European Journal of Political Research最新文献

Does the enactment of gender quotas in legislatures affect satisfaction with democracy? Although extensive research has generally affirmed the potential of gender quotas to advance women's political representation, our article investigates how quota adoption has shaped public attitudes toward democracy. We argue that positive effects resulting from the descriptive representation of women could be attenuated by negative reactions to the implementation of a quota system. Specifically, we posit that the backlash to these compulsory parity-corrective policies will lead to lower levels of satisfaction with democracy, particularly for men. Using cross-national survey evidence from as early as 1973 covering 69 countries and well over a million respondents, as well as a generalized synthetic control design to causally assess the impact of quotas, we find strong support for our expectations regarding the negative effects of quotas on democratic satisfaction. However, we do not find clear evidence that gender conditions this relationship and report heterogeneous region-specific findings with ideology and support for quotas as moderators. Importantly, we observe the strongest negative associations between quotas and satisfaction in contexts with higher levels of corruption, specifically in Latin America. Seeing that quotas have the potential to generate lower levels of democratic satisfaction among men and women, our analysis contributes to our understanding of public responses to fast-tracking women's representation and has broader implications for other top-down initiatives aimed at deepening norms of democracy and equality.

This article explores how citizens’ legitimacy perceptions are affected when decision makers deviate from the recommendations of a deliberative mini-public (DMP), and what can be done to mitigate negative consequences. The results of a preregistered vignette experiment in Belgium (N = 2659) support our two main expectations. First, citizens’ legitimacy perceptions decrease when politicians do not follow the outcome of a DMP. Second, when politicians communicate responsively about this – meaning that they show respect for the recommendations and publicly justify why they deviated from them – legitimacy perceptions substantially increase, generally reaching the level of those cases where recommendations are followed. Diving deeper into this result also shows that for this effect to occur, citizens must find the provided reasoning valid and acceptable. Finally, the results hold among both policy winners and policy losers. These findings have implications for the literature on democratic innovations, empirical legitimacy, and political representation, but also for policymakers striving to combine arrangements of public participation that go beyond triviality, with political responsibility for the whole, and sustained mechanisms for accountability.

Populism research has found much scholarly and public attention alike in recent years. Most research has focused on how populism can be defined, assessed or even measured. Even though there are emerging studies on populist messages, few of them have paid attention on causally identifying ways in which discourse can affect support for populist actors. This article positions itself within this gap and aims to answer which discursive elements make (non-)populist messages appealing to varying groups of people. To answer this research question, I conducted a novel survey experiment on vote choice in Germany from December 2020 to January 2021 with N = 3325. Respondents were asked to choose between two candidate statements that displayed varying discursive elements. Thus, the experiment causally tested whether people-centric rhetoric, blame attributive languages or populist style focusing on language complexity drive the populist vote. Results show that a neutral form of blame attribution, namely towards politicians, had the highest probability of driving vote choice, irrespective of respondents' underlying ideological preferences or populist attitudes. Simple language nearly always has a negative effect on vote choice, whereas people-centrism adds a positive touch. These results show that there may be an increasing dissatisfaction with democracy that is voiced by blaming political elites for the malfunctioning of society.

Many voters support the inclusion of technocrats in government. Yet we know very little about why technocrats are considered more appealing than traditional party representatives. In particular, it is unclear which advantages and disadvantages voters attach to the defining traits of technocratic ministers: party independence and expertise. We engage with this question drawing on a pre-registered survey experiment in Austria. We examine how manipulating ministers' party affiliation and expertise affects voters' perceptions of their issue competence and bargaining competence. Findings indicate that voters ascribe lower levels of issue competence to partisan ministers than to non-partisan ministers, notwithstanding their actual expertise, and that ministers' partisanship shrinks the positive effect of expertise on perceived issue competence. However, this ‘partisanship penalty’ disappears for supporters of the minister's party. Moreover, voters perceive partisanship as an advantageous trait with regard to a minister's bargaining competence. While voters like technocrats for their expertise and independence from party politics, our findings reveal nuanced perceptions, with voters still recognizing distinct advantages in being represented by party politicians.

Extensive media coverage of immigration, that is, media salience, has been thought to heighten anti-immigrant attitudes among native-born citizens by creating an information environment that portrays immigration as society's greatest problem. However, past empirical findings on the relationship between media salience and anti-immigrant attitudes have been mixed. Some studies have observed that media salience increases hostility towards immigrants, while others have found it has no significant influence. This study investigates the underlying reasons for these inconsistent findings and demonstrates the need to revisit the meaning of issue importance. It employs the concept of public issue salience, the perception that immigration is the most important problem or concern about immigration, to find evidence. It argues that when the immigrant issue is a pivotal point of political competition, the immigration issue signals conflicts, connoting negativity so public issue salience and anti-immigrant attitudes are closely related. On the other hand, in an environment where political elites reach a consensus, the immigration issue remains neutral so that they can be disentangled. The scope of media salience changes accordingly as well. This study chooses the United Kingdom and Germany for comparative research due to their similarities in immigration histories and the success of far-right parties as well as differences in their major political parties' reactions to the issue. I match individual-level longitudinal survey data to media article data and find clear country differences. In the United Kingdom, where political parties are polarized over the issue, public issue salience and anti-immigrant attitudes are closely related so that media salience heightens them. In Germany, where political elites across different ideologies hold welcoming stances, their relationship is moderate. Media salience merely increases the perceived importance and does not increase anti-immigrant attitudes. Contributions and implications are discussed with respect to political elites' role.

Does a leader's gender affect a country's performance during a health crisis, and through what mechanisms? This study finds a clear, substantial negative correlation between having a female leader in democracies and their COVID-19 infections and mortality rates, rejecting multiple spurious claims. The research is the first to analyse four pandemic waves covering 2 years while performing inter-wave analysis. The gendered performance gap continuously grew during the first three waves, moderated by vaccinations in the fourth wave. We found that trust and effectiveness mechanisms impacted the growth of the performance gap. As new variants of COVID-19 continue to spread and new threats related to the climate crisis are threatening globally, understanding the impact of gender in leadership roles, particularly during global crises, can provide valuable insights for policy makers and national leaders.

Ordinary citizens can serve as a critical defence against democratic backsliding. But beneath the surface, citizens' commitment to democracy is sometimes fragile, with crises exacerbating existing anxieties. We introduce ‘democratic persuasion’ as an actionable intervention to foster the resilience of citizens' commitment to liberal democracy. ‘Democratic persuasion’ seizes the opportunity of communicating with wavering democrats. ‘Democratic persuasion’ entails actively making the case for democracy and discussing democracy's inherent trade-offs while engaging existing doubts and misperceptions. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which stirred frustrations with democracy and highlighted democratic trade-offs, we invited citizens via Facebook to participate in one of sixteen Zoom town halls to engage in discussions on pandemic politics with members of German state and federal parliaments. Each representative hosted two town halls, with random assignment to a condition of ‘democratic persuasion’ in one of the two town hall meetings. The field experiment yielded mixed results, demonstrating significant effects on some indicators of democratic commitment but not on others. This study contributes to the nascent body of research aimed at reinforcing the societal pillars of liberal democracies.

In liberal democracies, protest can serve as a trigger for necessary policy reforms, but it can also be used by a loud minority to advance political goals against the will of the majority. Focusing on such vocal protests in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, we investigate the following question: How does the location of protest events affect the likelihood of political engagement with the protests in a multilevel system? Combining social movement literature with studies of issue attention and rhetorical responsiveness, we analyze how German members of parliaments’ (MPs) responses vary using their tweets from the onset of the pandemic to the German federal election in September 2021. Using quantitative text analysis, we measure rhetorical responsiveness to Covid-19 protests and apply multilevel regression analyses and difference-in-differences. We find that more protests lead to more attention; however, MPs respond most strongly to protests within the state they represent. Furthermore, politicians’ level within the German multilevel system affects their attention to these protests, with MPs elected at lower levels of an electoral system responding more to local protest events than MPs elected at higher levels. The results highlight the importance of the location of protests in attracting political attention.

Many theories of political participation imply that close elections increase voter turnout, but empirical support for this is mixed. One challenge is that close elections occur in unrepresentative places, making it difficult to extend counterfactual inferences across the wider electorate. In this note, I study closeness in an alternative way by leveraging those who move home between elections. With a large-scale longitudinal survey in Great Britain, comparing individuals who move between safe and competitive parliamentary constituencies, I provide evidence that closeness increases campaign contact but generally fails to affect turnout. British movers are politically comparable to the wider electorate, so the results can be cautiously generalised. This contributes to substantive literature on voter and party-led theories of participation, while adopting an empirical strategy seldom used in the study of political behaviour.