How do face-to-face, assembly processes, and non-face-to-face, popular vote processes impact the decisions made by citizens? Normative discussions of the comparative merits of these two broad types of participatory decision-making processes partly rely on empirical assumptions concerning this question. In this paper, we test the central assumption that assemblies lead to decisions that are more widely supported by participants than popular votes. We do so by analyzing 1,400 decisions made through these processes on the highly salient issue of municipal mergers in Swiss municipalities since 1999. We find that assembly decisions are consistently made by larger majorities than popular vote decisions and that this relationship is significantly mediated by turnout. This suggests that higher levels of agreement in assemblies mainly result from selection biases – with fewer dissenting citizens participating in assemblies than in popular votes – rather than from internal dynamics in assemblies.

This study investigates to what extent affective polarization, and more specifically hostility towards opposing party supporters, finds its roots in ideological differences. We look into the way out-groups are constructed when there are more than two political parties, and at the role of ideology in this process. Hereby we position ourselves in the discussion between those who argue that affective polarization finds its root more strongly in group attachments vs. those who argue that it is mostly rooted in ideological differences. We conduct our study in the context of the highly fragmented multi-party system of Belgium which enables us to analytically disentangle party label cues from ideological distance. Our findings demonstrate that affective polarization is largely rooted in ideological differences between party electorates in Belgium. Additionally, we find that this particularly holds for citizens who are more ideologically invested, namely those with higher political interest and more extreme ideological views.

In this study we test whether interest organizations that are confrontational towards EU institutions are less successful than their more cooperative counterparts in obtaining funding from the European Commission (EC). The transfer of public funds to interest organizations is a key dynamic in state-civil society relationships. Research shows that organizations, especially public groups, often heavily rely on public funds to the point that, without funds, many would cease to exist. ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ is thus a popular expression among leaders of organizations who apply for funds. Scholars document a widespread perception among group leaders that a confrontational attitude towards the state can lead to curtail of public funds. This perception is based on the assumption that state institutions use public funding to discipline confrontational interest organizations. We test this assumption using quantitative and qualitative data collected from a survey of 270 interest organizations who applied for EC funding between 2015 and 2018. Our findings suggest that, while almost half of our survey respondents feel that critical attitudes towards the EU would have negative consequences for their funding applications, empirically, confrontational and cooperative organizations have the same chances of obtaining EC grants. This finding is robust across different interest organization categories, including when non-applicants and mortality anxiety are considered in the analysis. The results add a new layer to resource dependency theory pointing at the incongruence between an organization’s perception of its relationship with public institutions and the observation of that relationship.

Previous literature suggests a party’s electoral result can shape its vote share and calculus of voting in a subsequent election. Less is known about whether this information-updating process helps explain the success of radical right parties (RRPs) in a multi-level system. To answer this question, I use the case of Germany to test whether a bottom-up spillover effect exists for RRPs. Through a regression discontinuity design, I first find that crossing regional electoral hurdles can substantially improve RRPs’ electoral performance in a subsequent general election. Yet, this positive spillover effect cannot be found for other party families. Next, I use a panel to ascertain which mechanisms drive this effect for RRPs. The analysis suggests the legitimation mechanism is more dominant than the viability mechanism and exposure mechanism. These findings enrich our understanding of both the second-order election framework and RRP studies.

Little is known about whether and under which conditions populist radical right parties’ (PRRPs’) nativist welfare politics matters to the voters. I address this gap in the research and test the argument that the electoral appeal of this electoral discourse varies among welfare regimes. The study compares the conservative and social-democratic welfare regimes and focuses on the vote choices of the two core constituencies of PRRPs – economically exposed and immigration-sceptic voters. The results show that these electorates support PRRPs’ nativist welfare positions for very different reasons in the two welfare regimes. First, in the conservative regime, economically exposed citizens vote for PRRPs, the more they stress nativism and welfare expansion. By contrast, in the social-democratic regime this group of voters is more likely to support positions combining nativism and dismantled welfare benefits. Second, immigrant-sceptic voters in the social-democratic regime support PRRPs who pledge to preserve the welfare state, and increased migration considerably boosts the probability that they do so. By contrast, this group of voters in the conservative regime is more likely to support PRRPs who seek to partly dismantle the welfare state, and the inflow of immigrants is unrelated to these choices. These results have important implications and suggest that welfare regimes moderate public opinion differently in the current age of populism compared to previous eras.

Social influence among people is widely understood to be a universal component of the human experience. However, studies of political behavior have generally approached social influence as specific to a type of behavior, such as voting, in a particular national context. There are good reasons to expect that social influence is observable across diverse behaviors and national contexts. In this study, we test this expectation using a two-wave panel survey of national samples in 19 countries. We employ autoregressive models that address some of the endogeneity challenges associated with attempts to measure social influence with survey designs. Our measure of social influence is predictive of diverse political behaviors in many countries with average effects comparable in size to important standard predictors of behavior.

Governments rely on citizen compliance for official rules to be effective. Yet achieving compliance is often tricky, particular when individual costs are high. Under what conditions will citizens voluntarily respect collective rules? We explore public compliance with SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) restrictions, focusing on the role of political trust. We anticipate that the effects of trust on compliance will be conditional on the presence of other factors, notably fear of infection. Low levels of fear may provide room for trust to shape compliance; yet high levels of fear may ‘crowd out’ the role of trust. We hypothesize that, at the pandemic’s outset, compliance was likely to be shaped more by fear than by trust. Yet as the pandemic progressed, the impact of fear on compliance was likely to have weakened, and the impact of trust to have strengthened. These hypotheses are tested using longitudinal data from Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Does ideological polarization undermine or strengthen people’s principled support for democracy? In this study, we suggest that different manifestations of ideological polarization have different implications in this respect. Using data from 11 surveys conducted with representative samples of the adult populations of a group of liberal democratic countries, part of the Comparative National Elections Project, we look at how people’s level of ideological extremism and their perceptions of ideological polarization in their countries’ party systems are related with their support for democracy. We show that citizens who hold more extreme ideological positions are indeed less supportive of democracy and that such a negative relationship is strengthened as citizens’ extremism increases. However, we also show that the citizens who display higher levels of principled support for democracy are those who perceive parties to be neither too distant nor too close to each other in ideological terms. In other words, while a very polarized partisan supply seems to undermine popular commitment with democracy, very low polarization may have similar consequences.

While there has been a veritable boom in literature on organized interests, their lobbying strategies, relationships with decision-makers, and their impact on policymaking, only a few studies have explored internal organizational developments and, specifically, the professionalization of interest groups. The present study focuses on the national and transnational factors driving the professionalization of interest groups in Central and Eastern Europe, a region previously neglected in much of the interest group literature. Based on a sample of more than 400 surveyed organizations operating in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia in the healthcare, higher education, and energy sectors, we explore three bundles of factors potentially enhancing the professionalization of interest groups – organizational funding sources, national and transnational intergroup cooperation and organizations’ standing in the domestic interest group system. Our statistical analyses show that state subsidies and tight policy coordination with the state are crucial drivers of internal organizational professionalization, suggesting rather patronistic and symbiotic relationships between the state and certain organizations. However, our data also support the notion that interorganizational collaboration, both at the national and international levels, may also be key to organizational professionalization, enabling groups that lack close ties with the state to compensate their disadvantage with intensive domestic and international networking. The study is also among the first to link increasing professionalization with organizational population density.