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Can constitutional court decisions shape public opinion on a governmental policy? Previous studies have focused on the US Supreme Court, which enjoys a high degree of public support as the major resource of power for courts. In this study, we examine the extent to which courts can influence public opinion regarding a government bill at European courts. First, we argue that the public support for courts also allows them to move public opinion on policies into the direction of their decisions. This works in both directions: they can confer legitimacy to a policy that they support, but they can also de-legitimize a policy that they oppose. Second, we argue that this mechanism strongly depends on the amount of support that a court receives. It only has an effect for courts that possess a higher institutional legitimacy and among the group of citizens trusting a court. We test our arguments by combining a most different systems design for France and Germany with a survey priming experiment on a school security bill. France and Germany are selected for a most different systems design as they exhibit different institutional designs as well as different levels of support for the court at the aggregate level. The survey experiment is implemented within large national election surveys, the German Internet Panel and the French National Election Study. Both experiments contain more than 2,600 respondents each. Our survey experiment primes for decision outcomes and different institutions to understand whether there are differences between an institution supporting and opposing a policy and between a court and alternative institutions. Our findings confirm that with higher public support, courts can move the opinion of citizens to both legitimize and de-legitimize a policy. This effect can be found at the aggregate level for a court enjoying higher public support, but also at the individual level for respondents with higher trust in the court. Interestingly, courts can even move the opinion of citizens with strong prior attitudes in the opposite direction, if these citizens highly trust the court. These findings have implications beyond the study itself. First, they confirm that the legitimacy-conferring effect can also be observed for European courts, not only for the US Supreme Court. Second, they show that the relevance of a mechanism identified for a single case, like the US Supreme Court, might only hold for specific conditions. As public support for courts strongly varies across countries in Europe, we also expect the impact of any mechanism relying on public support to strongly vary, as we can observe in our own analysis.

This paper takes the considerable variation in ballot design as a point of departure to ask which ballot features are preferred by voters. Using a discrete choice experiment as part of an online survey of 1200 German participants, we asked respondents to choose among fictious ballots that differed in terms of the information about the electoral system, information about the candidates, and the ballot design. The results show that respondents are opposed to lengthy explanations of the electoral system, but they are also critical when the explanation is too brief. Providing the candidates’ occupations and ages is welcomed, whereas candidate addresses are viewed with more skepticism. Overall, comprehension is the most important criterion for ballot evaluation. Based on the results, we discuss features of good ballots and present an example of a well-designed ballot. © 2020, The Author(s)., Die vorliegende Arbeit nimmt die große empirische Vielfalt in der Gestaltung von Stimmzetteln zum Anlass, um sich mit Frage zu beschäftigen, welche Stimmzettelmerkmale von Wählerinnen und Wählern gewünscht werden. Dazu greift die Studie auf ein Discrete-Choice-Experiment im Rahmen eines Online-Surveys mit rund 1200 deutschen Teilnehmenden zurück. Im Experiment entscheiden sich die Teilnehmenden zwischen fiktiven Stimmzetteln, die sich im Hinblick auf die Informationen zum Wahlsystem, die Informationen zu den Kandidierenden und das Design unterschieden. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich, dass die Teilnehmenden einer zu ausführlichen, aber auch einer zu knappen Erläuterung des Wahlsystems kritisch gegenüberstehen. Weiterhin schätzen die Teilnehmenden die Angabe von Beruf und Alter der Kandidierenden, während die Angabe von Kandidatenadressen skeptischer bewertet wird. Zudem kann festgestellt werden, dass die Verständlichkeit das wichtigste Kriterium für die Bewertung von Stimmzetteln ist. Auf Grundlage der Befunde werden Merkmale geeigneter Stimmzettel herausgearbeitet und ein gelungener Stimmzettel vorgestellt.

The Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) dataset is the only dataset providing information about the positions of parties for comparative researchers across time and countries. This article evaluates its structure and finds a peculiarity: A high number of zeros and their unequal distribution across items, countries and time. They influence the results of any procedure to build a scale, but especially those using factor analyses. The article shows that zeroes have different meanings: Firstly, there are substantial zeroes in line with saliency theory. Secondly, zeroes exist for non-substantial reasons: The length of a manifesto and the percentage of uncoded sentences, both strongly varying across time and country. We quantify the problem and propose a procedure to identify data points containing non-substantial zeroes. For the future comparative use of the dataset we plead for a theoretical selection of items combined with the information about the likelihood that zeroes are substantially meaningful.

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