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Populism is often associated with direct democracy. However, empirical support for this connection remains limited. Analysing a unique dataset on national referendums across 29 countries, this study challenges the presumption that populists are more inclined to advocate for referendums. Surprisingly, populists exhibit this tendency primarily when in opposition. Despite the increasing inclusion of populist parties in coalition governments, their impact on facilitating national-level direct democracy is more complex than anticipated. Utilising V-DEM data over 30 years, we find that populists prima facie enhance the use of direct democracy. However, this effect is contingent on contextual factors, such as party system institutionalisation and the democracy's age, indicating a nuanced relationship between populism and direct democratic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on technocracy has shown that expertise is a crucial factor in driving support for technocrats. However, the literature has not investigated yet what happens when technocrats are opposed to partisan experts. In this article, we want to fill this gap by analysing the support for two potential ministers of health with relevant expertise for their portfolio but with a different relationship to partisan politics. For this purpose, we run a novel survey in 14 European countries with more than 20,000 respondents. Our main results show that non-partisan experts are preferred over partisan experts across Europe, both when citizens have a high sympathy and a low sympathy for the party appointing the minister. However, in the latter case, the effect is more evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have tried to identify citizens' views about which actors should govern and how. These studies have mostly looked at support for citizens or independent experts being given a greater role. Recently, Hibbing, Theiss-Morse, Hibbing and Fortunato have proposed a new battery of 21 survey items capturing the dimensions along which citizens' preferences for who should govern are organized. Testing their survey instrument among US respondents, they identified seven dimensions. In this study, we replicate their approach across nine European democracies, namely, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Ireland and the Netherlands. The replication allows, first, to compare citizens' preferences for political actors between the US and Europe, and within Europe. Second, it provides suggestions for how Hibbing and colleagues' battery might be adapted and re-used in other countries, enabling further cross-national comparative research on citizens' preferences for who should govern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Europeans are favourable towards the idea of being governed by 'independent experts', and despite the burgeoning literature on technocratic ministers, we still miss important information about the profiles of technocrats in government. This article provides new insights into the characteristics of non-partisan, non-elected ministers and the roles they perform once in government based on a Technocratic Ministers' Dataset covering all governments in 31 European countries from 2000 to 2020. First, we show that average share of technocratic (as opposed to partisan) ministers in European cabinets rose from 9.5% to 14.2% over the last two decades. This increase is characteristic of all macro-regions, except Scandinavian countries. Second, technocratic ministers are assigned to a diversity of portfolios and not just finance and economy, which, respectively, account for only 15% of technocratic ministers. Finally, technocratic ministers do not hold office for shorter periods of time than partisan ones, except when they are part of caretaker cabinets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main 'promises' that populist parties seek to deliver is to bring politics closer to the 'people'. While the literature focused mainly on the relationship between voters and those parties, less attention has been given to the role of members' priorities in shaping parties' legislative activity. In this paper, we focus on a paradigmatic technopopulist case, the Italian Five Star Movement (FSM): one of the founding trademarks of the party was the involvement of the members in the party activities via a digital platform. FSM's digital platform included participative digital law-making features, which matched member priorities and élite policymaking. We built an original dataset which comprises the law-making activities of members and parliamentarians from 2013 to 2019. We analysed 2000 law proposals and found that FSM elected representatives' agenda, albeit partly diverging from that of members, still changed in the direction of member priorities through time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As representative democracy is increasingly criticized, a new institution is becoming popular among academics and practitioners: deliberative citizens' assemblies. To evaluate whether these assemblies can deliver their promise of re‐engaging the dissatisfied with representative politics, we explore who supports them and why. We build on a unique survey conducted with representative samples of 15 Western European countries and find, first, that the most supportive are those who are less educated and have a low sense of political competence and an anti‐elite sentiment. Thus, support does come from the dissatisfied. Second, we find that this support is for a part 'outcome contingent', in the sense that it changes with respondents' expectations regarding the policy outcome from deliberative citizens' assemblies. This second finding nuances the first one and suggests that while deliberative citizens' assemblies convey some hope to re‐engage disengaged citizens, this is conditioned on the expectation of a favourable outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have shown a consistent decline in class voting over time, arguing that social class no longer structures political competition. Yet, the loss of the explanatory power of social class should be attributed to the shift of left-wing parties towards less friendly issue positions for their class-based electorate and not entirely to demand-side explanations. This article focuses on the explanatory factors underpinning the decline of class voting, in particular economic and cultural ones. It does so by relying on a longitudinal dataset including survey data from the EES and party manifesto data from the CMP over the last 25 years in 12 European countries. Results show that when class-based parties adopt pro-labour positions, class voting is reinforced. By contrast, when class-bloc parties stand out for their pro-multiculturalism positions, class voting weakens significantly. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1987108. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long debated whether populism harms or improves the quality of democracy. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on the impact of populist parties in government. In particular, it inquires: (1) whether populists in government are more likely than non-populists to negatively affect the quality of democracies; (2) whether the role of populists in government matters; and (3) which type of populism is expected to negatively affect the quality of liberal-democratic regimes. The results find strong evidence that the role of populists in government affects several qualities of democracy. While robust, the findings related to (2) are less clear-cut than those pertaining to (1). Finally, regardless of their role in government, different types of populism have different impacts on the qualities of democracy. The results show that exclusionary populist parties in government tend to have more of a negative impact than other forms of populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]