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.

There is little research on the thousands of individuals who take part in intergroup violence. This article proposes that their participation is motivated by the emotion of intergroup anger, which, in turn, is triggered by a comparison between the intergroup distribution of resources and the distribution that is believed to be desirable. Thus, when another group is perceived to violate group entitlements – by taking jobs thought to belong to the ingroup, for example – anger is experienced and individuals become more willing to take part in violence against the outgroup. Support for this theory is found in a new survey dataset, collected in a slum in South Africa where anti-immigrant violence occurred in 2008.

Various theories of democratic governance posit that citizens should vote for incumbent politicians when they provide good service, and vote for the opposition when service delivery is poor. But does electoral accountability work as theorized, especially in developing country contexts? Studying Southern African democracies, where infrastructural investment in basic services has expanded widely but not universally, we contribute a new empirical answer to this question. Analyzing the relationship between service provision and voting, we find a surprising negative relationship: improvements in service provision predict decreases in support for dominant party incumbents. Though stronger in areas where opposition parties control local government, the negative relationship persists even in those areas where local government is run by the nationally dominant party. Survey data provide suggestive evidence that citizen concerns about corruption and ratcheting preferences for service delivery may be driving citizen attitudes and behaviors. Voters may thus be responsive to service delivery, but perhaps in ways that are more nuanced than extant theories previously recognized.

Deliberative Polls simulate public opinion in a given policy domain when members of the relevant mass public are better informed about the issues involved. This article reports on the results of a three-day Deliberative Poll, conducted before the June 2009 European Parliament elections, to evaluate the effects of deliberation on a representative sample of EU citizens. Findings show that, compared with a control group, deliberators changed their views significantly on immigration (becoming more liberal), climate change (becoming greener) and the EU itself (becoming more pro-European). Five different explanations of why deliberation appears to work are tested: sampling bias, increased political knowledge, discussion quality, small group social conformity pressure and the influence of other Deliberative Poll actors, but none is satisfactory.

This article explains a surprising wave of lethal attacks by drug cartels against hundreds of local elected officials and party candidates in Mexico, 2007–2012. These attacks are puzzling because criminal organizations tend to prefer the secrecy of bribery over the publicity of political murder. Scholars suggest that war drives armed actors to attack state authorities in search of protection or rents. Using original data on high-profile attacks in Mexico, the authors show that war need arguments underexplain violence. Focusing on political opportunities, they suggest that cartels use attacks to establish criminal governance regimes and conquer local governments, populations and territories. The study presents quantitative and qualitative evidence showing that cartels took advantage of Mexico's political polarization and targeted subnational authorities who were unprotected by their federal partisan rivals. Cartels intensified attacks during subnational election cycles to capture incoming governments and targeted geographically adjacent municipalities to establish control over large territories. The findings reveal how cartels take cues from the political environment to develop their own de facto political domains through high-profile violence. These results question the widely shared assumption that organized criminal groups are apolitical actors.

What are the lessons of the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU) regarding the effects of message framing? This article reports findings from an innovative online survey experiment based on a two-wave panel design. The findings show that, despite the expectation that campaign effects are generally small for high-salience issues – such as Brexit – the potential for campaign effects was high for the pro-EU frames. This suggests that within an asymmetrical information environment – in which the arguments for one side of an issue (anti-EU) are ‘priced in’, while arguments for the other side (pro-EU) have been understated – the potential for campaign effects in a single direction are substantial. To the extent that this environment is reflected in other referendum campaigns, the potential effect of pro-EU frames may be substantial.

Despite decades of research, our understanding of how institutional contextsinfluence urban political participation remains muddled. It is argued here thatthis confusion arises from the diversity of competing hypotheses, failures toconceptualize the causal processes underlying these hypotheses thoroughly, andthe use of inadequate controls for rival hypotheses. A more comprehensivespecification of the relationship between metropolitan jurisdictional contextsand two modes of participation is provided. After a presentation of atheoretical framework organizing the many extant hypotheses, these are tested,using survey data collected by the Knight Foundation from 2002 in twenty-fiveurban counties. Contrary to prior work, it is found that the size of localgovernments is positively associated with participation, while governmentalfragmentation diminishes the propensity for political action.

Why do political parties join coalitions to support other parties’ presidential candidates if presidents, once elected, are not bound to their pre-electoral pledges? This article argues that policy agreements made publicly between coalition partners during the campaign help parties pursue policy goals. However, parties cannot use pre-electoral coalitions to secure access to patronage, pork and government benefits under the control of presidents because they cannot hold presidents accountable to these agreements. Quantitative analysis of Latin American electoral coalitions demonstrates that political parties are more likely to form presidential electoral coalitions as the ideological distance between them decreases. Yet presidential electoral coalitions tend not to include non-programmatic political parties, even though such office-oriented parties are unconstrained by ideological considerations.

During the 1980s and the 1990s, the elites of the two largest Dutch parties converged dramatically in debates on income redistribution, nuclear power and the overall Left–Right dimension, paving the way for the Dutch party system's polarization on immigration and cultural issues. Did the Dutch mass public depolarize along with party elites, and, if so, was this mass-level depolarization confined to affluent, educated, politically engaged citizens? Analysis of Dutch Parliamentary Election Study respondents’ policy beliefs and partisan loyalties in 1986–98 shows that the mass public depolarized during this period, and that this extended equally throughout the electorate. These conclusions mirror previous findings on Britain, but differ from those on the United States, and have important implications for political representation and for parties’ election strategies.

The criticism that ordinary voters lack the necessary competence to make policy decisions persists despite the growth, popularity and implementation of direct democratic instruments throughout the democratic world. This article presents a novel measure of voters’ levels of justification as a possible, policy-specific, conceptualization of citizen competence in direct democracy. Using a unique dataset based on thirty-four ballot decisions in Switzerland, the study analyses the levels and correlates of citizen competence. The main findings are, first, that most voters do understand arguments about policies. Secondly, the political context as well as individual resources are important in determining voters’ competence. Finally, with regard to individual resources, motivation is strongly associated with justification levels, while the effect of ability is smaller than expected.

Numerous recent studies have addressed how the investment choices of firms depend on elite perceptions of the quality of national regulatory regimes. Likewise, other studies show that government structures can help to support credible commitments that protect market mechanisms. The authors provide the first analytic discussion of elite perceptions of national regulatory quality as a function of the independence of regulators in a country’s political system. Their central claims are that market operations depend on perceptions of regulatory quality and that independent regulators facilitate elite perceptions of regulatory quality because they check actors in domestic political systems. Cross-national statistical evidence suggests that regulatory independence supports elite perceptions of high regulatory quality. This article also provides evidence that regulatory independence is more likely where political competition shapes incentives to intervene in business markets.

Parties and politicians want their messages to generate media coverage and thereby reach voters. This article examines how attributes related to content and sender affect whether party messages are likely to get media attention. Based on content analyses of 1,613 party press releases and 6,512 media reports in a parliamentary, multiparty context, we suggest that party messages are more likely to make it into the news if they address concerns that are already important to the media or other parties. Discussing these issues may particularly help opposition parties and lower-profile politicians get media attention. These results confirm the importance of agenda setting and gatekeeping, shed light on the potential success of party strategies, and have implications for political fairness and representation.

This article tests contextual and individual-level explanations of the gender gap in political knowledge in Latin American countries. It suggests that this gap is impacted by political and economic settings through two interrelated mechanisms: gender accessibility (that is, the extent of available opportunities for women to influence the political agenda) and gender-bias signaling (that is, the extent to which women play important roles in the public sphere). Analyzing data from the 2008 Americas Barometer survey, this study shows that the gender gap in political knowledge is smaller among highly educated citizens, in rural areas (where both men and women know little about politics) and in bigger cities (where women’s levels of political knowledge are higher). More importantly, the magnitude of the gap varies greatly across countries. Gender differences in income, party system institutionalization and the representation of women in national parliaments are all found to play a particularly important role in explaining the magnitude of the gender gap in political knowledge across Latin America.

The correlation between ideology and partisanship in the mass public has increased in recent decades amid a climate of persistent and growing elite polarization. Given that core values shape subsequent political predispositions, as well as the demonstrated asymmetry of elite polarization, this article hypothesizes that egalitarianism and moral traditionalism moderate the relationship between ideology and partisanship in that the latter relationship will have increased over time only among individuals who maintain conservative value orientations. An analysis of pooled American National Election Studies surveys from 1988 to 2012 supports this hypothesis. The results enhance scholarly understanding of the role of core values in shaping mass belief systems and testify to the asymmetric nature and mass public reception of elite cues among liberals and conservatives.

This article provides an overview of the literature on the relationship between terrorism and migration. It discusses whether and how (1) migration may be a cause of terrorism, (2) terrorism may influence natives' attitudes towards immigration and their electoral preferences and (3) terrorism may lead to more restrictive migration policies and how these in turn may serve as effective counter-terrorism tools. A review of the empirical literature on the migration–terrorism nexus indicates that (1) there is little evidence that more migration unconditionally leads to more terrorist activity, especially in Western countries, (2) terrorism has electoral and political (but sometimes short-lived) ramifications, for example, as terrorism promotes anti-immigrant resentment and (3) the effectiveness of stricter migration policies in deterring terrorism is rather limited, while terrorist attacks lead to more restrictive migration policies.

In French election studies, a central debate concerns the French voter's ‘standing decision’ – is it party or ideology? The debate has been ongoing because of data and measurement issues and, we add, because of an inadequate understanding of the role electoral institutions play. The 1995 French National Election Study allows a fresh attack on these questions. It contains promising party and ideology measures, on a very large national sample. Both party identification and left–right ideological identification are shown to be widely held, with the latter more so. Their relative structural effects are found to depend heavily on the dynamics of the dual ballot. Party is more important for electoral choice on the first ballot, while ideology is more important on the second. This finding, demonstrated in fully specified logistic regression models of the presidential vote, seems also to inhere in the logic of French electoral institutions. The two-ballot rules, coupled with the pervasiveness of ideological and party identification in the public mind, go far towards revealing and explaining an underlying stability of the French political system.

The premise that parties are fundamentally motivated by office-seeking is common, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to its empirical validity. We approach this issue by analysing how parties respond to their electoral performance. Casting party leaders as the embodiment of their parties, we then examine the degree to which the length of time party leaders retain their position hinges on their party's electoral success, defined with reference both to the party's share of legislative seats and to its presence or absence in government. Our analyses centre on six parliamentary democracies in which the government is always formed by one of the two major parties either alone or in coalition with a minor party (Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland and New Zealand) in the years from 1945 through 2000. Results indicate that party leaders' risk of removal hinges substantially on their party's seat share and/or their party's presence in government. More specifically, we find that as the seat share of both major and minor parties increases, the chance that the party leader will be removed decreases. Likewise, if a major party loses its role in government, the chance that the party leader will be removed increases dramatically. Although presence in government has no significant impact on the tenure in office of party leaders of minor parties, the magnitude of the effect is indistinguishable from that for major parties. Beyond providing strong evidence that parties are at their core motivated by electoral performance, we also estimate the magnitude of the electoral imperative, at least as it pertains to party leaders.

What explains variation in the tactical choices of non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? This article uses network autocorrelation models to establish how the tactical choices of climate change NGOs are shaped by their embeddedness in transnational advocacy networks. Specifically, it finds that NGOs are more likely to adopt protest tactics when adjacent organizations – those with whom they have direct ties – have already done so. The choices of equivalent organizations – those that occupy similar relational roles in the network – do not appear to be influential. Qualitative evidence also shows that NGOs are affected by relational pressure from their peers, which alters their perception of costs and benefits. These findings enhance understanding of how networks influence actors’ behavior and offer insights into the relational processes that generate protest in global politics.

This article investigates intra-party politics and explores the determinants of factional breakaways, going beyond the unitary actor assumption. It presents a game-theoretic model that focuses on intra-party competition and bargaining dynamics to analyse the interplay between party leaders and minority factions. It tests several hypotheses based on the formal model using a new dataset that contains information about the strength and policy positions of factions inside Italian parties, from 1946 to 2011, measured through quantitative content analysis of motions presented during party congresses. The results show that office, policy and electoral motives influence factions’ decisions to break away. Other elements – such as intra-party democracy, the electoral system and party system competitiveness – also affect leaders’ attitudes toward compromising and alter the likelihood of a split.

Ministers are very busy and harassed people. Some of them encourage their staff when presenting their work to make what is complex appear to be simple, to draft papers composed of short sentences and cut up into short paragraphs, so that they can be taken in almost at a glance. This process (which has its dangers) is as far removed as it is possible to be from the deliberate and exhaustive methods of formal scholarship. That is why the proceedings of bureaucrats appear to the academic mind to be so superficial.