In this paper, we develop a framework for studying the role of group identities in contemporary cleavage formation. Identities, we suggest, hold the key to a central conundrum of current political sociology: the fact that today’s electoral realignments appear to be rooted in the social structure of post-industrial societies, while the decline of mass organizations has dissolved traditional links between politics and social structure. Bringing cleavage theory into dialog with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, we theorize how group identities may play an important role in stabilizing a new universalism-particularism cleavage emerging in Western Europe today. We identify two key processes of cleavage identity formation: bottom-up processes of “social closure” and top-down “classification struggles” waged by political entrepreneurs. For both processes, we review empirical findings and formulate an agenda for further research.

The transformation of the Belgian party system has unfolded asymmetrically: while conservative and far-right parties have thrived in Flanders, the populist right vote has not (yet) been mobilized in Francophone Belgium. Focusing on the demand side of electoral politics, this article explores whether these disparities on the supply side mirror distinct political dimensions and cleavages in both regions. By using an innovative methodology of (class-specific) multiple correspondence analysis, we find that the Flemish and the Francophone political space are largely alike – both in terms of the composition of their political dimensions as in their cleavage structure. However, we also find that Francophones adhere to a distinctive welfare consensus, which prevents working-class embourgeoisement and likely moderates the electoral fortunes of the far right. Overall, our results challenge the common stereotypes of a ‘conservative Flanders’ and a ‘progressive Wallonia’.

I investigate why some countries were more successful in containing the death toll than others during the COVID-19 pandemic. I focus on the role of socialism and on the existence of long-term regime-driven legacies that may have had an impact on the containment of COVID-related deaths. I claim that countries that went through successful socialist revolutions have specific features that equip them with better resources to cope with public challenges such as pandemics. Furthermore, these features remain even after the demise of the socialist regime. I find a positive effect of socialist revolutions over COVID-19 containment at the country level. I investigate three possible causal mechanisms for this relationship: authoritarianism, state capacity, and mass mobilization. Through mediation analysis, I find the socialist legacy seems to be channeled through higher levels of mobilization and also more authoritarian institutions.

Whether fiscal austerity by governments is unpopular or not is much discussed in the literature. One line of research argues that consolidation has negative electoral effects, ranging from declines in politicians’ approval ratings to abstention by voters at elections. Another strand highlights that re-election chances are not harmed by the implementation of austerity and that some voters in fact support consolidation measures. Both sides are limited in at least two regards. First, they do not allow for the possibility that public opinion is shaped by the political discussion about government debts and budget deficits. Second, and relatedly, the literature is limited in its extent to which it considers heterogeneity in preference adaptation across income groups. This article contributes to these debates by bringing to bear insights from the literature on mass preference formation. In particular, I argue that a cross-party consensus on austerity leads voters to align their preferences with the consensus, increasingly demanding cuts to government spending. This adaptation is conditioned by income so that the preferences of those income groups that are the furthest away from the consensus adapt their fiscal preferences most. By including the discursive context of fiscal policy, this article helps explain how austerity can be made popular. Empirically, I test these expectations by matching citizen preferences with party positions on fiscal policy for 60 country years. The empirical results indeed demonstrate that even though low- and middle-income voters are least supportive of austerity, they adapt the most to the party consensus on austerity.

Can public diplomacy in times of crisis shape citizens’ attitudes towards international politics? Using a survey experiment in Italy, we evaluated whether information cues about public diplomacy efforts by the United States and China to assist the country in dealing with the COVID-19 emergency shifted the importance citizens attached to Italy’s international allies being democracies. We found that citizens who receive positive cues about USA efforts to assist Italy report a stronger preference for Italy interacting with democracies. At the same time, when they received positive cues about China’s efforts to assist Italy, they discounted the importance attached to international allies being democracies. We further found that these effects are conditional on the participants’ support for democracy at home. We argue that these findings are consistent with a cognitive dissonance framework where citizens update their attitudes to decrease dissonant cognitions when they receive information that challenges prior beliefs or expectations.

In this study, we investigate how eco-social attitudes are interlinked with various modes of political action aimed at preventing environmental change and promoting social welfare. Using multiple correspondence analysis and cluster analysis, we explore the links between attitudes and political action, and associated socio-political characteristics, in the case of Sweden. Our results show a three-node pattern forming a political action triangle: individuals expressing joint support for social welfare and environmental concerns are most actively engaged in political action, while those supporting environmental concerns are sympathetic to take part in political action without actually participating, and those supporting social welfare or expressing low support for either set of concerns seem overly reluctant towards all types of political action. This pattern, which is also tied to distinctive socio-political characteristics, has wider implications for understanding the agency and the mobilization of support for tackling the multiple ecological and social crises contemporary societies are facing.

Many citizens in liberal democracies are concerned about immigration and its impact on their countries. Governments often seek to address these concerns by restricting the post-entry rights of immigrants such as the right to permanent settlement or access to welfare benefits. Thereby, it is expected that immigrants with an inferior legal status are (perceived as) less threatening to natives and, as a result, make the latter more willing to accept new immigrants. Does this policy rationale indeed attenuate public opposition to immigrant admission and thus allow for the reconciliation of the economic need for immigrants with the political concerns of domestic constituents? This study advances the theoretical argument of a rights-conditionality in citizens’ immigration preferences and provides empirical evidence on the phenomenon. A factorial survey experiment among citizens in the United States and Switzerland tests the effect of residence and welfare rights on the public opposition to immigrant admission. The results show that restricting immigrants’ welfare rights does significantly decrease public opposition towards immigration across the two countries. In contrast, restricting immigrants’ residence rights does not, and in the context of Switzerland, even increases opposition to immigrant admission. Citizens critical of immigration are thus not per se more welcoming to immigrants if they receive an inferior legal status but seem to care about immigrants’ contributions and commitment to the receiving society. The findings highlight the importance of immigrants‘ post-entry rights in the view of citizens and show how the design of immigration policies may help to understand public immigration preferences.

This article explores how populist attitudes are correlated with foreign policy postures at the public level in four European countries: France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy. We provide first evidence adjudicating between two rivalling perspectives. One perspective focuses on the ideational core of populism and argues that it entails substantive beliefs and values that may inform foreign policy preferences – just like any other ideology. Another perspective focuses on the thin-centredness of populism and argues that no policy implications can be derived from populist ideas. Analysing original survey data, we find strong and consistent associations of populist attitudes with two foreign policy postures, militant internationalism and isolationism, and weaker and less systematic associations with two others, cooperative internationalism and global justice orientations. Importantly, these patterns are independent of host ideologies. We discuss the implications of these findings for the question of how “thick” populism is and what that may mean for the politics of (European) foreign policies in times of a continuing populist Zeitgeist.

While elections are an instrument to hold politicians accountable, corrupt politicians are often re-elected. A potential explanation for this paradox is that citizens trade-off integrity for competence. Voters may forgive corruption if corrupt politicians manage to deliver desirable outcomes. While previous studies have examined whether politicians’ competence moderates the negative effect of corruption, this paper focuses on voters’ priorities and directly assesses what citizens value more: integrity or favourable outcomes. Using a survey experiment, we assess citizens’ support for politicians who violate the law in order to improve the welfare of their community and, in some cases, benefit personally from these violations. The results indicate that citizens prefer a politician who follows the law, even if this leads to a suboptimal outcome. However, voters are more likely to overlook violations of the law that benefit the community if these do not result in a personal gain for politicians (i.e., in the absence of corruption). These findings suggest that the mild electoral punishment of corruption may be due to the public’s unawareness of private gains from malfeasance, or to the delay in these private benefits becoming apparent by election day.

What candidates do voters perceive as best to combat corruption? While recent studies suggest that parties recruit women in order to restore legitimacy, we know less about whether voters believe that women candidates are better equipped than male candidates to fight corruption. This study suggests that women mayors are seen as more likely to fight corruption, yet that the credibility of both male and female politicians increases if they are ascribed traits traditionally seen as ‘female,’ including being risk averse or specializing in the provision of welfare services. Leveraging the diverse levels of socio-economic development, corruption, and gender equality across 25 EU member countries, our unique conjoint experiment shows support for these claims. Both women and male candidates benefit from being described as risk averse and prioritizing social welfare issues, while outsider status has no effect. Male candidates, however, have a consistent disadvantage, particularly among women voters. Moreover, the effects of candidate gender are strongest in areas of Europe with the highest levels of political gender equality.

Spatial inequalities within countries have recently been seen as a source of resentment, suggesting a “geography of discontent” in Europe. We examine this hypothesis by analyzing satisfaction with democracy (SWD) in urban and rural areas over the last two decades. Based on data from the European Social Survey (2002–2020) covering 19 countries and corroborated by the International Social Survey Programme and the European Values Survey, we find that urban–rural differences in SWD are statistically significant but very small over the whole period studied – only about 2.5 percentage points between big cities and rural areas. This gap is minimal compared to differences between countries and between socioeconomic groups such as citizenship, employment status, education, social class, or income. These results hold across various political satisfaction measures, such as trust in parliament or politicians. Despite significant cross-country heterogeneity in spatial disparities, they challenge the notion of widespread rural discontent in Europe.

There is extensive evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic has mostly affected the less well-off in society, boosting economic inequality. In contrast, little is known about how much such rising economic disparities affected the involvement of individuals in politics, thereby enhancing political inequality. Extending the research on political inequality to a key and somewhat neglected dimension of citizens’ involvement with politics - political engagement - this article claims that the COVID-19 depressed engagement and promoted political inequality. The analysis relies on a comparative European approach and on data before and after the emergence of the pandemic. Besides generally finding an overall socioeconomic gap with regard to political engagement, results also suggest that the pandemic somewhat lessened engagement, increasing the gap between the more and less socioeconomically advantaged. Generally, this is not strictly due to a tendency to decrease engagement among the latter but also to increase engagement among the former.

Trust between constituent actors within the European Union (EU)’s multilevel regulatory regimes is decisive for regulatory success. Trust drives information flows, increases compliance, and improves cooperation within these regimes. Despite its importance, systematic knowledge regarding the drivers of trust within regulatory regimes is limited. This paper inquires whether trust in regulatory agencies is influenced by their affiliation with the national or EU governmental level, as well as by their performance. While existing literature predominantly focuses on why citizens place their trust in governments or regulatory agencies, this paper presents original insights regarding the formation of trust among elites within the regulatory regime, including politicians, ministerial officials, agency officials, interest groups, and regulated entities. We employ data obtained from a large-scale vignette experiment conducted in six countries involving 752 decision-makers from relevant organizations. The experimental results suggest that both public and private elite actors’ trust assessment of regulatory agencies does not hinge on cues associated with the governmental level, but rather depends on agency performance. Accordingly, belonging to the national or EU governmental level does not create a difference in trust assessment of regulatory agencies in itself. It, however, shows that particularly elite actors are rather sensitive in terms of the performance of a regulatory agency.

Political scientists heavily rely on standard survey questions referring to “democracy” when they study citizens’ attitudes toward (liberal) democracy. However, we only know little about the way in which citizens respond to these questions. This article focuses on two frequently highlighted issues: social desirability and the consistency between citizens’ understanding and researchers’ understanding of the term “democracy.” To address these issues, I collected novel survey data via YouGov from 14,000 British, French, German, and Italian respondents. I use a list experiment to show that respondents do not feel socially pressured to misreport their support for democracy. However, what citizens have in mind when they claim to support democracy only reflects norms and institutions of minimal conceptions of democracy. Overall, this encourages the usage of questions regarding citizens’ support for democracy widely, although this should not be interpreted as the support for anything going beyond minimal conceptions of democracy (providing freedom and allowing for citizens’ influence on political decisions).

We conduct a global, large-N analysis of proportionality in the partisan distribution of cabinet portfolios. Formulated in the context of postwar Western European parliamentary democracy, Gamson’s Law predicts that parties joining a coalition government will receive cabinet ministries in direct proportion to the seats they are contributing to the coalition on the floor of the legislature. Using a sample of 1551 country-years of coalitional government in 97 countries from 1966 to 2019, and comparing all main constitutional formats (parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential), we find that Gamson’s Law does not travel well outside its context of origin. Among the constitutional predictors of cabinet proportionality, we find that pure presidentialism is a major outlier, with an exaggerated form of formateur advantage. Introducing party-system and assembly-level predictors to the debate, we find that party institutionalization tends to increase fairness in portfolio allocation within parliamentary systems only.

If elections are to perform their legitimizing role, they should not only be objectively free, fair and non-fraudulent, but should also be perceived by the public as such. This paper investigates who perceives elections to be fair and why by contrasting two main logics: one based on the idea that perceptions of election integrity arise from external cues voters get from their environment and a second logic claiming that perceptions are internally created based on attitudes and beliefs. We use original survey data collected in ten countries around the European Elections 2019. We find that perceptions of election fairness are unrelated to country levels of integrity but mainly relate to voters’ status as winners/losers of the elections, attachment to the institutions they elect and populist attitudes. We also find beliefs on fake news influence to weakly mediate the relation between populist attitudes and perceptions of election fairness.

This study examines interest groups’ influence on the European Commission’s policy agenda. We argue that organizations can gain agenda-setting influence by strategically emphasizing different types of information. Analyzing a novel dataset on the engagement of 158 interest groups across 65 policy issues, we find that prioritizing information about audience support is more advantageous than emphasizing expert information. However, the effectiveness of highlighting the scope of audience support depends on the level of issue salience and degree of interest mobilization. Specifically, our findings indicate that when dealing with issues characterized by quiet politics, there are no systematic differences among groups employing distinct modes of informational lobbying.

Several studies concentrate on the representation of minority groups and the policy goals that members of these groups highlight when becoming candidates for public offices. However, we do not know much about the degree of parliamentary representation of sexual minorities and what ideological profile politicians with an LGB+ identity adopt. We aim at filling this gap by analysing the ideological stances of LGB+ candidates on key policy dimensions. Using data from the 2021 German candidate study, we find that the self-identification as LGB+ contributes significantly to adopting progressive stances on the socio-cultural dimension and more favourable positions on welfare state expansion, regardless of further important factors like party affiliation. Moreover, candidates who consider themselves LGB+ do take on significantly less traditional positions on the socio-cultural dimension compared to the position of their party, indicating that increasing descriptive representation of LGB+ individuals in parliament leads to a strengthening of more progressive voices in parliament and a stronger substantive representation of LGB+ interests.