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.

Media coverage of elections in Europe and North America has increasingly focused on the campaign as a game rather than a policy debate. This is often explained by the changes in media pressures. It may also reflect the narrowing of policy space between left and right and the comparative prosperity enjoyed in Europe and North America. But the relevance of policy varies. The global economic crisis might have led to an increased interest in policy among voters and focus on it by media. Ireland experienced both extremes of boom and crisis between the late 1990s and 2011. The Irish case allows us to test the impact of the crisis on media framing of elections. This article uses original data from the three most recent national elections in Ireland, with a research design that holds other pertinent variables constant. We find empirical support for the theoretical expectation that the context of the election affects the relative focus on campaign or horserace vs. substantive policy issues.

Currently, at least three approaches to judicial governance coexist in the European continent: the judicial council model, the courts service model, and the Ministry of Justice model. Although doctrinal and case-specific literatures abound on this topic, examples of cross-country studies explaining choices on these models of judicial governance are rather scarce. More particularly, we lack so far knowledge on how different factors interact in leading to the implementation of the judicial council model. This is striking, given the importance of judicial councils for the operation of the rule of law. Furthermore, explanations on the choices of models of judicial governance are essential to understanding the intricate issue of the political rationalities underlying macrolevel design of judicial institutions. Using qualitative comparative analysis and focusing on European liberal democracies, this article contributes to the literature in the field. It is shown that judicial councils are created when postauthoritarian countries implement new constitutions either in romanistic law countries or in countries subject to Europeanizing pressures.

Deep changes regard the political careers of democratic leaders. Until recently, becoming president or prime minister was the last step before retirement or withdrawal to an undemanding seat on the back benches. On the contrary recent heads of government are enthusiastically seeking alternative ways to capitalize on their prestige and contacts portfolio, often ending up in the world of business or international finance. There are many examples of such a trend, from Blair to Mulroney, from Schröder to Barak. This article provides an empirical analysis of the phenomenon, by examining a dataset of 441 leaders in 78 different democratic countries over a period dating from 1989 to 2012. Attention will be focused on the political background of the prime ministers and presidents, how long they stay in power, the average age of heads of government, what professional pursuits they are involved in after their term in office and what career model they follow. The article concludes by proposing a post-presidential model which indicates some of the current trends and illustrates how former leaders are gaining decision-making power and visibility.

In America and Western Europe, legislatures preceded democratization and contributed to the establishment and maintenance of democratic regimes in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. In Central and Eastern Europe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, legislatures and democratic regimes appeared simultaneously. In the first 15 years of post-Communist transitions in 12 countries, attachments to the new regimes have been influenced by their institutional structures, their economic performance, and their records in protecting human freedom, while attachment to the new parliaments have been predominantly influenced by cultural factors related to early life socialization including education, age, gender, social status, and attitudes toward the former communist regime. Attachment to parliament was a product more than a cause of attachment to the new regimes, but the parliamentary system of government created a context that contributed to citizens’ attachment to their new political institutions. In that respect, attitudes toward parliaments in Central and Eastern Europe played a role similar to the role that these attitudes played in an earlier stage of democratization in Europe and North America, the role of attaching citizens to new political institutions.

Many judicial scholars argue that judicial dissent stems from partisanship or political differences among judges on courts. These arguments are evaluated using the variation in political backgrounds on a constitutional court, Chile’s Constitutional Tribunal, using case-level and vote-level data from 1990 until 2010. The analysis shows that the rate of dissent rises after major reforms to the powers and judicial selection mechanism of the Tribunal in 2005 and that the dissent rate corresponds to periods of greater partisanship on the court. Further, decisions regarding the unconstitutionality of laws intensify the propensity to dissent at both the case and judge level. In further examination of variation across judges’ voting records, judges who have identifiable partisan associations of any kind are generally more likely to dissent than those with limited political backgrounds.

We distinguish between the experience and expectation of subjective status decline in relation to electoral behaviour. Studies often link support for radical parties, especially radical right ones, to voters’ experience of status decline. A few other studies argue that voters’ expectation of status decline also triggers radical right support. Without precise measures of both perceptions, it has been difficult to distinguish which (or both) is most relevant for radical right support in Western Europe and the USA. Using survey data from 2018 (n = 4,076) and 2020 (n = 2,106) in Finland, we could precisely measure and distinguish between voters’ experience and expectation of status decline. Descriptively, voters who have experienced status decline have low income, whereas voters who expect status decline have (lower)middle income. Using multivariate analyses, we find that voters who expect status decline consistently prefer radical right parties more than voters who expect status improvement. However, there is no robust evidence of radical right support among voters who have experienced status decline. These findings suggest that the expectation, not experience, of status decline drives radical right support. If these expectations trigger radical right support in Nordic welfare states, they may be even more pertinent in less comprehensive welfare states.

The purpose of this study is to examine the adolescents who cross the boundaries of legality, also including illegal political means in their political action repertoire. The data comprised of questionnaire responses from middle and late adolescents in a Swedish city of around 130,000 citizens. Analyses of covariance, EXACON, and logistic regression were used to examine the extent to which adolescents including illegal political activities in their political activity repertoire compare with their legally oriented counterparts. Adolescents using illegal political activity reported higher levels of political interest and goal-orientation than adolescents involved solely in legal political activity. The major contrasts with legal political activism were that illegal political activism seemed to co-occur with (a) reluctance to accept authority, irrespective of the context (societal, school, or parental) and (b) approval of violent political means. In a simultaneous model, further analysis revealed that reluctance to accept authority reduced the predictive power of illegal political activities with regard to approval of political violence. This suggests that the tendencies to approve of political violence, among adolescents involved in illegal political activities, might be partially explained by challenges toward authority. To conclude, adolescents in illegal political activism seem to have similar resources for political engagement as their legally oriented counterparts. However, adolescents involved in illegal political activity seem more likely to let ends justify the means. Most likely, this position is related to authority challenges.

Traditional research on preferences for redistributive social policy suggest increasingly complex models of public opinion formation that envision individuals balancing normative concerns against sophisticated calculations of economic self-interest. This research largely ignores the large body of evidence demonstrating significant differences in levels of political awareness across the population that strongly influence the quality, structure, and determinants of political preferences. Analyzing public opinion data for 14 European countries reveals that large sections of the population do not appear to hold or express social policy preferences that are internally consistent or well-grounded in either their self-interests or ideological predispositions. At low levels of political awareness, little discernible connection exists between seemingly related preferences for redistribution, levels of social spending, left–right positioning, tolerance for inequality, or overall support for the welfare state. Moreover, income, a theoretically central causal variable, has no effect on attitudes toward redistribution when political awareness is low. These results pose a significant challenge to existing models of social policy preferences.

Governments claim to establish lobbying registers with the intent of giving citizens and the media the opportunity to see who is lobbying whom and for what purpose. This external scrutiny is expected to help prevent undue influence and corruption. Scholars, however, have noted that transparency might also serve internal scrutinizers by providing information to the lobbyists themselves. This study employed a survey of more than 300 interest groups in Ireland to test this alternative to the ‘armchair scrutiniser’ assumption, whereby transparency serves the purpose only of public scrutiny. The analysis found that a small but well-defined group of organizations routinely accesses the website of the Irish lobbying register and ‘consumes’ the information during the advocacy process. Interest-group characteristics, such as group type and material resources, help explain these trends. This study is relevant for scholars interested in the effects of transparency and how the availability of information is linked to lobbying strategies.

In the debate about the relationship between institutions and overall economic performance, the dependent variable has received scant attention – in contrast to the independent variable(s). This paper tries to enhance the understanding of the link between institutions and performance by presenting and assessing a substantively grounded conceptualization and operationalization of overall economic performance based on economic growth, employment, and public debt. A fuzzy-set ideal-type analysis of performance of 19 OECD countries between 1975 and 2005 reveals substantial variation across countries and over time that cannot sufficiently be accounted for by two key institutional features: corporatism and consensus democracy. Corporatism and consensus democracy may account for policy formation and implementation, but hardly for economic performance.

A strong correlation exists between inequality and religion, such that societies marked by high inequality are more religious than those with more egalitarian income distributions. What explains this correlation? Insecurity theory argues that high inequality generates intense insecurities, leading the poor to seek shelter in religion for both psychological and material comfort. This article develops an alternative perspective that reverses the chain of causality. It argues that religious institutions and movements frequently resist both the centralization of state power and socialist efforts to organize the working class. As a result, powerful religious movements constrain state-led efforts to provide social protection, increasing income inequality. Analysis of the historical record and contemporary data from 19 Western democracies reveals strong evidence that past periods of church-state conflict shaped the size and structure of welfare state institutions and, by extension, contemporary patterns of inequality.

The comparative study of authoritarianism has neglected plebiscites, and the comparative study of referendums tends to see in them a form of direct democracy regardless of the regime. We conceptualize dictatorial plebiscites as a genuine authoritarian tool, as part of a repressive strategy with the objective of hindering internal regime rivals and discouraging the coordination of the external opposition. We provide empirical evidence from dictatorships for the period 1946–2008 that is compatible with our expectations.

This paper considers the case of the international migrants’ confidence in political institutions, from a social embeddedness perspective on political trust. We use country-level aggregates of confidence in institutions as indicators of specific cultures of trust, and by employing data from the European Values Study, we test two competing hypotheses. First, as confidence in institutions depends on the values formed during early childhood, the international migrant’s confidence in political institutions in the current country of residency will be influenced by the confidence context from the country of origin. Second, the host country may have different norms of trust in political institutions, and a process of re-socialization may occur. Therefore, the immigrants’ confidence in institutions is influenced by two confidence contexts: one from the origin country and one from the host country. The time spent in the two cultures, along with other characteristics from these contexts, shape the interaction effects we tested in multilevel cross-classified models.

The notion of ‘place’ has become a central concern in research on the populist radical right (PRR), but scholars seem to have different things in mind when talking about how geography affects individual political attitudes. In our paper, we therefore aim to structure the debate on the impact of place and to understand exactly how place affects PRR attitudes (nativism, right-wing authoritarianism, and populism). Conceptually, we identify four potentially relevant aspects of ‘place’ that underpin much of the current literature: place-related attitudes (localism and resentment), place-specific living conditions, socio-demographic composition, and characteristics unique to a particular place, i.e., its local history and culture. We also discuss how these aspects are related and how they may interact. Empirically, we assess the relative importance of these four aspects of place for PRR sentiment in Germany, a country that is particularly well suited to this type of analysis. Using fine-grained geocoded survey data collected prior to the 2017 election, we find that (1) there is considerable spatial variation and clustering in PRR attitudes, (2) a place’s socio-demographic composition and (3) place resentment account for much of this, while (4) localism has weaker effects. We find (5) no relevant interaction between localism and place resentment, (6) no substantial evidence that mediation through place-related attitudes leads to an underestimation of the other aspects, and (7) no evidence for effects of the unique culture or history of the places we studied. Moreover, (8) location in the former GDR still has a substantial impact, whereas (9) other place-specific conditions (deprivation, demographic decline, migration, rurality) that could be addressed by policy interventions have no or rather weak effects. We conclude that PRR sentiment in ‘places that don’t matter’ results also, though by no means exclusively, from a lack of recognition.

Two currents can be distinguished in the literature regarding the domestic consequences of globalization. One perspective holds that globalization depoliticizes extra-parliamentary protest activity despite the presence of democracy. Another perspective suggests that globalization has contributed to the repoliticization of protest, especially when democracy is present. Using cross-sectional time-series data in a global sample for the 1970–2006 period, the paper examines the effect of globalization on extra-parliamentary protest activity in the context of democracy. The paper further tests these relationships cross-regionally comparing East Asia with Latin America – arguably the two regions in the world where dual transitions to economic and political liberalization have been in full force since 1970s. The results reveal distinct patterns of protest activity cross-regionally, whereby East Asia approximates the depoliticization trend from the global sample. In contrast, the results for Latin America provide confirming evidence for the repoliticization perspective. These findings remain robust across a number of control variables, and different measures of democracy and estimation techniques. Overall, the paper shows that democracy influences the relationship between globalization and extra-parliamentary protest activity – a relationship that up to now has remained systematically untested.

The literature on political budget cycles (PBCs) does not offer a full-fledged theory about the effect of democratization. However, it does imply a non-linear effect along the regime spectrum: positive at the autocratic end, negative at the democratic end. We theoretically develop and empirically test this implication by pointing to two countervailing effects of democratization: executive constraints and political competition. While the former contains PBCs, the latter stimulates them. Because of their empirical covariation, PBCs occur primarily in hybrid regimes where the decision-making powers of the executive are relatively unrestricted and politics is relatively competitive. We also show that while executive constraints and political competition condition PBCs, what triggers the fluctuations is electoral competitiveness. Only when incumbents fear electoral defeat, do they create PBCs. The study is based on novel data on public spending in 112 countries, covering the entire regime spectrum over the period from 1960 to 2006.

Affective polarization, a concept that originated in the USA, has increasingly been studied in Europe’s multi-party systems. This form of polarization refers to the extent to which party supporters dislike one another – or, more technically, to the difference between the positive feelings towards the supporters of one’s own political party and the negative feelings towards the supporters of other parties. Measuring this gap in Europe’s multi-party systems requires researchers to make various important decisions relating to conceptualization and measurement. Often, our focus could instead lie on assessing partisan hostility or negative party affect, which is easier to measure. While recent research on affective polarization in Europe has already taught USA lot, both about affective polarization and about political conflict in Europe, I nevertheless suggest that research in this field faces four challenges, namely developing better measures, more sophisticated theories, clearer accounts of affective polarization’s importance and successful ways of reducing negative party affect, if this is indeed desirable.

This paper scrutinizes the impact of intolerance toward diverse ethnic, religious, and cultural groups on an individual’s willingness to actively engage in non-violent protest. Following new insights, we examine the individual as well as the ecological effect of social intolerance on protest behavior. Drawing from insights of social psychology and communication science, we expect that the prevalence of intolerance reinforces the positive effect of individual-level intolerance on protest participation. From a rational choice perspective, however, a negative moderating effect is expected, as the expression of opinions becomes redundant for intolerant individuals in an intolerant society. We base our multilevel analyses on data from the World Values Surveys covering 32 established democracies. Our results reveal that intolerance leads to more non-violent protest participation. This relationship, however, is strongly influenced by the prevalence of intolerance in a country.

Despite the sweeping societal and economic transformation brought about by digitization, it has remained a relatively marginal topic in elections, with parties having few incentives to signal commitment to digitization. Why then would parties start to do so? We address this question by examining party manifestos from German subnational elections in the period between 2010 and 2018. Our analysis contributes to the research on issue competition by looking at why parties engage with the topic of the digitization even though it has neither become politicized nor salient, at present. We find, first, that parties emphasize digitization more in regions belonging to the mid-tier in terms of their degree of digital modernization. Second, parties with more resources and greater ideological compatibility signal more commitment to digitization. Finally, electoral success of the Pirate Party as a credible challenger has been followed by greater emphasis on digitization, especially among the ideologically closest competitors.