This study examines the presence of opportunistic electoral cycles in public-sector employment in Türkiye. Using a quarterly dataset spanning from 2007q1 to 2024q1, we employ dynamic Generalized Least Squares models utilizing the growth rates of variables across short-term and medium-term pre-election periods. We find a highly significant, yet structurally heterogeneous, surge in public employment prior to elections. While permanent public sector civil servants remain largely unaffected due to rigid bureaucratic constraints, incumbent politicians strategically manipulate flexible peripheral contracts. The electoral expansion is overwhelmingly driven by temporary public workers, exhibiting an extraordinary growth in both time horizons. The consistent magnitude across these periods indicates that opportunistic hiring is a deliberate, ongoing strategy aimed at bypassing administrative delays and enhancing voter reciprocity. Ultimately, these findings demonstrate how core institutional rigidities shift political patronage toward less regulated, temporary employment categories.
Voting is a cornerstone of democratic legitimacy, yet surveys often overestimate electoral participation. One explanation for this discrepancy is social desirability bias (SDB), whereby respondents overreport their intentions to vote to align with democratic norms. We use a list experiment to examine the extent to which citizens misreport their intention to abstain from voting. The study draws on a probability-based sample of Finnish citizens ( N = 655 ) and replicates the analysis in a convenience sample ( N = 1276 ) in the context of the 2024 European Parliament election. In the probability-based sample, 18.8
Populist far-right parties are often associated with economically insecure, lower-educated men from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds. Yet immigrants and their descendants may also express support for such parties despite being frequent targets of exclusionary rhetoric. Focusing on the Netherlands, this article examines how third-generation Turkish-Dutch participants develop favorable narratives toward the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) and its leader, Geert Wilders. Drawing on nine theoretically selected cases from a broader set of 60 narrative interviews conducted between November 2023 and April 2024, the analysis explores how participants justify these evaluations and reconcile them with identities historically targeted by far-right discourse. Their narratives were grounded less in broad ideological identification than in selective, issue-based support. Three domains were particularly salient: economic concerns, LGBTI+ issues, and attitudes toward newly arrived migrants. Across these domains, participants reconciled support and identity through pragmatic prioritization of everyday concerns, selective value convergence, and boundary-making between settled and newly arrived migrants. Rather than indicating a broader electoral realignment, these narratives show how support for far-right actors may remain partial, conditional, and distinct from voting behavior. The article contributes to debates on immigrant political behavior and minority engagement with the radical right by demonstrating how issue-specific reasoning can coexist with salient ethnic and religious identities.
Wealth is distributed more unequally than income globally, and wealth taxation has become a prominent topic in policy debates. While the majority of opinion research has centered on preferences for income taxation, research on public attitudes toward a wealth tax remains scarce. This paper compares how self-interest and ideological orientations are associated with public attitudes toward wealth and labor income taxation, using probability-based data from the Belgian National Election Study 2014 (n = 1901). Our results show large support for more progressive income taxation and a tax shift from labor to capital. Using ordinal logistic regression, we reveal patterns that reflect self-interest mechanisms, including less support for wealth and high income taxes among self-employed and higher social classes. However, the relationship with ideology is much stronger and varies depending on the type of tax. Taxes on wealth and high incomes are supported by egalitarians, opponents of the free market and those who attribute poverty to injustice and exclusion in society. Taxes on labor and low incomes are supported by less egalitarian respondents and those who think poverty cannot be avoided. We conclude that people do distinguish labor income from wealth taxation and that these two types attract different ideological profiles.
