European Journal of Political Research最新文献

While it is generally admitted that governments in most democracies make extensive use of public opinion research, we do not know much about the way they mobilize this resource. When and why do they want to learn about public opinion? What determines differences in the intensity of government polling over the electoral cycle? Are government opinion polls primarily a tool for testing the reception of government proposals or for learning more about issues that are important to citizens? And what does this tell us about the way political representation works? Understanding governments as actors in the production of public opinion, not just as passive consumers, our focus is on polls commissioned directly by governments. We argue that government polls can help us to better understand how contemporary political representation works since they can play an important role as ‘update instrument’ in anticipatory representation or as a decision-making aid in promissory representation. By studying government polls as dependent variable, we develop an innovative research design and systematically analyse the factors that explain whether the intensity of government polling (the number of questions asked) varies across different stages of the electoral cycle and whether the issues they ask about correspond more to the government's priorities or those of the public. We present evidence from Germany, mobilizing an original database of all survey questions directly commissioned by the German government during the 18th and 19th legislative periods (2013–2021). Our findings help to better understand the factors that determine the intensity of government polling at different moments of the electoral cycle and to identify the different logic of representation behind this activity. The transition from the post-election period to the routine period and from the routine period to the pre-election period correspond to turning points in the German government's use of this instrument. While we could not observe any direct effects of the electoral cycle on the intensity of government polling, the interplay between the former and different types of policy issues proves to be insightful. The government commissions significantly more survey questions on government priorities during the first 3 months in office than during routine times and significantly more survey questions on salient issues as federal elections approach. Moreover, we show that governments commission fewer questions on issues they ‘own’, which points in the same direction as previous studies showing that governments are less interested in public opinion on these issues.

Democratic innovations aim to strengthen citizen participation in democratic decision-making processes. Building on theories of deliberative democracy, participatory democracy and direct democracy, different types of democratic innovations have been developed, ranging from mini-publics, to participatory processes and referendums and citizens’ initiatives. Over the last four decades, an expanding number of scholars have investigated the effects of these democratic innovations on citizens. However, even though a considerable amount of research has been done, there currently exists no overview of the effects of different types of democratic innovations on citizens’ attitudes, behaviour and capabilities. In addition, it is unclear which effects prove robust across studies, and which effects require more investigation.

The aim of this paper is to systematically evaluate what we know and what we do not know yet about the effects of democratic innovations on citizens who participate in them. In order to do so, we conduct a meta-analysis of 100 quantitative empirical studies published between 1980 and 2020. We find, perhaps unsurprisingly, that mini-publics are widely researched for their effects on citizens, whereas studies into the effects of participatory processes and referendums and citizens’ initiatives on participating citizens are much less frequent. We also find that participation in mini-publics changes citizens’ policy attitudes and positively affects citizens’ political attitudes, knowledge, internal efficacy and reasoning skills. For participatory processes, our analyses indicate that they appear to have a positive effect on participants’ political attitudes and knowledge and no effect on participants’ internal efficacy, but there are too few studies to draw robust conclusions. Participation in referendums and citizens’ initiatives appears to have a positive effect on participants’ knowledge and internal efficacy, even though these findings should also be considered preliminary due to the limited number of studies.

Affective polarization is increasingly evident around the world. This has been attributed in part to residential segregation by partisanship. The ‘Big Sort’ has meant that neighbourhoods in the United States, and elsewhere, have become more homogenous in terms of vote. Yet there is little systematic evidence on the relationship between homogenous partisan neighbourhoods and affective polarization. Does living among fellow partisans make people more negative towards the other side? In this Research Note, we use unique data from Britain to show that while people accurately recognize that their local area is more or less politically homogenous, neighbourhood political homogeneity is not correlated with any measure of affective polarization. These findings are robust to the type of political divide (partisanship or Brexit identity), the level of geography, length of residence and controls for ideology and social characteristics. We therefore suggest that while geographical sorting is an important phenomenon, it is unlikely to be a major cause of affective polarization.

Over the past two decades, extreme parties have gained increasing electoral success in European party systems. While this party polarization is often associated with its negative consequences, recent studies have suggested its potential benefit for remobilizing the electorate by offering clear political alternatives. However, it remains unclear which groups of citizens may be mobilized by broader supply and whether this positive effect is generalizable to multiparty systems. This article contributes to this debate arguing that the system multidimensionality matters when assessing the relationship between polarization and voter turnout. Through a multilevel analysis and two studies at the aggregate and individual levels, this article provides evidence that party polarization is associated with increased turnout only when parties polarize on the cultural dimension of party competition. This effect is moderated by the party system unidimensionality and mobilizes voters at large, regardless of their level of extremism, political awareness or partisanship. These findings support previous research suggesting a ‘realignment’ of party systems, meaning that the main line of political conflict for parties and voters is shifting towards the cultural dimension of party competition across Europe.

In times of crisis, citizens tend to increase their approval of the government and its leader which can shift the balance of power. This ‘rally effect’ is a persistent empirical regularity; however, the literature is still undecided on its underlying causal mechanisms. We argue that crises induce threat and anxiety and hypothesize that perceived threat increases approval of the incumbent leader, whereas anxiety decreases it. By analysing German panel data from the COVID-19 pandemic, we causally identify both mechanisms and provide systematic evidence supporting this theory. Moreover, we increase the scope of our theory and show that both mechanisms are also at work when citizens approve cabinet members who manage key portfolios. Our findings have highly important implications for our understanding of the rally effect and crises politics in democracies.

Interest groups are often included as key actors in consultation processes, with the aim of making policy more effective, fair and representative. At the same time, their influence is frequently viewed with suspicion. This research note uses survey experiments in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States (N = 9,357) to explore how the ties citizens hold to different types of interest groups affect their perceived legitimacy of involving them in parliamentary hearings. We find that affective, behavioural and attitudinal ties shape how citizens evaluate the representation of groups, but that there are important differences between ties to different group types: ties to cause groups representing societal interests are more consequential than ties to business interests. These findings underline important heterogeneity in how different interest groups relate to their constituencies and have implications for accountability relationships between citizens and policymakers. The heightened sensitivity of citizens with ties to cause groups regarding their representation underscores the need to actively nurture and involve these groups in policy making.

Legislators face a challenge when implementing long-termist policies that prioritise sustainability and the well-being of future generations: citizens prefer policies that pay off sooner rather than later. In this research note, I assess the hypothesis that the lifespan structures this temporal discounting effect. Do people show a particular preference for policies that pay off within, rather than beyond, their own lifetime? In a pre-registered conjoint analysis with age-group blocking (N = 2405), I find little evidence in support of this explanation. Although they significantly prefer nearer-term policy benefits, citizens show no sign of especially preferring policies whose benefits will materialise within their own lifetimes. This pattern holds across a range of personal, political and philosophical differences. The temporal discounting effect is also substantially smaller than other policy features, such as how large the payoff of that policy is expected to be. Additionally, people are clearly willing in principle to trade off the timing of benefits for the scale of benefits, preferring larger later payoffs to sooner smaller ones. Across and beyond the lifespan, the sooner a policy pays off, the better. But, whenever they materialise, the bigger the societal benefits of that policy, the better. These findings strongly suggest that temporal policy discounting is not driven by selfish concerns, while also reinforcing that any such effect does not overwhelm citizens’ evaluations of policy proposals in principle.

Does economic inequality dampen support for the political system? This question has been answered in the affirmative in prior work studying the relationship between economic inequality and various manifestations of political system support across countries or US states. However, recent work challenges the premise underlying such analyses by showing that citizens are generally ignorant about national-level inequality. Relatedly, work on contextual effects finds that economic and social phenomena are particularly consequential for political attitudes when they reflect palpable everyday experiences. Combining these insights, we suggest that a more theoretically and methodologically appropriate test of the proposition that economic inequality reduces political system support should focus on local, neighbourhood-level economic inequality, which citizens encounter on a daily basis. By linking multiple geo-referenced surveys – both cross-sectional and longitudinal – with Danish registry data, we create micro-contextual measures of local economic inequality and relate them to a range of indicators of political system support. We find no evidence indicating that local inequality reduces political system support.

This paper applies a conjoint experiment to assess the sources of contemporary social status hierarchies in Western Europe. Social status has become a popular concept in political science to explain resentment against economic and cultural transformations. However, we do not know whether cultural sources like race and gender have an independent causal effect on social status perceptions. Furthermore, these characteristics may be more contested between societal subgroups and thus have a weaker stratifying effect than income or occupation. This study employs an innovative conjoint experiment, conducted in Switzerland, to systematically assess the multidimensional sources of status. The design asks respondents to place profiles with randomized criteria and thus captures intersubjective status perceptions. In contrast to evaluating one's own placement on the social status hierarchy, placing others provides more accurate insights about the structural force of social status. The results show that both economic and cultural sources strongly shape social status, with occupation, race/ethnicity and income being most important. Furthermore, different subgroups agree on the hierarchy no matter their own status. This study helps to understand the structural roots of political resentment by showing that both cultural and economic inequalities are recognized.

Parties strive to set the ‘terms of the debate’ in elections by selectively emphasising issue areas that enhance their popular appeal. Yet, do citizens respond to parties’ issue emphasis, or do they mainly respond to objective factors such as economic and environmental conditions, crime rates, immigration flows, and so on? We report a time-series, cross-sectional analyses of the relationship between the public's issue attention, parties’ issue emphases and objective national conditions across seven issue areas in 13 western publics between 1971 and 2021, finding a strong association between objective conditions and citizens’ subsequent issue attention, but weaker associations to party system issue attention. There are stronger links, however, between parties’ issue emphases and their supporters’ subsequent attention.