Prospects for democracy in multi-ethnic societies are generally more promising if elections are not mere ethnic censuses, in which people vote predominantly for co-ethnic parties and candidates. But what institutions facilitate or hinder ethnic voting? Unlike past studies, this article explores ethnic voting by conducting a natural experiment (rather than surveys or laboratory experiments). It examines the case of Fribourg, a bilingual (French/German) Swiss canton where elections at different levels of government, within the same electoral district, are held under both majoritarian and proportional systems. Coupled with the high territorial homogeneity of the linguistic groups, this unique setting allows us to conduct a robust empirical analysis of voter behaviour. We find that cross-ethnic voting is significantly more frequent in multi-member majoritarian elections than in list-PR elections or in two-member majoritarian elections. Our results yield qualified support to the centripetalist approach to electoral design in multi-ethnic societies, that favours majoritarian systems, rather than to the consociational school that advocates proportional representation.

The Federalist, justifying the Electoral College to elect the president, claimed that a small group of more informed individuals would make a better decision than the general mass. But the Condorcet Jury Theorem tells us that the more independent, better-than-random voters there are, the more likely it will be that the majority among them will be correct. The question thus arises as to how much better, on average, members of the smaller group would have to be to compensate for the epistemic costs of making decisions on the basis of that many fewer votes. This question is explored in the contexts of referendum democracy, delegate-style representative democracy, and trustee-style representative democracy.

Can non-citizen enfranchisement policies reduce the turnout gap between citizens with an immigration background and native citizen voters? While increasingly common in practice, there are only a handful of studies on the political consequences of non-citizen enfranchisement on voter mobilisation. Here, we examine the impact of non-citizen voting (NCV) rights on the political participation of citizens with and without an immigration background. Focusing on Switzerland, we use high-quality household panel data (SHP) from 1999 to 2014, leveraging both longitudinal and municipal level variation of enfranchisement laws when identifying their effect on turnout. We show that NCV rights boost political participation overall, and it particularly enhances turnout among citizens with an immigration background. Our analysis adds to existing theoretical explanations and empirical debates on representation and political participation in diverse democratic societies with large immigrant populations.

Recent societal conflicts over immigration, free trade and EU membership testify to the controversiality of globalization in Western societies. Brexit, Trump, the refugee crisis, and the debate around transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP) are clear illustrations of the salience of globalization in politics. Many argue that neoliberal ideology supports and drives globalization. This raises the question whether opposition to globalization is also ideological, and how. This contribution investigates the existence of ideologies of globalization. It does so presenting a novel rigorous version of Freeden’s analytical morphological approach to ideologies, with deductive conceptualization drawing on political philosophy combined with inductive correlational analysis at the level of individual arguments. It presents original representative claims analysis data on debates over climate change, human rights, migration, trade, and regional integration in the United States, Germany, Poland, Mexico, Turkey, the European Parliament, and the United Nations General Assembly between 2004 and 2011. It shows that we are witnessing the making of four ideologies of globalization: liberalism, cosmopolitanism, communitarianism, and statism. Each has its own distinctive grouping of concepts. Their emergence may solidify a globalization cleavage in Western societies, shape democratic politics for years to come, and affect the course of globalization itself.

When mainstream parties accommodate radical-right parties, do citizens grow more concerned about immigration? Based on a rich literature, we argue that challenger parties’ ability to affect mainstream party positions, particularly on immigration, is associated with greater public salience of immigration and voter positivity towards challengers exists. We use Comparative Manifesto Project and Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data in order to show that challenger issue entrepreneurship, and mainstream accommodation are associated with greater public concern for challenger issues. These factors do not result in greater public positivity towards challengers. Our findings thus support the argument that a mainstream party accommodative strategy might not be as beneficial for them as often expected by pundit and political scientists alike. This has implications for understanding the effect of indirect party strategies on public attitudes, since mainstream accommodation changes public concern regarding issues, which may bolster challengers’ positions, including radical-right parties.

Thanks to crowdfunding, deliberative mini-publics can be funded bottom-up to reach a wider support in the population and secure financial autonomy for their design. But who are the people willing to pay for deliberative democracy and why? This article answers this twofold question using an original survey with crowdfunders of the G1000 in Belgium. First, the financial support for deliberative democracy mainly comes from the more socially advantaged groups. But second, the crowdfunders largely diverge in their democratic preferences. Some are critical and favour any forms of alternative decision-making process, including technocratic forms. Others demonstrate a stronger attachment to electoral institutions and their political actors. Hence, the study of the crowdfunders of the G1000 shows that deliberative democracy attracts the support of citizens with different political orientations. This sheds light on the complex and intertwined links between a mini-public and its larger maxi-public.

It is often supposed that the European Union (EU) can be legitimated as a Pareto-improving bargain between its member states. This paper explores the assumptions of social choice and political philosophy that lie behind that claim. Starting out from a republican view that a polity needs to satisfy standards of non-arbitrariness if it is to be legitimate, the paper begins by explaining why ‘Coasian’ assumptions of Pareto improvement are so important to arguments for the continued indirect legitimacy of the EU by its member states. The paper then identifies four reasons from the social choice literature why attempts to follow a ‘Coasian’ pathway to Pareto improvement may fail to deliver forms of collective choice at the European level that are non-arbitrary from the point of view of all member state governments: non-neutral starting points, preference drift, indivisibilities, and multiple equilibria. These problems are, in turn, used to identify difficulties that mechanisms of indirect legitimation are likely to encounter in meeting two key conditions political philosophers specify for the non-arbitrary exercise of political power, namely, political justice and ‘democratic self-legislation’.

The ‘going public’ of religious actors is taking central stage both in religious studies and political philosophy. But this ‘going public’ of religious actors is controversial. The debate revolves around the question of whether religious actors must frame their religious convictions in terms of secular reasons or whether they should be allowed to introduce religiously grounded beliefs into public political argument without constraints. Despite vigorous and ongoing debate, there is little systematic and empirical research on this question. This article focuses on the public statements of religious actors in the context of Swiss direct democratic votes on abortion and immigration. Our empirical findings reveal an interesting gap: while many political philosophers and religious thinkers have moved to a position where religious actors can – and even should – openly employ religious arguments, the practice of religious actors in Switzerland is different. The larger denominations of Catholics and Protestants especially have a tendency to use a great amount of secular vocabulary. In addition, our findings also reveal that the use of religious or secular reasons varies considerably according to different issues, different media types (religious vs. secular press), different religious traditions, different alliance structures, and different media genres, while there is no clear time trend.

On 8 February 2013, the European Council agreed on the EU’s multiannual financial framework for 2014–20. The agreement includes a reduction of the overall spending level and significant reprioritisations. This paper asks how this agreement has been reached. Scharpf’s actor-centered institutionalism is applied, including the concept of the joint-decision trap. The paper finds that the outcome was made possible by compensating the member states that were worst affected by the policy changes. A coalition of net contributors, centered on Germany and the United Kingdom, was influential regarding the overall spending level. In addition, the external environment with the fiscal and economic crisis created a momentum for reduced expenditures. Those against the reduction, the member states in favour of agriculture and cohesion, were not able to avoid cutbacks. Member states in favour of the cohesion policy faced hard conditions for maintaining unity in their coalition, whereas member states in favour of agricultural spending could more easily negotiate for their common interests.

Current theories on institutional change tend to interpret it either as the result of long-term gradual trends, or of disrupting shocks following periods of punctuated equilibrium. Less is known about the moments in which change is more frequent. Focusing on the short-term determinants of reforms of core democratic rules in consolidated democracies, the article shows that proximate shifts in the electoral arena have a distinctive impact on the number of institutional reforms that are adopted in a legislature. Using the empirical and theoretical findings of the literature on electoral reform, the article develops a model tested in statistical analyses aggregating a large sample of institutional reforms in Western European democracies between 1990 and 2010. The results show that rising electoral uncertainty measured by volatility, and the change of preferences of the actors in power measured by the advent of new forces in government lead to the adoption of more institutional reforms. These results appear consistent when some categories of reform are added or subtracted, giving confidence that this model can be applied to a wide range of institutional reforms.

This paper notes the tendency of ‘social movement unionism’ scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic to focus on and prescribe the citizen repertoire as the single most important repertoire of labor for challenging neoliberal globalization. Consistent with liberal conceptions of civil society and theories of participatory democracy, it implicitly dismisses political unionism as a path to labor’s revitalization. It also assumes epochal change and confines neoliberalism to the post-Washington Consensus era. Deviant case analysis of Italian labor’s use of two repertoires (the citizen and the labor repertoire) and of its two regimes of capitalism (in succession, a post-WWII neoliberal regime and a post-1970 corporatist regime) over the course of the ‘American Century’ gives pause to both these contentions. This study relates labor’s citizen repertoire to the era of US hegemony that promotes changes in party-government that tend to reproduce the image of the archetypically neoliberal American polity: a polity that is devoid of ‘labor’ as a recognized category of the political community, is low in social rights, and, relatedly, is devoid of a party of labor. In this neoliberal political order, labor is perennially locked into the category of ‘citizen’ and reliant on the citizen repertoire. By contrast, the survival of parties of labor in non-US polities during the post-war wave of neoliberalism permitted union movements a route away from labor-decategorizing orders – political unionism. Now, in the post-Washington Consensus wave of neoliberal regime change, that route is more onerous owing to Third Way changes in parties of labor. The major challenge for labor movements that have experienced regime change to a neoliberal polity is in directing their efforts and even their new citizen repertoire to the task of recapturing parties of labor or to creating new ones – or risk long-term US-style labor decategorization.

How does democratic politics affect infant mortality? The bulk of existing research has debated whether democracies have lower levels of infant mortality than non-democracies. Yet, infant mortality varies as much within countries as it does between countries, suggesting that the political processes affecting infant mortality operate at the subnational level. To shed new light on the debate, this paper examines how three core democratic attributes affect infant mortality within a single democracy: India. I argue that higher levels of political representation, citizens’ participation, and electoral competition provide political incentives for elected representatives to reduce infant mortality. The theory is tested on a times-series data set from 15 major Indian states between 1980 and 2011. Overall, the results demonstrate the significance of democratic politics, particularly political representation, in influencing infant mortality.

This study investigates priming effects during the global financial crisis that erupted in September 2008. Using two longitudinal data sources on public opinion dynamics in Sweden between 2007 and 2010, we find no evidence of a basic priming hypothesis. Drawing upon the distinction between accessibility and applicability mechanisms, however, additional analysis indicates that priming of economic considerations was moderated by citizens’ attributions of responsibility for current economic developments. These results support the notion of priming as a two-step process, whereby heavy news coverage of the financial crisis increases the accessibility of economic considerations among the audience, but whether these considerations are used in government approval assessments depends on their perceived applicability as well.

Studies of party system size have looked at institutional and sociological factors in their attempt to explain what determines the number of parties. While some recent studies contend that party laws, beyond the district magnitude, have a significant impact on, among others, new party entry, we know very little about whether certain rules matter more in some societies than they do in others. In this paper, we study the extent to which various party finance rules affect party system size and differentiate the effect between new and established democracies. Specifically, we focus on direct and indirect public subsidization and limits on private donation and campaign expenditure. We hypothesize that compared to established countries, new democracies tend to have a larger party system size when the political finance rules create more equal conditions for electoral competition. Using data from 43 Europe democracies, the empirical analyses support our hypothesis.

By focusing on the legislative process underpinning marriage equality in the American states, this article identifies the combinations of conditions under which attempts at institutional displacement succeed or fail. Hitherto, few scholarly works have empirically examined displacement and whether, and how, actors can preserve institutional stability in the face of organized efforts to change institutions. Taking causal complexity into account, the analytical model factors in the resources of both change and status quo actors as well as the political context that enables or constrains their strategies. The results of the comparative analysis show that states have followed different paths to the displacement of heterosexual marriage in favor of marriage equality. Yet, most crucially, the findings pinpoint that the inclusion of religious exemption clauses is a condition sine qua non for marriage equality laws to be effectively passed, thus challenging the widely accepted notion that morality policies are foreign to compromise.

Which of the new political parties that emerged in advanced democracies faded away and which ones managed to survive and why? Considering a party as dead once it ceases to nominate candidates in any elections, we develop two sets of hypotheses to account for party death derived from two conceptions of political parties. One conceptualizes parties as vehicles formed by career-oriented politicians eager to maximize individual rewards. Failure to deliver seats or government access is therefore expected to predict an earlier death. The other conceptualizes parties as societal organizations that serve representational functions valued in themselves by elites and members alike. This conception stresses the importance of roots in society or ideological novelty. Using survival analysis, we test our hypotheses in 17 advanced democracies based on a new data set covering 144 new parties from birth until their (potential) death. Arguments derived from both conceptions have significant support stressing the complexity of the drivers underpinning parties’ very existence.

This article analyses the visibility of European Union (EU) citizens in EU news during the 2009 European Parliament election. It argues that the presence of EU citizens in EU news is vital for responsiveness of European governance. First, the theoretical notion of EU citizens is considered. Next, a new way of defining EU citizens is proposed: EU citizens are divided into national and supranational EU citizens. The visibility of EU citizens in EU news of 27 EU member states is analysed aiming to explain cross-country differences. The paper is based on a large-scale content analysis of TV and newspaper articles gathered during the 2009 European Parliament election. To explain different levels of visibility, a multi-level analysis is carried out. The results suggest that EU citizens are visible in the EU news, yet, their presence strongly varies across countries. The findings indicate that explanations for different levels of visibility can be found at both the media and country level.

Improvement of regulatory quality has become one of the most important items on the European Union’s (EU) Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs. In this context, the European Commission has sought to influence the regulatory reform policies of the Member States, focusing on the implementation of better regulation principles and tools. This article explores the interactive nature of Europeanization, viewing domestic institutions as ‘users’ of European policies according to their strategies. The author performs a within-case study based on a bottom–up research design, analysing the impact of EU better regulation on Italy. The results show that the effects of Europeanization relate more to agenda setting than to implementation – the latter is still, prevalently, determined by domestic factors.

Does supranational identity have an independent effect on individuals’ beliefs about culturally contested issues in their national systems? This article demonstrates that self-categorization in the supranational realm – a seemingly unrelated category to domestic value cleavages – has implications for individuals’ views on cultural issues. Traditional theories of international norm diffusion focus almost exclusively on state-level interactions, but our findings provide further evidence to the existence of a more direct mechanism through which norms reach some citizens. A sense of identification with a supranational entity such as Europe makes citizens more likely to espouse the views and opinions promoted by supranational organizations. We use the European Values Study to examine whether supranational identity is associated with socially liberal preferences. Results from the multi-level models indicate that supranational identity exerts a systematic effect on attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and gender equality. Additionally, while these effects are more consistent in EU member states, supranational identity exhibits a similar impact on social attitudes in non-EU countries such as those in the former Soviet Union.

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.