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Support for EU membership has long been an important topic of study. Individual-level research shows that winners of globalisation, including the higher educated, express greater EU support as they profit from economic and cultural conditions resulting from European integration. Recent context-focused work suggests that individuals in 'left-behind' places are less supportive of EU integration because of their home regions' weaker long-term economic conditions. This paper brings these two research strands into conversation with each other by examining how the relationship between EU support and individual-level education is contingent on subnational economic conditions. Using harmonised Eurobarometer data from almost 750,000 respondents spanning 2004–2019, combined with subnational economic data from 201 European regions, we find no evidence that subnational economic conditions influence the relationship between EU support and respondents' education level. At the same time, when cross-sectionally comparing long-term differences between regions, we find that EU support is positively related to regional GDP per capita (though unrelated to regional unemployment), among both the higher and lower educated, and especially in the post-Great Recession period. Longitudinally, EU support is positively related to declining regional unemployment, both among the higher and lower educated, but not to increasing regional GDP per capita. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between citizen satisfaction with the functioning of democracy and ideological congruence. We focus on how this relationship may vary by government type, paying attention to the conditioning effects of coalition governments' ideological make-up and individual-level education. Our analyses rely on harmonized survey data covering one million respondents in 28 countries over a 40-year period. We find limited evidence that the relationship between citizen satisfaction and ideological congruence is conditional on national government type. All coalitions are not, however, created equal. Comparing single-party governments to multi-party governments with different ideological compositions, we find striking differences, but only for the higher educated. While the negative relationship between citizen satisfaction and ideological incongruence is similar for lower-educated citizens in single-party and multi-party coalition settings (irrespective of cabinet composition), for the higher educated, the relationship weakens as a function of the ideological diversity of the coalition cabinet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research mainly analyzes mass attitudes towards the European Union (EU) from the national and individual‐level perspective. This paper adds to this literature by focusing on the relationship between EU support and subnational economic conditions, using harmonized survey data covering 40 years and 1.1 million respondents in 197 European regions. We first describe Europe's changing subnational conditions in terms of catch‐up, wealthy, declining and glass‐ceiling regions. The paper then develops and tests a set of hypotheses regarding the temporally dynamic relationship between EU attitudes and regions' long‐ and short‐term economic conditions. Our analyses reveal important longitudinal variations in this relationship with low levels of geographic differentiation in public opinion giving way to clear spatial differences in recent years. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the Great Recession and Brexit have generated a new geography of both Euroscepticism in Europe's declining regions and EU support in its wealthy and catch‐up regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of descriptive representation have paid growing attention to the issue of class. This article contributes to this line of research by examining the educational (mis)match of elected officials and the citizens they serve. Using data from an original paired elite-mass survey experiment, it investigates whether judgements of democratic quality are affected by education-based descriptive representation. The study reveals limited evidence in support of the idea that citizens and politicians value education-based descriptive representation in sociotropic terms. Instead, it provides strong evidence of affinity effects where democratic judgments are influenced by whether descriptive representation, or the lack thereof, favours citizens and politicians based on their own educational background. An important exception though are citizens without higher education, whose assessments of democratic quality are unaffected by education-based descriptive representation. The article ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings for existing and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satisfaction with democracy (SWD) is one of the most commonly studied topics in the fields of political behavior and public opinion. Gauged with a survey question that asks respondents whether they are satisfied with the way democracy works, SWD has featured as an independent or dependent variable in more than 400 publications. In this Synthesis, we review the evolution and findings of this nearly 50-year-old body of literature, identifying gaps and disagreements. We pay particular attention to issues of measurement and conceptualization, research methodology, and real-world importance. We conclude by highlighting critical areas of future research, including continued investigation into the measurement of SWD and what the question captures, more qualitative and (quasi-)experimental work, more focus on emotions and extreme (dis)satisfaction, and greater geographic coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the individual-level characteristics and political and economic conditions associated with political discussion. To build our model of discursive engagement, we draw on existing research on political participation as well as our own theoretical reasoning. Our data cover two million individuals in twenty-eight European countries over forty-five years, and we employ a little-used approach to multilevel analysis that distinguishes variations in engagement attributable to cross-country differences from those stemming from within-country changes. Our primary findings reveal that, within countries, citizens are more likely to talk about politics at election time, when there are more electorally competitive political parties, during periods of recession, when unionization levels are higher, and when racial and ethnic diversity is greater. Across countries, political discussion is more likely where elections are ongoing and in countries with lower levels of income inequality and corruption. We also find that men and the higher-educated are more likely to discuss politics, as are those who are middle aged or employed. Our approach is wide-ranging, but it is also deliberately correlational. Future observational and experimental studies might expand on and identify the causal underpinnings of the associations we establish here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments around the world are increasingly recognizing the power of problem-oriented governance as a way to address complex public problems. As an approach to policy design and implementation, problem-oriented governance radically emphasizes the need for organizations to continuously learn and adapt. Scholars of public management, public administration, policy studies, international development, and political science have made important contributions to this problem-orientation turn; however, little systematic attention has been paid to the question of the state capabilities that underpin problem-oriented governance. In this article, we address this gap in the literature. We argue that three core capabilities are structurally conducive to problemoriented governance: a reflective-improvement capability, a collaborative capability, and a dataanalytic capability. The article presents a conceptual framework for understanding each of these capabilities, including their chief constituent elements. It ends with a discussion of how the framework can advance empirical research as well as public-sector reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances the argument that quality of democracy depends not only on the performance of democratic institutions but also on the dispositions of citizens. We make three contributions to the study of democratic quality. First, we develop a fine-grained, structured conceptualization of the three core dispositions (democratic commitments, political capacities, and political participation) that make up the citizen component of democratic quality. Second, we provide a more precise account of the notion of inter-component congruence or "fit" between the institutional and citizen components of democratic quality, distinguishing between static and dynamic forms of congruence. Third, drawing on crossnational data, we show the importance of taking levels of inter-dispositional consistency into account when measuring democratic quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideological congruence is an important and popular measure of the quality of political representation. The closer the match between the preferences of the public and those of elected elites, the better representative democracy is thought to function. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to the effects of ideological congruence on political judgment. We address this gap by examining whether citizens use egocentric or sociotropic judgments of congruence to evaluate democratic performance. Using a variety of congruence measures, we find that citizens are unmoved by sociotropic congruence; however, our analyses provide clear evidence that egocentric congruence boosts citizen satisfaction, especially among political sophisticates. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of ideological congruence and political representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]