This article identifies the determinants of party loyalty while making a distinction between government and opposition voters within an electoral cycle in the two most recent European Union members (Bulgaria and Romania). Both countries are characterized by the perception of widespread corruption and a general distrust of politicians that are likely to hinder the development of strong ties between citizens and parties. We test the explanatory potential of both traditional and revisionist theories of partisanship, suggesting that perceptions of corruption should be treated as equal to evaluations of actual performance. The statistical analysis of comparative study of electoral systems survey data emphasizes the salience of party performance evaluations for party loyalty. Corruption perceptions are significant predictors of loyalty in the Bulgarian case. Voters in both countries assess critically the performance of their preferred party whether it was part of the government or in opposition. A significant difference arises between government and opposition voters with regard to the predictive potential of identification conceptualized as closeness to a party.

Female representation in political decision-making positions is now a salient issue in public discussions throughout Europe. Understanding public attitudes towards a more balanced gender distribution in politics remains limited, however. Using a 2017 Eurobarometer, we focus on cross-national differences in public support for increased female participation in politics to address this limitation. Building on the policy feedbacks literature, we stress the role of gender quotas. We argue that quotas – as legislative devices usually adopted through elite-driven initiatives – stimulate support for stronger female representation. Ensuing debates on quotas raise individual awareness about the underrepresentation of women – informational effect – and, once adopted, give a clear signal that persistent gender imbalance is a social problem to be redressed – normative effect. Our empirical analysis supports this argument. Citizens in countries with gender quotas display stronger support for increased female participation in politics.

Coalition theories have produced arguments about the importance of party positions for participation in government coalitions, but have not connected the existing government institutions (in particular agenda setting) with the coalition government that will be formed. This article presents a veto players’ approach to coalition formation, which pushes the logic of non-cooperative game-theoretic models one step further: we argue that policy positions play a significant role in coalition formation because governments in parliamentary systems control the agenda of the policymaking process. As a result, the institutions that regulate this policymaking process affect coalition formation. In particular, positional advantages that a government may have (central policy position of formateur, fewer parties, and small policy distances among coalition partners) will become more necessary as a government has fewer institutional agenda setting advantages at its disposal. The empirical tests presented in this paper corroborate these expectations by explicitly accounting for the conditional effects of policy positions and institutional agenda setting rules on one another in a set of multilevel logit models.

This paper discusses the hypothesis that democracy hurts economic growth and development, also known as the Lee thesis, and discusses why one could expect dictatorship to be particularly beneficial for growth in the Asian context. Three general theoretical arguments in support of the Lee thesis are then presented. However, the empirical results, based on panel data analysis on more than 20 Asian countries, do not support the hypothesis that dictatorship increases economic growth in Asia. There is no significant, average effect of democracy on growth. Asian dictatorships do invest a larger fraction of their GDP than democracies, but they are worse at generating high enrollment ratios in education after primary school.

This article builds on V.O. Key’s postulate that voters are not fools and that they function as an echo chamber reflecting the clarity of alternatives presented to them. We first propose a reassessment of Key’s claim by examining whether and to what extent the impact of issue preferences on the vote choice depends on the clarity of parties’ profile on these issues. Our empirical tests are based on data from the 2007 Swiss election study and cover three different issues that voters may use as decision-making criteria. Our results confirm that the clearer a party’s profile on a given issue, the higher the impact of that issue on the vote for the party. Second, we offer a refinement of Key’s argument by arguing that voters’ political sophistication conditions the strength of issue voting. Empirical evidence supports this argument, but shows that the effect of political sophistication is curvilinear: sophistication exerts a stronger mediating role when a party has a moderately clear profile than when it has a low or high profile.

Political parties are likely to hold differing views about employment protection legislation (EPL). While pro-welfare parties could support EPL, pro-market parties might focus on labour market deregulation. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether partisan politics, especially the government participation of Social democrats and Christian democrats, matter for EPL in 21 established OECD countries from 1985 to 2019. We show that during the golden age of the welfare state, the level of EPL was much higher where Social and Christian democrats dominated the government than elsewhere. After the golden age and under conditions of high unemployment, these unconditional effects mostly disappeared. Instead, the level of unemployment conditions partisan differences. Christian democrats liberalize EPL for regular employment significantly less than other parties under high levels of unemployment. In contrast, Social democrats defend high levels of EPL for regular and temporary employment when unemployment is low. Against expectations, they even liberalize employment protection for labour market insiders more than other parties at very high levels of unemployment.

While much ink has been spilled as to how economics impacts election outcomes, existing scholarship has concentrated on the valence model, which focuses on assessments of incumbent administration’s handling of the economy. Recently, however, there has been an appreciation that economic voting is multidimensional. Nonetheless, the impact of positional economics – voters’ views of economic policy – on the vote remains less explored, especially from a cross-national perspective. In this contribution, we examine the impact of economic policy preferences regarding income redistribution and spending preferences on the vote in 32 states. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 4 data and hierarchical models, we show that voters’ economic policy preferences directly impact vote choice in many states. We also show that positional economic voting is more likely to take hold in mature democracies. However, support for the idea that ideological polarization contributes to macro-diversity concerning positional economic voting is mixed at best. Our research breaks new ground regarding positional economic voting and highlights how context impacts the extent of positional economic voting.

Building on the literature on public finance, this article explores the consequences of political scale for government spending. The central argument is that the tendency for small political units to have big governments is not merely the result of economies of scale in the provision of public goods, but a reflection of the greater pressures for public spending faced by politicians in smaller and more homogeneous political units. The importance of such political pressures relative to other influences on spending is assessed on the basis of subnational data by comparing the relationship between size and spending under democracy and dictatorship. To the extent that government expansion is driven by citizen demands, the impact of size on spending may be expected to be more pronounced under democratic than authoritarian governance. Results from a time-series cross-sectional analysis of growth in government spending are consistent with this expectation. Government growth is shaped not only by the population size of political units but also by the interaction between regime and size. Analysis of spending patterns under democratic rule further indicates that size is an important determinant of spending even after controlling for variations in citizen preferences, political institutions, electoral competitiveness, and economic performance. The results have important theoretical implications for the study of fiscal policy and democratic governance around the world because they suggest that political scale conditions the linkages between citizens and the state, creating widely varying incentives for government growth across differently sized political units.

Although theoretically contentious, most empirical studies contend that electoral-political factors structure the welfare state. In practice, most studies concentrate on ‘government partisanship’, that is the ideological character of the government. We agree that politics matters but also seek to expand our understanding of what ‘politics’ should be taken to mean. Drawing on recent comparative research on agenda-setting, we study the impact of whether welfare state issues were broadly salient in the public sphere during the election campaign that produced the government. We formulate hypotheses about how such systemic campaign salience and government partisanship (separately and interactively) affect welfare generosity. We also consider how such effects might have changed, taking into account challenges to standard assumptions of representative democracy coming from the ‘new politics of the welfare state’ framework. We combine well-known, but updated, data on welfare state generosity and government partisanship, with original contextual data on campaign salience from 16 West European countries for the years 1980–2008. We find that campaigns matter but also that their impact has changed. During the first half of the examined period (the 1980s and early 1990s), it mainly served to facilitate government partisanship effects on the welfare state. More recently, big-time campaign attention to welfare state issues results in some retrenchment (almost) regardless of who forms the postelection government. This raises concerns about the democratic status of the politics of welfare state reform in Europe.

This article discusses how nationalist regional and state-wide parties, responding to different sub-national party systems dynamics, contribute similarly to interregional and individual public opinion disagreements about the model of the state in new, successfully decentralized democracies. Using individual survey data and other regional-level aggregate measures to perform a multilevel analysis in the 17 Spanish regions, we will show that both types of parties (non- and state-wide parties), following certain sub-national party system dynamics, are a very important influential and conditional factor in explaining the individual preferences adopted by citizens regarding the model of the state, despite the generally positive evaluation of the performance of new decentralized institutions by a large majority of Spaniards. These different positions are producing a persistent inter-individual conflict among Spaniards that have also a strong interregional component.

A popular claim made by criminologists argues that globalization has created a general punitive turn in Western industrialized countries and led to much harsher law and order policies. The present paper challenges this view and adds to the literature in two respects as follows: first, it presents empirical evidence that substantial differences in law and order policies remain between Western industrialized countries even when law and order policy is measured in a much more finely grained manner than previously. Second, the paper provides empirical evidence for a persisting influence of the partisan ideology of governments and the party system characteristics of a country on its law and order policies: whereas the general trend of increasing economic globalization may well set the overall tone, this impact is conditioned by national political and institutional settings – and the ideology of the government as well as the party system in particular.

This paper argues that Honneth's theory of recognition opens promising venues for exploring the role of emotion in politics, particularly when issues of injustice are at stake. While endorsing Honneth's view that ‘feelings of injustice’ are an important source for intelligibility of injustice, and that disadvantaged individuals need to build a ‘shared interpretative framework’ in struggles for recognition, this article contends that a more nuanced account of discursive justification is required to deal with dissent and moral disagreement. As a response to this problem, we suggest that Honneth's approach of subjective reaction to injury as violation of conditions to practical identity can be brought together with notions of discursive justification in the Habermasian fashion. Through an empirically based analysis – using storytelling of deaf people gathered in two virtual environments: (a) the website of the main Brazilian organization for deaf persons (FENEIS), and (b) Orkut, an online social network – this paper evinces that subjects not only articulate feelings of injustice or claims for recognition in everyday experience, but also usually engage in interpretation, judgment and justification of such claims. Results show that Honneth's theory of recognition, when articulated with a notion of discursive justification, can better equip scholars concerned with practices that aim to overcome injustice.

The study of ethnic riots has a substantial pedigree in the social sciences, but so far there has been no systematic attempt to unify insights from scholars working on different areas of the world, nor has there been any extensive application of existing knowledge to the study of Western Europe. We address these two lacunae by drawing on contemporary scholarship to generate testable hypotheses about state responses to ethnic riots in liberal democracies, and by conducting a preliminary test of these hypotheses on four controlled comparison cases from Britain and France. Our cases reveal that states employ a relatively even balance of repression and accommodation in keeping with the social control perspective, but that the precise balance is affected by the electoral incentives of the party in power. This evidence suggests the external validity of findings by Fording (2001) – who emphasizes the significance of social control in the American context – and Wilkinson (2004) – who stresses the importance of electoral incentives in the Indian environment – but it implies that these separate insights may be more powerful in combination. Our study also demonstrates the limitations of perspectives that predict either simple repression or accommodation of rioters, and of those that emphasize distinctive national responses to riots.

The inclusion of subnational parliaments into the early warning system (EWS) for subsidiarity control generates transforming dynamics in parliamentary modus operandi in European Union (EU) decentralized states. Empirical findings reveal considerable variations in the pace and scope of subnational parliamentary activity in EU policy control challenging the existing theories of territorial mobilization. Drawing from a comparative institutional analysis, this article offers a theoretical framework that permits accounting for cross-country variations in subnational parliamentary mobilization in EU affairs, under the EWS. By placing an increased focus on the domestic environment, it suggests that the two important factors which might affect the scope of parliamentary activity are (1) the relationship between the executive and legislature at the subnational level, and (2) the position of the regional executive in domestic governance arrangements.

The personalization of politics has become a central concern in political science. This is also true for parliamentary governments, where the Prime Minister has allegedly acquired an increasing relevance. Nonetheless, a key question remains unanswered: How can we estimate the Prime Minister Policy Autonomy (PMPA) in parliamentary governments? Moreover, what are the determinants of this autonomy? This article aims to answer these questions by proposing a novel and easily replicable index of PMPA, based on data from an analysis of Prime Ministers’ and members of Parliament’s parliamentary speeches, and specifically from cosine similarity analysis. In this article, we explore PMPA by focussing on two most different cases of coalition governments, Italy and Germany between 1994 and 2014. A multilevel regression analysis shows that coalition-related factors strongly influence PMPA, party-related factors are somewhat relevant, and the Prime Minister-related factor (its selectorate) does not have a significant impact on such autonomy.

Conventional wisdom suggests that environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) play a major role in pushing states towards more ambitious environmental policies. However, demonstrating that this presumption is in fact true is rather difficult, because the same system structures of democracies that may create more opportunities for ENGO activities are also, on their own, conducive to better environmental policies. This leaves open the possibility that the additional (marginal) impact of ENGOs on policy making is smaller than presumed. In trying to disentangle these effects, this paper examines the influence of ENGOs contingent on key structural characteristics of democratic systems. We develop the argument that presidential systems with a plurality electoral rule per se tend to provide more environmental public goods, which induces a smaller marginal impact of ENGOs. Conversely, parliamentary systems with a proportional representation electoral rule are likely to provide fewer environmental public goods, which allows for a larger marginal impact of ENGOs. We find robust empirical support for these hypotheses in analyses that focus on the ratification behavior of 75 democracies vis-à-vis 250 international environmental agreements in 1973–2002.

This paper challenges both rationalist and constructivist approaches in explaining China’s foreign policy behavior toward multilateral institutions after the Cold War. Borrowing insights from socialization theory and operational code analysis, this paper suggests a ‘superficial socialization’ argument to explain China’s pro-multilateralist diplomacy after the Cold War. Using operational code analysis to examine belief changes across three generations of Chinese leadership and on different occasions, we argue that China’s pro-multilateralist behavior is a product of ‘superficial socialization’, in which Chinese foreign policy elites change their beliefs about the outside world and regarding the future realization of their political goals in multilateral institutions. However, Chinese policy makers have not changed their instrumental beliefs regarding strategies even in multilateral institutions. China is indeed socialized through multilateral institutions, but its scope is still far from the ‘fundamental socialization’ stage when states’ interests, preferences, and even identities change.

We hypothesize that decisions to constrain government revenue may constitute an attractive strategy, especially to right-wing governments, when pursuing a preference for welfare state retrenchment. Whereas programmatic retrenchment in social policy programs imposes concentrated losses in return for diffuse gains, the distributive profile of systemic retrenchment via tax cuts might entail concentrated benefits for specified groups financed by diffuse losses for larger groups in a distant future. Consequently, the electorate may accept or even desire tax cuts and associated initiatives to curb government income relative to retrenchment measures of services and benefits. Our empirical analysis supports such theoretical propositions. In an extensive comparative analysis of all tax laws adopted by four Danish governments, we find clear partisan differences. In an in-depth study of the tax policy of the latest right-wing government, we moreover empirically support the causality of the argument as the government did in fact try to curb specific taxes in order to constrain the spending side of the welfare state in an indirect manner.

Political science research on Europeanization has focused too little on the domestic legal-constitutional implications of European legal integration. We address this relative neglect, identifying two models of the impact of European law on domestic judicial discourses and testing them against evidence on the invocation of three EU law concepts within English courts. Contrary to a statist model, which expects judicial discourses to correspond closely with direct importations of European law through the preliminary reference procedure, we find stronger support for an indigenization model in which courts gradually domesticate previously alien concepts. These domesticating discourses offer new insights into domestic political and constitutional orders in the context of European and international legalization.

Much scholarly attention has been given to the potentially disruptive distributional implications of new technologies in labor markets. Less explored is the way citizens as socially embedded individuals perceive and respond to technological transformation. This study fills this gap by exploring how welfare state institutions shape and are shaped by citizens’ perceptions of technological transformation. My analysis covering over 50 developed and developing countries finds that welfare state generosity is associated with a greater acceptance of technological change. I also provide evidence consistent with the expectation that labor market interventions of the welfare state have the potential to reduce the skill cleavage over technological transformation by mitigating the insecurity faced by the low-skilled. Additionally, citizens embracing technological transformation are more supportive of the welfare state than techno-skeptics are.