Abstract Many consider the rise of populism to be a major threat to liberal democracy today. At the same time, voters have given considerable support to such parties and politicians, with their average vote-share quadrupling in the last thirty years. Thus, while research realizes the potential hostility populism poses to the polity at large, it is unclear what connotations of the ideology exist to voters. Do voters recognize they are voting for a politician considered to be averse to democracy? Do they simply not care? I field a randomized survey experiment of 2099 respondents in the United Kingdom to measure (1) the effect labeling a politician ‘populist’ may have on their level of support, and (2) voters’ perception of the link between populism and democracy. Results suggest voters’ perception of ‘populist’ labels are largely dependent on the candidate’s left-right ideology, as well as the level of populist ideology of the voter.
Abstract Over the last years, there have been frequent claims that democracy may be endangered by polarization, which has the potential to push voters and elites to embrace undemocratic practices and hence pave the way for democratic backsliding. But what is more decisive to generate tolerance to such practices: ideological or affective proximity? This article examines the effect of ideological vis-à-vis affective polarization on support for undemocratic practices. By using a conjoint experiment fielded in Catalonia in a sample of citizens and politicians, we find that both voters and elites overall reject politicians with undemocratic attitudes in a sizable and consistent way. Among citizens, while ideological proximity does not mitigate punishment of undemocratic attitudes, affective polarization does: individuals with a more intense affection toward their candidate’s party are less prone to punishing him/her for eroding the losers’ consent. The article has important implications for our understanding of the relationship between affective and ideological polarization, and support for democratic undoing.
Abstract Citizens increasingly demand involvement in policymaking, driving the rise of participatory processes like deliberative minipublics. This article introduces a novel longitudinal survey measure to determine the extent to which citizens are more considerate of others’ interests as a result of their participation in such forums. The study explores how participants’ considered interests vary across demographics and process-related factors measured throughout five Swiss minipublics (2019–2023) on different topics and validated using word-embedding techniques on their transcripts. While results show that minipublic participants considered interests different from their own, individuals belonging to less advantaged groups did not consistently show greater consideration of others’ interests. Interest inclusiveness was higher among older individuals, low-income earners and participants in minipublics linked to referendums. This article explains how and why participants in minipublics consider interests beyond their own, which is essential for designing more inclusive participatory processes that engage people from diverse backgrounds in increasingly polarized societies.
Abstract This article is a review of the recent literature on generational differences in electoral behaviour. We first discuss several conceptual issues, after which we provide a description of the main findings in three fields: the role of generations in (1) turnout, (2) party choice and (3) the determinants of party choice. In the concluding section we discuss a number of overall patterns that emerge from this very rich literature. We also sketch some pitfalls and avenues for further research.
Abstract European elections consistently show lower turnout compared to national elections. Two types of explanations have been proposed. The first is the “don’t know” explanation: European citizens are not adequately informed about what the EU does, what the role of the European Parliament (EP) is, and what impact their vote can have. The second explanation is that they “don’t care”: voters do not care about European elections because they might think that EU policies do not affect them or that the European Parliament is not an important actor in EU politics. I use a between-subject survey experiment in 16 EU countries, with approximately 30,000 respondents, one month before the 2024 European elections, with a follow-up in the days after the vote, to see whether giving voters more information about what the European Parliament does and presenting respondents with hypothetical increases in the powers of the European Parliament, affects their intention to vote and eventual real-world vote. Results show that information increases likelihood to vote. Importantly, these effects last and increase actual voting propensity a month later. Surprisingly, hypothetical increases in the powers of the EP decrease the likelihood to vote among almost all groups of respondents. Among respondents that are skeptical of the EU or perceive a democratic deficit, this negative effect is more pronounced. Even among pro-EU respondents and among those that prefer to see a stronger role for the Commission, the backlash is strong. When considering increasing the powers of the EP, the European Union has little to gain and much to lose when it comes to civic participation. The EU needs to first improve its legitimacy before considering political reforms.
Growing concerns about affective polarization have led scholars to develop depolarizing interventions (i.e., experimental manipulations designed to reduce partisan animosity) with promising results in the United States. However, these interventions remain untested in Europe's multi-party systems. This study adapts depolarization interventions highlighting commonalities among political parties and voters to the European context. We test these interventions in a 16-country experiment, featuring approximately 27,000 participants, conducted right before the 2024 European Parliament elections. Our results present three key findings. First, our interventions effectively increased perceptions of parties' shared European and democratic ground. Second, their effects are conditional, influencing only non-far-right party supporters with pro-European and pro-democratic views. Third, despite successfully shifting perceptions, the interventions fail to reduce affective polarization. These findings contribute to the growing consensus that depolarization is difficult to achieve and extend it to the European context. In particular, they highlight the limitations of commonality-based interventions in multi-party systems, where heterogeneous partisan alignments make it harder to identify shared ground that resonates across political groups. More broadly, this paper challenges the generalizability of depolarization strategies tested in the United States and urges us to define the scope and conditions for interventions to depolarize effectively across diverse political contexts.
Printed media can shape its audience's political preferences. Research on governments influencing their narrative focuses on censorship of political scandals but largely ignores day-to-day political content. We analyze opinion columns from Mexico, a country with a democratic culture where outright censorship is unfeasible, and yet there is journalistic evidence on the government "sponsoring" the media to communicate messages with a less negative tone. We estimate the negative tone of over 200,000 opinion pieces from Mexico's eight most prominent newspapers using sentiment analysis. We propose a novel metric of media capture that conveys the over-favoring of publicity spending by the government in news outlets. We find that captured media are less negative about the incumbent president and more negative about their main political rival, suggesting media organizations adapt their content to their advertisers' preferences. The results are validated by rare qualitative evidence that uncovers the blacklisting of media deemed too negative of the incumbent.
Which social groups do citizens view as deserving of beneficial policy? Research on welfare deservingness has long emphasized relatively homogeneous deservingness perceptions, raising concerns that groups widely seen as undeserving could be systematically disadvantaged in policymaking. More recent findings point to variation in deservingness perceptions across geography, time, and individuals. Building on these insights and on studies that examine specific groups in isolation, we claim that ideology systematically shapes divides in how social groups are perceived. Because left-wing and right-wing individuals prioritize different considerations-groups' needs on the left, merit, reciprocity, and identity on the right-we expect them to differ in the level of deservingness attributed to most groups. Drawing on survey data collected among 5,541 German and 6,020 French citizens, we provide unique evidence on perceived deservingness for a broad range of politically salient target groups by adopting a cross-group perspective in two different contexts. Crossed random effects models depict the expected ideological divides for most groups. These divides create incentives for political parties to compete over "who gets what" and, thereby, to represent diverse interests including those of groups perceived as less deserving on average.
This article investigates the structural hybridization of technocracy and democracy in European governance. Moving beyond normative and binary accounts that frame the two as mutually exclusive, we conceptualize their relationship as a systemic, relational, internal, and processual dynamic. Building on this framework, we develop a typology of four ideal-type governance configurations - techno-dominant, demo-dominant, high-intensity hybrid, and low-intensity hybrid - which captures the co-evolution and institutional entanglement of democratic and technocratic logics. Empirically, we construct original composite indices of technocracy and democracy using V-Dem data, and apply them to 893 country-year observations across the EU27 and the United Kingdom (1989-2024). The findings reveal significant regional variation and temporally differentiated trajectories of hybrid governance, shaped in part by major crises. Our typology offers a replicable tool for classifying governance regimes and invites further inquiry into how hybrid forms condition democratic legitimacy, institutional resilience, and the evolving architecture of political authority in the twenty-first century.
Despite its place at the core of EU integration, support for the EU's single market is under-investigated by European public opinion scholars. This paper uses novel survey data from eight EU member states to compare how utilitarian concerns, postmaterialist values and national identities shape popular views of the EU's single market. Focusing on the freedom of movement for goods, workers, and services, we find that postmaterialist attitudes more consistently predict attitudes towards the single market than economic positioning. We thus contribute to the literature on attitudes towards European integration by showing that postmaterialist values and national identities matter not only for views of highly politicized issues like migration, but also for "bread-and-butter" policies like single market governance. These results are particularly surprising given that we would expect utilitarian expectations to be particularly prominent for these kinds of economic policies.
Party youth wings (PYWs) are often portrayed as marginal actors within political parties, yet we know little about how they themselves pursue policy-seeking strategies inside their mother parties. This article presents a qualitative case study of PYWs in Germany, examining how German PYWs advance policy-related positions within their parties and how their strategic repertoires are shaped by organisational conditions. It develops a conceptual framework for analysing PYW policy-seeking strategies centred on three party-organisational dimensions: formal organisation, mobilisation potential, and leadership. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with selected PYW leaders across Germany and an analysis of official documents, the study compares different PYWs within a single national party system to explore how formal and informal channels for articulating youth interests are combined. Rather than assessing the effectiveness of these strategies, the study highlights how distinct organisational constellations are associated with different modes of policy-seeking within parties. The findings suggest that mobilisation capacity and leadership-based informal access feature prominently in PYWs' strategic self-understandings, often taking precedence over formal participatory rights. While empirically grounded in the German case, the article contributes to research on intra-party democracy, youth representation, and party change by clarifying how PYWs navigate opportunities and constraints within party structures.
This article develops an innovative quantitative analysis of the drivers of state-NGO relations in the field of human rights, specifically focusing on their political drivers. Drawing on cross-national survey data from 2,000+ reported interactions between NGOs, national and EU governmental actors in 26 EU Member States, we examine how national governments' political orientation, the level of politicisation of human rights issues, and multilevel governance dynamics shape the frequency and nature of state-NGO and EU-NGO interactions. Our multilevel regression models show that NGOs' relations with conservative governments are less collaborative, though not less frequent, than with progressive ones. For highly politicised human rights issues, interactions between governmental actors and NGOs are less frequent and less collaborative. NGOs facing conservative governments report more frequent and more collaborative interactions with EU institutions, consistent with multilevel 'venue-shopping' strategies. These findings highlight the role of political context in shaping European human rights governance.
Presidential impeachment has traditionally been seen as a clear manifestation of accountability. Recently, however, the impeachment of some presidents has sparked public backlash. This article highlights the importance of elite affective and ideological polarization in explaining presidential impeachment. We theorize impeachment as a multi-hurdle process and focus on examining the determinants of overcoming two primary hurdles: a pro-impeachment lower house vote and removal from office. The article employs crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to examine 44 cases of successful and failed impeachment. The results uncover three types of impeachment: polarized, scandalized, and mobilized impeachments. Notably, elite polarization, be it affective or ideological, is the primary trigger of impeachment in several cases and the facilitator of impeachment in the presence of other triggers such as corruption scandals or mass mobilization. While both ideological and affective polarization facilitate a pro-impeachment vote in the lower house, it is affective polarization that drives removal from office primarily in the absence of a legislative shield. We use two illustrative cases to demonstrate polarized impeachment: Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021, and Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The findings withstand a wide range of robustness tests, including sensitivity ranges, consistency thresholds, fit-oriented robustness, and cluster analysis. Given the rise of affective polarization worldwide, presidential impeachment may be increasingly weaponized by polarized elites.
Research consistently shows that migrants are considered less deserving of welfare than citizens, yet existing studies of this "deservingness gap" rarely account for heterogeneity within migrant populations or variation across social protection schemes. This article provides a more granular analysis of welfare deservingness by examining how migration status and scheme type jointly shape public support for migrant welfare access. Drawing on vignette experiments in Germany and the UK, we asked respondents to evaluate the deservingness of citizens and three migrant categories - those with residence permits, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants - across four welfare schemes: unemployment benefits, emergency medical care, regular medical check-ups, and care for life-threatening illnesses. Our findings reveal substantial variation in deservingness judgments. While citizens are consistently rated as more deserving than all migrant groups, the deservingness gap varies substantially: undocumented migrants face the largest penalty, followed by asylum seekers, then migrants with residence permits. Crucially, these gaps are most pronounced for unemployment benefits but narrow considerably for healthcare services, particularly emergency and life-threatening care. We characterize these patterns as "segmented welfare chauvinism," where public support for migrant welfare access is stratified by welfare scheme, contribution history, and legal status. These findings highlight the need for scholarship to move beyond treating "migrants" as a monolithic category and to consider how different dimensions of welfare provision activate distinct deservingness criteria.
Over the past decade, high rental prices have become an increasingly serious problem in major Western European cities. While political science research has started to explore the broader political consequences, the local effects on renters in particular remain understudied. Furthermore, little is known about the influence of additional local characteristics that potentially impact the political consequences of high rental prices. This study addresses these research gaps by examining how local rental prices affect renters' satisfaction with the local public administration, using large-N geocoded survey data collected in forty neighborhoods across ten major German cities. Multilevel regression results reveal a negative relationship between high rental prices and satisfaction with the local public administration that is not offset by greater rental housing availability or the provision of public services. In practical terms, these findings highlight the far-reaching consequences of high rental prices for the political satisfaction of renters, underlining the need for policies that ensure affordable urban housing.
The democratization of party leaders and candidates has garnered significant attention in recent decades across various countries. However, the comparative literature has devoted less attention to other internal party democratic innovations such as party internal referendums. So far, scholarly research has focused on case studies describing the rules and main features of such events, while participation remains largely unexplored. This paper aims to bridge this gap by exploring the relevance of four meso-level features on turnout: competitiveness, saliency, frequency, and length of the voting period. To test the relevance of such factors, the paper builds on an original database of 407 intra-party referendums in the Czech Pirate Party, Five Stars Movement and Podemos conducted from 2013 to 2023. The results point out the significance of more extended voting periods and proposals on public policies as the main drivers of turnout. These results also have significant consequences in the study of participation within (digital) political parties.
Research on unequal representation argues that party representatives' preferences align more closely with wealthier citizens than with the public. Comparative research on the role of economic elites in political representation, however, remains largely unexplored, as most studies rely on income to distinguish segments of the population. To address this gap, we employ an innovative measure - the Earth Mover's Distance - to examine elite bias through a longitudinal, comparative analysis of mass-elite congruence across 16 European countries in 2007, 2016, and 2017. Our findings confirm a systematic bias toward the preferences of economic elites, particularly among party representatives from mainstream, right-leaning, and governing parties. Yet, this tendency is not uniform. Elite bias is most evident on cultural values and European integration, whereas voter bias emerges on other issues. Our results also show that politicians moved further away from the positions of economic elites in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis.
Citizens with high populist attitudes are 'dissatisfied democrats' because they desire more power to the people. PB apparently addresses this desire, since it takes power away from the elite and gives it back to the people. However, are populist participants indeed more willing to accept the outcome of alternative decision-making procedures when they themselves contributed to it? Taking a mixed-methods approach, combining survey data with interviews with participants to three Dutch PBs, this paper assesses how the populist legitimacy framework works out in practice. The quantitative analysis finds no evidence that populist participants are more (or less) willing to accept the outcome of PB. The interview analysis, however, shows that the underlying mechanisms differ between populist and non-populist participants, indicating a 'populist experience'. While both populists and non-populists lauded the overall process, populist participants in particular felt heard by their fellow participants and were happy that they got what they wanted and this increased their overall satisfaction. The non-populist participants were more focused on the organisation, and highlighted that the participants were often not entirely representative of the broader population, but they were satisfied with the process, and this trumped the other considerations.
