical analysis highlights that the shadow economy makes welfare systems less generous and taxation rates more demanding. These novel results have important implications for our understanding of democracy and help us clarify the conditions under which governments are more or less likely to deliver responsive policies. Finally, these results demonstrate the importance of studying the political consequences of the shadow economy.

The personalization of politics includes electoral reforms that give voters more opportunity to select individual representatives as well as behavioural personalization among voters and politicians. Institutional research suggests that the latter is a function of the former, but it remains unclear whether the association between the two types of personalization is actually causal. In order to get empirical leverage on this question, we analyze local elections in Denmark, which feature within-district and within-party variation in the openness of party lists. Using detailed information on the behaviour of politicians and voters, we find that, once we take differences between districts and parties into account, the personalization of electoral rules has a negligible effect on behavioural personalization.

Do gender quotas increase political knowledge? While some studies suggest that quotas can positively impact women's political engagement and participation, others find null or negative effects. This paper focuses on Western Europe and argues that the implementation of quotas serves as an attention and consciousness-raising event, potentially enhancing awareness of the political sphere. To investigate this, I propose a novel research design that capitalizes on the (quasi) exogenous shock resulting from the introduction of gender quotas. By influencing symbolic representation, quotas may enhance women's sense of empowerment, equality and willingness to engage in politics. Furthermore, the impact is expected to be more pronounced among younger women due to the heightened political socialization experienced during adolescence. Thus, the institutional change brought about by quotas is anticipated to particularly boost political knowledge among (younger) women and subsequently narrow the gender gap. To examine this hypothesis, I analyse data from 1992 to 2018 from 12 countries, of which six implemented gender quotas. Using a hierarchical Bayesian model, I assess respondents' answers to knowledge questions. The findings indicate that the introduction of gender quotas in parliamentary systems has a positive effect on reducing the gender gap in political knowledge among younger individuals, while the effects are statistically insignificant for older citizens.

How much autonomy elected representatives should have in looking after the interests of their constituents is a central question of democratic theory. While much research has been conducted on the representational roles adopted by elected representatives, we currently lack an understanding of citizens’ preferences for contrasting models of representation, more specifically whether they believe representatives should primarily act as instructed delegates, closely following public opinion or rather as trustees, relying on their own convictions and judgement. As a result, we know relatively little about how congruent citizens’ and politicians’ representational preferences are, whether some subgroups of citizens and politicians are more congruent with each other than others and whether citizens’ and politicians’ representational preferences are driven by the same determinants. Using data from 13 countries, we assess the level of congruence between voters’ and MPs’ preferences in representational style. In all countries, citizens favouring delegate-style MPs are poorly represented as the vast majority of representatives display a moderate to strong preference for trusteeship. Analysing subgroups of politicians and citizens according to party family, ideology, inclusion in government, populism and social class reveals that MPs from left-wing or right-wing radical and populist parties, representatives sitting on the opposition benches and those belonging to lower classes tend to hold representational preferences that are more in line with the preferences of their own supporters or individuals belonging to the same group as themselves, but also with those of the entire electorate. However, even among these politicians there are few delegates. Examining whether citizens’ and politicians’ representational preferences are driven by similar determinants, we assessed the influence of their ideological orientations, socioeconomic status and support for (or affiliation with) a party in government on their representational preferences. For citizens, our results indicate that locating oneself on the right of the ideological spectrum is related to higher scores on the delegate–trustee scale, while supporting a populist party seems to decrease voters’ favourability toward trusteeship. Politicians’ preferences could not be explained by similar factors as none of the tested factors were significant. In line with our congruence analysis, there seems to be little variation in MPs’ representational preferences. Even groups of MPs that can be thought of as most likely to be delegates turn out to be staunch trustees, potentially causing frustration among citizens preferring delegate-style representation.

The use of emotive rhetoric in legislative debates has attracted increasing scholarly attention in political science research. Building on recent scholarship, I examine the conditions under which emotive rhetoric dominates legislative speeches in the UK House of Commons between 2001 and 2015. By coding nearly half a million legislative speeches according to Ekman's six basic emotions – anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise – I argue that members of parliament (MPs) strategically use emotions in their speeches to maximize their influence and visibility. The findings reveal modest but discernible effects related to electoral safety, seniority and party status. Specifically, the results show that speeches by electorally vulnerable, junior and opposition MPs contain higher levels of emotive language compared to those by other MPs. Notably, despite considerable similarity in the correlates of individual emotion categories, there are also significant differences. For example, opposition MPs and electorally vulnerable MPs rely more heavily on negative emotions such as anger, disgust, fear and sadness than government MPs and electorally safer MPs. While junior MPs use fear, sadness and surprise at higher rates compared to their senior counterparts, they are statistically indistinguishable from senior MPs in their use of anger, disgust and joy. Overall, these results underscore the need for greater scholarly attention to the communication styles of representatives in legislatures and emphasize the importance of examining the nuanced strategies behind the use of different types of emotions.