The personalization of politics has become a central concern in political science. This is also true for parliamentary governments, where the Prime Minister has allegedly acquired an increasing relevance. Nonetheless, a key question remains unanswered: How can we estimate the Prime Minister Policy Autonomy (PMPA) in parliamentary governments? Moreover, what are the determinants of this autonomy? This article aims to answer these questions by proposing a novel and easily replicable index of PMPA, based on data from an analysis of Prime Ministers’ and members of Parliament’s parliamentary speeches, and specifically from cosine similarity analysis. In this article, we explore PMPA by focussing on two most different cases of coalition governments, Italy and Germany between 1994 and 2014. A multilevel regression analysis shows that coalition-related factors strongly influence PMPA, party-related factors are somewhat relevant, and the Prime Minister-related factor (its selectorate) does not have a significant impact on such autonomy.

Middle-aged to senior men of the ethnic majority and higher income groups are generally overrepresented in parliaments. While research on group representation has examined issues of gender, economic standing, and, more recently, ethnicity, few studies examine age groups. We argue that the design of political institutions influences the share of young adults in parliaments across nations and hypothesize that the electoral system type, age candidacy requirements, and quotas influence the share of younger deputies in national parliaments. Analyzing an original data set with a global cross-national sample, we find that proportional representation and giving candidates the right to stand in elections as early as possible (i.e. at the age of 18) matter. In contrast, quota provisions for youths are currently too selectively applied to increase the percentage of young deputies in parliament.

This study examines whether or not political representation in the Netherlands is biased toward the rich and higher educated by comparing the political orientations of members of parliament to those of the electorate. The analyses reveal stark differences in the representation of different socio-economic groups. The political views of elected national representatives are far more similar to those of rich, higher educated citizens than to those with less income and education. Moreover, a longitudinal analysis reveals that inequalities in political representation have actually grown in recent years. We also show that the use of measures of ideological self-identification might to lead to highly misleading results regarding the nature of political representation as opposed to the use of issue items. We conclude that, despite a highly proportional electoral system, the views which are represented in the Dutch lower house of parliament contain major distortions of the views of the broader electorate.

Inclusiveness is essential to deliberative democracy, but factors influencing citizens’ willingness to participate in deliberation need to be better understood. In the case of deliberative minipublics, demographic, and attitudinal attributes demonstrably correlate with willingness to participate, and thus arguably affect the inclusiveness of deliberative events. Similarly, features of deliberative situations also influence participation – whether it will be decisive, for example. However, what is lacking is a framework for how individual and situational characteristics interact, and the role of background political and cultural settings in influencing this dynamic. Advances in personality psychology offers a useful framework for addressing this lacuna, as well as providing tools for understanding how effective participation can be enhanced. In this article, I explore how personality interacts with situational features to influence patterns of deliberative participation, as well as the motivations that are associated. These effects are illustrated by drawing on data from a field experiment, involving minipublic deliberation in Sweden on the issue of begging by internal EU migrants. The findings support the relevance of personality as a predictor of participation in deliberation, which interacts with features of deliberative situations to induce particular motivations to either participate or refuse.

Existing literature has analysed the relationship between electoral systems and either corruption or satisfaction with democracy (SWD) focussing on the traditional distinction between majoritarian and proportional systems. This paper, instead, investigates if and how specific aspects of electoral systems moderate the negative effects of corruption perceptions on SWD. We argue that two mechanisms act simultaneously but at different levels. The first mechanism is the relationship between voters and the national government, while the second links single representatives to their constituents. We advance conditional hypotheses that postulate an attenuating effect of disproportionality and a reinforcing impact of personal vote. Empirical results from 35 elections in 33 democracies, using both individual and aggregate-level data, confirm the research hypotheses. More disproportional electoral systems weaken the impact of citizens’ perceived corruption on their democratic satisfaction, while this is strengthened by systems in which the ballot control is mostly in the hand of the voters.

Despite widely held views on fiscal adjustment as a political minefield for government parties, the empirical literature on the issue has been surprisingly inconclusive. A crucial variable that has been often overlooked in the debate is partisan politics. Building on the micro-logic of Albert Hirschman’s ‘exit, voice, and loyalty’ framework, this article offers a novel theoretical perspective on the conditioning impact of partisan government in the electoral arena. Due to their more limited exit options at their disposal, left-wing voters are less likely to inflict electoral punishment on their parties, offering the latter an electoral advantage over their right-wing rivals. Relying on the largest cross-national data set to date on the evolution of close to 100 parties’ popularity ratings in 21 democracies, time-series–cross-section results confirm this electoral advantage. Somewhat paradoxically, while center-right government parties systematically lose popularity in years of fiscal adjustment, no such regularity is found for left-leaning incumbents.