Democratic innovations (DIs), such as deliberative mini-publics and referenda, are gaining traction in Europe, but their legitimacy depends on public support and their ability to address democratic discontent. While prior research focuses on individual-level drivers, structural conditions remain understudied. This study uniquely integrates the regional economic context into the analysis, combining survey data (N = 16,000) with economic indicators from ninety-one regions in thirteen European countries. Findings show that DIs receive slightly more support in poorer regions. Additionally, in these regions, economic hardship fuels demand for DIs by amplifying economic deprivation and political disaffection (‘enraged’ mechanism), whereas in wealthier regions, political interest is the key driver of public support for DIs (‘engaged’ mechanism). By incorporating economic conditions into the study of DIs, this research refines two key theories of DI support and offers a more nuanced understanding of when and why citizens support institutional change, thereby informing more context-sensitive participatory policies.

Making policy speeches is a major activity of authoritarian elites, yet we know surprisingly little about their incentives to be understood by constituents, and whether more effective communicators are rewarded. While many authoritarian actors care little about their audience and speak tediously, we argue that, in the service of legitimation and co-optation, simpler, more effective communication is required in protest-prone regions with lower regime support. Because such regions often have more developed economies and educated populations, paradoxically, this results in the opposite dynamics to that under democracy, where simpler speech is addressed at less educated, poorer constituents. Drawing on data from Russian governors’ major policy addresses and social media posts, and supplementing it with federal parliamentary speeches, we find that the linguistic complexity of elites reflects their audiences; elites also reduce it when their strategic context changes. In turn, more effective communicators are promoted. Our findings contribute to an understanding of authoritarian co-optation, elite incentives, responsiveness, and propaganda.

How do threats of interstate conflict affect American voters’ propensity to support candidates who violate democratic principles? We argue that undemocratic behavior affects perceived dominance, which citizens value in times of conflict. We fielded two conjoint experiments and a factorial vignette experiment in the United States to test this two-step argument. First, our conjoint experiments demonstrate a robust and strong relationship between undemocratic candidate behavior and dominance impressions. Second, our vignette experiment – manipulating undemocratic behavior by in-party presidential candidates and priming threats of conflict with China and Russia – shows that undemocratic candidates are evaluated more positively under conflict compared to peace. This is especially the case among Republican voters, although the pattern is also evident among Democrats and Independents. Our letter sheds light on the consequences of the escalation of wars with relevance to the United States around the globe, pointing to toleration of undemocratic behavior specifically.

What is the effect of exposure to contested commemorations? Previous research has mostly found that removing these objects generates backlash. However, I argue that non-intervention can itself have detrimental effects as citizens are exposed to them in their daily lives. Empirically, I leverage a survey experiment where the treatment is administered via an originally created video that resembles a tour guide of an American city. With minimal manipulations, respondents in the treatment group are exposed to Confederate commemorations, while those in the control group are not. I find that these symbols signal the town’s history and predominant ideology. They also negatively shape observers’ emotions, political efficacy, trust in the town residents, and donations to local schools. The effects are moderated by partisanship. Republican respondents are either unaffected by the treatment or move in the opposite direction. These results highlight the potential negative consequences of maintaining controversial commemorations.

In some divided societies, identity-based groups engage in ‘contentious rituals’, such as public parades or commemorative events, to cultivate the group’s collective social memory and build solidarity. We examine whether and how such rituals perpetuate group divisions in post-conflict societies, drawing on evidence from a case study of parading in Northern Ireland. Every year, contentious parades in this post-conflict society have the potential to raise tensions between the two major communities, Catholics and Protestants. Using a mixed-methods design, we show that parades in Northern Ireland are detrimental to intergroup attitudes. Our research design relies on compiling geolocated data on over 55,000 parades (2002–22), analyses of both nationally representative longitudinal surveys (2003–19) and an original survey fielded in 2022, and insights from qualitative fieldwork conducted during the height of the parading season in 2023.

Theories of representative democracy emphasize the importance of electoral pledges for informed voting and government accountability. Recent studies have highlighted citizens’ tendency to impose electoral punishments when parties fail to fulfill their pledges. However, conditions under which citizens consider non-fulfillment acceptable have received little attention. Specifically, multiparty government makes it less likely that an individual party fulfills its pledges, but whether citizens take such obstacles into account when evaluating the acceptability of non-fulfillment has remained largely untested. We theorize that both the coalition negotiation context and the negotiation outcome influence citizens’ evaluations. To test our hypotheses, we conducted two vignette experiments in Finland and Germany. The results revealed that, regardless of their opinion about the substance of a pledge, voters were more accepting of unfulfilled pledges when party or coalition characteristics created obstacles to fulfillment. The findings suggest that voters possess a nuanced understanding of the constraints of coalition government.

With ambitious action required to achieve global climate mitigation goals, climate change has become increasingly salient in the political arena. This article presents a dataset of climate change salience in 1,792 political manifestos of 620 political parties across different party families in forty-five OECD, European, and South American countries from 1990 to 2022. Importantly, our measure uniquely isolates climate change salience, avoiding the conflation with general environmental and sustainability content found in other work. Exploiting recent advances in supervised machine learning, we developed the dataset by fine-tuning a pre-trained multilingual transformer with human coding, employing a resource-efficient and replicable pipeline for multilingual text classification that can serve as a template for similar tasks. The dataset unlocks new avenues of research on the political discourse of climate change, on the role of parties in climate policy making, and on the political economy of climate change. We make the model and the dataset available to the research community.

This paper investigates the conditions under which subnational concerns shape public assessments of international climate governance. In line with existing literature, we maintain that costly policy adjustments fuel negative views of international co-operation in policy-exposed regions. At the same time, we argue that the more resentful relations are with the national center of politics, the more sympathetic these regions are to international institutions and global governance. Based on geographically targeted survey data from the United Kingdom, we find that fossil fuel-intensive regions with strong, institutionalized regional politics have more positive assessments of international climate co-operation than structurally similar regions where regional political institutions are less pronounced. The findings show that regional politics characteristics are key for understanding climate policy beliefs among citizens that bear the brunt of adjustments to international climate agreements.

How does right-wing terrorism affect electoral support for populist radical right parties (PRRPs)? Recent research has produced contrary answers to this question. We argue that only high-intensity attacks, whose motives and targets mirror PRRPs’ nativist agenda, are likely to generate a media backlash that dampens electoral support for PRRPs. We test this argument by combining high-frequency survey and social media data with a natural and survey experimental design. We find that right-wing terror reduced support for the radical right party Alternative für Deutschland after one of the most intense nativist attacks in recent German history. An analysis of all ninety-eight fatal right-wing attacks in Germany between 1990 and 2020 supports our argument. Our findings contribute to an understanding of how political violence triggers partisan detachment and have important implications for media responsibility in the aftermath of terrorist attacks.

Systematized information on the background of policymakers across long time-periods and all geographical regions of the world remains limited. In this article, we introduce Paths to Power (PtP), a new dataset on the educational, occupational, and social background of cabinet members. PtP contains detailed individual-level data – whenever identifiable – on 44,789 cabinet members across 141 countries in the period 1966-2021. This comprehensive dataset will be of relevance to numerous scholars (and others) interested in understanding politics and recent political history, and it enables a wide variety of new, empirically founded insights. We first present how the data is created and then discuss data quality and limitations. Next, we show how PtP is useful for researchers in diverse fields, including comparative politics, political sociology, gender studies, public administration, and international relations.

Amid declining public standing, many political parties seek to regain disaffected voters through various institutional strategies. One key approach is democratizing legislative candidate selection to grant party members or voters greater influence and signal improved responsiveness, transparency, and legitimacy. Yet does this strategy pay off electorally? The growing literature on this topic provides conflicting answers and limited evidence. We argue that more inclusive candidate selection does not have meaningful effects at the polls despite its merits. Whereas voters favor such procedures in principle, as some suggest, they underprioritize them in favor of other considerations when electing parties. We support this argument with observational and experimental data, including a matching difference-in-differences estimation of party performance across thirty-four democracies and a survey democracies and a survey experiment in three countries. This article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between party institutions and voter behavior in an age of eroding public trust and rising anti-establishment sentiment.

How do voters react to new political actors? Recent research suggests that radical right party success can provoke electoral backlash. We argue that such backlash is not exclusive to the radical right but can emerge whenever new political actors disrupt the status quo. With very distinct policy positions and behaviour, Green parties were early disruptors of post-war party systems in Europe. Using first-difference and difference-in-differences designs with voting records from Germany, we show that Green party success provoked a conservative backlash. After the Greens entered state parliaments, the Christian Democrats gained support. Using additional evidence from election surveys, we find that Green party success reinforces feelings of animosity among conservatives, mainly driven by disapproval of the Greens’ behaviour. These results highlight a broader pattern of backlash against new disruptive political actors. Our findings are especially relevant as polarization and party system fragmentation intensify across many established democracies.

It is widely believed that high inflation reduces the popularity of incumbents, and contributed to poor incumbent performance in recent elections in the United States and elsewhere. Existing research shows that voters’ inflation perceptions are associated with their evaluations of incumbent parties, but these observational studies cannot eliminate the possibility that the causal relationship runs the other way, where opposition to incumbent governments causes individuals to report higher price increases. To help overcome this inferential challenge, this study draws on a pre-registered experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey fielded just days before the 2024 US Presidential election. We find that priming Americans to think about inflation reduced support for the incumbent party. This effect is most pronounced among Independents and Democrats. These findings suggest that inflation likely contributed to the Democrats’ 2024 electoral defeat, and provide novel evidence that inflation has a causal effect on support for incumbent parties.

How do citizens evaluate the judiciary in the wake of politically salient rulings? I argue that judicial checks on the government shape citizens’ attitudes about judicial institutions at large, but these effects are driven by instrumental considerations, namely partisanship. In particular, my account suggests that judicial checks – as specific instances of interbranch conflict – provide citizens with instrumental information that shapes their beliefs about the broader judiciary. Thus, I hypothesize that court rulings limiting the government’s power will undermine support for the judiciary among individuals aligned with the incumbent, but increase support among opposition sympathizers. I test these expectations by exploiting the timing of two judicial decisions in Argentina (enacted by a lower court and the Supreme Court) that invalidated a highly salient judicial reform promoted by the government in 2013. Using data from a survey fielded before and after the court rulings, I show that the decisions significantly decreased government supporters’ trust in the judiciary, while opposition supporters increased their trust only following the Supreme Court ruling. Moreover, suggestive evidence provides support for the mechanism proposed by my account – that judicial checks expose citizens to information that is primarily instrumental. This article contributes to our knowledge of the determinants of public support for judicial institutions involved in interbranch conflicts.

A large literature has studied the effects of socialization under authoritarianism on political attitudes. In this research note, we extend this literature by demonstrating striking gender disparities in the post-transition persistence of these effects. We study the case of authoritarian indoctrination in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) using a regression kink design for causal identification. First, we draw on a unique survey fielded right before reunification to show that education under authoritarianism substantially reduced support for democratic capitalism and reunification with the West. In the second step, we triangulate multiple contemporary data sources to trace the persistence of these effects over time. More than two decades after the fall of the GDR, the attitudinal effects of authoritarian socialization persist only among men, but not women. Our results highlight considerable heterogeneity in the persistence of authoritarian legacies, raising critical questions about post-authoritarian ‘re-socialization’ and gendered adaptability.

Politicians’ presentation of self is central to election efforts. For these efforts to be successful, they need voters to receive and believe the messages they communicate. We examine the relationship between politicians’ communications and voters’ perceptions of their ideology. Using the content of politicians’ ideological presentation of self through social media communications, we create a measure of messaging ideology for all congressional candidates between 2018 and 2022 and all congressional officeholders between 2012 and 2022 along with voter perceptions of candidate ideology during the same time period. Using these measures, our work shows voters’ perceptions of candidate ideology are strongly related to messaging, even after controlling for incumbent voting behavior. We also examine how the relationship between politician messaging and voter perceptions changes relative to other information about the politician and in different electoral contexts. On the whole, voters’ perceptions of candidate ideology are strongly correlated with politician communications.

This article focuses on the effects of different communication modes – ‘contestatory’, ‘collaborative’, and ‘open’ (and two control groups – ‘information-only’ and a ‘placebo’ group) on reasoning and opinion formation in the context of conflictive collective decision problems. Focusing on two population-based survey experiments in Germany and Austria on the prioritization of health or freedom (Germany) and the introduction of mandatory vaccination (Austria) in the COVID-19 crisis, we find an important trade-off: while a contestatory and open mode enhances in-depth reasoning, a collaborative mode promotes constructive thinking. Regarding opinion formation, we find that when societal polarization is not extreme, communication modes do not matter for opinion (de-)polarization; here, the exposure to information is all that is needed to move minds. In highly polarized situations, however, open communication is the only way to communicatively reach out to people. Our results contradict both advocates of a contestatory and collaborative renewal of public discourse.

Sceptics charge that ordinary citizens are not competent enough to sustain democracy. We challenge this assessment on empirical and theoretical grounds. Theoretically, we provide a new typology for assessing citizen competence. We distinguish the democratic values of reliability, accountability, and inclusive equality, mapping the different competencies implied by each. Empirically, we show that recent research, focused primarily on Americans but with some analogues in other regions, significantly undercuts common worries about citizen competence. We then delineate a solutions-oriented, theoretically-informed approach to studying citizen competence, one which would focus more on systemic rather than individual-level interventions.

Philosophical accounts of discrimination distinguish the question of what discrimination is from the question of its wrongfulness. This article addresses these two questions in the context of anti-homeless hostile design of public spaces. Regarding the first question, all forms of anti-homeless hostile design amount to discrimination, with typical cases (for example, anti-homeless spikes or benches) being direct discrimination, but with some cases (for example, CCTV not intended to target the homeless) being indirect discrimination. Regarding the second question, it is argued that all major accounts of the wrongness of discrimination identify the usual, directly discriminatory hostile design as wrongful on account of its harmful or disrespectful character. Most accounts also consider the less common indirectly discriminatory hostile design to be possibly wrongful, especially given the severe disadvantages faced by the homeless in contemporary cities.