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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]