European Journal of Political Research最新文献

A close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. However, legislators cannot be responsive to all voters at all times with regard to the policies the latter favour. We argue that legislators use their speaking time in parliament to offer compensatory speech to their constituents who might oppose how they voted on a policy, in order to re-establish themselves as responsive to the public's wishes. Leveraging the case of Brexit, we show that legislators pay more attention to constituents who might be dissatisfied with how they voted. Furthermore, their use of rhetorical responsiveness is contingent on the magnitude of the representational deficit they face vis-à-vis their constituency. Our findings attest to the central role of parliamentary speech in maintaining responsiveness. They also demonstrate that communicative responsiveness can substitute for policy responsiveness.

Past research has long documented that voters dislike parties and leaders who reverse their policy positions. But would they tolerate (principled) policy U-turns if they are motivated by external events, such as a large-scale crisis or scientific evidence? In this study, we explore whether the motivation behind positional shifts affects voter evaluations of political parties. To do so, we seek to connect the causes and consequences of policy shifts, a synergy still unexplored in the literature. We suggest that, while U-turns, in general, can be damaging to a party's reputation, principled changes brought about by new scientific evidence or major crises should not necessarily have negative implications, because these changes can be necessary for the public good. We conducted a nationally representative survey experiment in Germany (n = 3127) featuring two classes of policy reversals: strategic and principled. Surprisingly, however, we find that voters by and large hold negative views of different types of policy U-turns, thus including when external circumstances suggest change may be necessary. Interestingly, our empirical analysis reveals intriguing patterns. First, voters are willing to tolerate all sorts of policy reversals if the party ends up adopting their positions, suggesting that proximity matters even in the event of exogenous events. Second, voters with high levels of political trust tolerate different types of policy reversals, even when the party changes for mere strategic office-seeking motivations. Coming from the premise that political and societal change is imperative, these findings have direct implications for democracies.

A large literature studies whether, and under what circumstances, voters will electorally punish corrupt politicians. Yet this literature has to date neglected the empirical prevalence of transnational dimensions to real-world corruption allegations, even as corruption studies undergo a ‘transnational turn’. We use a survey experiment in the United Kingdom in 2020 to investigate whether voters differentially punish politicians associated with transnational corruption and test four different potential mechanisms: information salience, country-based discrimination, economic nationalism and expected representation. We find evidence suggesting that voters indeed differentially punish transnational corruption, but only when it involves countries perceived negatively by the public (i.e. a ‘Moscow-based firm’). This is most consistent with a mechanism of country-based discrimination, while we find no evidence consistent with any other mechanism. These results suggest that existing experimental studies might understate the potential for electoral accountability by neglecting real-world corruption allegations’ frequent transnational dimension.

While scholars have closely examined the intensification of negative affect across party lines during elections, less is known about the decline of partisan hostility in the aftermath of election campaigns. Synthesizing insights from research on electoral rules and political psychology, we theorize and empirically test two such mechanisms of post-election negative affect decline. The first is that of winners' generosity: the expectation that self-perceived election winners will express warmer feelings towards political opponents. The second is that of co-governance, which predicts that shared coalition status leads to warmer affective evaluations among governing parties. We provide evidence that these mechanisms operate as pressure valves of negative partisan affect. We also show that while co-governance reduces negative affect between parties who govern together, it fuels negative affect among supporters of opposition parties. The empirical analyses leverage a uniquely uncertain political period following the 2021 Israeli elections, around which we conducted an original panel study. Our findings advance the comparative polarization literature and connect psychological and institutional accounts of temporal fluctuations in partisan affect.

This article analyses the role of political parties in policy accumulation. We study this relationship in the area of social policy. Our analysis builds on a large data set covering the size of policy portfolios (policy targets and instruments) in three subfields of social policy for 22 OECD countries over 30 years. We find that the probability of social policy accumulation is not affected by the government's ideological position. Left governments do not produce more extensive social policy portfolios than right ones. Yet, this striking result does not contradict governments’ political ideologies, as left and right parties accumulate for different reasons. While left parties address new social policy targets to broaden the scope of the welfare state, right parties adopt new policy instruments to condition social benefits. These findings hold regardless of how we measure governments’ ideological position and despite strong endogenous policy growth dynamics, that is, countries with greater policy portfolios also display higher levels of policy accumulation. Our findings indicate that party political considerations can explain the reasons for but not the level of policy accumulation. Changes in government are thus unlikely to stall or slow down the constant accumulation of public policies.

Public opinion polls have become vital and increasingly visible parts of election campaigns. Previous research has frequently demonstrated that polls can influence both citizens' voting intentions and political parties' campaign strategies. However, they are also fraught with uncertainty. Margins of error can reflect (parts of) this uncertainty. This paper investigates how citizens' voting intentions change due to whether polling estimates are presented with or without margins of error.

Using a vignette experiment (N=3224), we examine this question based on a real-world example in which different election polls were shown to nationally representative respondents ahead of the 2021 federal election in Germany. We manipulated the display of the margins of error, the interpretation of polls and the closeness of the electoral race.

The results indicate that margins of error can influence citizens' voting intentions. This effect is dependent on the actual closeness of the race and additional interpretative guidance provided to voters. More concretely, the results consistently show that margins of error increase citizens' inclination to vote for one of the two largest contesting parties if the polling gap between these parties is small, and an interpretation underlines this closeness.

The findings of this study are important for three reasons. First, they help to determine whether margins of error can assist citizens in making more informed (strategic) vote decisions. They shed light on whether depicting opinion-poll uncertainty affects the key features of representative democracy, such as democratic accountability. Second, the results stress the responsibility of the media. The way polls are interpreted and contextualized influences the effect of margins of error on voting behaviour. Third, the findings of this paper underscore the significance of including methodological details when communicating scientific research findings to the broader public.

Can territorial disputes within countries be a basis for affective polarization? If so, how does it vary across territories? A burgeoning literature on affective polarization has largely focused on partisan divisions; we argue that contentious political issues such as those relating to territorial integrity can also be a basis for such affective polarization, where citizens feel concord with those sharing such policy preferences and animus for those who do not. We specify hypotheses about territorial-policy-based affective polarization and bring comparative survey evidence from three European regions with salient and contentious territorial claims: Scotland, Catalonia and Northern Ireland. While these three cases encompass different outcomes of territorial disputes, our results show strikingly similar levels of affective polarization.

This article undertakes a comprehensive investigation into several common critiques of career politicians. Career politicians are said to be self-serving: active and assertive when it suits their career interests, and much more interested in attaining higher offices than in serving as constituency-oriented MPs. Yet, empirical investigations of their alleged behaviours are few, and the results are patchy and mixed. Focusing on the United Kingdom case and using a multi-dimensional conceptualization that accords with academic and popular understandings of career politicians, the article draws on uniquely rich attitudinal and longitudinal behavioural data covering the first large generational wave of career politicians to be elected to parliament in the early 1970s. It reports findings consistent with contemporary critiques, suggesting that such dispositions are inherent in the role of career politician. The strongest career politicians among this first wave concentrated strategically on career-serving activities, voted strategically to safeguard their careers, attained and retained successfully ministerial offices and prioritized their personal goals over their party obligations. The article further demonstrates that different measures used by researchers can produce contradictory results and that future comparative research should seek to range beyond unidimensional indicators.

Most studies on European solidarity (‘bonding’) during COVID-19 lack a baseline comparison with outside states. We, therefore, cannot say whether European solidarity is universal or geared towards European Union (EU) insiders (‘bounding’). We thus ask whether European solidarity is ‘bounded’, that is, whether it relies on differentiation between European insiders and outsiders. We argue that if existent, bounded solidarity constitutes a long-term and thick basis for institutional building. To explore this ‘bonding–bounding’ dynamic, we use a vignette experiment embedded into an original survey collected in eight European countries (n ∼ 8900), covering all European regions. Our design varies the countries receiving solidarity, and the channels (EU level vs. member state level), policy domains (health vs. economy) and instruments (loans, grants, medical equipment, vaccines) through which solidarity is provided. Regarding bounding, we find that most countries are more solidaristic with EU countries than an outsider, baseline state (Peru), Italy excepted. There is, nonetheless, a strong heterogeneity between countries: France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden mostly want to help themselves and Southern member states, but not Central Eastern European member states, which we show is due to their perceived obstructionism related to the Rule of Law debate. Concerning the nature of solidarity, we find that most respondents prefer solidarity to be channelled through the EU and loans, with evidence suggesting a freeriding mechanism behind this preference. All in all, our results indicate that EU citizens form a distinct community of solidarity which, in line with a Rokkanian understanding of polity formation, plays a key role in political development and consolidation.

Concerns about widespread democratic dissatisfaction have prompted a search for remedies, such as increasing citizens’ role in politics. While the public seems supportive, it remains unclear whether such newly introduced procedures can effectively tackle citizens’ dissatisfaction with present-day politics. This paper develops a problem-solving approach to studying this question. It proposes that combining insights on what ‘pushes’ and ‘pulls’ people to support procedural reform is crucial: Only then can we uncover if and how people consider procedural reform as addressing the problem(s) they see in the representative system today. Using the example of deliberative minipublics and original, pre-registered survey data from Belgium (n = 1,579), we find that respondents generally think of minipublics as problem-solvers rather than problem-creators, albeit to different degrees. For instance, this perceived problem-solving potential is more pronounced among discontent citizens. This study sheds new light on the importance of studying citizens’ reasoning about the roots and remedies for political dissatisfaction.