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.

What has caused the marked, cross-national, and unprecedented trends in European electoral results in the 21st century? Scholarly explanations include social structure and challenger party entrepreneurship. We argue that these electoral changes more proximally result from public issue salience, which results from societal trends and mainly affects rather than is caused by party agenda setting. We use aggregate-level panel data across 28 European countries to show that the public issue salience of three issues—unemployment, immigration, and the environment—is associated with later variation in the results of the conservative, social democrat, liberal, radical right, radical left, and green party families in theoretically expected directions, while the party system issue agenda has weaker associations. Public issue salience, in turn, is rooted in societal trends (unemployment rates, immigration rates and temperature anomalies), and, in some cases, party agenda setting. We validate our mechanism at the individual-level across 28 European countries and using UK panel data. Our findings have implications for our understanding of the agency of parties, the permanency of recent electoral changes, and how voters reconcile their social and political worlds.

A burgeoning literature documents the emergence of a new globalization cleavage in Western Europe, centered around the issues of immigration and European integration. We investigate to what extent the globalization cleavage has crystallized by studying the alignment of preferences regarding open borders, their connection to more fundamental elements in the normative component of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism, and the extent to which this links up to the organizational component through party choice. To do this, we use innovative items tapping into political priorities, values, understandings of democracy, and virtues in a cross-sectional comparative survey in Norway and the UK. We find that the globalization cleavage is significantly more developed in the UK than in Norway but lacks a solidified normative component in both. This implies that considerable opportunities remain for ideological entrepreneurs to either fortify or dilute this cleavage, even in the UK.

This paper explores the potential of elections to change our emotions and modify the relevance that voters assign to self-interest and group-identity issues. We examine this question by analyzing the 1998–2016 period of the Catalan and Basque regional elections. The analysis exploits that Basques pushed to leave Spain in the early 2000s, and Catalans pursued independence about fifteen years later. When the separatist goal emerges, two issues gain relevance. First, there is a significant rise of identity politics, associated with the territory’s culture and language, to the detriment of other issues that traditionally explain vote choice, such as the left-right ideology, the degree of regional autonomy, or the economic discontent. Second, the territory becomes more divisive, big cities align against dominant separatist parties, and rural areas align with independentists. We conclude that material self-interests dilute and group-identity factors emerge to determine vote decisions in times of national dissolution.

This article demonstrates that deindustrialization increases ethnonational mobilization. We maintain that levels of mobilization of ethnonational movements are to an important extent a residual to the class cleavage, that is, to the degree the class conflict dominates political competition. Since in the context of Western Europe industrialism is the main force behind the class cleavage, deindustrialization weakens this cleavage and allows instead for mobilization along ethnonational divisions. In order to empirically test our argument, we analyze levels of electoral mobilization of ethnonational party blocs among 15 Western European minorities between 1918 and 2018. Our analysis clearly reveals that levels of industrialization are negatively related to ethnonational mobilization. However, this is only true for regions with historically high levels of industrialization and if the ethnonational movement is unified. The article contributes to the comparative literature on the electoral performance of ethnonational parties and the literature on deindustrialization and nationalism.

Populist radical right parties (PRRPs) claim to be particularly responsive to people’s needs and have been identified as a major source of disinformation. The present contribution sets up a field experiment to zoom in on one-to-one communication between voters and their parliamentarians. By drawing on pieces of misinformation that are present among different parties’ supporters, artificial citizen’s requests are sent to all 2503 German federal parliamentarians. In fact, PRRP politicians do not turn out to be more responsive and they are by far more reluctant to reject misinformation. In contrast, parliamentarians of all other parties largely object to misinformation, even if it matches their political positions and is shared by their electorates. In opposition to PRRP politicians who reveal signs of vote-seeking behaviour, established parties’ communication behaviour indicates a high degree of intrinsic motivation.

Democratic theorists have long emphasized the importance of participatory equality, that is, that all citizens should have an equal right to participate. It is still unclear, however, whether ordinary citizens view this principle as central to democracy and how different violations of this principle affect subjective democratic legitimacy. The attitudes of citizens are imperative when it comes to the subjective legitimacy of democratic systems, and it is therefore important to examine how participatory inequalities affect these attitudes. We here contribute to this research agenda with survey experiments embedded in two surveys (n = 324, n = 840). We here examine (1) whether citizens consider participatory inequality to be an important democratic principle, and (2) how gender and educational inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and the perceived usefulness of the participatory input. The results show that citizens generally consider participatory inequalities to be important, but only gender inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and usefulness. Hence it is important to consider the type of inequality to understand the implications.

Social democratic parties have experienced considerable electoral decline recently, which has often been attributed to their rightward policy movement. This paper advances this literature by examining who benefits from this moderation strategy and who is abandoning the social democrats. It does so by analyzing aggregate-level election results and individual-level Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data, on a sample of 21 advanced democracies, over 327 elections, from 1965 to 2019. I find little support for the assertion that social democrats are defecting to one party. However, in agreement with the spatial theory of party competition, results reveal that the radical left increasingly and significantly benefit from social democratic economic rightward positions, which is magnified when combined with rightward sociocultural positions. This predominantly occurs because left-leaning voters migrate to the radical left. The findings provide notable ramifications for party strategy and contribute to explanations for the rise of challenger parties, at the expense of mainstream parties.

Why is taxing the rich so difficult despite rising inequality and public support for progressive taxation? Recent research has mostly focused on the ‘demand side’ of electoral tax politics, showing that economic crises can increase public demands for progressive taxation in contemporary societies. Complementing this research, we focus on the political ‘supply side’, investigating the conditions under which social democratic parties take up these calls and translate them into policy. Studying wealth taxation in the course of the global financial crisis, we argue that whether parties pushed for taxing wealth crucially depended on intra-party struggles between the (office-seeking) leadership and the (policy-seeking) left wing. Only if the leadership became convinced that redistributive tax policy was electorally promising, did the social democratic parties fight for implementing wealth taxes. We evaluate this theoretical proposition in a comparative analysis of wealth tax policies in Austria, Germany and Spain in 2008–2015.

Many democracies are witnessing the rise and continuing success of parties and politicians who oppose fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Recent research finds that voters support illiberal politicians, because they trade off policy congruence against attitudes toward liberal democracy. Other studies, however, suggest that authoritarian and populist voters might actually have a preference to vote for illiberal candidates. We argue that both factors interact: Authoritarian and populist voters are more willing to trade off policy representation against support for liberal democracy. To test this mechanism, we rely on a survey experiment conducted in Germany. The results clearly demonstrate that voters indeed trade off policy congruence against liberal democracy. Moreover, this effect is particularly strong for populist and authoritarian voters. Overall, the results have important implications for understanding when and which voters support or oppose liberal democracy.

This article investigates determinants of candidate turnover in 10 European established democracies with list-PR electoral systems. We identify party and election variables that affect the supply and demand of new candidates on the parties’ lists. In addition, we apply a weighted candidate turnover measure to investigate the dynamic of renewal on high-ranked list positions. We built an original dataset that contains 3344 electoral lists of represented political parties. Hypotheses are tested by means of a multilevel analysis of political party list renewal rates. At the party level, leadership change and larger party size in terms of members are found to coincide with higher general turnover. At the system level, general turnover is higher in elections with closed lists and high electoral volatility. At higher positions on the list, candidate turnover appears not to be affected by the party- and system-level variables identified in the broader literature.

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.

This study investigates populist radical right (PRR) influence on aid amid widespread concerns about a potential connection between its rise and the reduction of aid allocation. Previous studies failed to address these concerns owing to the disuse of immigrant inflows as an intervening variable and a bilateral framework capable of investigating properties in donor and recipient countries. By analyzing panel data on Western European parliamentary democracies, the study demonstrates the PRR’s reducing effect via a coalitional pathway on bilateral aid to the recipients, failing to stem emigration into the donor countries. Further, analysis shows that such reduction intensifies in conjunction with the donors’ weak pluralistic institutions and the recipients’ sociocultural characteristics different from the ordinary citizens represented by the PRR. The findings make a novel contribution to the expanding literature on the PRR to integrate insights on the aid–immigration nexus, strategies for policy influence, and ideational profiles.

As deliberative democracy is gaining practical momentum, the question arises whether citizens’ attitudes toward everyday political talk are congruent with this ‘talk-centric’ vision of democratic governance. Drawing on a unique survey we examine how German citizens view the practice of discussing politics in everyday life, and what determines these attitudes. We find that only a minority appreciates talking about politics. To explain these views, we combine Fishbein and Ajzen’s Expectancy-Value Model of attitudes toward behaviors with perspectives from research on interpersonal communication. Individuals’ interest in politics emerges as the only relevant political disposition for attitudes toward everyday political talk. Its impact is surpassed and conditioned by conflict orientations and other enduring psychological dispositions, as well as contextual circumstances like the closeness of social ties and the amount of disagreement experienced during conversations. The beneficial effect of political interest dwindles under adverse interpersonal conditions. The social dimension of everyday political talk thus appears to outweigh its political dimension.

The article investigates whether and to what extent the welfare policies of Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) vary in diverse government coalitions. Relying on a multidimensional framework differentiating coalitional politics along the welfare size and deservingness dimension, we conduct a comparative case study analysing welfare reforms of the ‘standard’ centre-right/PRRP government coalition ÖVP-FPÖ in Austria and the ‘new’ populist government coalition M5S-Lega in Italy. We find that both PRRPs do not promote pro-welfare policies in general, but rather opt for selective expansion of benefits for ‘makers’, while aiming at retrenching benefits for ‘takers’. This welfare strategy includes pensioners and male breadwinner families but excludes migrants or long-term unemployed. The analysis furthermore shows that the central line of conflict with the centre-right ÖVP is mostly about the size of welfare policies, especially for ‘deserving’ citizens, while with the socially more left-leaning M5S it is rather centred around the deservingness dimension, e.g., benefits for takers. These results offer a more fine-grained understanding of the PRRPs’ welfare agenda and their coalitional welfare politics in office.

A close reading of the literature on radical right parties (RRPs) suggests that these parties erode trust and solidarity in European democracies when they pit ‘the pure people’ against political and legal institutions, elites, and immigrants. I propose the conjecture that RRPs with seats in the national parliament have better conditions for spreading nativist and populist messages that may erode trust and solidarity between a society’s residents, between ethnic groups, and towards its political and legal institutions. To test this research question, I combine nine waves of European Social Survey data from 17 countries and data on national elections spanning the years 1999 to 2020. Two-way fixed effects models estimate that RRPs representation in the national parliament is associated with a reduction in public support for redistribution of ca. 18% of a standard deviation. Additionally, I demonstrate that this inverse relationship runs parallel to growing welfare chauvinistic beliefs and that it is stronger in countries with weak integration policies. Contra theoretical expectations, the radical rights’ political representation has not produced any change in societal levels of anti-immigration attitudes, institutional trust, or social trust. While the findings persist across a wide range of robustness checks and other model specifications, threats to identification in the form of non-parallel pre-trends and unobserved sources of confounding, means that one should be cautious in interpreting the findings in a causal manner.

In Slovakia, women are poorly represented in politics and public life. Yet it is the first country in Central Europe with a female president. By applying a mixed-methods approach to analyzing an original dataset containing media coverage of leading presidential candidates (n = 1492), this study explores how the media covered them and discusses under what conditions gender-stereotypical coverage could be detrimental or beneficial to electoral outcomes. The results show media outlet type was not significantly associated with a gender-stereotypical attribution of communal and agentic traits to candidates. Tabloids and quality press equally perpetuated gender stereotypes. Irrespective of their gender, journalists were more likely to depict women candidates as possessing communal qualities perceived as incompatible with leadership. However, findings from the qualitative analysis suggest that when corruption perception is high, and public trust in institutions is low, communal traits stereotypically attributed to women are appreciated. Novelty also works to women’s advantage. These findings have important implications for women candidates’ campaign strategies.

Deliberative minipublics—participatory processes combining civic lottery with structured deliberation—are increasingly presented as a solution to address a series of problems. Whereas political theory has been prolific in conceiving their contributions, it remains unclear how the people organizing minipublics in practice view their purposes, and how these conceptions align with the theory. This paper conducts a thematic analysis of the reports of all the minipublics convened in Belgium between 2001 and 2021 (n = 51) to map whether and how justifications coincide with the theory. The analysis reveals an important gap: minipublics are in practice predominantly presented as contributions to policymaking, while more deliberative functions remain peripheral. Some common practical purposes also remain under-theorized, in particular their capacity to bridge the gap between citizens and politics. This desynchronization, combined with a plethora of desired outcomes associated with minipublics, indicates the creation of a minipublic bubble which inflates their capacity to solve problems.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, globalization strengthens the linkage between the economy (across-border benchmarked measures) and vote choice, thereby facilitating electoral accountability by enriching the information available to the public. In the pre-globalization era, ordinary citizens had difficulty assessing domestic economic conditions in a comparative setting, in part because they were less exposed to information concerning other countries’ economic performance. However, globalization has provided citizens with excellent sources for comparisons in the form of media coverage. Moreover, openness results in a reduction in relative variance of exogenous rather than competence shocks. Using media-guided comparisons from 29 countries since the 1980s, this study finds that relative economic performance significantly affects citizens’ vote choices when their economy is highly integrated into the world market.