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Freie und faire Wahlen bilden das Herzstück der repräsentativen Demokratie. In den letzten Jahren geraten Wahlen jedoch in vielen entwickelten Demokratien zunehmend unter Beschuss von populistischen Akteur:innen, welche mittels ihrer Rhetorik die Qualität und Integrität des elektoralen Prozesses in Frage stellen. Während sich die wissenschaftliche Debatte bisher weitgehend auf Expert:innenbefragungen zur Messung und Dokumentation der objektiven Integrität verschiedener Wahlen konzentriert hat, so ist über die individuellen Wahrnehmungen elektoraler Integrität seitens der Bevölkerung und insbesondere deren Implikationen für das politische Verhalten der Bürger:innen nur vergleichsweise wenig bekannt. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht die vorliegende Studie, welchen Einfluss Wahrnehmungen elektoraler Integrität auf das politische Verhalten der Bürger:innen in Deutschland ausüben. Hierbei fokussiert die Studie auf insgesamt drei verschiedene Formen politischen Verhaltens: die Wahlbeteiligung, die Wahlentscheidung sowie die nichtelektorale (institutionalisierte und nichtinstitutionalisierte) politische Partizipation im Offline- und Online-Bereich. Die präregistrierte empirische Analyse basierend auf der Vorwahlbefragung der German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) 2021 zeigt, dass elektorale Integritätswahrnehmungen bedeutende Effekte auf die Wahlbeteiligung sowie die Wahlentscheidung haben, während ihr Einfluss auf die nichtelektorale politische Partizipation von der spezifischen Art und dem Bereich der politischen Beteiligung abhängt. Diese Ergebnisse liefern innovative Einsichten bezüglich der verhaltensrelevanten Implikationen elektoraler Integritätswahrnehmungen und erweitern die Befunde bisheriger Forschung um (1) ein breiteres politisches Partizipationsrepertoire sowie (2) den deutschen Kontext. Hinsichtlich der generellen Funktionsfähigkeit moderner Demokratien deutet die in dieser Studie präsentierte empirische Evidenz darauf hin, dass der Zusammenhang zwischen elektoralen Integritätswahrnehmungen und politischem Verhalten als "dreifaches Handicap" oder "doppeltes Korrektiv" für die repräsentative Demokratie angesehen werden kann. Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of representative democracy. In recent years, however, elections in many advanced democracies have increasingly come under attack by populist actors and rhetoric questioning the integrity of the electoral process. While scholarly attention has so far largely focused on expert surveys measuring and documenting the objective integrity of different elections, a thorough understanding of citizens' electoral-integrity beliefs and their implications for political behavior is still lacking. Against this background, the present study investigates the impact of electoral-integrity beliefs on citizens' political behavior in Germany. Specifically, the study aims to assess the influence of electoral-integrity perceptions on turnout, vote choice, and nonelectoral (institutionalized and noninstitutionalized) political participation in the offline and online spheres. The study's preregistered empirical analysis based on the preelection survey of the 2021 German Longitudinal Election Study shows that electoral-integrity beliefs entail clear implications for citizens' turnout and vote choice, while their influence on nonelectoral behavior is contingent upon the specific type and sphere of political participation. These findings provide novel insights on the behavioral implications of electoral-integrity beliefs and extend the (scarce) findings of previous research to (1) a broader political action repertoire as well as (2) the German context. The empirical evidence generated comes with far-reaching implications for the general viability of modern democracies, suggesting that the nexus between electoral-integrity beliefs and political behavior can be a "triple penalty" or a "double corrective" for representative democracy.

Previous research underlines that a political system's adherence to principles of distributive and procedural justice stimulates citizens' political trust. Yet, most of what is known about the relationship between justice and political trust is derived from macro-level indicators of distributive and procedural justice, merely presuming that citizens connect a political system's adherence to justice principles to their trust in political authorities and institutions. Accordingly, we still lack a clear understanding of whether and how individual perceptions and evaluations of distributive and procedural justice influence citizens' political trust and how their impact might be conditioned by a political system's overall adherence to principles of justice. In addition, previous research has implicitly assumed that the link between justice principles and political trust operates identically for all major political authorities and institutions, disregarding the possibility that citizens evaluate representative and regulative authorities and institutions on the basis of different justice criteria. Against this background, the aims of the present study are (1) to investigate the impact of individual evaluations of distributive and procedural justice on citizens' political trust, (2) to analyze to what extent the effects of justice evaluations on political trust depend on political systems' overall adherence to principles of distributive and procedural justice, and (3) to assess whether and in which ways the influence of justice evaluations differs for trust in representative and regulative authorities and institutions. Our empirical analysis covering more than 30,000 respondents from 27 European countries based on data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project demonstrates that (1) more positive evaluations of distributive and procedural justice foster citizens' political trust, that (2) the impact of justice evaluations on political trust is amplified in political systems in which the overall adherence to justice principles is compromised, and that (3) different facets of distributive and procedural justice evaluations exert varying effects on citizens' trust in representative as compared to regulative authorities and institutions. These findings entail important implications with regard to the relation between justice and political trust and the general viability of modern democratic systems.

Jugendliche und junge Erwachsene in Deutschland werden häufig als Hauptantriebskraft sinkenden politischen Engagements und zunehmender politischer Entfremdung identifiziert. Allzu oft wird jedoch außer Acht gelassen, dass die Niveaus und Trends der politischen Partizipation junger Menschen erst durch ihren Bezug zu gesamtgesellschaftlichen Entwicklungen sowie einen Vergleich mit anderen Altersgruppen innerhalb der Bevölkerung Aussagekraft und Bedeutung erhalten. Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Partizipationsniveaus und -trends junger Menschen im Zeitraum von 2002-2014 und zeigt, dass eine Charakterisierung Jugendlicher und junger Erwachsener als (zunehmend) teilnahmslos und politikverdrossen im gesamtgesellschaftlichen Kontext nur wenig zutreffend erscheint.

Research concerned with a decline of associational involvement has examined whether the use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, may reinvigorate or crowd out involvement in civil society. Yet, previous studies have not systematically investigated possible effects of Facebook use on associational membership. We posit that the effects of Facebook use are twofold: Facebook stimulates associational membership directly through its inherent networking features and indirectly by compensating for the lack of traditional mobilizing factors, such as social trust and internal efficacy. Relying on a probabilistic sample of German participants aged 18-49, our findings show that Facebook users are more likely to be members of voluntary associations and that Facebook use increases the likelihood of associational membership even for individuals with low levels of social trust and internal efficacy. Instead of crowding out offline associational involvement, Facebook use stimulates membership in voluntary associations, thus contributing to the vitality of civil society.