Abstract Satisfaction with democracy and confidence in political institutions are often linked to policy or ideological alignment between voters and elected officials. While policy congruence has been widely studied, less attention has been paid to process congruence—the gap between citizens’ preferences for representation and politicians’ perceptions of their duties. This paper uses data from three Portuguese election cycles (2005, 2011, and 2015) to examine how process congruence affects satisfaction with democracy. It also assesses whether political interest and educational attainment moderate this relationship, shaping the extent to which citizens respond to congruence between their own representational preferences and those of political elites. The results indicate that policy congruence is by far the strongest correlate of satisfaction with democracy. By comparison, the independent association of process congruence is small and not statistically robust: once policy and ideological congruence are accounted for, moving across the observed range of process congruence is not reliably related to satisfaction, and the estimates are inconsistent in direction across representative targets (i.e., whether congruence is measured in relation to all MPs, government MPs, or one’s preferred-party MPs). Citizens’ underlying representational preferences are nonetheless related to their satisfaction—those who favour a delegate style tend to be less satisfied than those who favour a trustee style. Contrary to expectations, this relationship is not stronger among the politically interested or the more educated; the limited moderation we detect—by education—runs opposite to expectations. Taken together, these findings caution against treating process congruence as a determinant of democratic satisfaction comparable to policy congruence, while suggesting that how citizens think representation should work is not irrelevant to how they evaluate democracy.
Abstract The European Union (EU) is one of the world’s major donors of democracy assistance, which aims to foster democratisation. Its effects, however, depend on various conditional factors. This study explores the nexus between democracy assistance and administrative state capacity. Since democracy assistance seeks to strengthen —not substitute—the state and its institutions, we argue that administrative capacity is a crucial condition for the effectiveness of democracy assistance. To test our argument, we conduct a time-series cross-sectional analysis covering EU democracy assistance allocation from 2007 to 2021 across 23 countries in the EU’s neighbourhood. Our results indicate that assistance allocated to countries with higher state capacity has a more substantial effect on their levels of democracy than assistance allocated to countries with lower state capacity. With that, we address an important research gap and contribute to policy debates on the allocation of democracy assistance.
Abstract In the context of growing polarization and culture war conflict, politics is often seen as invading cultural spaces such as sports and popular music. An example is the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), where political attitudes toward participant countries are thought to influence outcomes. In this study, we administer an online survey in four European countries to examine voting behavior in the ESC. Unlike existing studies, our individual-level data allow us to distinguish political influences on ESC voting behavior from cultural attitudes and song quality. We show that most voting in the contest is idiosyncratic, not political. Political attitudes, cultural attitudes, and song quality all influence ESC voting behavior, but effects and explained variance are small. Moreover, political attitudes only influence voting for those countries—Ukraine and Israel—whose policies generate strong opinions. The results suggest that, even in polarized contexts, cultural preferences are still primarily about aesthetics rather than politics.
Abstract This article examines whether and how national media in Portugal, Spain, and Ireland converged in their interpretation of European economic issues during the Eurozone crisis. Building on research on the European Public Sphere, it analyses how national media located political authority, responsibility, and problem-solving capacity under conditions of intensified EU involvement in domestic economic governance. Conceptually, the article distinguishes between relational convergence, referring to cross-national similarity in media narratives, and directional convergence, capturing within-country shifts in narrative orientation along the national–EU axis. Empirically, the analysis draws on a comparative framing study of 6,070 economic news articles published in six quality newspapers between 2002 and 2015. Narrative interpretation across five framing dimensions—Problem, Cause, Responsibility, Consequences, and Solution—is operationalised through an original Convergence Index capturing the balance between EU-centred and nationally centred narratives. The findings show no generalised relational convergence following the onset of the crisis. Instead, cross-national dispersion in narrative orientation increases in the post-crisis period. Directional convergence towards EU-centred narratives occurs selectively: Spanish and Irish media display modest centripetal shifts, whereas Portuguese coverage follows a contrasting trajectory of systematic re-nationalisation. Overall, these results qualify crisis-driven expectations of communicative integration. While the Eurozone crisis intensified diagnostic and accountability-oriented framing across national media, it did not generate stable or cumulative convergence in narrative interpretation. Media convergence thus emerges as a differentiated and non-linear process, with important implications for how the communicative foundations of a European Public Sphere should be assessed under conditions of systemic stress.
Abstract Does an increase in the number of shared identity traits between citizens and their public representatives increase the likelihood that they will agree on policy priorities? The identities of citizens and politicians are complex and multi-dimensional, but we know little about how the combination of multiple shared identity traits affects the convergence of attitudes on government policy. In this paper, we analyze two waves of original survey data on local government councillors in conjunction with several surveys of citizens in South Africa. We find that both within and across political parties, greater degrees of trait similarity between citizens and politicians – even beyond the one or two traits considered in most studies of descriptive representation – are associated with modest but consistent increases in alignment on policy priorities, especially when citizens and councillors share traits that reinforce a historically marginalized identity. We also show that trait similarity increases policy priority alignment to a greater degree when politicians have roles that require frequent contact with constituents, suggesting that communication channels may strengthen the substantive impact of descriptive representation.
