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In this study, we investigate who would vote 'none of the above' (NOTA) if this were available on the ballot paper using original data from eight European countries. In particular, we examine whether NOTA would be used by abstainers and voters to protest within the electoral process. We also test whether socioeconomic factors and specific and diffuse support for democracy and its institutions correlate with a NOTA vote. We find that having NOTA on the ballot would reduce invalid balloting more than abstention and much more than protest party voting. Our results also suggest that NOTA is related to socioeconomic status, political interest, political knowledge and distrust in political institutions and authorities, but not to broadly undemocratic attitudes. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the increasingly large amounts of abstention and invalid voting, as well as the growing distrust of political institutions, in democratic countries. They also hold lessons for electoral reformers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tolerance has long been identified as a crucial feature of liberal democracies. Although the limits of tolerance are debated, the extent to which citizens are open and willing to accommodate others who are different from them is often regarded as a sign of a healthy and well‐functioning liberal democracy. The goal of this paper is to empirically investigate the state of political tolerance in Europe today. The main questions we ask are: What explains the different levels of tolerance across individuals in various countries? Which groups in society are the most likely targets of intolerance? We understand political tolerance as the willingness to allow the free articulation of interests and ideas in the political system of groups one opposes. Previous research emphasizes education, civic activism and threat perceptions as important determinants of tolerance. We redirect the debate to a set of novel correlates of tolerance. We argue that conspiratorial thinking and cosmopolitanism are critical factors that explain levels of tolerance among Europeans. The analysis employs original survey data collected as part of a mass survey conducted in 2017 in 10 European Union member states: Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. Our descriptive analysis shows that far‐right groups (i.e., fascists and neo‐Nazis) and Muslims are the most disliked groups in Europe. When it comes to the level of tolerance towards these groups, we find that more than half of the respondents in each country are willing to deny their most disliked group parliamentary representation. Moreover, we find that even after controlling for traditional determinants of tolerance, conspiratorial thinking and cosmopolitanism emerge as the most important predictors of political tolerance. Our analysis suggests that the recent rapid spread of various conspiracy theories related to the COVID‐19 pandemic is likely to have far‐reaching implications for tolerance as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have some territories performed better than others in the fight against COVID‐19? This paper uses a novel dataset on excess mortality, trust and political polarization for 165 European regions to explore the role of social and political divisions in the remarkable regional differences in excess mortality during the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic. First, we investigate whether regions characterized by a low social and political trust witnessed a higher excess mortality. Second, we argue that it is not only levels, but also polarization in trust among citizens – in particular, between government supporters and non‐supporters – that matters for understanding why people in some regions have adopted more pro‐healthy behaviour. Third, we explore the partisan make‐up of regional parliaments and the relationship between political division – or what we refer to as 'uncooperative politics'. We hypothesize that the ideological positioning – in particular those that lean more populist – and ideological polarization among political parties is also linked to higher mortality. Accounting for a host of potential confounders, we find robust support that regions with lower levels of both social and political trust are associated with higher excess mortality, along with citizen polarization in institutional trust in some models. On the ideological make‐up of regional parliaments, we find that, ceteris paribus, those that lean more 'tan' on the 'GAL‐TAN' spectrum yielded higher excess mortality. Moreover, although we find limited evidence of elite polarization driving excess deaths on the left‐right or GAL‐TAN spectrums, partisan differences on the attitudes towards the European Union demonstrated significantly higher deaths, which we argue proxies for (anti)populism. Overall, we find that both lower citizen‐level trust and populist elite‐level ideological characteristics of regional parliaments are associated with higher excess mortality in European regions during the first wave of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties are typically seen as conservative institutions which rarely change. Despite this common perception, parties do change, and on occasion, transform themselves by changing features such as the party name and logo, or their policy program. How can we conceptualize these kinds of changes, and what are the electoral consequences for parties which change in these ways? In this paper, I argue that feature changes and policy changes are instances of party rebranding, or situations where a party attempts to overhaul its entire image. I then test the electoral consequences of feature and policy rebrands on a dataset of 239 political parties from 1945 to 2019. The results indicate that feature rebrands increase party vote share for the election after the rebrand, while policy rebrands have no effect. These findings have implications for our understanding of parties themselves and the kinds of party signals that voters respond to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prominent theories claim that young Europeans are increasingly socialist as well as divided from their elders on non‐economic issues. This paper asks whether age‐based polarisation is really growing in Europe, using new estimates of the ideological positions of different age groups in 27 European countries across four issue domains from 1981 to 2018. The young in Europe turn out to be relatively libertarian: more socially liberal than the old in most countries but also more opposed to taxation and government spending. These age divides are not growing either: today's differences over social issues and immigration are similar in size to the 1980s, and if anything are starting to fall. Analysis of birth cohorts points to persistent cohort effects and period effects as the explanation for these patterns; there is little evidence that European cohorts become uniformly more right‐wing or left‐wing with age. Hence age‐based polarisation need not be a permanent or natural feature of European politics but is dependent on the changing social, political and economic climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are parties' ideological positions and levels of populism connected? Existing research either advocates for a U‐shaped relationship between parties' left‐right position and their degree of populism or uses specific dimensions of a two‐dimensional policy space to describe right‐wing populist parties. We provide an integrated perspective to describe parties' degree of populism by arguing that populism is higher when parties put strong emphasis on a collectivist host ideology. This has implications on how these ideologies relate to the two‐dimensional policy space. Combined with salience of policy dimensions, such a perspective allows for a better understanding of the occurrence of populism among right‐ and left‐wing populist parties. Using expert survey data on parties in Europe, we find strong and robust empirical support for the expected patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of populism and its relationship with modern democracy has gained considerable attention in recent years. This article aims at advancing our understanding of how populism affects different models of democracy and tests the proposed arguments empirically. Building on a large scholarly literature on populism and democracy, we take stock of existing arguments and theorize which democratic models may be affected by populism in a positive or negative way. Moreover, we move beyond the normative debate and analyse the effect of populism in power on different models of democracy empirically. We do so by merging data on populist governments in Europe and Latin America from 1995 until today with the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which enables us to capture the relationship between populism and different democratic models in these regions. Despite mixed‐theoretical expectations, our results suggest a rather negative impact of populism on the electoral, liberal and deliberative models of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do political parties respond to external shocks? Using an original survey of political parties across Europe conducted in June 2020 and Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) data on partisan ideological positioning, we argue that the pre‐existing ideological stances of Europe's political parties shaped their response to emerging Covid‐19 policy issues, including the tension between economic normalization and containment, legal versus voluntary enforcement and the role of science in policymaking. We find that party ideology powerfully predicts how parties, both in government and in opposition, responded to the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains far‐right mobilisation in the protest arena? After decades of growing electoral support and policy influence, the far right is experiencing an increase in grassroots mobilisation. Scholars of social movements and political parties have devoted little attention to the determinants of far‐right protest mobilisation in Europe. In this article, we bridge previous research on the far right and social movements to advance hypotheses on the drivers of far‐right protest mobilisation based on grievances, opportunities and resource mobilisation models. We use an original dataset combining novel data on 4,845 far‐right protest events in 11 East and West European countries (2008–2018), with existing measures accounting for the (political, economic and cultural) context of mobilisation. We find that classical approaches to collective action can be fruitfully applied to the study of the far right. Cultural grievances, notably concerns about immigration, as well as the availability of institutional access points in contexts characterised by divided government increase far‐right protest mobilisation. But far‐right protest mobilisation also rests on the organisational resources available to nativist collective actors, that is, the network in which they are embedded, their visibility in the media and elected officials. These findings have important implications to understand far‐right success in advanced democracies. They show that far‐right mobilisation in the protest arena not only rests on favourable circumstances, but also on whether far‐right actors can profit from them. More broadly, the study links party politics and social movement research to grasp the far right's modes of political contestation, locating research on this phenomenon at the intersection of political sociology and comparative politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the notable successes of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) activism in the region, individual European countries have varied considerably in the extent and speed with which they have adopted legislation to recognise the rights of their LGBTI citizens. Scholars have often turned to modernisation theory to explain these variable outcomes and argue that high levels of national wealth are an important factor in the success of LGBTI movements. Although the correlation between modernity, economic development and tolerance of LGBTI lifestyles is often treated as a truism in the literature, scholars have paid less attention to the precise mechanisms by which the complex processes associated with modernisation facilitate policy change. Drawing on the classic works of both modernisation theory and gay and lesbian history, we examine a less explored route by which modernisation leads to the expansion of LGBTI rights. Specifically, we posit that urbanisation facilitates the adoption of rights policies by strengthening LGBTI movements and enhancing their political effectiveness. To test this proposition, we use event history analysis and an original dataset that contains measures for institutional, cultural, economic and movement variables, as well as measures of urbanisation in 44 European countries between 1980 and 2015. Our findings support the contention that urbanisation has a strong effect on the formation of LGBTI movement organisations as well as the speed with which European states adopt both same‐sex union and anti‐discrimination legislation. The relationship between urbanisation and rights expansion persists even after controlling for a country's level of wealth, religious adherence and the influence of European institutions and norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates whether economic hardship affects social capital in Europe. Comparing 27 European countries, it evaluates the impact of personal experiences of economic hardship on engagement in voluntary associations as a cornerstone of civic and democratic life. Empirical analyses of the Eurobarometer data indicate that individual economic hardship has indeed a negative effect on associational volunteering in Europe. However, the result is qualified in two respects. First, it is found that the effect of individual economic hardship is contingent upon education. Second, this effect mostly refers to volunteering for associations providing solidarity goods (Putnam groups). These results have broader implications for understanding how economic hardship shapes the social capital within democratic societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emigrants' ideologies and partisan attitudes may diverge from other voters': overseas voters are ideologically self‐selected, receive distinctive information about campaigns and have experiences abroad that are likely to shape their political views. Parties, anticipating these emigrant attitudes, can manipulate overseas voting availability to give the vote primarily to their own supporters. Alternatively, parties may expect newly enfranchised voters to provide electoral support in gratitude for the right to vote. To distinguish these separate processes, this project undertakes a case study of Turkey to trace a ruling party's strategic expectations as it makes overseas‐enfranchisement decisions. To see how generalisable these results are, the study further extends to a statistical analysis of differences in vote choice between voters at home and abroad across all 23 European countries that report overseas votes separately, using an original dataset encompassing 121 elections. Both the case study and the statistical analysis suggest that emigrant‐enfranchising parties tend to garner overseas voters' support in a lasting way. This suggests that overseas enfranchisement most often appears to involve incumbent parties (correctly) expecting long‐term ideological compatibility with their overseas nationals, not simply exchanging the franchise for short‐term, transactional support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key reasons for the scholarly and policy concern about the rising levels of ethnic diversity is its apparently detrimental effect on the production of public goods. Although numerous studies have tackled that issue, there is still much ambiguity as to the precise micro‐level mechanisms underpinning this relationship. In this article, a novel theoretical explanation for this relationship is proposed, building on the social resistance framework. This proposition is tested using a new cross‐sectional public opinion survey covering 14,536 respondents in 817 neighbourhoods across 11 Central Eastern European countries. Analysing national minorities defined by postwar border changes means one can overcome the endogeneity problem faced by research based on immigrant groups. The findings show that it is the combination of a minority group's discrimination and its spatial clustering that makes minorities reluctant to contribute to public goods. The article constitutes a novel theoretical and methodological contribution to the research on the effects of diversity on public goods provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximately 70 per cent of the parties emerging in the post‐Second World War era failed to keep their seats in parliament. Party survival is an important issue, especially in parliamentary democracies, where parties are the means through which voters' preferences are linked to government policy outputs. Using an event history modeling framework, and data from 37 democracies, covering 830 parties, this article analyses two questions regarding party durability. First, when do parties fail? Second, which parties survive longer? The article shows that most parties fail at the beginning of their lifespan, and disappear before the end of their fourth term in parliament. Moreover, it is found that moderate policy position, distinct ideology and participation in governing coalitions increase the duration of party survival, even when controlling for party size. This article contributes to the extensive literature about the electoral benefits of ideological moderation and distinct policy positions by showing the long‐term benefits of these factors. Moreover, the long‐term benefit of party participation in government in terms of survival overcomes the short‐term cost of ruling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: What happens to the proposals generated by participatory processes? One of the key aspects of participatory processes that has been the subject of rare systematic analysis and comparison is the fate of their outputs: their policy proposals. Which specific factors explain whether these proposals are accepted, rejected or transformed by public authorities? In this article contextual and proposal‐related factors are identified that are likely to affect the prospect of proposals being implemented. The explanatory power of these factors are tested through multilevel analysis on a diverse set of 571 policy proposals. The findings offer evidence that both contextual and proposal‐related variables are important. The design of participatory processes affects the degree of implementation, with participatory budgeting and higher quality processes being particularly effective. Most significant for explaining outcomes are proposal‐level, economic and political factors: a proposal's cost, the extent to which it challenges existing policy and the degree of support it has within the municipality all strongly affect the chance of implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article explores whether differential time horizons in legislative chambers that result from staggered membership renewal affect legislative behaviour. The analysis focuses on patterns of bill initiation and the introduction of amendments in the upper chambers of Australia, France, Germany and Japan – all four of which contain two or more classes of members that face re‐election at different times. Drawing on original comparative data, clear evidence is found of over‐time variation in legislative activity levels in the upper chambers. Approaching elections lead to increased activity levels, with increases in the introduction of bills, but also, to a lesser extent, amending activity. Such variation is found not only for those members facing the most proximate election, but for all members of the chamber. Importantly, there are no significant differences in legislative behaviour between those members up for re‐election and those not facing the electorate in the most proximate election. These patterns are interpreted tentatively as evidence of the paramount importance of political parties in parliamentary systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Do voters’ assessments of the government's foreign policy performance influence their vote intentions? Does the ‘clarity of responsibility’ in government moderate this relationship? Existing research on the United States demonstrates that the electorate's foreign policy evaluations influence voting behaviour. Whether a similar relationship exists across the advanced democracies in Europe remains understudied, as does the role of domestic political institutions that might generate responsibility diffusion and dampen the effect of foreign policy evaluations on vote choice. Using the attitudinal measures of performance from the 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey collected across 13 European countries, these questions are answered in this study through testing on incumbent vote the diffusion‐inducing effects of five key domestic factors frequently used in the foreign policy analysis literature. Multilevel regression analyses conclude that the electorate's ability to assign punishment decreases at higher levels of responsibility diffusion, allowing policy makers to circumvent the electoral costs of unpopular foreign policy. Specifically, coalition governments, semi‐presidential systems, ideological dispersion among the governing parties and the diverse allocation of the prime ministerial and foreign policy portfolios generate diffusion, dampening the negative effects of foreign policy disapproval on vote choice. This article contributes not only to the debate on the role of foreign policy in electoral politics, but also illustrates the consequential effects of domestic institutions on this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article explains legislative turnover in eight West European legislatures over 152 general elections in the period 1945–2015. Turnover is measured as the rate of individual membership change in unicameral or lower chambers. It is the outcome of a legislative recruitment process with a supply and a demand side. Decisions made by contenders affect supply, while decisions made by parties and voters influence demand. Such decisions are shaped by four political and institutional factors: the institutional context of political careers, or structure of political career opportunities; political party characteristics; electoral swings; and electoral systems. Ten specific hypotheses are tested within this theoretical framework. The structure of political career opportunities is the most decisive factor explaining variability in turnover rates, followed by electoral swings and political parties. Electoral systems show less substantive effects. Electoral volatility is the predictor with the most substantive effects, followed by duration of legislative term, strength of bicameralism, regional authority, gender quotas, level of legislative income and district magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this article, the effects of regional autocratic linkage on the survival of autocratic regimes are analysed. Scholars have suggested that regional factors shape regime survival through processes of diffusion. However, in most accounts, diffusion is simply derived from characteristics of the region, such as the number or proportion of regional autocracies. In contrast, it is argued here that it is the actual linkages between countries that must be examined. Regional political, economic and social ties between autocratic regimes create domestic and external stakes in the regime, counterweigh democratisation pressure and facilitate autocratic learning. The study employs the average volume of trade, migration and diplomatic exchanges between autocratic regimes within a region as proxies for regional autocratic linkage, and asserts that regional autocratic linkage is on the rise. Applying Cox survival models on a dataset of regional autocratic linkage and regime survival between 1946 and 2009, it is found that regional autocratic linkage significantly reduces the likelihood of autocratic regime breakdown. These effects hold when the proportion of autocratic regimes within a region is controlled for, suggesting that one must look beyond the characteristics of the countries within a region and focus on the ties and linkages between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Leaders and members of parliament serve as a political party's public face. Their image casts a shadow in which observers interpret policy statements. It is hypothesized in this article that media cover and voters understand policy messages through the lens of prominent party members’ characteristics. Easy‐to‐observe descriptive traits, such as gender or ethnicity, cue parties’ policy priorities. Media are more likely to emphasise party messages on issues historically related to these groups when they are visible in the party's public image. Hypotheses from this theory are tested using data on prominent party members’ descriptive characteristics, policy statements and media coverage of statements from the European Election Studies. Data from the 1999, 2004 and 2009 European elections evidence support for the theory. Parties with more female representatives signal stronger emphasis on gendered issues in media reports. The results hold implications for understanding the ways in which parties deliver and voters receive campaign messages. This research offers an explanation for voters’ limited knowledge of parties’ policy positions; media reinforce existing gender stereotypes and voters’ predispositions by selectively reporting policy statements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Party politics and electoral research generally assume that party members are loyal voters. This article first assesses the empirical basis for this assumption before providing individual‐level explanations for defection. It combines prominent theories from party politics and electoral behaviour research and argues that internal disagreement and external pressure can each bring about disloyal voting. The hypotheses are motivated with multi‐country European survey data and tested on two sets of party‐level national surveys. The results show, first, that, on average, 8 per cent of European party members cast a defecting vote in the last election, and second, that dissatisfaction with the leadership is the strongest predictor of defection. Additionally, internal ideological disagreement is associated with higher probabilities of defection, whereas the effects of pull factors in the form of contentious policies are rather limited. These findings emphasise the importance of testing scientific assumptions and the potential significance of party leadership contests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Which parties use simple language in their campaign messages, and do simple campaign messages resonate with voters’ information about parties? This study introduces a novel link between the language applied during election campaigns and citizens’ ability to position parties in the ideological space. To this end, how complexity of campaign messages varies across parties as well as how it affects voters’ knowledge about party positions is investigated. Theoretically, it is suggested that populist parties are more likely to simplify their campaign messages to demarcate themselves from mainstream competitors. In turn, voters should perceive and process simpler campaign messages better and, therefore, have more knowledge about the position of parties that communicate simpler campaign messages. The article presents and validates a measure of complexity and uses it to assess the language of manifestos in Austria and Germany in the period 1945–2013. It shows that political parties, in general, use barely comprehensible language to communicate their policy positions. However, differences between parties exist and support is found for the conjecture about populist parties as they employ significantly less complex language in their manifestos. Second, evidence is found that individuals are better able to place parties in the ideological space if parties use less complex campaign messages. The findings lead to greater understanding of mass‐elite linkages during election campaigns and have important consequences for the future analysis of manifesto data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Governments led by nonpartisan, ‘technocratic’ prime ministers are a rare phenomenon in parliamentary democracies, but have become more frequent since the late 1980s. This article focuses on the factors that lead to the formation of such cabinets. It posits that parliamentary parties with the chance to win the prime ministerial post will only relinquish it during political and economic crises that drastically increase the electoral costs of ruling and limit policy returns from governing. Statistical analyses of 469 government formations in 29 European democracies between 1977 and 2013 suggest that political scandals and economic recessions are major drivers of the occurrence of technocratic prime ministers. Meanwhile, neither presidential powers nor party system fragmentation and polarisation have any independent effect. The findings suggest that parties strategically choose technocrat‐led governments to shift blame and re‐establish their credibility and that of their policies in the face of crises that de‐legitimise their rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains variation in tax outcomes between European states? Previous studies emphasise the role played by political institutions, but focus mostly on the input side of politics - how access to power and policy making is structured - and the institutions of relatively recent times. It is argued in this article that output-side institutions related to the implementation of political decisions also matter and have deep institutional origins. As the classic literature has argued, the early modern period from 1450 to 1800 was formative for the development of fiscal capacity, but European states diverged in the stock of capacity they acquired. This article tests whether these differences still affect contemporary tax outcomes using a novel measure of fiscal capacity, based on the age, extent and quality of state-administered cadastral records. The empirical analysis shows that, on average, countries with higher early modern fiscal capacity have higher tax revenue today, compared to countries with lower early modern fiscal capacity. This association is robust to different model specifications and alternative measurements. The findings have important policy implications as they indicate how deeply the current fiscal problems of the continent are entrenched, but also point to what needs to be prioritised within ongoing tax reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores two theoretical possibilities for why personal health may affect political trust: the psychological-democratic contract theory, and the role of personal experience in opinion formation. It argues that citizens with health impairments are more likely to experience the direct effects of political decisions as they are more dependent on public health services. Negative subjective evaluations of public services can lower trust levels, especially if people's expectations are high. Using European Social Survey data, the association between health and trust in 19 Western European states is analysed. The results indicate that people in poor health exhibit lower levels of trust towards the political system than people in good health. The differences in trust between those in good and poor health are accentuated among citizens with left-leaning ideological values. The results suggest that welfare issues may constitute a rare context in which personal, rather than collective, experiences affect opinion formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on populist parties - or 'supply-side populism' more generally - are numerous. Nevertheless, the connection with demand-side dynamics, and particularly the populist characteristics or tendencies of the electorate, requires more scholarly attention. This article examines in more detail the conditions underlying the support for populist parties, and in particular the role of populist attitudes amongst citizens. It asks two core questions: (1) are populist party supporters characterised by stronger populist attitudes than other party supporters, and (2) to what extent do populist (and other) attitudes contribute to their party preference? The analysis uses fixed effect models and relies on a cross-sectional research design that uses unique survey data from 2015 and includes nine European countries. The results are threefold. First, in line with single-country studies, populist attitudes are prominent among supporters of left- and right-wing populist parties in particular. Second, populist attitudes are important predictors of populist party support in addition to left-wing socioeconomic issue positions for left-wing populist parties, and authoritarian and anti-immigration issue positions for right-wing populist parties. Third, populist attitudes moderate the effect of issue positions on the support for populist parties, particularly for individuals whose positions are further removed from the extreme ends of the economic or cultural policy scale. These findings suggest that strong populist attitudes may encourage some voters to support a populist party whose issue positions are incongruous with their own policy-related preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does international migration impact the composition of the demos? Constitutional doctrines and democratic theories suggest contrasting responses: an insular one excludes both non-citizen immigrants and citizen-emigrants; a deterritorialised one includes all citizens wherever they reside; a postnational one includes all residents and only these. This article argues that none of these predicted responses represents the dominant pattern of democratic adaptation, which is instead a level-specific expansion of the national franchise to include non-resident citizens and of the local franchise to include non-citizen residents. This is demonstrated by analysing an original dataset on voting rights in 31 European and 22 American countries, and outlining a level-sensitive normative theory of citizenship that provides support for this pattern as well as a critical benchmark for current franchise policies. The findings can be summarised in two inductive generalisations: (1) Voting rights today no longer depend on residence at the national level and on citizenship of the respective state at the local level; (2) Voting rights do, however, generally depend on citizenship of the respective state at the national level and on residence at the local level. In the article, these are called the patterns of franchise 'expansion' and 'containment'. The former supports the idea of widespread level-specific expansion of the franchise and refutes the insular view of the demos. The latter signals corresponding level-specific restrictions, which defeats over-generalised versions of deterritorialised or postnational conceptions of the demos. In order to test how robust this finding is, cases are analysed where the dominant patterns of expansion have been resisted and where unexpected expansion has occurred. With regard to the former, the article identifies constitutional and political obstacles to voting rights expansion in particular countries. With regard to the latter, the article shows that even where national voting rights have been extended to non-citizen residents, containment remains strong through indirect links to citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses an issue previously neglected in the research on support for populist parties: How do perceptions of the local quality of government (QoG) and local service delivery affect voters' propensity to vote for a populist party? It argues that personal experience with poor QoG makes voters more likely to support populist parties. The argument highlights the interplay between supply and demand factors in explaining populist support and discusses why populist parties have been particularly successful in certain regions in Europe. A unique dataset from the Quality of Government Institute that surveys citizens' perception of QoG in their area is used to estimate both individual- and regional-level models of the link between perceived local QoG and populist support in Europe. The empirical results show a strong and robust association between within-country variation in QoG and support for populist parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When democracies ban political parties, one of the central issues that usually emerges in both public and academic debate concerns the effects of proscription. Some argue that proscription may lead to radicalisation, a growth of militancy and readiness to use violence. Others argue that, in the long run, banning parties may damage the foundations of a democratic polity as the ban may be interpreted as a silent weakening of democratic rights in the state and therefore a failure of democracy itself. However, and notwithstanding its centrality for the conduct of democratic politics, the impact of party bans on party system development has remained mostly under-researched. Trying to address this lacuna, and employing a new dataset of banned parties in Europe between 1945 and 2015, the study reported in this article compares the effects of party ban regulation on party system stability in three different arenas: electoral, parliamentary and governmental. In particular, the impact of party proscription on electoral volatility, fragmentation and closure is examined in three countries: Turkey, Germany and Spain. Using examples both at national and regional (e.g., Basque Country, Navarre, Saxony) levels, and making use of survey data when available, it is found that the banning of a relevant political party not only increases volatility and reduces fragmentation, but also alters the existing structure of competition at the time of government formation. Likewise, the empirical analysis also suggests a number of alternative hypotheses (i.e., organisational succession, electoral system) when trying to explain why the outcomes of some cases within each country deviate from theoretical expectations. Finally, the article also examines the phenomenon of 'non-banning' and how the failure of attempts to ban political parties might affect the development of a party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of European integration has traditionally focused on organisational growth: the deepening and widening of the European Union (EU). By contrast, this article analyses organisational differentiation, a process in which states refuse, or are being refused, full integration but find value in establishing in-between grades of membership. It describes how the EU's system of graded membership has developed, and it explains the positioning of states in this system. The core countries of the EU set a standard of 'good governance'. The closer European countries are to this standard, the closer their membership grade is to the core. Some countries fall short of this standard and are refused further integration by the core: their membership grade increases with better governance. Other countries refuse further integration because they outperform the standards of the core countries: their membership grade decreases as governance improves. These conjectures are corroborated in a panel analysis of European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource-based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual-level grievances interact with macro-level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual-level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross-level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How the recent creation, re-invention or reinforcement of regional levels of political decision making across Europe compounds political representation is one of the key issues of contemporary democratic government. Despite growing scholarly interest, the critical question as to whether the regional institutional setting has brought about distinct representational roles among sub-state legislators has yet to be addressed. To advance research in this field, this study bridges the literature on multilevel politics and legislative studies that to date have developed in isolation. Using innovative survey data from 14 statewide and 56 regional legislatures across Europe, it provides the first comprehensive test of how the state structure affects a legislator's views on representation. The results highlight that, relative to legislators in unitary states and national legislators in multilevel states, legislators at the regional level are more constituency-oriented. Moreover, this heightened responsiveness to constituents at the regional level is not offset by weaker collective representation operating through political parties. Beyond these findings' immediate relevance to scholars of federalism/regionalisation and parliaments, they also speak to the wider normative debate about the quality of political representation and public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first comparative study of multidimensional government-citizen policy congruence, this article shows that citizens are less satisfied with democracy when their views differ from that of the government on policy dimensions beyond the general left-right axis. Satisfaction is reduced by a government that deviates on European integration and redistribution and partly also on social lifestyle, immigration and environmental protection. Furthermore, this analysis identifies the level of political interest as central moderator of this relationship. Satisfaction of citizens with stronger interest in politics suffers more when there is a politically distant government. Combining data from the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey and two waves of the European Social Survey, the analysis builds on information on citizen-government policy congruence of some 45,000 citizens and 31 governments in 15 Western and Central Eastern European countries. The article brings a multidimensional perspective to the study of policy congruence between citizens and governments in a time when the preference structure of parties and citizens has become increasingly complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda-setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single-country studies has suggested a number of general agenda-setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single-party governments compared to those with multiple-party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some scholars and policy makers argue in favour of increasing democratic contestation for leadership and policy at the European level, for instance by having European-wide parties campaign for competing candidates for President of the European Commission ahead of European Parliament elections. But do such changes put the survival of the European Union at risk? According to the consociational interpretation of the EU, the near absence of competitive and majoritarian elements has been a necessary condition for the stability of the EU political system given its highly diverse population. This article contributes to the debate in two ways. First, it develops a more precise understanding of 'problematic' diversity by examining how three variables - the heterogeneity, polarisation and crosscuttingness of citizen preferences over public polices - affect the risk of democratic contestation generating persistent and systematically dissatisfied minorities. Second, it uses opinion surveys to determine whether the degree of diversity of the European population is problematically high compared to that of established democratic states. It is found that the population of the EU is slightly more heterogeneous and polarised than the population of the average Member State, although policy preferences in several Member States are more heterogeneous and polarised than the EU as a whole. Strikingly, however, policy preference cleavages are more crosscutting in the EU than in nearly all Member States, reducing the risk of persistent minorities. Moreover, policy preferences tend to be less heterogeneous and polarised, and nearly as crosscutting, in the EU as a whole as in the United States. For observers worried about how high polarisation and low crosscuttingness in policy preferences may combine to threaten democratic stability, these findings should be reassuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classical outbidding model of ethnic politics argues that democratic competition involving ethnic parties inevitably leads to ethnic outbidding where parties adopt ever more extreme positions. However, recent small-N studies show that ethnic outbidding is only one of a range of strategies available to ethnic parties. This article seeks to explain why some ethnic parties are extremist, whereas others adopt moderate positions. Drawing on the ethnic outbidding and the nested competition model of ethnic party competition, it is hypothesised that the ethnic segmentation of the electoral market, and the relative salience of an ethnically cross-cutting economic dimension of party competition, account for the varying degrees of extremism. Hypotheses are tested drawing on a novel, expert-survey-based dataset that provides indicators for the positions of 83 ethnonational minority parties in 22 European democracies in 2011. Results of ordinary least squares and two-level linear regressions show that as the economic dimension gains importance, parties become more moderate relative to the party system mean. The electorate's ethnic segmentation has a positive effect on extremism, but this effect is not significant in all models. Contrary to expectations, higher ethnic segmentation of the party system is associated with more moderate positions in the majority of the estimated models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent financial and debt crisis has resuscitated the debate about European federalism -- a theme that seemed not to have survived the painful constitutional adventure that ended with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. With the adoption of significant policy and institutional measures for tightening macroeconomic and budgetary coordination (including a constitutionally enshrined debt brake), the reforms of the monetary union have undisputedly brought the European Union further on the path towards an ever closer union. In an era where EU integration has been increasingly politicised, and Euroscepticism has been on the rise and exploited by anti-system parties, national leaders have to face a political hiatus and respond to increased needs for symbolic and discursive legitimation of further federalisation. This is all the more crucial for French and German leaders who have brokered the main decisions during the crisis of the eurozone. Against this background, the purpose of this article is not to assess whether, or to what extent, the recent reforms of economic and monetary union have made the EU more federal. Rather, the purpose is to tackle the following puzzle: How have EU leaders legitimised the deepening of federal integration in a context where support for more European federalism is at its lowest? To elucidate this, a lexicographic discourse analysis is conducted based on all speeches held by the German Chancellor Merkel and the two French Presidents Sarkozy and Hollande, previous to, or after European summits from early 2010 until the spring of 2013. The findings indicate that federalism is both taboo and pervasive in French and German leaders' discourse. The paradox is barely apparent, though. While the 'F-word' is rarely spoken aloud, two distinctive visions co-exist in the French and German discourse. The coming of age of a political union through constitutional federalism is pictured as ineluctable, yet as a distant mirage out of reach of today's decision makers. At the same time, the deepening of functional federalism in order to cope with economic interdependence is a ubiquitous imperative that justifies further integration. The persisting gap between the constitutional and the functional vision of European federalism has crucial implications. Insofar as the Union is held responsible for not delivering successful economic policy, political leaders will fail to legitimise both functional and constitutional federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies previously ignored determinants of public support for the European Union's security and defence ambitions. In contrast to public opinion vis-à-vis the EU in general, the literature on attitudes towards a putative European army or the existing Common Security and Defence Policy ( CSDP) suggests that the explanatory power of sociodemographic and economic variables is weak, and focuses instead on national identity as the main determinant of one's support. This article explores the possible impact of strategic culture, and argues that preferences vis-à-vis the EU's security and defence ambitions are formed in part through pre-existing social representations of security. To test this proposition, 'national' strategic cultures are disaggregated and a typology is produced that contains four strategic postures: pacifism, traditionalism, humanitarianism and globalism. Applying regression analysis on individual-level Eurobarometer survey data, it is found that strategic postures help explain both the general level of support for CSDP and support for specific Petersberg tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the collapse of party membership in the last half-century has consumed much of the focus of party scholarship, the notion of membership itself is surprisingly under-theorised. This article presents a tripartite framework for understanding party membership as a constructed concept: from the perspective of the state, the individual and the political party. As organisational mediators and strategic electoral actors, political parties construct varying notions of membership in order to mobilise resources and gain legitimacy, while balancing the participatory demands of citizens with the legal and normative expectations imposed by the state. Using a number of illustrative examples from Europe and beyond, the article analyses the development of supporters' networks and the extension of participatory opportunities to non-members. Designed in part to address this membership decline and to offer individuals a different way of engaging with political parties, these initiatives are seen as a crucial step in the evolution of modern parties towards looser, more individualised and amorphous networks of affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National officials working in international bureaucracies regularly invoke the fear that member states strategically use such officials for influencing decision making and agenda-setting to their advantage. This article theoretically analyses conditions under which the autonomy of national civil servants in international bureaucracies might become compromised. The ensuing predictions are then tested using a unique survey among seconded national experts ( SNEs) in the European Commission ( N ≈ 400). Finally, evaluating the characteristics linked to reduced autonomy among SNEs in the Commission, the article illustrates that these officials are, in practice, likely to be relatively independent from member state influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does voter polarisation affect party responsiveness? Previous research has shown that political parties emphasise political issues that are important to their voters. However, it is posited in this article that political parties are not equally responsive to citizen demands across all issue areas. The hypothesis is that party responsiveness varies considerably with the preference configuration of the electorate. More specifically, it is argued that party responsiveness increases with the polarisation of issues among voters. To test these theoretical expectations, party responsiveness is analysed across nine West European countries from 1982 until 2013. Data on voter attention and voter preferences with regard to specific policy issues from a variety of national election studies is combined with Comparative Manifestos Project data on parties' emphasis of these issues in their election manifestos. The findings have major implications for understanding party competition and political representation in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members of the European Parliament ( MEPs) represent their citizens in European Union policy making, having the power to approve, amend or reject the near majority of legislation. The media inform EU citizens about their representatives and are able to hold them publicly accountable. However, we know little about whether, and to what extent, MEPs are visible in the news. This study investigates the visibility of MEPs in national broadsheets in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. It seeks to explain individual-level variation by employing an original dataset of news visibility of 302 MEPs over a period of 25 months ( September 2009- September 2011) and tests the applicability of the news values and mirror theories in the context of supranational politics. The results show that political office, length of tenure and domestic party leadership have a positive effect. Legislative activities have a mixed effect on MEP news visibility. Attendance negatively affects news visibility, while non-attached MEPs receive more news coverage. In short, despite the core supranational nature of EP legislative politics, MEP news visibility primarily depends on journalists' domestic considerations. This informs both our understanding of MEP parliamentary behaviour and journalism studies in the context of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates networks and political actions by migrant organisations in five European cities. It examines how political opportunity structures moderate the impact of organisational networks on organisations' political contacts and protests using data from organisational surveys undertaken between 2005 and 2008 in Budapest, Lyon, Madrid, Milan and Zurich. Results suggest that the political context moderates the role that different types of networks have on mobilisation. It is found that migrant organisational networks may be sources compensating for the lack of contextual opportunities, thus fostering the use of protest by migrant organisations. However, migrant organisational networks can also favour the creation of political subcultures, marginalised from mainstream politics. Finally, migrant networks are likely to foster migrant organisations' political integration in multicultural contexts through conventional as well as non-conventional politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]