A growing number of studies focus on the two-way channels connecting public opinion and interest groups, highlighting how public support affects interest groups’ mobilization, strategies, and influence, while also showing how interest groups manage to shape public opinion. We contribute to this debate, assuming that interest groups are fundamentally survival-maximizing organizations. First, we investigate whether public opinion bears on advocacy groups’ assessment of their own survival prospects. Second, we assess whether public opinion-driven mortality anxiety affects advocacy groups’ choices regarding different lobbying strategies. Empirically, we rely on data from the Comparative Interest Group Survey, including over 2500 interest group respondents across six European Union (EU) countries as well as groups working at the EU level. Our analysis shows that (1) public opinion crucially influences how advocacy groups estimate their chances of survival, particularly for citizen groups and (2) public opinion-related survival concerns stimulate greater relative use of outside lobbying by citizen groups.

This study analyses congruence across various issues in 16 European democracies. Making use of public opinion and expert survey data, our analyses show that congruence between the policy preferences of citizens and the stances of governments is much more complex than what is revealed by studies focusing on ideology solely. Size and directions of incongruence are larger and more systematic on specific issues than on the left–right scale. On redistribution, citizens are more to the left than their governments, while popular support for European integration is systematically lower among citizens than among their representatives. Moreover, the relatively poor are particularly underrepresented on redistribution, while the preferences of the relatively lower educated are not well reflected in government preferences in relation to European integration. We interpret these results as being partly linked to a representation gap with privileged social groups enjoying higher levels of congruence with their government.

While expert information and information on public preferences are seen as key resources that interest groups provide to policymakers, little is known about the resources that are necessary to acquire such information. Existing scholarship argues that financial resources enhance a group’s ability to supply information, which could be problematic as it suggests that resource poor groups are disadvantaged when lobbying policymakers. Applying a resource perspective to informational lobbying, this paper argues that different information types require different resources and that financial means are less important than assumed. The predictions are tested using a new dataset and survey of 383 advocates active on 50 specific policy issues in five West European countries. The results show that while economic resources are indeed associated with a higher amount of expert information, political capacities allow a group to provide both expert information and information on public preferences. This suggests that groups can rely on other than economic resources for information provision.

Amidst the European sovereign debt crisis and soaring unemployment levels across the European Union, ambitions for European unemployment policies are high on the political agenda. However, it remains unclear what European taxpayers think about these plans and who is most supportive of European unemployment policies. To contribute to this debate, we conducted a survey experiment concerning solidarity towards European and domestic unemployed individuals in the Netherlands and Spain. Our results suggest that (1) Europeans are less inclined to show solidarity towards unemployed Europeans than towards unemployed co-nationals, (2) individuals with higher education, European attachment, and pro-immigration attitudes show more solidarity towards unemployed people from other European countries, but (3) even they discriminate against foreigners, and (4) finally, economic left-right orientations do not structure solidarity with unemployed people from abroad.

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.

Increasing political distrust has become a commonplace observational remark across many established democracies, and it is often used to explain current political phenomena. In contrast to most scholarship that focuses solely on the concept of trust and leaves distrust untheorized, this article makes a contribution by analysing political distrust. It argues that citizen distrust of government and political institutions poses a threat for democratic politics and clarifies the relationship between the distrust observed in established democracies and classical ‘liberal distrust’, which is considered beneficial for democracy. Further, it addresses the relationship between trust and distrust, identifying a series of functional asymmetries between the two concepts, with important implications for theoretical and empirical work in political science. The article suggests that a conceptualization of political distrust based on evaluations of incompetence, unethical conduct and incongruent interests can provide a fruitful ground for future research that aims to understand the causes, consequences, and potential remedies for political distrust.

Governments are often punished for negative events such as economic downturns and financial shocks. However, governments can address such shocks with salient policy responses that might mitigate public punishment. We use three high-quality nationally representative surveys collected around a key event in the history of the Dutch economy, namely the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, to examine how voters responded to a salient government bailout. The results illustrate that governments can get substantial credit for pursuing a bailout in the midst of a financial crisis. Future research should take salient policy responses into account to fully understand the public response to the outbreak of financial and economic crises.

Despite the sweeping societal and economic transformation brought about by digitization, it has remained a relatively marginal topic in elections, with parties having few incentives to signal commitment to digitization. Why then would parties start to do so? We address this question by examining party manifestos from German subnational elections in the period between 2010 and 2018. Our analysis contributes to the research on issue competition by looking at why parties engage with the topic of the digitization even though it has neither become politicized nor salient, at present. We find, first, that parties emphasize digitization more in regions belonging to the mid-tier in terms of their degree of digital modernization. Second, parties with more resources and greater ideological compatibility signal more commitment to digitization. Finally, electoral success of the Pirate Party as a credible challenger has been followed by greater emphasis on digitization, especially among the ideologically closest competitors.

The staggered renewal of parliamentary mandates is widespread in upper chambers, yet little understood. Comparative work has found that all members of a chamber are affected by upcoming elections, not merely those whose terms are up for renewal. In this study, we explore for which activities, and under which conditions, staggered membership renewal is associated with class-specific parliamentary activity, defined as systematically differing behaviour across two or more classes of members. We examine these questions with data on the French Senate. Drawing on insights from the study of political business cycles, legislative cycles, and previous scholarship on staggering, the article shows that behaviour varies over the course of senators’ mandates, and that class-specific behaviour exists. However, staggering produces a different pattern of parliamentary activity than might be expected: proximity to elections reduces parliamentary activity of the class of senators facing re-election; by contrast, senators ‘not up next’ become more active. This effect, we argue, reflects the electoral system under which senators are elected.