Class divisions over emerging policy issues are well-documented, yet the mechanisms driving these divisions remain underexplored. This article argues that perceptions of how the working class positions itself on divisive political issues, specifically immigration and the environment, fuel polarisation between opinion-based groups and self-identified social classes. Using a vignette survey experiment in the UK, we leverage the base-rate fallacy to manipulate respondents' perceptions of the working class stance on these issues. Working class respondents feel significantly closer to opinion-based groups when they believe the working class is the majority within those groups, whether pro- or anti-immigration and pro- or anti-environment. Conversely, respondents with liberal orientations who perceive the working class as aligned with opposing camps express greater social distance from the working class, a pattern observed among both middle and working class respondents. Our findings illuminate how social and political polarisation are dynamically intertwined through perceptions of group opinion alignments.
This article investigates how information on the misuse of foreign aid affects support for aid among citizens and politicians. It draws on original survey data and experiments with a representative sample of 2,205 UK citizens and 117 UK parliamentarians. The findings show a significant public backlash against foreign aid when misuse is revealed. This backlash is not confined to the country where the scandal occurred but spills over to other aid recipients, and a strong political response from the donor government does not offset this effect. UK parliamentarians also become less supportive of aid to the country implicated in the scandal, but do not display the broader contagion effects observed among citizens. These findings have important implications for the literature on public support for aid and our understanding of how citizens and elites update their prior beliefs about foreign policy tools.
Health care provision is one of the most central tasks of the welfare state. It is also one of the most politically sensitive and controversial tasks because of the importance voters attribute to high-quality health care. Drawing on extant theories of the welfare state, this article outlines the contours of the politics of health care in Western Europe. The area exhibits some features pertaining to both the demand for and supply of health care, which creates a unique landscape of political conflict. This is visible in Denmark, Germany, and the UK; three cases studied in the article that represent distinct welfare regimes.
In the 2024 Irish elections, the main governing parties emerged more-or-less unscathed, with the largest party, Fianna F & aacute;il, growing its seat share. Fianna F & aacute;il and Fine Gael continued to lead the government, consolidating the core of a new coalition formula. As in 2020-2024, the political landscape would involve a centre-right government facing a predominantly left-of-centre opposition led by Sinn F & eacute;in. The far right did not make significant inroads at the election, even if it did organise and contest the election to an extent not previously seen.
Although political trust is commonly understood as a relation between subject (truster) and object (trustee), research almost exclusively focuses on citizens. The inherent agency of politicians has been overlooked. This article sets three aims: (1) to develop a codebook to analyse trust in texts and speeches by politicians, (2) to describe the use of political trust in parliamentary debates, and (3) to understand how MPs employ political trust in these debates. It studies annual state-of-the-nation debates in four European (high-trust and low-trust; majoritarian and proportional) democracies between 1998 and 2018. Generally, political trust receives little attention in these debates. Over time, politicians' attention for political trust coincides with economic hardship and rising radical-right populism. Moreover, politicians discuss trust predominantly for strategic purposes (discrediting others; praising themselves), rather than as a substantive concern. This may contribute to a politicisation of political distrust that may harm legitimacy in the long run.
For decades, the European Union has derived much of its international influence from its economic size and centrality in global trade. This article addresses the paradox that nowadays the very foundation of the EU's international power - openness to trade - is also a source of weakness, exposing it to coercion, disruption, and unfair competition. If trade becomes a liability rather than a tool of power, what are the implications for the EU's position in global economic governance? Building on the framework of 'power in trade' and 'power through trade', this article introduces the complementary notions of 'weakness in trade' and 'weakness through trade' to capture how interdependence can serve as both leverage and liability. Tracing policy developments across three eras - the Cold War, the Age of Globalisation, and today's Geoeconomic Age-the article shows that some global economic contexts present the EU with harder challenges than others. It argues that recently the EU has made some progress in increasing its resilience and remains important in rule-setting but its capacity in coercive economic statecraft is limited compared to that of the United States or China.
One key driver of political support is congruence - the alignment between citizens' policy preferences and those of their representatives. Previous research has focused on egocentric (congruence with a citizen's own position) or sociotropic congruence (with the electorate overall). This article proposes a third perspective: group-based congruence, where citizens' support depends on how well their social group's preferences are represented. Focussing on occupational classes, this article hypothesises that the greater the distance between the government's position and the preferences of one's class, the lower an individual's support. Using data from the European Social Survey, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, and ParlGov covering 28 countries, it is found that class-based incongruence in four policy domains is associated with lower support. Similar effects are observed for alternative groups, but only insofar as they structure political preferences. Demonstrating that group-based congruence matters, this study adds a novel perspective to research on congruence and political support.
After two crisis decades, the European Union (EU) needs to meet the challenges of climate change, migration, strategic competition, and war. But, given these challenges, what kind of Europe do Europeans want? The article argues that the idea of more or less integration does not adequately capture different polity preferences since more integration can mean different things to different people. In order to capture this polysemy, the article presents a richer conceptualisation of European integration along two dimensions: binding (EU centralisation of competences) and bounding (bordering at the EU level). Combining these two, five types of polity formation preferences are constructed: Fortress, Sovereign, Cosmopolitan, Minimalist, and No-vision EU. Exploiting a new original survey, the analysis confirms that public preferences are well represented by these two dimensions. A majority wants more bounding, but they are divided on binding.
This article reviews the evolution of research in Comparative Political Economy of Inequality (CPEI) over the past 25 years, highlighting key developments in the field. Early research in CPEI emphasised the political and institutional determinants of inequality, particularly the role of power resources, labour market institutions, and welfare state policies. Over time, scholarship has expanded to examine the consequences of inequality, focusing on political participation, preference formation, and biases in policy responsiveness. This article identifies a persistent dynamic of self-reinforcing inequality, where rising socio-economic disparities shape political behaviour, depress voter turnout, and limit redistributive policies. Additionally, it outlines a future research agenda, emphasising the role of political parties in mitigating or exacerbating inequalities and the issue of trade-offs in responsiveness to short- and long-term challenges.
This article investigates how national government-opposition dynamics influence populists' ethical claims in the supranational arena. While research on populism highlights moral integrity rhetoric and examines whether populist parties moderate once in office, less is known about how they adjust ethical claiming supranationally when entering national government. Using written questions in the European Parliament, this study asks: Do legislators from populist parties raise more ethical claims than mainstream ones? Do they moderate when their party enters national government? Do they behave differently when targeting European Union (EU)- versus national-level actors? The findings show that, outside government, populist Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) raise more ethical questions than mainstream MEPs, but once in office they moderate more strongly than mainstream legislators. For opposition parties, populist-mainstream differences are larger for EU-level than for national-level targets, and this EU-level difference narrows when populists enter office. The study contributes to debates on populism in multi-level contexts.
The 2025 election to the Czech Chamber of Deputies marked a continuation of long-term transformations rather than a rupture in the country's political development. The contest reaffirmed the electoral dominance of ANO, led by Andrej Babi & scaron;, against a fragmented bloc of centre-right and liberal parties that governed between 2021 and 2025, while further consolidating the decline of the traditional left. The campaign was strongly shaped by culture wars, particularly around the war in Ukraine, foreign policy orientation (mainly politics towards other Visegrad countries, the EU and US), and identity-based issues, overshadowing programmatic economic debates. The results reflected pronounced regional and socio-demographic divides, with ANO mobilising support in economically weaker regions and among older and less-educated voters. Post-election coalition formation led to the inclusion of a far-right party in government for the first time in Czech history, alongside tensions within the semi-presidential system. While institutional safeguards remain, increasing personalisation and culture war dynamics pose challenges to the resilience of Czech democracy.
How do political parties' climate proposals impact their electoral fortunes? While research has explored public support for climate policies and the electoral consequences of implementing them, evidence remains limited on how parties' climate proposals influence their support. This article conceptualises party positions on climate action along two dimensions: the direction of the proposal (supporting or opposing climate action) and its specificity (emphasising goals or concrete policy means). Drawing on a conjoint experiment in France, it analyses how climate proposals on these dimensions affect voter support for hypothetical candidates. Results show that supporting climate goals is electorally rewarding, while climate denial is strongly penalised across partisan lines. However, backing ambitious, concrete climate policies yields no electoral gains and may even provoke voter pushback, whereas avoiding such measures can be advantageous. Overall, the findings suggest pro-climate parties face limited electoral incentives to advance ambitious, specific climate proposals.
European states have not responded uniformly to the growing Russian threat. While some states addressed it in a hierarchical mode of state capacity-building, others expanded the involvement of society in defence in a networked mode. What explains these varying degrees of societal involvement in European countries' defence policy making since 2014? Drawing on theories of path dependence and domestic approaches to defence policy, this article argues that the more domestic legacies favour inclusive and collaborative defence policy making, the more the respective country will involve the society in a networked mode. A comparative analysis of Sweden's, Germany's, and France's responses to Russia's war against Ukraine reveals a general increase in societal involvement but also cross-country variation consistent with the theoretical expectations of the domestic legacies' hypothesis. The article extends domestic theories of defence policy making to the politically vital but under-researched issue of societal involvement, while pointing to a Zeitenwende in strategic thinking.
Globalisation has contributed to the emergence of a new societal cleavage. While the structural and organisational dimensions of this divide are well documented, its psychological component remains less understood. Drawing on comparative survey data from 30 countries collected through the Public Attitudes towards the Liberal Script (PALS) project, this research note examines whether individuals who perceive themselves as losers of globalisation differ systematically from others in their perceptions of major societal threats. Subjective losers are more likely to identify immigration, elite influence, and state surveillance as threats, while expressing comparatively less concern about climate change, discrimination, and pandemics. These patterns indicate that the globalisation divide is not only rooted in socio-economic structures but also reflected in distinct threat perceptions that may reinforce identity-driven mobilisation. At the same time, several threat perceptions are widely shared across groups, pointing to potential 'bridging issues' that cut across the divide.
