Does extending voting rights to immigrants change election outcomes? We answer this question using two natural experiments in Spain: the 2007 EU enlargement, which granted municipal voting rights to Romanians and Bulgarians, and bilateral agreements in 2011 that extended municipal voting rights to immigrants from six Latin American countries. Using electoral section-level data, we compare neighborhoods that received newly enfranchised immigrant voters to neighborhoods that did not within the same municipality and the same election. Enfranchisement moved no party's votes: the estimates are precise zeros in both experiments, robust to entropy balancing, first differencing, and a shift-share instrument. Equivalence tests bound every estimate below the vote shift required to change a single council seat under Spain's D'Hondt allocation rule. These findings suggest that fears that extending voting rights to immigrants could have significant distributional consequences are unfounded.

What explains the relationship between political preferences and support for European integration? Why did people on the Left oppose, and Right support, European integration in the 1980s, but this pattern reverse in the 2020s? We argue that citizens evaluate European integration in a transactional way in terms of their assessment of EU policy outputs. If the European Union offers citizens policies in line with their political preferences, they support it. If not, they oppose it. We find support for this argument using individual level public opinion data (n > 1,100,000) from all EU member states over almost 50 years (from the mid 1970s to the present) and novel approaches for measuring the left-right policy location of EU legislative outputs.

This article estimates whether the classic second-order national election (SONE) model still holds after 10 rounds of European Parliament elections, and how far the model explains the result in the 2024 elections, in particular. The article also investigates pan-European political effects: whether some political families have done systematically better or worse in European Parliament elections, including in 2024. It finds that the SONE model still holds, on average, across all 10 rounds of elections, including those in central and eastern Europe, but also that green and anti-European/radical right parties generally perform better in European elections than their government/opposition status or their previous national election performance would predict. In addition, the SONE model does not explain the outcomes in 2024 as well as it did for earlier rounds of the elections.

Voting-advice applications (VAAs) are increasingly popular, but their impact on electoral outcomes is contested among political scientists. To bring new and stronger evidence to this debate, we conducted a series of pre-registered studies during the 2024 European Parliament elections in Germany, Italy, and France. In this paper, we report results for the highest-powered VAA encouragement experiment to date (total n = 6,501) and a novel regression discontinuity design around VAA recommendation thresholds (n = 10,535). While we observe null effects of VAA usage on voter turnout, the frequency of vote switching, and political knowledge, we find that our VAAs significantly improved the quality of vote switching: users were more likely to vote for their ideologically most aligned party. Based on these findings and a rich battery of supplementary analyses, we conclude that VAAs are effective precisely for their intended purpose: to help voters make better-informed vote choices.

Contemporary international organizations face pressure to be more effective and accountable. But reforming them is challenging given stringent supermajority voting requirements and increasingly critical publics. Some argue that institutional preferences are endogenous to policy, or policy-elastic. Are there policy-inelastic policy preferences? And are there viable European Union (EU) reform packages? We tackle these questions through a conjoint experiment in 16 EU countries. The evidence shows that majoritarian institutional reforms and stronger legal enforcement powers are supported independently of policy. Finally, results from a Bayesian finite mixture model identify combinations of institutional and policy reforms that could command broad public support. The study is significant for the understanding of institutional preferences, as well as for EU reform processes.

Micro-targeting is entering a new era: interacting a large set of voter characteristics with multiple message sub-components -- "nano-targeting'' -- will become increasingly cheap and accessible. We combine evidence from two survey experiments (N=5,000) and predictive modeling to test the effectiveness of nano-targeted messages on climate policy. We find that, on average, nano-targeting does not perform better than an overall "best message'', but that nano-targeted messages were more persuasive than the best message for individuals who were already supportive of climate action. We also discover backlash effects from "mis-targeting'', and find an important asymmetry: being randomly assigned messages predicted to be far from one's best policy has stronger dissuasive effects than the persuasive effects of being shown one's best message. Together these results suggest that these technologies may not be practical for most actors, but may be effective for entrepreneurs who aim to dissuade, demobilize or polarize.

The 2014-2019 European Parliament (EP) contained an unprecedented number of Eurosceptic Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). These changes reflected a growing politicisation of European integration in which conflicts between those opposing the process and those favouring it became more pronounced. Using a unique time series of surveys of the European parliamentarians, we examine how far the policy preferences of the MEPs responded to this politicisation. MEPs' preferences over general policy questions as well as European Union (EU)-specific issues have traditionally been described by a multi-dimensional space: with a left-right dimension, incorporating both economic and socio-cultural issues, distinct from a pro-/anti-Europe dimension. We find that the political space in the EP evolved in the 2014-2019 parliament, with MEPs' preferences more strongly aligned along a single dimension, which captures economic, socio-cultural, and EU integration issues.

Centralized agenda control is a feature of many parliaments, with important consequences for the conduct and outcomes of legislative politics. Much previous work has thus sought to understand the emergence of centralized agenda-setting rules. We extend this literature by studying the "Balfour reforms", which centralized agenda control in the early twentieth century UK House of Commons. Our aim is to probe a conventional claim in the existing literature: that the opposition supported these reforms. This is a counter-intuitive claim, which rests on relatively little direct evidence. We analyze historical roll-call data from 1902 to assess how far the opposition supported agenda centralization. We complement this analysis by examining attempted amendments and speech contributions to parliamentary debates. Contrary to the standard view, we find that the primary opposition party consistently resisted these reforms. This evidence of controversy rather than consensus revises our understanding of a key milestone in the development of the Westminster parliament, and contributes to the wider literature on the choice of agenda-setting procedures.

Public support for Brexit has declined since the 2016 referendum. We argue that part of this decline is due to cohort replacement where many older voters (who support Brexit) have passed away, while younger voters (who oppose Brexit) have entered the electorate. Using a series of original YouGov surveys from 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022, each representative of the UK electorate, we first demonstrate the large and stable differences in Brexit support between younger and older voters. Next, we employ demographic decomposition calculations to estimate that cohort replacement alone accounts for approximately one third of the decline in aggregate Brexit support in just 6 years (with two thirds of the decline being explained by within-cohort changes). Furthermore, by combining our data on Brexit support with Office for National Statistics cohort projections up to 2030, we derive testable hypotheses about the pressure that cohort replacement will continue to put on Brexit support over the next decade across a wide range of potential scenarios. Altogether, our study demonstrates the powerful role that cohort replacement plays in shaping British (and European) politics in the post-Brexit world.

The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is the start of a new relationship between the UK and the European Union (EU). As the consequences of Brexit unfold, there will be pressure to change the TCA, either in a “softer” or “harder” direction. To determine the potential medium-term direction of the EU–UK relationship, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment with a sample of British voters, where we asked them to choose between different hypothetical package deals. When faced with such choices, British citizens overall mostly support a softer relationship in which the UK applies EU regulatory standards in return for greater access to the single market. However, Leave voters most often support a much harder trade-off of full regulatory sovereignty but continued restrictions on UK exports.

This chapter examines the development and operation of the European Union from a comparative politics perspective. It first considers the evolution of the EU, from the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1951 that established the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) to the admission of Lithuania in 2015 as the nineteenth member of the Eurozone, and the UK’s decision to leave the EU in 2016. The chapter then explores the process of European integration and goes on to explain what it means to think of the EU as a political system. It also describes the two basic dimensions of the EU system: the vertical dimension (the EU as a ‘regulatory state’) and the horizontal dimension (the design and operation of EU decision-making). The chapter concludes by analysing the ‘missing link’ in the EU system— the lack of genuine democratic politics.

According to the Interlaken principles, relations with third countries should not slow down the process of integration; compromise the EU’s decision-making autonomy; or share power with non-members. Access to the benefits of the EU Internal Market is conditional, with partner states expected to assume key elements of the acquis communautaire. In practice, there is not a linear relationship. The EU prefers structured, institutionalised arrangements conforming to existing models and encompassing all aspects of the relationship. Yet the existing models themselves, including those in Michel Barnier’s ‘ladder’ are themselves the product of ad hoc deals and often far from comprehensive.

The Brexit deal, as represented by the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is the start of a new relationship between the UK and the EU. As the economic and political consequences of Brexit play out, there will be pressure to change the TCA, either in a “softer” or “harder” direction in one particular issue area or another. To try to find out where the EU-UK relationship might be heading in the medium-term we conducted a conjoint survey experiment with a random sample of British voters, where we asked them to choose between different hypothetical “package deals”. This forced respondents to have to make trade-offs across key issues. When faced with such choices, British citizens overall prefer a “softer” form of Brexit to the TCA: where the UK applies EU regulatory standards in return for greater access to the EU’s single market. However, a majority of Leave voters prefer a much “harder” trade-off: of full regulatory sovereignty but continued restrictions on UK exports. We also found that Scottish citizens prefer a closer relationship with the EU across a range of issues than do English citizens. Reconciling these differences will continue to be a challenge for British politicians and policy-makers.

External differentiation refers to the various relationships the EU has with neighbouring countries with which it has a formal agreement. There is a general principle that the more access associated countries have to the EU Single Market, the more regulatory alignment they must accept. There is, however, no standard formula for achieving this. The only standardised arrangement is the European Economic Area and even that varies in detail for the individual states. Otherwise the arrangements differ according to concerns about sovereignty, sectoral interests, regulatory styles, power politics and the salience of particular issues and the overall trajectory of associated states towards or away from the EU.

In this article, we revisit the main claims of Part Four of Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology and especially the changing support coalitions for parties of the left. Piketty's core argument in this part of the book is that the left now represents the highly educated and that, as a result, the redistributive preferences of the working class do not find representation in today's party systems. We address these claims building on existing political science research that has investigated the transformation of politics in advanced capitalist societies. We argue, first, that the educational divide cannot be adequately analyzed by looking at a left and a right bloc, but crucially needs to pay attention to the rise of green/left-libertarian and radical right parties. Second, we contend that the new middle classes that support parties of the left are largely in favor of economic redistribution. Analyzing data from the European Social Survey in 11 West European countries from 2002 to 2018, we show that the effect of education on voting left or right is indeed largely driven by green/left-libertarian and radical right parties, while there is little empirical evidence that social democratic parties represent the educational elite. We also find that redistributive preferences remain at the heart of voting behavior and that, especially for educated voters, these preferences determine whether someone votes for a party of the left rather than the right.

AbstractElectoral reform creates new strategic coordination incentives for voters and elites, but endogeneity problems make such effects hard to identify. This article addresses this issue by investigating an extraordinary dataset, from the introduction of proportional representation (PR) in Norway in 1919, which permits the measurement of parties’ vote shares in pre-reform single-member districts and in the same geographic units in the post-reform multi-member districts. The electoral reform had an immediate effect on the fragmentation of the party system, due in part to strategic party entry. The authors find, though, that another main effect of the reform was that many voters switched between existing parties, particularly between the Liberals and Conservatives, as the incentives for these voters to coordinate against Labor were removed by the introduction of PR.

Regional economic integration is both a deregulatory project, involving the removal of barriers to the movement of goods and services, as well as a re-regulatory project, involving the adoption of common economic, social, and environmental standards to enable the market to function. The removal of trade barriers can be achieved by bilateral or multilateral agreements. However, the adoption of common rules requires the delegation of agenda-setting and enforcement to a supranational body to resolve policy coordination problems and enable states to credibly commit to implement market integration. The lesson from the experience of the European Union is that such delegation, if designed carefully, need not threaten national sovereignty, which is clearly a fear in East Asia. A supranational executive can be tightly controlled by the governments if (i) unanimity is required for any decision to delegate in a particular policy area, (ii) the governments are equally represented in the executive body, and (iii) there are high decision-making thresholds and checks and balances for the adoption of policy proposals by the supranational body. Such a design requires a certain degree of preference convergence among the governments to enable the initial delegation decision to take place by unanimous agreement. It also requires the establishment of an equitable system of representation and decision-making, which allows each state a fair chance to influence policy outcomes. Preferences may not yet have converged sufficiently in East Asia, but a system of representation can be designed which would allow states to be represented equitably in a supranational decision-making structure in the region, as the ASEAN+3 states have started to do in the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization framework.

Ireland has experienced many of the ('demand side') economic and cultural factors that have led to the rise of populism in democracies across the world: a major economic downturn, growing income inequality, and mass immigration. Also, at the individual level, the same socio-demographic characteristics seem to predict populist values in Ireland as in many other countries; with lower income and older Irish voters opposed to immigration, for example. Yet, trust in Irish democracy remains high, and Ireland does not have a radical right populist party. The explanation of Irelands apparent immunity to populism, I suggest, can be found in the way the Irish system of 'supplemented democracy' (through STV, referendums, and deliberative mini-publics) has allowed for a highly responsive and representative polity. This raises a challenge for the standard views of populism in political science, as it suggests that more attention needs to be paid to political ('supply-side') factors that explain populism: of how and why democracy fails or succeeds to respond to potential populist challenges.

Abstract Immigration is highly salient for voters in Europe and the USA and has generated considerable academic debate about the causes of preferences over immigration. This debate centers around the relative influences of sociotropic or personal economic considerations, as well as noneconomic threats. We provide a test of the competing egocentric, sociotropic, and noneconomic paradigms using a novel constrained preference experiment in which respondents are asked to trade off preferred reductions in immigration levels with realistic estimates of the personal or societal costs associated with those reductions. This survey experiment, performed on a national sample of British YouGov panelists, allows us to measure the price-elasticity of the publicʼs preferences with regard to levels of European and non-European immigration. Respondents were willing to admit more immigrants when restriction carries economic costs, with egocentric considerations as important as sociotropic ones. People who voted for the UK to Leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum are less price-elastic than those voting Remain, indicating that noneconomic concerns are also important.1

With the battle over Brexit returning to the House of Commons with the Internal Market Bill, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture: what the British public wants in terms of a longer-term relationship with the European Union. To try to find out, Simon Hix (LSE), Clifton van der Linden (McMaster University) and Mark Pickup (Simon Fraser University) conducted a survey experiment with a random sample of British voters, where they asked them to choose between hypothetical “package deals”. This forced voters to have to make trade-offs across key issues. When faced with such choices, British voters overall prefer a “softer” form of Brexit: where the UK applies EU regulatory standards in return for quota-free and tariff-free access to the EU’s single market. However, a majority of Leave voters prefer a much “harder” trade-off: of regulatory sovereignty but restrictions on UK exports. Reconciling this difference will continue to plague British politics.