This paper deals with the often-observed complex relationship between the so-called old, ‘economic’ left/right alignment (egalitarianism) and the new, ‘cultural’ alignment. Many authors have observed that the less educated members of society occupy an apparently contradictory position, combining a leftist stand in favor of more equality and government intervention, with a rightist stand on minority rights, the treatment of criminals, and other aspects of democratic citizenship. Various explanations have been offered for this paradox. This paper proposes an explanation in terms of vulnerability and the way in which it is culturally processed. Less educated people are often vulnerable and long for more equality. The stronger their desire for equality, the greater their frustration when feeling vulnerable, and the greater the need to cope with that vulnerability. They do so, using particular narrative-coping strategies that create an affinity with the attitudes that form the new left/right alignment. One such coping strategy is based on feelings of relative deprivation. In the empirical part of the paper it is shown that relative deprivation completely explains the paradoxical position of the less educated, and that, when taking feelings of deprivation into account, the two left/right dimensions are in fact independent of each other at all levels of education, creating a situation that leads to tensions within parties that pursue egalitarian policies. The mechanism uncovered in this analysis reveals a tension at the heart of egalitarianism: the stronger the longing for equality among the vulnerable members of society, the more likely they are to opt for right wing positions on the new left/right dimension.

Policies allowing enfranchisement of non-resident citizens (emigrants and their descendants) are now implemented in the majority of states worldwide. A growing number of case studies show that the extension of voting rights to non-resident citizens is often contested among country of origin political parties. However, there is no systematic comparative study of why different political parties support or oppose external voting rights and how this position is framed by the parties. Drawing on a unique data set based on 34 debates across 13 countries, we estimate the extent to which ideology and party family are correlated with the positioning and framing of parties. Among the findings are that the more to the right is a party, the more it tends to support external voting rights, except in the case of radical right parties. The position on emigrant voting rights is largely framed along more pragmatic arguments.

Linguistic barriers may pose problems for politicians trying to communicate delicate decisions to a European-wide public, as well as for citizens wishing to protest at the European level. In this article I present a counter-intuitive position on the language question, one that explores how grassroots activists in social movements use translation as a novel practice to debate political alternatives in the European Union's (EU) multilingual public sphere. In recent years, new cross-European protest movements have created the multilingual discursive democracy arena known as the European Social Forum (ESF). I compare deliberative practices in the multilingual ESF preparatory meetings with those in monolingual national Social Forum meetings in three Western European countries. My comparison shows that multilingualism does not reduce the inclusivity of democratic deliberation as compared to the national context. In the ESF, grassroots deliberators work using a novel practice of translation that has the potential to include marginalized groups. It is, however, a distinct kind of translation that activists use. Translation, compared to EU-official practices of multilingualism, affects a change in institutionalized habits and norms of deliberation. Addressing democratic theorists, my findings suggest that translation could be a way to think about difference not as a hindrance but as a resource for democracy in linguistically heterogeneous societies and public spaces, without presupposing a shared language or lingua franca, nor a national identity.

We examine the question of whether economic winners were more likely to support European Union (EU) membership than economic losers in post-communist countries. We include in our analysis every cross-national survey of post-communist countries with both a measure of individual attitudes toward EU membership as well as an appropriate measure of individual self-assessment of economic progress. The resultant data set contains data from 67 different surveys over a 12-year period (1991–2003) in all 10 post-communist countries that have joined the EU to date. Using a variety of analytical techniques, ranging from simple cross-tables and multivariate analysis of the individual surveys to multilevel models of a fully pooled data set, we show that the pattern of economic winners being more likely to support EU membership for their country is remarkably consistent across both time and space. At the same time, the dynamic component of the analysis allows us to show that the size of this gap varies over time, with winners being even more likely to support EU membership than losers when EU membership is a more realistic possibility.

Considerable research shows the presence of an economic vote, with governments rewarded or punished by voters, depending on the state of the economy. But how stable is this economic vote? A current argument holds its effect has increased over time, because of weakening long-term social and political forces. Under these conditions, short-term forces, foremostly the economic issue, can come to the fore. A counter-argument, however, sees the economic vote effect in decline, due to globalization. Against these rival hypotheses rests the status-quo argument: the economic vote effect remains unchanged. To test these claims, we estimate carefully specified models of the incumbent vote, at both the individual and aggregate levels. Western European elections provide the data, with particular attention to Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Perhaps surprisingly, we find the economic vote to be stable over time, a ‘standing decision’ rule that voters follow in national elections.

A central assumption of deliberative theory is that political preferences are endogenous to decision-making processes in which they are transformed by communicative interaction. We identify discursiveness and coordination of interaction as central determinants of preference change and develop a typology of political modes of interaction that affect the likelihood of preference change differently. These properties are in turn influenced by institutional characteristics of the fora in which communicative interaction takes place. To illustrate our approach empirically we present a comparative analysis of two extreme modes of interaction, ‘debate’ and ‘deliberation’, providing a case study of a parliamentary debate and a citizen conference on the same conflict: the import of embryonic stem cells in Germany. We assess the discursiveness and coordination as well as the amount of preference transformation in both forums.

The purpose of this paper is to account for varieties of organizational change. In particular, we contend that in order to explain change in international organizations (IOs) we cannot simply dichotomize between change and the lack thereof. Rather, change is best conceptualized as made up of two dimensions: speed and scope. The combination of the two dimensions leads to a taxonomy with four distinct types of policy change. The paper evaluates the emergence of different types of change by focusing on the relationship between IOs and their fields. Specifically, the position of the organization in the field helps to account for the speed of change (slow vs. rapid), whereas the openness of the organization to the inputs coming from the field helps to explain the scope of change (incremental vs. radical). We illustrate our argument by comparing the changes in the International Monetary Fund's policies in the areas of financial sector surveillance and poverty reduction.

Does ideological polarization undermine or strengthen people’s principled support for democracy? In this study, we suggest that different manifestations of ideological polarization have different implications in this respect. Using data from 11 surveys conducted with representative samples of the adult populations of a group of liberal democratic countries, part of the Comparative National Elections Project, we look at how people’s level of ideological extremism and their perceptions of ideological polarization in their countries’ party systems are related with their support for democracy. We show that citizens who hold more extreme ideological positions are indeed less supportive of democracy and that such a negative relationship is strengthened as citizens’ extremism increases. However, we also show that the citizens who display higher levels of principled support for democracy are those who perceive parties to be neither too distant nor too close to each other in ideological terms. In other words, while a very polarized partisan supply seems to undermine popular commitment with democracy, very low polarization may have similar consequences.

In the literature, two approaches toward the development of a European identity can be distinguished. Society-based approaches assume that the most important foundation for the development of a European identity is trust toward other European citizens as this allows Europeans to identify with the European Union as a community of citizens and values. The institutional approach, on the other hand, assumes that a shared European identity is predominantly based on trust in political institutions. In this paper, we use the results of the IntUne Mass Survey 2009 (n=16,613 in 16 EU member states) to test the relationship between social and political trust on the one hand, and European identity on the other. The results suggest that trust in other European citizens is positively associated with European identity, but trust in the European political institutions has a stronger relation with European identity. This could imply that efforts to strengthen European identity cannot just rely on a bottom-up approach, but should also pay attention to the effectiveness and the visibility of the EU institutions and the way they are being perceived by European citizens.

In this article, we demonstrate that the collective actions of undocumented migrants possess similar symbolic dimensions, even if the contexts of their actions differ. We explain this finding by focusing on the power relations that undocumented migrants face. Given that they occupy a very specific position in society (i.e., they are neither included in nor completely excluded from citizenship), they experience similar forms of power relations vis-à-vis public authorities in different countries. We argue that this leads them to participate in collective actions as acts of emancipation. Our analysis illustrates this argument by comparing marches by undocumented migrants in three countries: France, Germany and Canada-Quebec. Through an in-depth analysis, we demonstrate that these marches redefine the legal order and politicize the presence of undocumented migrants in the public sphere. By highlighting the cognitive, emotional and relational dimensions of collective actions, we show that the symbolic dimension of these three marches relates to the empowerment, pride and solidarity of undocumented migrants.

This article investigates the ways in which political parties are codified in modern democratic constitutions, providing a unique cross-sectional and longitudinal overview of the patterns of party constitutionalization in post-war Europe. Although the constitutions of western liberal democracies traditionally have paid little attention to the role of parties, evidence suggests that in contemporary democracies, both old and new, they are increasingly accorded a formal constitutional status. Little is known, however, about the substantive content of their constitutional position or about the normative connotations of their constitutional codification. In this article, we demonstrate that there is a clear correlation between the nature and the intensity of party constitutionalization and the newness and historical experience of democracy and that, with time, the constitutional regulation of the extra-parliamentary organization and the parties’ rights and duties has gained in importance at the expense of their parliamentary and electoral roles. The analysis furthermore suggests that three distinct models of party constitutionalization can be identified – Defending Democracy, Parties in Public Office, and Parties as Public Utilities – each of which is related to a particular conception of party democracy.

In this paper, we apply a revised version of the Discourse Quality Index (DQI) developed by Steenbergen et al. to European Parliament (EP) debates. This updated measurement instrument, after the inclusion of new indicators, helps us identify not just the principles of European Union (EU) deliberation but most importantly the favourable contextual conditions of supranational deliberation. We illustrate the new DQI coding for selected debates over the last EU parliamentary term and discuss how the data can be employed to assess the overall quality of deliberation in the EP. At the same time we demonstrate that institutional issues matter for the quality of EP discourse, as do Members of the European Parliaments’ personal characteristics. Issue attributes on the other hand, influence supranational deliberation but not in the expected direction.

Are populist actors more like a hurricane that risks undermining democracy? Or do they aim for a different type of democracy, which strengthens popular control? This article offers one of the most extensive, systematic analyses on the impact of populism on multiple functions of the Quality of Democracy. Going beyond the view of ‘high-’ or ‘low-quality’ democracies, we emphasize that the Quality of Democracy is related to multiple dimensions or ‘functions of democracy’, characterized by important trade-offs. We argue that populist actors exert differentiated effects across these functions, depending on their degree of government access and host ideology. Our analysis relies on a new disaggregated dataset covering 53 established democracies in diverse world regions over the period between 1990 and 2016. We find that populist actors increase participation and representation, especially if they are confined to the opposition and especially if they belong to the political left-wing. In contrast, we find a negative impact of populists across the spectrum on institutional safeguards, such as the rule of law and state transparency. In sum, our findings indicate that populism has a variable impact on multiple aspects of democratic quality which should be systematically investigated in a disaggregated manner that is sensitive to these differences.

How does the European Court of Justice (ECJ) firmly maintain a now 45-year-old consistent integrationist jurisprudence when exerting virtually no control over the recruitment of its members (a selection left to national governments)? Rather than considering such judicial consistency over time as a ‘given’, the paper questions the social fabric of judicial preferences. On the basis of a variety of commemorative materials produced within the Court (Festschriften, tributes, eulogies, and jubilees) and never studied so far, the paper stresses the manner in which these rituals are home to social processes of aggregation (into one unique judicial family), demarcation (from the political realm), and self-identification (to roles of so-called ‘founding father’, ‘current spokesmen’, or ‘would-be judges’), thereby enabling transnational role transmission within international courts such as the ECJ.

This study examines how characteristics of participatory processes affect citizens’ evaluations of such processes and thereby establish what kind of participatory process citizens demand. The literature on democratic innovations has proposed different criteria for evaluating participatory innovations. What remains unclear, however, is how citizens evaluate these participatory mechanisms. This is here examined in a conjoint analysis embedded in a representative survey of the Finnish population (n = 1050). The conjoint analysis examines the impact of inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgment, transparency, efficiency, and transferability on citizens’ evaluations of participatory processes. Furthermore, it is examined whether the evaluations differ by the policy issues and process preferences of the respondents. The results show that people want transparent participatory processes with face-to-face interaction among participants and expert advice to deal with complicated issues. The participatory processes should also be advisory and should not include too many meetings. These effects appear to be uniform across policy issues and do not depend on the process preferences of citizens.

Ongoing changes in social structures, orientation, and value systems confront us with the growing necessity to address and understand transforming patterns of tolerance as well as specific aspects, such as social tolerance. Based on hierarchical analyses of the latest World Values Survey (2005–08) and national statistics for 28 countries, we assess both individual and contextual aspects that influence an individual's perception of different social groupings. Using a social tolerance index that captures personal attitudes toward these groupings, we present an institutional theory of social tolerance. Our results show that specific institutional qualities, which reduce status anxiety, such as inclusiveness, universality, and fairness, prevail over traditional socio-economic, societal, cultural, and democratic explanations.

Is it true that national identity increases trust, as liberal nationalists assume? Recent research has studied this side of the ‘national identity argument’ by focusing on conceptions of the content of national identity (often civic or ethnic) and their links to social, rather than political, trust. This paper argues that if we take social identity theory seriously, however, we need to complement this picture by asking how varying the strength – rather than the content – of a person’s sense of their national identity affects both their social and political trust. We break down the different dimensions of national identity, hypothesizing and empirically verifying that there are divergent links from national attachment, national pride, and national chauvinism to social and political trust. We do so with data from the US (General Social Survey) and the Netherlands (Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences ), thus expanding current knowledge of national identity and trust to a highly relevant yet neglected European case.

Turnout among young adults has declined steadily in various advanced industrial democracies in recent decades. At the same time, as a consequence of delayed transitions to adulthood, many life-cycle events considered important for the development of electoral participation are experienced later in life. These combined trends call for a revaluation of the political life-cycle model and the way in which it explains voter turnout among young adults. More specifically, in this paper it is argued that variation in the timing of life events has been overlooked as an explanatory factor of generational differences in young adults’ propensity to turn out to vote. With accumulating evidence that the decision to vote is to some extent habitual, a lack of life experiences may cause young adults to form the habit to abstain rather than to vote. If the mechanisms of the life-cycle model are indeed correct, later maturation should at least partially explain why young adults these days are less inclined to vote than their parents or grandparents in their younger years. Based on the British Election Studies from 1964 to 2010, the findings of this study confirm generally observed patterns of a delayed assumption of adult roles by young citizens. This trend toward later maturation negatively affects turnout levels of young citizens. If maturation levels had remained at pre-war levels, the average turnout among Britain’s post-seventies generation would have been no less than 12 percentage points higher.

This study examines political party contestation over Europe, its relationship to the left/right cleavage, and the nature and emergence of Euroscepticism. The analysis is based on a large original sample of parties’ claims systematically drawn from political discourses in the mass media in seven countries: Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. It addresses questions concerning parties’ mobilized criticisms of European integration and the European Union (EU), specifically: their degree and form; their location among party families and within party systems; cross-national and diachronic trends; their substantive issue contents; whether their ‘Euro-criticism’ is more tactical or ideological; whether claims construct a cleavage; and their potential for transforming party politics. Findings show that a party’s country of origin has little explanatory power, once differences between compositions of party systems are accounted for. Also governing parties are significantly more likely to be pro-European, regardless of party-type. Regional party representatives, by contrast, are significantly more likely to be ‘Euro-critical’. Overall, we find a lop-sided ‘inverted U’ on the right of the political spectrum, but this is generated entirely by the significant, committed Euroscepticism of the British Conservatives and Schweizerische Volkspartei. There is relatively little evidence for Euroscepticism elsewhere at the core, where pro-Europeanism persists. Finally, parties’ Euro-criticism from the periphery mostly constructs substantive political and economic critiques of European integration and the EU, and is not reducible to strategic anti-systemic challenges.

How may we understand the occurrence of gradual but significant change following economic crisis? Theories of gradual institutional transformation offer important insights to analyses of long-term institutional change, but have so far shied away from dealing with institutional change during and following crisis, leaving the issue to more traditional critical juncture models. Instead of seeing gradual institutional change originating only in the efforts of rule takers to circumvent existing institutions – potentially leading to gradual change over longer periods of time – the paper suggests that in more abrupt processes of change characteristic of economic crisis, rule makers may also reinterpret the meaning of rules and redeploy them under significantly altered circumstances leading to gradual change. The paper suggests that the concept of bricolage is useful for understanding how policymakers create new institutional setups through the re-ordering of existing institutional elements. The empirical relevance of these arguments is demonstrated with a study of post-crisis special bank insolvency policies in Denmark and the United States, showing how in both polities new institutions were created from existing institutional elements.