Spatial inequalities within countries have recently been seen as a source of resentment, suggesting a “geography of discontent” in Europe. We examine this hypothesis by analyzing satisfaction with democracy (SWD) in urban and rural areas over the last two decades. Based on data from the European Social Survey (2002–2020) covering 19 countries and corroborated by the International Social Survey Programme and the European Values Survey, we find that urban–rural differences in SWD are statistically significant but very small over the whole period studied – only about 2.5 percentage points between big cities and rural areas. This gap is minimal compared to differences between countries and between socioeconomic groups such as citizenship, employment status, education, social class, or income. These results hold across various political satisfaction measures, such as trust in parliament or politicians. Despite significant cross-country heterogeneity in spatial disparities, they challenge the notion of widespread rural discontent in Europe.

There is extensive evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic has mostly affected the less well-off in society, boosting economic inequality. In contrast, little is known about how much such rising economic disparities affected the involvement of individuals in politics, thereby enhancing political inequality. Extending the research on political inequality to a key and somewhat neglected dimension of citizens’ involvement with politics - political engagement - this article claims that the COVID-19 depressed engagement and promoted political inequality. The analysis relies on a comparative European approach and on data before and after the emergence of the pandemic. Besides generally finding an overall socioeconomic gap with regard to political engagement, results also suggest that the pandemic somewhat lessened engagement, increasing the gap between the more and less socioeconomically advantaged. Generally, this is not strictly due to a tendency to decrease engagement among the latter but also to increase engagement among the former.

Trust between constituent actors within the European Union (EU)’s multilevel regulatory regimes is decisive for regulatory success. Trust drives information flows, increases compliance, and improves cooperation within these regimes. Despite its importance, systematic knowledge regarding the drivers of trust within regulatory regimes is limited. This paper inquires whether trust in regulatory agencies is influenced by their affiliation with the national or EU governmental level, as well as by their performance. While existing literature predominantly focuses on why citizens place their trust in governments or regulatory agencies, this paper presents original insights regarding the formation of trust among elites within the regulatory regime, including politicians, ministerial officials, agency officials, interest groups, and regulated entities. We employ data obtained from a large-scale vignette experiment conducted in six countries involving 752 decision-makers from relevant organizations. The experimental results suggest that both public and private elite actors’ trust assessment of regulatory agencies does not hinge on cues associated with the governmental level, but rather depends on agency performance. Accordingly, belonging to the national or EU governmental level does not create a difference in trust assessment of regulatory agencies in itself. It, however, shows that particularly elite actors are rather sensitive in terms of the performance of a regulatory agency.

Political scientists heavily rely on standard survey questions referring to “democracy” when they study citizens’ attitudes toward (liberal) democracy. However, we only know little about the way in which citizens respond to these questions. This article focuses on two frequently highlighted issues: social desirability and the consistency between citizens’ understanding and researchers’ understanding of the term “democracy.” To address these issues, I collected novel survey data via YouGov from 14,000 British, French, German, and Italian respondents. I use a list experiment to show that respondents do not feel socially pressured to misreport their support for democracy. However, what citizens have in mind when they claim to support democracy only reflects norms and institutions of minimal conceptions of democracy. Overall, this encourages the usage of questions regarding citizens’ support for democracy widely, although this should not be interpreted as the support for anything going beyond minimal conceptions of democracy (providing freedom and allowing for citizens’ influence on political decisions).

We conduct a global, large-N analysis of proportionality in the partisan distribution of cabinet portfolios. Formulated in the context of postwar Western European parliamentary democracy, Gamson’s Law predicts that parties joining a coalition government will receive cabinet ministries in direct proportion to the seats they are contributing to the coalition on the floor of the legislature. Using a sample of 1551 country-years of coalitional government in 97 countries from 1966 to 2019, and comparing all main constitutional formats (parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential), we find that Gamson’s Law does not travel well outside its context of origin. Among the constitutional predictors of cabinet proportionality, we find that pure presidentialism is a major outlier, with an exaggerated form of formateur advantage. Introducing party-system and assembly-level predictors to the debate, we find that party institutionalization tends to increase fairness in portfolio allocation within parliamentary systems only.

If elections are to perform their legitimizing role, they should not only be objectively free, fair and non-fraudulent, but should also be perceived by the public as such. This paper investigates who perceives elections to be fair and why by contrasting two main logics: one based on the idea that perceptions of election integrity arise from external cues voters get from their environment and a second logic claiming that perceptions are internally created based on attitudes and beliefs. We use original survey data collected in ten countries around the European Elections 2019. We find that perceptions of election fairness are unrelated to country levels of integrity but mainly relate to voters’ status as winners/losers of the elections, attachment to the institutions they elect and populist attitudes. We also find beliefs on fake news influence to weakly mediate the relation between populist attitudes and perceptions of election fairness.

This study examines interest groups’ influence on the European Commission’s policy agenda. We argue that organizations can gain agenda-setting influence by strategically emphasizing different types of information. Analyzing a novel dataset on the engagement of 158 interest groups across 65 policy issues, we find that prioritizing information about audience support is more advantageous than emphasizing expert information. However, the effectiveness of highlighting the scope of audience support depends on the level of issue salience and degree of interest mobilization. Specifically, our findings indicate that when dealing with issues characterized by quiet politics, there are no systematic differences among groups employing distinct modes of informational lobbying.

Several studies concentrate on the representation of minority groups and the policy goals that members of these groups highlight when becoming candidates for public offices. However, we do not know much about the degree of parliamentary representation of sexual minorities and what ideological profile politicians with an LGB+ identity adopt. We aim at filling this gap by analysing the ideological stances of LGB+ candidates on key policy dimensions. Using data from the 2021 German candidate study, we find that the self-identification as LGB+ contributes significantly to adopting progressive stances on the socio-cultural dimension and more favourable positions on welfare state expansion, regardless of further important factors like party affiliation. Moreover, candidates who consider themselves LGB+ do take on significantly less traditional positions on the socio-cultural dimension compared to the position of their party, indicating that increasing descriptive representation of LGB+ individuals in parliament leads to a strengthening of more progressive voices in parliament and a stronger substantive representation of LGB+ interests.

In recent decades, representation of ethnic minorities increased significantly across Europe, while concurrently many political parties moved to the right on multiculturalism and immigration, a seeming paradox. We explain it by arguing that often it is the same parties that move to the right and simultaneously increase representation. They use this dual strategy in an attempt to positionally converge to the median voter, where the increased minority representation acts as a reputational shield to prevent allegations of intolerance. Looking at parliaments of eight European countries between 1990 and 2015, we find that parties that shifted to the right in response to a public mood swing to the right are indeed significantly more likely to bring more ethnic minority politicians into parliament. This has important implications for the literature on descriptive representation and party platform change.

Affective polarization, a concept that originated in the USA, has increasingly been studied in Europe’s multi-party systems. This form of polarization refers to the extent to which party supporters dislike one another – or, more technically, to the difference between the positive feelings towards the supporters of one’s own political party and the negative feelings towards the supporters of other parties. Measuring this gap in Europe’s multi-party systems requires researchers to make various important decisions relating to conceptualization and measurement. Often, our focus could instead lie on assessing partisan hostility or negative party affect, which is easier to measure. While recent research on affective polarization in Europe has already taught USA lot, both about affective polarization and about political conflict in Europe, I nevertheless suggest that research in this field faces four challenges, namely developing better measures, more sophisticated theories, clearer accounts of affective polarization’s importance and successful ways of reducing negative party affect, if this is indeed desirable.

Many citizens feel excluded from political decision-making, which, in their eyes, is dominated by an unresponsive political elite. Citizens with high populist attitudes perceive the world through a populist ‘lens’ and therefore yearn for more popular control and for ‘the people’ to be included in the political process. Participatory budgeting should be particularly suited to address populist demands due to the fact that it is focused on giving citizens actual influence on policy-making. However, so far, no study has examined the effect of participation in a democratic innovation on populist attitudes. This paper empirically assesses if and to what extent participation in a participatory budget affects populist attitudes, and whether citizens with high populist attitudes are affected differently than citizens with low populist attitudes. We analyze panel data on participants of four local participatory budgeting events in the Netherlands before and after participation and find that citizens with high populist attitudes decrease these attitudes significantly after participating in a participatory budget, whereas citizens with low populist attitudes are not significantly affected. Moreover, the significant difference in change between these two groups suggests that citizens with high populist attitudes go ‘through the looking glass’ and become less populist after participating in a participatory budget.

How do citizens react to repeated losses in politics? This paper argues that experiencing accumulated losses creates strong incentives to externalize responsibility for these losses to the decision-making procedure, which can, in turn, erode legitimacy perceptions among the public. Using a survey experiment (N = 2,146) simulating accumulated losses in a series of direct votes among Irish citizens, we find that decision acceptance and the perceived legitimacy of the decision-making procedure diminish with every loss. Three accumulated losses depress the perceived legitimacy of the political system. These effects are mediated by procedural fairness perceptions, suggesting that even when democratic procedures are used, accumulated losses can induce a belief that the process and system are rigged.

The rise of populism in Western Europe is often portrayed as a reaction to globalisation and supra-national integration processes. However, the domestic-international divide is only one aspect of the scalar organisation of government. In this article, we explore the relationship between populist attitudes and orientations towards state scales more generally. Drawing on a representative survey of 4033 citizens in Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland, we show that populist attitudes are linked to preferences for those state territories viewed as ‘closer to the people’ not only in a metaphorical but also in a scalar sense. The results suggest that the rise of populism should not only be considered a response to a crisis of party government in a context of globalisation but also as a response to a crisis of national statehood.

Expectations about ethnic solidarity notwithstanding, Latino support for Donald Trump grew between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Despite his anti-immigration positions and policies, the number of votes cast for Trump unexpectedly increased among members of the group most strongly associated with the issue of immigration. Latinos showed considerably more variance in voting behavior than what would be expected given accounts focused mainly on their ethnic solidarity. We propose a counterintuitive explanation for this trend: due to the activation of dormant political dispositions, it is the very anti-immigration attitudes characterizing Trump that account for his ascendence among Latino voters. Latinos voting for Trump did so because of his anti-immigration positions and not despite those positions. Our findings motivate a reevaluation of standard understandings of the role of minorities in American politics writ large and in American elections more specifically. Furthermore, as anti-immigration Latinos reside disproportionately more in certain swing states, we find them to be a pivotal political force in determining election outcomes, though in unexpected ways.

The extent in which voters from different ideological viewpoints support state interventions to curb crises remains an outstanding conundrum, marred by conflicting evidence. In this article, we test two possible ways out from such puzzle. The role of ideology to explain support for state interventions, we argue, could be (i) conditional upon the ideological nature of the crisis itself (e.g., whether the crisis relates to conservation vs. post-materialist values), or (ii) unfolding indirectly, by moderating the role played by political trust. We present evidence from a conjoint experiment fielded in 2022 on a representative sample of 1,000 Italian citizens, in which respondents were asked whether they support specific governmental interventions to curb a crisis, described under different conditions (e.g., type of crisis, severity). Our results show that the type of crisis matters marginally – right-wing respondents were more likely to support state interventions only in the case of terrorism. More fundamentally, political trust affects the probability to support state interventions, but only for right-wing citizens.

This paper advocates a move beyond the systemic approach in the field of Deliberative Democracy. It argues that the notion of deliberative ecology can deliver the necessary conceptual elements that deliberative democrats seek in deliberative systems without some of the problems they either overlook or embrace. To advocate the advantages of an ecological perspective to deliberation, the article focuses on six axes of comparison: (i) performances of actants (instead of functions of arenas and players); (ii) articulations and translations (instead of transmission); (iii) vulnerabilities (instead of pathologies and dysfunctions); (iv) practice (instead of institutionally-oriented design); (v) diverse temporalities (instead of linear temporality) and; (vi) hologram-based analysis (instead of systemic analysis). In a nutshell, the article claims that the ecological approach to deliberation has the advantage of conceptualizing an ever-changing web of relations of interdependency, which connects diverse entities that are either relevant to a public discussion or that hinder its enactment.

In Western European welfare states, research shows that support for welfare chauvinism, or the notion that welfare benefits for immigrants should be restricted, is highest among white, blue-collar working-class voters. On the other hand, higher-educated, middle-class voters are more likely to reject welfare chauvinism and support the inclusion of immigrants into the welfare state. For social democratic parties, this might pose an electoral dilemma between generous welfare states and open borders: They rely on both middle- and working-class constituencies and are ideologically tied both to a universal welfare state and the protection of (national) workers. To what extent does such an electoral dilemma between classes exist for social democratic parties? How do social democratic parties solve this dilemma when in government? In this paper, we postulate that a class divide around welfare chauvinism exists within the electorate for social democratic parties and that these parties’ policies in government reflect these divides: If the social democratic electorate has a high share of working-class voters, they should act more welfare chauvinist than if their electorate is mostly middle class. We test these hypotheses by combining survey and macro-level policy data in 14 Western European countries from 1980 to 2018. We find consistent evidence of the existence of a working-class/middle-class divide regarding welfare chauvinism, even within social democratic electorates. On the macro-level, we find partial evidence that social democratic parties in power respond to the class demands of their electorate: They are less welfare chauvinist when they have a higher proportion of middle-class voters, whereas their working-class vote share does not significantly condition their policies at all, contrary to assumptions in the literature. We therefore conclude that as social democratic parties become parties of the middle classes, the likelihood that they will retrench immigrant welfare rights reduces.

Investigating the relationship between Islamic religiosity and electoral participation amongst Muslim citizens in Western Europe, this study combines insights from the sociology of religion and Islamic studies with political behavior literature thus creating an improved theoretical framework and a richer empirical understanding surrounding the electoral participation of religious minorities. First, we theorize about three underlying dimensions of Islamic religiosity: frequency of mosque attendance, religious identification, and frequency of prayer. Subsequently, we consider how the religiosity–voting relationship is bolstered or hindered by hostile national environments such as more exclusionary policies and practices (e.g., veil banning or exclusionary citizenship laws).

Empirically, we use a unique dataset that harmonizes five European surveys, resulting in a sample size of just under 8,000 European Muslims. Using multi-level techniques, we find, contrary to research on majority religiosity, that communal religiosity is unrelated to electoral participation. However, individual religiosity bolsters voting in particular among the second generation. Opposite to our expectation, we find that hostile environments do not seem to lead to different impacts of Islamic religiosity within Western Europe. Our results support the taking of a more fine-grained approach when measuring religiosity and also highlight how the impact varies across genders and generations.

Research on intra-coalition control shows that monitoring increases with the ideological distance between coalition partners. However, the focus of scholarship has been primarily on parliamentary regimes, not mixed regimes. In mixed regimes, intra-coalition control becomes more complex due to a dual executive. Parties must simultaneously monitor each other and the directly elected Head of Executive (HoE). This article examines intra-coalition control in mixed regimes by analyzing parliamentary questions from 21 German city councils. The German local level resembles a mixed regime. The executive consists of the coalition cabinet supported by the council majority and the directly elected mayor as the HoE. The results show that the division of governmental responsibilities affects intra-coalition control. When a coalition party is aligned with the HoE, the balance of power within the coalition is affected, and the other partners intensify controlling the aligned party. Additionally, policy divisiveness and issue salience are driving factors for intra-coalition control.