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In recent years, the attention of political scientists investigating political polarization has turned from the ideological aspects of polarization to its partisan and affective aspects. This recent turn implied that this area has experienced an urgent need to create appropriate polarization indices that are backed with high-quality data across time and countries to carry out comparative research. This paper argues that existing polarization indices mostly fail to adequately include the most important aspect of polarization, that is, bimodality. To fill this gap, it proposes a partisan polarization index using European Social Survey data on government satisfaction of partisan camps, which is available for 32 European countries between 2002 and 2020 for all in all 214 country-years. That is, the paper offers an insight into trends in partisan polarization for these 214 cases. The analysis of cases shows that in the last two decades polarization hit mostly Southern European countries and some East-Central European ones, like Cyprus, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Poland and especially, Hungary. Within the realm of possibilities, the paper compares the newly constructed index to other polarization indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral reforms offer an opportunity to incumbents to change the rules strategically, for their own benefits. From this aspect, the low number of studies addressing the effect of incumbents' potential strategic manipulations of the electoral rules is striking. Most research analyses single reform cases, offering an overview of the context, the negotiations, and the outcome of the reform process. Comparative research on strategic electoral manipulation, however, is scarce, and almost non-existent on non-transitional settings or established democracies. To fill this gap, the present study examines whether European electoral reforms have served the short-term interest of the incumbent parties, analysing data in 30 European countries of all relevant electoral reforms carried out between 1960 and 2011. Interestingly, the results do not support the assumption that incumbent parties generally benefit from carrying out a reform. Moreover, it finds no substantial differences in this regard between major and minor reforms, and neither the age of democracies nor the timing of the reform has a significant effect on reformers' gains. The paper discusses possible explanations for the negative effect found, and it concludes that, apart from promoting self-interest and the unpredictability of the reforms' effects, the most probable causes are the reformers' alternative goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several scholars have suggested that political dividedness has harmful effects on economic performance. Interestingly, empirical tests tackling this argument are almost entirely absent. The paper aims to fill this gap by testing the above hypothesis using data from the European Social Survey, including 27 countries between 2002 and 2015. Controlling for a range of well-known explanatory variables, the results of the panel regression analysis suggest that partisan polarisation is adversely related to economic growth, while ideological polarisation is not. The finding is congruent with the hypothesis of polarisation having a notable negative effect on growth, yet future works are necessary to test both the direction and the possible channels of causality. As scholars increasingly describe contemporary politics as an era of growing polarisation, the results imply that partisan polarisation should deserve more attention from political scientists and economists as a factor that might influence economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To win a policy debate, political actors may apply two analytically distinct counterframing strategies, rhetoric and heresthetic. Rhetoric is when counterarguments are formulated in the original dimension of the debate, while heresthetic is using arguments in a different dimension compared to the original frame. Although both rhetoric and heresthetic are ubiquitous phenomena in the process of public opinion formation, there are no general rules to specify their efficacy. Drawing on a survey experiment carried out in Hungary in 2020 (N = 2000), this paper uncovers the factors determining the effect of the two strategies. Introducing a conceptual distinction between open and trade-off framing situations, the paper demonstrates that the structure of the situation matters. While heresthetic has a robust effect in trade-off framing situations, rhetoric may have a strong impact in open framing situations. Moreover, the effectiveness of counterframing depends on the party affiliation of respondents and the strength of their related attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes a new dataset, the European Government-Opposition Voters Data Set (EGOV), which categorizes European voters and party identifiers based on their individual party preferences, dividing them into pro-government and pro-opposition groups. The dataset includes two variables that can be used to supplement the integrated data sets of the European Social Survey project, which publishes one of the most comprehensive and most widely used social scientific database covering Europe. The present data enables the recoding of (any part of) an integrated dataset containing responses from more than 420 000 respondents in 33 European countries between 2002 and 2020, covering eight data waves and 215 country-years. The EGOV Data Set facilitates research that includes the aspect of respondents' government-opposition status either as an independent or a control variable. Being a winner or a loser in a political sense strongly influences not only political opinions but also a wide set of perceptions from subjective well-being to economic performance. This way, these data could be especially helpful for research addressing polarization, institutional trust, economic perceptions and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, considerable theoretical literature has emerged on voters' sophistication and its effect on democratic functioning. Some works argue that the political choices of more sophisticated voters lead to more favourable social outcomes (Brennan, 2017. Against democracy. Princeton University Press; Somin, 2016. Democracy and political ignorance: Why smaller government is smarter. Stanford University Press). However, Achen and Bartels (2016. Democracy for realists: Why elections do not produce Responsive government. Princeton University Press) argue that sophisticated citizens are at least as biased as the unsophisticated. This paper aims to clarify this link by investigating the role of education, information acquisition, and interest on bias. The question is tested on European Social Survey data. The results show that the level of bias is independent of education but is significantly related to both interest and newspaper reading. The findings fully support the interpretation of Achen and Bartels (2016. Democracy for Realists: Why elections do not produce responsive government. Princeton University Press) on the effect of sophistication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As related research in political psychology shows, election results affect the emotions of individuals, although most studies report about a short-term effect that disappears in one or two weeks. This paper investigates whether election results influence the general mood, the happiness of individuals in the long run. The analysis uses the European Social Survey data from 30 European countries between 2002 and 2015. Regression models suggest that voting for and being attached to an incumbent party increases happiness, while ideological closeness to the government does not. Moreover, the interaction effects show that the closer people feel to their preferred party, the larger the happiness gap becomes between government and opposition supporters. This trend, however, does not hold in case of opposition supporters, whose happiness level is not alternated by the closeness of the attachment. These results prove that partisan motivations are in action in the non-political sphere of life too, and they complement former evidence about an intense short-term effect of winning the elections on voters' happiness. By testing and confirming the effects of the most widely used explanatory variables of happiness on a large cross-national sample, the paper contributes to general happiness research as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covering the largest sample of countries to date, this study examines the effect of three country-specific factors on the tone of electoral campaigns across Europe: electoral system disproportionality, party system fragmentation, and the polarization of the electorate. We use an original dataset of statements made by political actors during eighteen electoral campaigns in nine European countries. Our multinomial logit model suggests that increasing disproportionality slightly increases negativity, while thanks to parties competing on the same market, less polarized electorates invite more negative political campaigns. Finally, we find a U-shaped relationship between party system fragmentation and negativity: Increasing the number of parties, negativity decreases first, only to start increasing again once the party system becomes very fragmented. We explain this with parties altering their coalition strategies with the changing number of parties: Less fragmentation makes it more likely to having to step into coalition with the competitors, thus decreasing negativity, while in very fragmented systems, parties not needed to any potential coalitions become easy targets to negative campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on media and politics generally find an effect of the media on the symbolic policy agenda. Analysing data from the Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project, we demonstrate that this effect is extremely weak in the Hungarian policy-making process. We identified those issues that received greater than average coverage in the media. However, we found that in the majority of cases governmental initiatives or decisions preceded the media coverage - that is, instead of the media agenda pulling the policy agenda, the general logic is the opposite: the media are talking about the policy initiatives of the government. The ambition of the paper is twofold. First, our findings reinforce those claims in the literature that point to the many institutional and political factors affecting the media-politics nexus. This suggests that policy-making might be very different in new(er) democracies. Second, our research analyses the policy-making side of Viktor Orbán’s governance. Changes in the polity, democratic backlash and illiberal tendencies are usually the focus concerning the political changes in Hungary since 2010, but no attention has been devoted to how this type of governance is reflected in policy-making. Our paper seeks to make a contribution also in this respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares the political leadership of Silvio Berlusconi and Viktor Orbán from the beginning of their political careers to 2014, Besides giving a descriptive comparison of the Italian and Hungarian political leaders, the paper focuses on two questions: (1) the nature of their populism; (2) the quality and robustness of the changes induced by their policy. The paper concludes that both leaders introduced a new era in politics, but Orbán has been more effective in transforming policy means and priorities and also in adjusting the institutional settings (polity). Unlike Berlusconi, he has become a founder of a new regime; a democracy with authoritarian elements. Both of them are populist leaders in terms of substance, as well as process and linkage, but the ideological nature of their populism is rather different. While Berlusconi represents liberal populism, Orbán represents an illiberal one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article applies Nye’s (2008, 2014) conceptual proposal for the empirical comparison of the political leadership of Silvio Berlusconi and Viktor Orbán. Nye modified Burns’ (1978) concept of transactional and transformational leaders and differentiated between inspirational and transactional leadership styles. Supplementing Nye’s conceptual–theoretical framework, the article differentiates between leadership style, policy objectives and policy outcome. The empirical comparison highlights the different configurations of these three characteristics of leadership and justifies Nye’s conceptual innovation compared to Burns’ transformational leadership: the inspirational leadership style is not necessarily accompanied by transformational objectives and outcomes. While both Berlusconi and Orbán may be characterised by their inspirational leadership style, Berlusconi had more moderate, incremental policy objectives and achievements compared to Orbán’s transformational ones. The article also discusses the factors which might explain the differences in the two political leaders’ traits and effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]