What are the consequences of being the victim of crime for political participation? Previous studies report mixed results with respect to voter turnout, in contrast to the positive effects found for other indicators of political engagement. However, previous turnout studies have failed to differentiate between violent and non-violent crime, and have relied on cross-sectional survey data that is prone to measurement biases and selection effects. This article addresses these shortcomings via a panel analysis of official registry data from Denmark recording individual-level turnout in two municipal elections (in 2009 and 2013) and victimization from violent and non-violent crime. It identifies the effect of victimization by comparing changes in turnout between the two elections for victims and two different counterfactual groups: non-victims in the general population, and individuals who were victimized after the 2013 election. The results show that victimization from violent crime increases turnout by 2 to 3 percentage points. The study further demonstrates a large negative between-individual effect of victimization, suggesting that previous studies have been marred by severe selection bias.

This letter is the first to systematically scrutinize the multifaceted claim that a strong state promotes democratic development. It analyzes new Varieties of Democracy data from 1789 to 2015 to specify and examine eight different versions of this ‘state-first’ argument in analyses that span the entire era of modern democracy. The authors document that high levels of bureaucratic quality at the time of the first democratic transition and during democratic spells are positively associated with democratic survival and deepening. By contrast, state capacity has no robust effects on democratic survival or deepening and does not condition the impact of bureaucratic quality. These findings underline the importance of particular features of a strong state as well as the importance of a disaggregated approach. They imply that democratic development is better aided by strengthening the impartiality of bureaucratic organizations than by building capacity for territorial control.

Democracies without democrats are not sustainable. Yet, recent studies have argued that Western citizens are turning their backs on the system of self-governance, thereby eroding the societal foundations of consolidated democracies. This study contributes to discussions about citizen support of democracy by (1) analyzing new cross-national survey data in 18 European countries that facilitate assessments of the temporal and geographical generalizability of previous findings, (2) disentangling age, cohort and period effects, thereby aligning the analytical methods with the theoretical arguments and (3) transparently reporting all evidence derived from pre-registered analyses to avoid cherry-picked findings. The findings show that citizens of consolidated democracies continue to endorse self-governance. Yet in some (but not all) countries, there is evidence of a growing number of ‘democrats in name only’, particularly among the young generation. These findings suggest a second phase in research on democratic fatigue that broadens the analytical scope for the multi-faceted nature of democratic support.

The potential for participatory processes to address deficits in perceptions of legitimacy is strongly debated. This letter discusses how to evaluate the effects of participatory procedures. It argues that participatory processes should not be compared to normative ideals about how citizens should behave, but rather to the status quo of representative decision making. The authors use the example of winner–loser gaps in perceptions of fairness to illustrate the importance of evaluation frameworks, drawing on twelve experiments from the Netherlands and Sweden (total N = 5,352). The study shows that the choice of benchmarks matters substantially for the interpretation of process effects. When comparing participatory processes to the status quo of representative decision making, it finds higher fairness perceptions for a participatory process than for a representative process across all twelve experiments, even when the outcomes are unfavourable.

Does anti-Muslim rhetoric by Western politicians breed radical attitudes among European Muslims? This article explores this question by conducting an experimental study in Bosnia – a European democracy, where, unlike the rest of Europe, Muslims are neither immigrants nor socio-economically disadvantaged. This helps clearly identify the radicalization potential of Western rhetoric alone, absent contextual factors such as social inferiority. Experimental evidence with Bosnian Muslims from five surveys (with a total of 2,608 participants) suggests that rhetorical attacks on Islam by Western politicians do not strengthen individuals' Muslim identity, cause higher levels of animosity toward the West or lead to condoning the use of violence. The study also finds that pro-Muslim rhetoric, while increasing positive views of the West, does not affect individuals' strength of Muslim identity or their radical sympathies. These results have important implications for the sources of radicalization and efforts to curb radical tendencies.

Human trafficking affects millions of people globally, disproportionately harming women, girls and marginalized groups. Yet one of the main sources of data on global trafficking, the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Reports, is susceptible to biases because report rankings are tied to political outcomes. The literature on human rights measurements has established two potential sources of bias. The first is the changing standards of accountability, where more information and increased budgets change the standard to which countries are held over time. The second is political biases in reports, which are amended to comply with the interests of the reporting agency. This letter examines whether either of these biases influence the TIP Reports. In contrast to other country-level human rights indicators, the State Department issues both narratives and rankings, which incentivizes attempts to influence the rankings based on political interests. The study uses a supervised machine-learning algorithm to examine how narratives are translated into rankings, to determine whether rankings are biased, and to disentangle whether bias stems from changing standards or political interests. The authors find that the TIP Report rankings are more influenced by political biases than changing standards.

Leading accounts of the politics of the welfare state focus on societal demands for risk-spreading policies. Yet current measures of the welfare state focus not on risk, but on inequality. To address this gap, this letter describes the development of two new measures, risk incidence and risk reduction, which correspond to the prevalence of large income losses and the degree to which welfare states reduce that prevalence, respectively. Unlike existing indicators, these measures require panel data, which the authors harmonize for twenty-one democracies. The study finds that large losses affect all income and education levels, making the welfare state valuable to a broad cross-section of citizens. It also finds that taxes and transfers greatly reduce the prevalence of such losses, though to varying degrees across countries and over time. Finally, it disaggregates the measures to identify specific ‘triggers’ of large losses, and finds that these triggers are associated with risks on which welfare states focus, such as unemployment and sickness.

In order to explain differences in political interest, two strands of literature point to the relevance of either dispositional or situational factors. I remedy this and show how political interest is shaped by the interplay between personality differences and the political environment. Specifically, I demonstrate that people with a stable motivation for engaging with new ideas are more interested in politics when exposed to new political events, e.g. during election campaigns and when unexpected events unfold. The results have implications for our understanding of political inequalities in democratic engagement and shed light on how citizens' interest in politics can be relatively stable over time as well as responsive to the political environment in predictable ways.

Previous studies have stressed the role of a child's family environment for future political participation. This field of research has, however, overlooked that children within the same family have different experiences depending on their birth order. First-borns spend their first years of life without having to compete over their parents' attention and resources, while their younger siblings are born into potential rivalry. We examine differences in turnout depending on birth order, using unique population-wide individual level register data from Sweden and Norway that enables precise within-family estimates. We consistently find that higher birth order entails lower turnout, and that the turnout differential with respect to birth order is stronger when turnout is lower. The link between birth order and turnout holds when we use data from four other, non-Nordic countries. This birth order effect appears to be partly mediated by socio-economic position and attitudinal predispositions.

What shapes attitudes towards procedural rules that constrain executive power? This letter argues that procedural values are contextual: A function of who is in power. Supporters of those in power prefer fewer procedural constraints, while opposition supporters prefer greater. This study reports the results of a unique test using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. Respondents were asked, in both pre- and post-election waves, if they thought it should be ‘easier or harder for the president to keep documents secret from the public’. The panel design makes it possible to track individual changes following the shift in political context. The results show evidence of a partisan ‘flip’ in attitudes following the election, with Republicans becoming less likely – and Democrats more likely – to prefer additional constraints on presidential secrecy. However, this partisan ‘flip’ is present only among higher political knowledge respondents.

In 2016, attitudes related to racism and sexism were strong predictors of vote choice for president. Since then, issues related to race and gender have continued to be an important part of the political agenda. This letter shows that hostile sexism and denial of racism emerged as stronger predictors of the House vote in the 2018 cycle than they had been in 2016. The results show that the increased importance of these factors came largely from the shifting of less sexist and less racist voters from voting Republican in 2016 to voting for Democrats in 2018. Overall, the results suggest that Trump's hostility towards women and minorities is becoming part of the Republican Party's brand, and that this appears to have created an electoral penalty for Republican candidates in 2018.