ABSTRACT Recent evidence shows that compassion prompts personal action in response to societal crises. We argue that compassion—the awareness of suffering and the desire to alleviate it—is also associated with assigning greater responsibility to multiple societal actors, thus possibly facilitating more wide‐ranging crisis responses. As citizens in democracies elect politicians to address the issues they care most about, the recognition of suffering and the desire to alleviate it should prompt citizens to also demand institutional responses (i.e., from politicians, authorities, and organizations). Analyses of nationally representative panel data from Sweden demonstrate that compassion is associated with personal actions and the assignment of responsibility to other societal actors. While an experiment in the US provides no causal evidence that inducing compassion shifts these outcomes, it corroborates our correlational findings: people reporting more compassion also report greater personal action, demands for institutional responsibility, and monitoring of various actors' crisis responses. Together, while further evidence on the causal effects of compassion is needed, our results suggest that compassion's effects may go beyond personal action, facilitating the multi‐layered responses that complex societal crises require.
ABSTRACT Governments increasingly coordinate executive communication to manage volatile media environments. In this article, I conceptualize government communication as encompassing greater control over messaging, timing, and media access; greater centralization at the PMO/ministry level; and greater coordination of communication with the public. Using a longitudinal study of Denmark (2010–2024)—a least‐likely case given formal neutrality norms—I document co‐variation between increased control, centralization, and coordination of communication and increased professionalization of staff. The study also indicates growing partisan alignment among staff, measured using a crude indicator derived from career trajectories. While stronger control, centralization, and coordination can improve agenda control, they also coincide with tighter gatekeeping and reduced transparency, echoing Nordic findings and recent Danish diagnoses of accelerated decision‐making and politicization pressures. My contribution is to (1) update Nordic evidence on executive communication centralization, (2) provide a structured mapping of Danish government policy professionals over time, and (3) propose an operational, auditable indicator of increasingly partisan recruitment based on pre‐ and post‐employment.
ABSTRACT How did the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 shape the salience of immigration in Europe? While previous research has documented transatlantic attitudinal spillovers, we know less about how such developments shape the salience of political issues. This study addresses this gap by leveraging individual‐level data from the ESS and the SOM Institute, using the election as an Unexpected Event during Survey Design. Employing regression discontinuity and embedding regression techniques, we analyze attitudinal change as well as open‐ended survey responses to the “most important issue” question to assess the election's effect on immigration salience. Our findings confirm previous work and show subgroup variations in the attitudinal effects of the election by different party groups, where authoritarian voters exhibit the largest liberalizing shift. Turning to salience, the text‐based embedding analyses point to a significant shift in issue engagement, driven primarily by an increase among authoritarian voters, a pattern also evident, though more weakly, in the hand‐coded data. Taken together, authoritarian voters became simultaneously more liberal in their immigration attitudes and more engaged with the issue. The findings underscore the importance of analytically distinguishing between attitudes and salience, illustrate how measurement choice can shape conclusions about salience, and demonstrate how major global political events can reshape the importance of specific political issues.
ABSTRACT The parliamentary floor represents an important arena for political debate. Recent research shows that politicians use foreign events strategically through parliamentary speeches to achieve electoral success. However, it is not clear how politicians do so to increase attention to their preferred issues. This article argues that by combining key insights from issue competition and legislative debate theory, we can see how issue ownership and the opposition's greater freedom to focus on certain issues interact to shape responses to foreign events. This is demonstrated through a parliamentary speech attention framework tested on Danish and Norwegian responses to the October 7 attacks in Israel. Issue ownership was more strongly associated with attention responses for opposition than government parties, with Denmark driving multiculturalism responses and Norway driving immigration responses. The article shows how foreign events can become assets for issue‐owning opposition parties and thus advances our understanding of issue competition in parliamentary debates.
Can electoral success be an asset for being appointed to more prominent ministerial posts in cabinets? Are ministers punished or rewarded by voters according to the importance of their post? These questions are explored in this article. Portfolio allocation as well as electoral consequences of participating in governments is usually studied at the party level and not for individual politicians. The novel approach in this article is to focus on individual ministers rather than parties. We approach importance of ministerial posts according to membership of certain cabinet committees, which can mark a clear demarcation line of which ministers have more and less influence on cabinet policies within parties in governments. By using a dataset on Danish ministers from 1977 to 2022 we find a complex relationship between personal votes and policy influence in cabinet, providing important nuances to the existing literature on cabinet governance, ministerial selection and cost of ruling.
