Research finds that citizens evaluate the election result of their preferred party more favourably than those of other parties. However, little is known about whether favourable electoral outcome assessments extend to political elites, or about how to reduce such favouritism. We hypothesize that incumbents and candidates for political office evaluate election outcomes even more favourably than citizens, and that such favouritism diminishes if people are asked to reflect on criteria for evaluating electoral success or receive information about the actual election outcome. Using large-scale data from parallel pre-registered surveys including experiments on representative samples of citizens and politicians/candidates running in the Danish 2021 local elections, we uncover substantial favouritism in election outcome evaluation among citizens and to an even greater extent among the elite. Our reflection treatment does not alter favouritism, while providing information to citizens about electoral outcomes reduces favouritism. These findings speak to important debates on polarisation and democratic support.
Coalition politics presents a major challenge for citizens. Not only do they need to know the parties’ policy profiles, but also who the parties are willing to collaborate with. This task is becoming increasingly difficult as new coalition patterns emerge across Western Europe. Coalition politics may therefore be a major source of frustration for citizens, leading to a sense that politics is too complex to understand, that is, a sense of limited internal political efficacy. Surprisingly, we know little about whether this is actually the case. We analyze this question using a four-wave panel survey during and after the Danish 2022 general election, an unusually complex election where several parties defied traditional coalition structures. Despite this complexity, we demonstrate that Danish citizens gained more internal efficacy during this episode because they learned about the relevant facts. Yet, we find no evidence that people who learned similar facts in the post-government formation period felt more efficacious in response. This suggests that knowledge of coalition politics is critical for citizens’ internal efficacy, but only when complex coalition dynamics are on the agenda.
Religious and ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in political office, but its reasons are debated. Using administrative data from Norwegian local elections, we show that candidates with Muslim names receive fewer personal votes, and propose that this is (partly) due to political beliefs about Muslims as politicians.To examine this claim, we identify salient political beliefs and implement a conjoint experiment that estimates anti-Muslim bias with and without information on these beliefs.In a low-information setting, respondents exhibit a substantial anti-Muslim bias, but providing belief-relevant information reduces this anti-Muslim bias by 2–5 percentage points. The largest reduction occurs when respondents learn candidates’ positions on minority-rights issues. This reduction is driven by right-wing voters and is large enough to eliminate the left-right gap in anti-Muslim bias. These findings show a strong political component in the anti-Muslim bias.
Democratic legitimacy is typically thought to depend on whether political decisions reflect public opinion, or majority preferences. Do citizens share this standard? And what if citizens are wrong about public opinion? We study how beliefs about public support for controversial policy proposals are associated with the perceived legitimacy of adopting them, and whether accurate polling information changes these judgments. In a representative survey experiment in Germany, respondents reported their own position on four such proposals, estimated public support, and rated the legitimacy of adopting each one. For a random subset of proposals, respondents received accurate polling information showing that the proposal lacked majority support. We find that perceived public support predicts legitimacy judgments even after accounting for respondents’ own policy preferences. Yet these perceptions are often inaccurate and shaped by respondents’ own views. Corrective polling information modestly lowers perceived legitimacy, especially among those who initially overestimated public support. The findings suggest that misperceptions of public opinion can distort, but accurate information can also partly correct, citizens’ assessments of democratic legitimacy.
Where can we expect support for populist parties and initiatives to be weakest, and why? We argue support will be weakest in places that have experienced strong growth of employment in high-quality jobs, because such growth has positive spillover effects that shape wider perceptions of the economic status quo and the prevailing ideological climate. We test this proposition in relation to Brexit support at the time of the 2016 EU referendum and in the present day, using Census data to proxy the rate at which highly paid jobs replaced low- and mid-paid jobs in English and Welsh Local Authority Districts 1991–2016, and substantiate it at both the area and the individual-level. High-quality employment growth is a more powerful predictor of Brexit support than alternative local economic indicators and individual-level effects are sizeable. All else being equal, analysis of Understanding Society data shows the probability of Brexit support is only 30
