Political misinformation represents a challenge to contemporary democracies. It is widely acknowledged that misinformation is not only spread by individual users on social media, but also by politicians employing both digital and legacy media to disseminate biased or misleading content to advance their political agendas. This study explores the mechanisms through which misinformed statements made by politicians influence public opinion and examines the effectiveness of corrections from academic/official sources or fact-checking websites, also focusing on the role of partisanship. We investigate whether agreement with a misinformed statement on key policy issues - minimum wage, COVID-19 vaccination, and working hours - increases when it is attributed to a politician, and whether corrections by academic/official sources or fact-checkers reduce agreement. Through survey experiments conducted in Italy, we find that while misinformation from politicians does not always affect agreement with false statements, corrections generally decrease agreement. However, partisanship plays a crucial role, with individuals more likely to resist correction when misinformation comes from politicians they have more positive feelings toward. These findings shed light on the complex relationship between misinformation, the effectiveness of corrective messages, and political identity in shaping public opinion.

Recent comparative and single-case studies have investigated the link between the electoral performance of populist parties and the political attitudes and behaviors of populist voters. However, they have not addressed what happens to populist voters' satisfaction with democracy and political trust when populist parties gain representation in parliament or join cabinets across countries and over time in Europe. This study argues that there are two possible expectations. According to a 'winner-loser' mechanism, populist voters' political trust and satisfaction might increase, thus bridging the gap with mainstream voters. Conversely, according to a 'spiral of distrust' mechanism, populist parties fuel discontent and populist voters' political trust and satisfaction might decrease. Analyses of nine rounds of the European Social Survey from 22 countries and LISS panel data from the Netherlands find that voters of populist parties have less satisfaction with democracy, and less trust in parliament and politicians than voters of mainstream parties. However, these differences narrow over time when populist parties gain seats in parliament and enter the cabinet. This article shows that voters for populist parties might be 'losers in disguise' and that the performance of the parties they support serves as a corrective mechanism for their political dissatisfaction and distrust.

Motivated by ongoing academic debates about whether education functions as a causal driver or a proxy in shaping sociopolitical outcomes, this study investigates the impact of educational tracking on the development of political interest among youths. Specifically, we examine whether the transition into academic and vocational upper-secondary school tracks affects students' political interest. We applied a difference-in-differences framework to estimate the causal effect of track placement, drawing on individual-level panel data from the German National Educational Panel Study. The longitudinal design allowed us to observe students at multiple time points: before, during, and after their transition into upper-secondary education. We found that students exhibited different levels of political interest before their upper-secondary tracks, and the academic track had no substantive nor significant causal effect on the development of political interest. We conclude that educational tracking at the upper-secondary level did not actively contribute to the differentiated development of individual political interest and had negligible impact on altering preexisting disparities; its role in shaping civic dispositions might be more limited than often assumed. We call for more research in different contexts and at earlier stages of political socialization.

This article examines how individual changes in the frequency of political information consumption and discussion across different communication environments influenced affective polarization (AP) during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Using a three-wave panel survey of Italian citizens and fixed-effects models, we find that increased exposure to political information through legacy media and face-to-face discussions heightened AP, whereas similar engagement on social media had no such effect. Additionally, we explore the moderating role of economic uncertainty in this relationship. While financial insecurity was directly linked to lower AP, it intensified polarization when combined with greater political information from legacy media, face-to-face discussions, and, to a lesser extent, social media. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of AP and its connections to media consumption and communication dynamics.

Given the academic and media salience of democracy and its measurement, in this contribution we take a closer look at the various existing datasets. For this purpose, in the first two sections we look at democratic conceptualization and measurement, and then focus on the most used datasets on democracy and assess them against the conceptual criteria illustrated in the first section. The third section focuses on the notion of quality of democracy and how it has advanced the understanding of contemporary democracies. The subsequent section illustrates changes in democratic scoring in European countries over the past 15 years. Our results show that democracy has not become more robust in European countries: on the contrary, several countries witnessed significant democratic deterioration. Furthermore, we show that – with the exception of Polity – the indexes analysed are highly correlated and therefore could be equally useful for an ongoing analysis of European democracies.

This study provides a first empirical test of Margaret Canovan's influential argument on the relationship between democracy and populism, which posits that populism emerges as a consequence of the unresolved conflict between the pragmatic and redemptive faces of democracy. Despite its impact on scholars of populism, the implications of her framework remain untested. Using data from the EVS/WVS Integrated Values Surveys, we test Canovan's claims about the effect of 'pragmatic politics' on support for populist parties, operationalized as consensual democracies, economic and political globalization, and checks on government. Our analyses predominantly reveal no significant effects, and where significant results are observed, they indicate directions contrary to Canovan's claims, thus providing no empirical support for her claims. These results challenge long-standing assumptions about the relationship between populism and democracy, urging scholars to reevaluate existing assumptions and explore this intricate connection further. We conclude by suggesting some directions for future research to deepen our understanding of populism.

This article studies how trust in institutions is shaped among immigrants, considering the level of democracy in the countries of both origin and destination. Democracy is relevant to institutional trust as this system provides citizens with better performance, procedures and accountability. Immigrants use a 'dual frame of reference' when asked the extent to which they trust public institutions. They use their experiences in their countries of both origin and destination. Therefore, the difference between the levels of democracy in these two contexts may affect their trust in the institutions of the destination country. This article also considers the role of the length of time immigrants have lived in the host country and the age at which they migrated. Longer stays may make immigrants more similar to native citizens in their scepticism about institutions, while early-age migration may limit experience in the country of origin. To test these arguments the study applies a 'double comparative design' to data from the European Social Survey and the V-Dem project, and finds that trust in public institutions increases as immigrants move from less to more democratic countries, depending on their length of stay and age at migration.

Despite the introduction of laws granting family rights for lesbians and gays (LG) in many countries, negative attitudes towards homosexuality persist among various segments of the population, even in countries that have fully legitimized same-sex relationships. This mismatch raises questions about the processes through which societies achieve positive attitudes towards gays and lesbians. This article applies diffusion theory to nearly 20 years of European Social Survey data for 27 countries to provide an in-depth examination of the evolution of attitudes towards gays and lesbians. Using data on same-sex legislation and cluster analysis, we construct a classification of countries distinguishing among those that are more versus less ahead in the process of granting family rights for LG couples, which is then applied to societal growth curve models to account for historical changes in attitudes among different social groups. Our results show a stronger increase in positive attitudes towards homosexuality among higher educated, secular, and non-conservative individuals in countries with greater same-sex rights. These findings suggest that laws granting family rights to LG people represent a necessary but not sufficient condition for the diffusion of positive attitudes towards homosexuality, pointing to a considerable lag between the macro and the micro-level.

This article explores changes in the relationship between attitudinal and participatory dimensions of politics, and age in Southern European countries. We look at how attitudes towards the political system and institutions combine with engagement in politics to define the ways in which citizens relate to the political sphere and the impact of the economic crisis on this relationship, in particular among the young. Using all available rounds of the European Social Survey for Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain between 2002 and 2019, this article develops a typology of citizens and analyses heterogeneities based on age, time and countries to find whether the relationship between citizens and politics has changed over time among the four states, in particular among young citizens.

The article examines the link between time effects and dealignment in Southern European countries, which allows us to assess the relative importance of short- and long-term factors on the political instability of the region during the Eurocrisis. First, we analyse life cycle, cohort and period effects on partisan identities across countries. Second, we investigate to what extent time-related factors have been responsible for the erosion of the vote in mainstream parties, especially during the crisis period, thus isolating the impact of time on general patterns of party system change. Our results show that electoral and partisan dealignment is fostered in particular by period effects, whereas age and cohort differences play a more limited role. In addition, there are also important differences across countries in terms of both evolution and intensity of time effects.

Populist parties are often argued to be very skilled in using digital media to attract supporters and strengthen linkages with their followers. However, only rarely has research shown this linkage empirically. This study explores whether arguments about the relation between digital platforms and populist voting can be substantiated using comparative survey data in France, Germany and Italy. Digital media include a variety of online platforms that can affect populist vote in different ways. This article addresses the relation between the political use of digital platforms and the populist vote. First, it looks at how the use of Social Networking Sites (SNS) and Mobile Instant Messaging Services (MIMS) is related to voting for populist parties. Second, it assesses whether the role of digital platforms is different for supporting digital 'immigrant' and digital 'native' populist parties. Third, it explores country differences in the relation between SNS and MIMS' use and the populist vote. Using original online surveys, the article shows that political activities on SNS and MIMS platforms (sending messages or posting, discussing or convincing others to vote for a candidate) increase the probability of voting for populist parties. However, it also finds that the political use of digital media is associated with the populist vote under certain (and limited) circumstances, that is only for a subset of populist parties. Finally, it identifies important differences in how SNS and MIMS are linked to the populist vote in countries presenting diverse institutional features, web regulations and constellations of media systems.

By considering the Facebook activity of 52 party leaders during national election campaigns held in 18 Western democracies that went to the polls between 2013 and 2017, we study users’ engagement with popularization and with populist leaders. Applying negative binomial hierarchical models on original data of party leaders’ Facebook pages, we find that elements of popularization in leaders’ posts are associated with an increase in users’ acknowledgement (number of likes), decreases in redistribution (number of shares), while they do not affect discursive interactions (number of comments). Our research also shows that, irrespective of their content, messages published by populist leaders are more capable of increasing both acknowledgement and redistribution, while they do not generate more comments than those published by non-populists. Finally, we find that when populist leaders adopt popularization as a communicative style, they do not achieve any extra gain vis-a-vis non-populist actors.

By relying on two items included in the 8th round of the European Social Survey (2016–2017), this article compares general attitudes towards gays and lesbians and attitudes towards the specific issue of adoption by same-sex couples in 22 countries. Ordered logit multilevel models reveal that age, education and religiosity have a weaker association with attitudes towards adoption than with attitudes towards homosexuality in general. In contrast, at the contextual-level, the presence of laws and policies ensuring rights for the LGBTI population is positively associated with both attitudes to a similar extent. However, models with random slopes and cross-level interactions reveal important differences in the way critical individual-level characteristics operate in different contexts. In particular, across countries, youth, higher educated and secular respondents display more positive attitudes towards homosexuality regardless of whether their country recognizes legal rights to LGBTI people. Instead, these individual characteristics are associated with positive attitudes towards adoption by same-sex couples only in countries that are more progressive in terms of LGBTI rights. These results point to the existence of “mixed opinions” in the way people in Europe think about rights for gays and lesbians and indicate that large attitudinal gaps persist even in the most progressive countries.

In analysing attitudes and perceptions of people and political party proposals, and how we can lay the bases for searching the explanations of characteristics and level of implementation of our two values, first, we recall one of the key findings discussed in this chapter: the changes, the levels, the characteristics of the demand and elite supply of the two values are highly context- and time-dependent. Citizens’ demands and party supply are dependent on the historical trajectory and the economic situation. This partial finding shows that in the middle and long run there is a steady consistency between people’s attitudes and leader actions, on the one hand, and social, economic, cultural reality, on the other. Consequently, the requests for equality and freedom are consistent with the existing socio-economic-cultural reality. A second remark is a difference in terms of volatility/resilience between attitudes and realities. The demand and party supply of equality and freedom can be more or less volatile as reactions to the changes and uncertainties brought about by the economic situation, or other factors, such as technological changes, industrial organization developments, working conditions changes, economic mobility and the whole existing structure of external opportunities. Finally, up to now, the empirical evidence suggests that the demand for implementation of the two values seems to follow different logic and different paths. What this discussion and the related findings are pointing to is also the responsiveness seen from a more realistic perspective.

The winner-loser electoral status may affect citizens' perceptions of the national economy. In the context of Europe, this issue has aroused little interest as multi-party competition makes it difficult to study. We look at the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum, a top-down national referendum, which approximates second-order elections and divides voters in two groups, allowing the study of the effects of elections on opinions. Using a pre-post referendum panel survey, results show that losers-relying on motivated reasoning-radically change their retrospective and prospective economic evaluations after the referendum, and that this effect is conditional on party identification. The article provides new evidence on the role of partisan loyalties in the adjustment of economic perceptions.

This book explores differences in attitudes towards democracy and political institutions across 31 European countries. It develops a unique framework assessing the role of the institutional format and the quality of the political process to explain trends in public opinion.

Several studies investigate the meanings of democracy among the adult population. In contrast, less is known about young citizens’ ideas of democracy, and which individual and contextual characteristics are associated with them. This article contributes to the literature by uncovering the meanings of democracy and their correlates among adolescents in 38 countries. Using the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2009, the article shows that meanings of democracy vary among adolescents. These meanings are the results of how adolescents find various aspects of democracy, as the rule of law, freedoms, rights, pluralism, or equality, constitutive of it. Then, the article assesses whether socialization agents and personal characteristics account for the different meanings of democracy to adolescents. Finally, the analysis addresses the role that larger contexts—democratization and human development—have in the formation of concepts of democracy among adolescents.