While conventional wisdom connects crises and external threats to increasing support for populism, several questions remain unanswered. Following insights of affective intelligence theory (AIT), we posit that anger and fear elicited by pandemic threat relate differently to populist attitudes. While such relations have already been explored in the context of other hazards (such as financial turmoil, terrorism, or immigration), our study allows us to evaluate the emotional bedrocks of populism in the context of a threat that is not apparently connected to the classical political grievances underlying populism. Expanding the literature on psychological underpinnings of populism and on the political consequences of the pandemic, our analyses of original survey data support our contentions that pandemic threat-induced anger is positively related to populist attitudes while fear is negatively linked to populist stances. This holds in particular for anti-elitism and the Manichean outlook inherent in populism. Altogether, we provide new comparative evidence to the puzzle about the emotional bedrocks of populism by illuminating a domain that has not been systematically explored before.

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.

Most literature finds a detrimental effect of amalgamation on voter turnout in municipal elections. Some other studies reveal instead null or even positive effects. We argue that this inconsistency derives from the fact that previous research has only analysed the amalgamation/turnout relation in single case studies. The contribution of this article is therefore twofold. First, it proposes a unified framework to investigate the amalgamation/turnout relation in comparative perspective, which clarifies the shortcut between size and amalgamation, disentangles the multifaced nature of municipal amalgamation, and outlines clear testable hypotheses related to its implementation – both at the national and at the local level. Secondly, it provides an original 10-European-country dataset of municipal amalgamations in the last decades (comprising Albania, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway) to empirically verify such hypotheses concerning the effects of the amalgamation features on voter turnout. Our study crucially reveals the relevance of the characteristics of the amalgamation process. When the amalgamation is imposed by the national government, turnout is particularly low, similarly to when the amalgamation occurs independently from a wide reform scheme. On the other hand, municipal turnout after amalgamation is higher when a larger number of municipalities are merged and when the amalgamated municipalities had a similar population before being merged. Moreover, our empirical evidence confirms the importance of traditional second-order predictors of turnout in municipal elections, even with specific reference to the post-amalgamation elections. Conversely, in such elections, the overall size of the (final) municipality is not a significant predictor of voter turnout.

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.

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.

This study examines the information demands of decision-makers from across the globe in their exchanges with interest organizations. It proposes two explanatory factors that drive these information demands: democracy and development. We argue that decision-makers’ information demands vary depending on whether they hail from developed countries or developing countries, as well as the extent to which their political systems are democratically accountable. We test our expectations based on interviews with 297 decision-makers from 107 different countries who were active during transnational trade and climate change negotiations. Our findings demonstrate that decision-makers from less developed countries exhibit a higher preference for interactions with organizations that provide them with technical information. Decision-makers from democratically accountable countries, by contrast, tend to place relatively greater value on political information provided by interest groups.

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.

This article is a comparative study of regional differences in social and political value orientations. I identify four central sets of value orientations: two Old Politics orientations – religious–secular and economic left–right; and two New Politics orientations – libertarian/authoritarian and green values. I use the international value studies from 15 West European countries as my empirical base. The article addresses three major research problems: (1) Which of the four value orientations is most strongly anchored in regional differences, and in which countries do we find the largest value differences between the regions? (2) Do we find the same ranking of the regions across the four value orientations, or do the value orientations group the regions in separate ways? (3) Can the other socio-structural variables explain the impact of region on value orientations, or is that impact unique? The average correlations between regions and each of the four value orientations are similar but somewhat larger for religious value and libertarian/authoritarian values. With regard to the second research problem, I hypothesize one-, two-, and three-dimensional solutions based on different spatial configurations. The one-dimensional configurations implied that there exist some (centre) regions that have secular, economic rightist, green, and libertarian regions, and (peripheral) regions with opposite value orientations. This pattern is clearly found in four countries. The expected two-dimensional solution with an Old Politics and a New Politics dimension was found in four countries, whereas the expected three-dimensional solution with two Old Politics and one New Politics dimension was found in three countries. In the multivariate analysis examining the causal impact of region, only a small portion of the correlation between region and value orientations was spurious when controlling for the other (quasi-)ascriptive variables. Furthermore, only a small portion of the impact of region was transmitted via social class variables.

It is widely debated in studies of international negotiations why certain negotiators are more successful than others. Institutionalist and rationalist approaches claim that institutions and negotiators’ resources largely explain the outcome of negotiations, whereas constructivist approaches stress the importance of shared norms and values. The article asks to what extent the use of normative arguments explains negotiation success in EU treaty negotiations. We apply our approach to the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Amsterdam. We first define normative arguments as justifications for positions that refer to common norms and develop a concept of common values for EU constitutional negotiations. Second, we assess to what degree governments justify their positions by normative arguments using an automated analysis of position papers. Finally, we ask if such justifications increase success in negotiations. The results of our statistical models show that arguing affects negotiation success significantly and positively.

Studies of party system size have looked at institutional and sociological factors in their attempt to explain what determines the number of parties. While some recent studies contend that party laws, beyond the district magnitude, have a significant impact on, among others, new party entry, we know very little about whether certain rules matter more in some societies than they do in others. In this paper, we study the extent to which various party finance rules affect party system size and differentiate the effect between new and established democracies. Specifically, we focus on direct and indirect public subsidization and limits on private donation and campaign expenditure. We hypothesize that compared to established countries, new democracies tend to have a larger party system size when the political finance rules create more equal conditions for electoral competition. Using data from 43 Europe democracies, the empirical analyses support our hypothesis.

Policy issues compete for the attention of political actors, and the size of the agenda an issue can occupy is largely determined by the way in which it is defined. This logic constitutes a simple agenda-setting model in which factors related to the participants in the policy process and their context influence the attention a single issue receives after being problematised. In order to be able to apply this model to the construction of a whole agenda, we need to add an intermediate step. This study proposes to do so by incorporating the notion of issue character and offers an empirical application of the adapted model to the European Council, a crucial informal player in European Union (EU) agenda setting. Using a dimensionality reduction technique, the composition of the agenda is broken down to two constitutive dimensions – core vs. non-core themes of government and economic vs. non-economic character. Since the first structuring element is in line with existing knowledge and the role expectations for the European Council, the analysis concentrates on the second type. Changing saliency levels of the economic issue character of the agenda are used as a dependent variable in a model, including predictors related to the nature of the institution and contextual factors. The results show that leftist European Council party ideology and growing government deficit in the EU contribute to the increasing prominence of the economic dimension, which in turn explains rising levels in attention to various issues, especially of the non-core themes type.

As a consequence of the European Economic Crisis, the European Union (EU) has implanted mechanisms to assist fellow member states facing economic difficulties. Despite an increasing academic interest in public preferences for such intra-EU solidarity measures, research has so far largely ignored individual characteristics that could possibly influence politicians’ views. In this paper, we look at politicians’ preferences for transnational solidarity and argue that these preferences depend on attitudes regarding socioeconomic issues as well as attitudes related to the EU. Moreover, we hypothesize that the relationship is moderated by responsibility attribution and the economic situation in a country. Using survey data of about 4000 politicians running for office in nine EU countries, we find that transnational solidarity is more common for socioeconomically left-wing and pro-EU politicians. Yet, attitudinal differences only cease to matter when the beneficiary state is perceived responsible for the crisis and economic problems at home are low.

While there has been a veritable boom in literature on organized interests, their lobbying strategies, relationships with decision-makers, and their impact on policymaking, only a few studies have explored internal organizational developments and, specifically, the professionalization of interest groups. The present study focuses on the national and transnational factors driving the professionalization of interest groups in Central and Eastern Europe, a region previously neglected in much of the interest group literature. Based on a sample of more than 400 surveyed organizations operating in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia in the healthcare, higher education, and energy sectors, we explore three bundles of factors potentially enhancing the professionalization of interest groups – organizational funding sources, national and transnational intergroup cooperation and organizations’ standing in the domestic interest group system. Our statistical analyses show that state subsidies and tight policy coordination with the state are crucial drivers of internal organizational professionalization, suggesting rather patronistic and symbiotic relationships between the state and certain organizations. However, our data also support the notion that interorganizational collaboration, both at the national and international levels, may also be key to organizational professionalization, enabling groups that lack close ties with the state to compensate their disadvantage with intensive domestic and international networking. The study is also among the first to link increasing professionalization with organizational population density.

Prospects for democracy in multi-ethnic societies are generally more promising if elections are not mere ethnic censuses, in which people vote predominantly for co-ethnic parties and candidates. But what institutions facilitate or hinder ethnic voting? Unlike past studies, this article explores ethnic voting by conducting a natural experiment (rather than surveys or laboratory experiments). It examines the case of Fribourg, a bilingual (French/German) Swiss canton where elections at different levels of government, within the same electoral district, are held under both majoritarian and proportional systems. Coupled with the high territorial homogeneity of the linguistic groups, this unique setting allows us to conduct a robust empirical analysis of voter behaviour. We find that cross-ethnic voting is significantly more frequent in multi-member majoritarian elections than in list-PR elections or in two-member majoritarian elections. Our results yield qualified support to the centripetalist approach to electoral design in multi-ethnic societies, that favours majoritarian systems, rather than to the consociational school that advocates proportional representation.

The Federalist, justifying the Electoral College to elect the president, claimed that a small group of more informed individuals would make a better decision than the general mass. But the Condorcet Jury Theorem tells us that the more independent, better-than-random voters there are, the more likely it will be that the majority among them will be correct. The question thus arises as to how much better, on average, members of the smaller group would have to be to compensate for the epistemic costs of making decisions on the basis of that many fewer votes. This question is explored in the contexts of referendum democracy, delegate-style representative democracy, and trustee-style representative democracy.

This article analyses the visibility of European Union (EU) citizens in EU news during the 2009 European Parliament election. It argues that the presence of EU citizens in EU news is vital for responsiveness of European governance. First, the theoretical notion of EU citizens is considered. Next, a new way of defining EU citizens is proposed: EU citizens are divided into national and supranational EU citizens. The visibility of EU citizens in EU news of 27 EU member states is analysed aiming to explain cross-country differences. The paper is based on a large-scale content analysis of TV and newspaper articles gathered during the 2009 European Parliament election. To explain different levels of visibility, a multi-level analysis is carried out. The results suggest that EU citizens are visible in the EU news, yet, their presence strongly varies across countries. The findings indicate that explanations for different levels of visibility can be found at both the media and country level.

Representative democracies are supposed to be uniquely virtuous in that they ensure that public preferences drive public policy. Dynamic representation is the outcome of a recurring interaction between electorate and parties that can be observed at the macro level. Preferences can shape government policy via two possible mechanisms. ‘Policy accomodation’ suggests that governments respond directly to the electorate’s preferences. ‘Electoral turnover’, on the other hand, assumes that preferences shape policy indirectly. Parties pursue their ideological goals, and public preferences respond ‘thermostatically’ by moving in the opposite direction to policy. This causes voters to switch votes and eventually leads to a turnover of power from one ‘side’ to ‘the other’. In this paper, we estimate preferences for government activity (‘the policy mood’) in Spain between 1978 and 2017. We show that mood responds ‘thermostatically’ to policy. Variations in mood are associated with support for parties. Policy is driven by party control but is not thermostatically responsive to mood. It appears that in Spain – like Britain – dynamic representation can only be achieved by electoral turnover. We consider the implications of this for our understanding of how representation works.

Despite the fact that international courts have proven popular in the last 20 years, systematic and empirical inquiry to determine whether they are beginning to realize their objectives is a fairly recent phenomenon. Support among the publics in the affected countries is critical to their success for, as deGuzman writes, ‘… the globalization of communications increasingly means that an institution’s legitimacy depends on the opinions of ordinary citizens around the world’. I develop a theory of public opinion regarding international criminal justice and test it on support for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), among peoples of the former Yugoslavia. I contend that support for the ICTY is filtered through individuals’ perceptions of the past, present, and future. As one’s beliefs about whether conditions are good or improving grow more positive, such positive perceptions are generalized to extend to international institutions that play a major role in shaping those conditions. In addition, I argue that support for the ICTY is strongly influenced by an individual’s views of the legitimacy and morality of the law. Ethnicity is also important in differentiating levels of support across the peoples of the former Yugoslavia.

Thanks to crowdfunding, deliberative mini-publics can be funded bottom-up to reach a wider support in the population and secure financial autonomy for their design. But who are the people willing to pay for deliberative democracy and why? This article answers this twofold question using an original survey with crowdfunders of the G1000 in Belgium. First, the financial support for deliberative democracy mainly comes from the more socially advantaged groups. But second, the crowdfunders largely diverge in their democratic preferences. Some are critical and favour any forms of alternative decision-making process, including technocratic forms. Others demonstrate a stronger attachment to electoral institutions and their political actors. Hence, the study of the crowdfunders of the G1000 shows that deliberative democracy attracts the support of citizens with different political orientations. This sheds light on the complex and intertwined links between a mini-public and its larger maxi-public.