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A strong argument can be made for the prime importance of information in the context of an economic recession. It is in times of crisis that information on the state of the economy is abundant and citizens have incentives to acquire it in order to sanction incumbents for mismanagement of the economy. Simultaneously, however, economic hardship strains people's cognitive resources and motivations to seek relevant information. Using a novel research design, we assess how the recent economic recession has shaped information acquisition. Our results indicate that while personal economic hardship depresses levels of information, the recession overall boosted considerably the public's knowledge of the state of the economy and, to a lesser degree, of parties' policy positions in elections. For both economic and electoral types of information, economically marginal groups caught up to the economically secure in contexts of economic hardship, thereby reducing information inequalities. We discuss the findings' implications for representative democracy.

This paper analyzes individuals’ adoption of populist attitudes in nine European countries in the wake of the Great Recession. We assess the consequences of three different, interrelated aspects of economic hardship that are expected to foster the development of populist attitudes at the individual level: vulnerability, grievances, and perceptions of the national economic situation. Using comparative survey data, we find effects of all three of these individual aspects. Our analysis suggests that the main explanation for populist attitudes is neither the vulnerability nor the economic hardship suffered by the people, but rather the perceptions that citizens have about the economic situation in their country. Using panel data from Spain, we address concerns about the presence of endogeneity in the relationship between economic perceptions and populism and conclude that the effect goes mostly from economic perceptions to populist attitudes, not the other way around.

Altres ajuts: Ramon y Cajal (RYC-2012-09861) Popular accounts of populist movements often point to negative emotions as a key motivating factor underlying their support. However, little systematic research has been devoted to examining differences in how distinct negative emotions affect levels of populism among voters. This paper attempts to fill this gap by focusing on the influence of the two emotions most frequently connected to populism in political commentary: fear and anger. Informed by appraisal theories of emotions, we hypothesize that populist attitudes are driven by feelings of anger, rather than fear. Using a three-wave online panel survey of Spanish citizens between 2014 and 2016, we find that anger expressed over the economic crisis is consistently associated with variations in support for populism both between individuals and over time, whereas no significant effects emerge for expressions of fear. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the nature of populist support.

This article analyses the relationship between populist attitudes and political participation. We argue that populist attitudes can be a motivation for participation through their identity, emotional, and moral components, and that they have the potential to narrow socioeconomic gaps in participation. Using survey data from nine European countries, our results show that populist attitudes are positively related to expressive non-institutionalized modes of participation (petition signing, online participation and, in some contexts, demonstrating), but not to turnout. In addition, populist attitudes are found to reduce education-based gaps and even reverse income-based inequalities in political participation. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Altres ajuts: Programa RecerCaixa (la Caixa i ACUP) Social movements often face tactic diversification. In otherwise nonviolent movements, some groups or radical flanks may resort to violent actions such as street rioting. This article analyzes the impact that these violent episodes can have on popular support for the movement as a whole. To estimate the causal effect of violence, it exploits an unexpected riot outbreak that occurred during the fieldwork of a face-to-face survey in Barcelona in May 2016, led by a squat group linked to the anti-austerity movement known as the 15-M or indignados that emerged during the financial crisis. By comparing respondents interviewed before and after the riots, it finds that the street violence episode reduced support for the 15-M movement by 12 percentage points on average. However, the magnitude of the effect is highly conditional on the respondents' predispositions towards the movement. Core supporters, that are expected to share the frame of the movement in justifying violent actions, are the least affected by the violent outbreak. On the other extreme, weak supporters, opposers, and non-aligned citizens reduce their support to a larger extent. Results are robust to different specifications and a wide range of robustness checks. These findings have potentially important implications for movements concerned with broadening their support base.

In this article we analyze the effects of election salience on affective polarization. Campaigns and elections epitomize the moment of maximum political conflict, information spread, mobilization, and activation of political identities and predispositions. We therefore expect that affective polarization will be higher just after an election has taken place. By the same token, as elections lose salience, affective polarization will diminish. We analyze this question using CSES data from 99 post-electoral surveys conducted in 42 countries between 1996 and 2016. Our identification strategy exploits variation in the timing of survey interviews with respect to the election day as an exogenous measure of election salience. The empirical findings indicate that as elections lose salience affective polarization declines. The article further contributes to the debate on the origins of affective polarization by exploring two mechanisms that may account for this relationship: changes in ideological polarization and in the intensity of party identification. Both are relevant mediators, with ideological polarization seemingly playing a more important role.

We examine the visibility of the European Union (EU) in the national public spheres of nine European countries during the period 2008-14, inquiring whether the impact of the recent economic crisis and the austerity policies have advanced the presence of the EU, its member states, and European concerns, or not. Using political claims analysis, we map the visibility of collective actors in the main national newspapers of France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Despite the overall limited presence of the EU and European subjects, we find meaningful differences among countries. First, Germany's leading position conveying visibility to European claims, followed by Greece, Italy, and France. In contrast, negligible levels of visibility of the EU in the United Kingdom and Switzerland along with general low levels in the remaining selected countries, even in those most severely hit by the recent economic crisis and under EU surveillance. Related Articles in this Special Issue Zamponi, Lorenzo, and Lorenzo Bosi. 2016. “Which Crisis? European Crisis and National Contexts in Public Discourse.” Politics & Policy 44 (3): 400–426. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12156/abstract Lahusen, Christian, Maria Kousis, Johannes Kiess, and Maria Paschou. 2016. “Political Claims and Discourse Formations: A Comparative Account on Germany and Greece in the Eurozone Crisis.” Politics & Policy 44 (3): 525–552. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12162/abstract Cinalli, Manlio, and Marco Giugni. 2016. “Collective Responses to the Economic Crisis in the Public Domain: Myth or Reality?” Politics & Policy 44 (3): 427–446. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12159/abstract Related Media de Vreese, Claes. 2014. “Understanding the Role of Mass Media and Interpersonal Discussion in Shaping Today's European Citizenship.” European Public Sphere Conference April 10-11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkCkFVCxIJs&feature=youtu.be City University London. 2016. “Context Matters.” News. Arts & Culture. Series: Research Spotlight. Accessed on March 17, 2016. http://www.city.ac.uk/news/spotlight-on-research/context-matters En este estudio analizamos la prominencia de la Union Europea en la esfera publica nacional de nueve paises europeos durante el periodo 2008-14, para determinar si el impacto de la reciente crisis economica y las politicas de austeridad han servido para aumentar la presencia de la UE, sus estados miembros, y las preocupaciones europeas, o no. Usando un analisis de discurso politico, se mapea la visibilidad de actores colectivos en los principales diarios de Francia, Alemania, Grecia, Italia, Polonia, Espana, Suecia, Suiza y el Reino Unido. A pesar de la limitada presencia de la UE y temas europeos, encontramos diferencias significativas entre los paises. Primero, la posicion de liderazgo de Alemania que otorga visibilidad a los temas europeos, seguida de Grecia, Italia y Francia. En contraste, se observaron bajos niveles de visibilidad de la UE en el Reino Unido y Suiza, asi como niveles generalmente bajos en el resto de los paises seleccionados, incluso si estos se encuentran bajo escrutinio de la UE y fueron severamente afectados por la reciente crisis economica.

The chapter analyses the consequences of the economic recession in Spain for the development of populist attitudes and the appearance of a left-wing populist party, Podemos. In the first section, we contextualise the Spanish case and we show that Podemos’ voters are the ones that hold highest levels of populist attitudes. In the second section, we analyse economic and political correlates of populist attitudes among the citizenry. We show that income, sociotropic evaluations of the national economy, political sophistication, being left-wing oriented, and not being close to the incumbent are positively related to populist attitudes. In the last section, we use populist attitudes to explain vote choice and show that Podemos was the party most affected by these attitudes in the 2015 election.

Corruption cases have limited electoral consequences in many countries. Why do voters often fail to punish corrupt politicians at the polls? Previous research has focused on the role of lack of information, weak institutions and partisanship in explaining this phenomenon. In this paper, we propose three micro-mechanisms that can help understand why voters support corrupt mayors even in contexts with high information and strong institutions: implicit exchange (good performance can make up for corruption), credibility of information (accusations from opposition parties are not credible) and the lack of credible alternatives (the belief that all politicians are corrupt). We test these mechanisms using three survey experiments conducted in Catalonia. Our results suggest that implicit exchange and credibility of information help explain voters’ support for corrupt politicians. Support for this research was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [research grant CSO2010-18534].

Some respondents of online surveys click responses at random. Screeners or instructional manipulation checks (IMC) have become customary for identifying this strong form of satisficing. This research first analyzes the factors that condition IMC failures using an online panel survey carried out in Spain (2011-2015). Our data show that the probability of passing a screener depends mainly on the screener's difficulty, the individuals' intrinsic motivations for answering the survey, and past failures. We then address the substantive consequences of omitting those who fail to pass IMCs. We find that this strategy introduces an additional source of bias in descriptive analyses. The article ends with a discussion of the implications that these findings have for the use of IMCs.