Research on unequal representation argues that party representatives’ preferences align more closely with wealthier citizens than with the public. Comparative research on the role of economic elites in political representation, however, remains largely unexplored, as most studies rely on income to distinguish segments of the population. To address this gap, we employ an innovative measure – the Earth Mover’s Distance – to examine elite bias through a longitudinal, comparative analysis of mass–elite congruence across 16 European countries in 2007, 2016, and 2017. Our findings confirm a systematic bias toward the preferences of economic elites, particularly among party representatives from mainstream, right-leaning, and governing parties. Yet, this tendency is not uniform. Elite bias is most evident on cultural values and European integration, whereas voter bias emerges on other issues. Our results also show that politicians moved further away from the positions of economic elites in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis.

Parliaments at all levels of government do not necessarily resemble the society they represent. Such parliaments are generally more masculine, less diverse in terms of ethnicity and region, and older than the population. Focusing on youth’s underrepresentation, we are interested in why young people do not get elected. Using the German local elections as a case and looking at a random sample of 100 German municipal elections comprising more than 6400 candidates, we find that youth’s underrepresentation stems to a large degree from their underrepresentation in the candidate pool. In addition, we also discover that youth face some disadvantages in the electoral process. However, these disadvantages are subtle, in that parties are less likely to put young candidates on the top and most electorally advantaged list positions. Voters, in turn, do not generally vote less for young candidates, but they vote less for them if youth occupy a top list position.

The democratization of party leaders and candidates has garnered significant attention in recent decades across various countries. However, the comparative literature has devoted less attention to other internal party democratic innovations such as party internal referendums. So far, scholarly research has focused on case studies describing the rules and main features of such events, while participation remains largely unexplored. This paper aims to bridge this gap by exploring the relevance of four meso-level features on turnout: competitiveness, saliency, frequency, and length of the voting period. To test the relevance of such factors, the paper builds on an original database of 407 intra-party referendums in the Czech Pirate Party, Five Stars Movement and Podemos conducted from 2013 to 2023. The results point out the significance of more extended voting periods and proposals on public policies as the main drivers of turnout. These results also have significant consequences in the study of participation within (digital) political parties.

There is a strong consensus in the literature that political sophistication is associated with ‘correct voting’, i.e., the ability to identify the political party that is closest to one’s own political preferences (Lau & Redlawsk, 2006). Since the theory was first formulated two decades ago, however, patterns of news consumption have changed dramatically. Not only is there a massive transfer from print to online formats, but a growing an increasing part of the population has adopted a pattern of ‘news avoidance’. This increasingly prevalent phenomenon leads to a reconsideration of the traditional relation between political interest, political knowledge, news consumption, and the ability to cast an ideologically congruent vote. One of the key elements of news avoidance is the assessment that traditional news is no longer considered as relevant or salient by a substantial number of citizens. What is not yet clear is to what extent this attitude is related to electoral outcomes. Our analysis is based on the results of the BelREP panel survey that was conducted to coincide with the June 2024 elections in Belgium. More specifically we investigated to what extent news avoidance limits ideologically congruent voting, controlling for conventional indicators of political sophistication. The results indicate that news avoidance has a detrimental effect on congruent voting, especially among respondents with low levels of political knowledge.

Citizens with high populist attitudes are ‘dissatisfied democrats’ because they desire more power to the people. PB apparently addresses this desire, since it takes power away from the elite and gives it back to the people. However, are populist participants indeed more willing to accept the outcome of alternative decision-making procedures when they themselves contributed to it? Taking a mixed-methods approach, combining survey data with interviews with participants to three Dutch PBs, this paper assesses how the populist legitimacy framework works out in practice. The quantitative analysis finds no evidence that populist participants are more (or less) willing to accept the outcome of PB. The interview analysis, however, shows that the underlying mechanisms differ between populist and non-populist participants, indicating a ‘populist experience’. While both populists and non-populists lauded the overall process, populist participants in particular felt heard by their fellow participants and were happy that they got what they wanted and this increased their overall satisfaction. The non-populist participants were more focused on the organisation, and highlighted that the participants were often not entirely representative of the broader population, but they were satisfied with the process, and this trumped the other considerations.

To what extent does sharing the same religion, migration background and gender versus policy positions impact voting? Most evidence comes from the US and majority populations, but European minorities may respond differently. In this study, respondents from France, Germany and the Netherlands choose between profiles of hypothetical politicians with randomised politician religion, migration background, gender and policy positions. Oversampling voters with a migration background (N = 1,889/3,058), among which a portion identifies as Muslim (N = 649/3,058), reveals that instead of minorities, majorities are just as, if not more, likely to engage in affinity voting. Shared religion is the most influential affinity impacting Muslim and non-religious voters. Sharing the same migration background or gender has no positive impact on voting likelihood; on the contrary, the findings suggest that voters with a migration background tend to prefer politicians without a migration background. Non-religious voters exhibit an in-group preference both when the voter and politician agree but especially when the voter and politician disagree about policy. These findings reveal the electoral challenges to achieving diversity in politics and minority representation, particularly concerning the political inclusion of Muslims.

In federal systems where multiple orders of government share authority, do citizens care about which order makes a policy? To investigate whether citizens place importance on the order of government and whether if they do, this reflects principled preferences or implicit assumptions about policy performance, we conducted a vignette experiment in Germany. The design of the study disentangles the effects of policy adoption and financing from the expected effectiveness of a policy and its impact on regional differences. Our findings show that citizens are largely indifferent regarding the order of government that adopts a policy, but they show a modest preference for financing by the federal government. These results suggest that previously observed preferences for federal policy-making in other studies may reflect citizens’ implicit assumptions about policy performance rather than principled support for centralization.

As many representative democracies face growing challenges of public dissatisfaction and legitimacy crises, understanding how to enhance citizens’ support for political decision-making processes becomes increasingly crucial. While existing research suggests that public participation can strengthen democratic legitimacy in well-established Western democracies, relatively little attention has been paid to whether the positive effects of public participation also hold in young democracies like South Korea. Moreover, many studies on the effect of public participation do not assume that its effects should be varied across different segments of the population. Through a survey experiment with 2083 adults in South Korea, we examine how participatory processes enhance citizens’ legitimacy beliefs at the local level. We find that a decision-making process including public participation produces a higher legitimacy belief than decision-making process without public participation. We also find that the effect of a participatory policy-making process on legitimacy beliefs is higher among citizens with a stronger anti-elite attitude. Our study not only extends previous research beyond Western democracies but also reveals how public participation might serve as a crucial tool for rebuilding democratic legitimacy among disaffected citizens, particularly in young democracies where citizen engagement remains underdeveloped.

This article is a review of the recent literature on generational differences in electoral behaviour. We first discuss several conceptual issues, after which we provide a description of the main findings in three fields: the role of generations in (1) turnout, (2) party choice and (3) the determinants of party choice. In the concluding section we discuss a number of overall patterns that emerge from this very rich literature. We also sketch some pitfalls and avenues for further research.

Vaccine hesitant sentiments are reported among some ethnic and racial minority communities. This study argues that their vaccine hesitancy stems from distrust in the government that marginalizes them. Building on existing studies on ethnicity, health, and political trust, this study offers an original contribution by using causal mediation analyses to provide suggestive evidence of a mediating relationship between ethnic marginalization and vaccination intention and by focusing on African countries. We conduct causal mediation analyses of nationally representative survey data across 14 African countries and find that trust in government mediates the effect of perceived ethnic marginalization on COVID-19 vaccination intention. Perceived marginalization decreases government trust and thus reduces vaccination intention. The findings have implications beyond the pandemic era. A path dependent consequence of marginalization during non-crisis times hinders collective actions during crisis times. Governments must put efforts into combating ethnic marginalization during non-crisis times.

Previous research has shown that the perception of party positions changes when they are in government. To what extent does this also apply to populist radical parties? Including radical actors in a coalition gives some legitimization to their views and normalizes them; therefore, they might be perceived as ideologically more moderate. However, the reactions to government inclusion might be different for supporters of populist radical parties compared to other voters. Hence, this paper aims to examine if populist radical parties that are included in a government coalition are perceived as ideologically more moderate and whether partisanship moderates this effect. A time-series cross-sectional analysis of the public perception of governing populist radical parties in 29 elections across 20 European countries shows that they are not always seen as more moderate when in office. This paper contributes to the study of coalition heuristics and populists in power and has important consequences for our understanding of party mainstreaming.

Legislators may consider the preferences of both business actors and citizens when making trade policy decisions. But when business and citizen preferences diverge, what makes legislators more responsive to one side or the other? We argue that when levels of political engagement are kept constant, legislators are more responsive to citizens than business. This effect should be particularly large for left-leaning legislators and legislators who conceive of themselves as delegates. We use three survey experiments with over 1000 legislators from 47 countries across the globe and qualitative evidence from an open survey question and 30 interviews with legislators to test our expectations. Based on this unique evidence, we find strong support for our expectations. These findings contribute to research on trade policy-making, the interaction between elites and the public in international relations, and responsiveness.

Concerns are rising over far-right support among security forces, given their role in upholding the state’s monopoly on violence. Such support raises fears that far-right ideologies could shape law enforcement practices and undermine democratic norms. Existing explanations often attribute this alignment to authoritarian and law-and-order preferences. Using data from the European Social Survey, this research note examines whether security forces are more likely than the general electorate to vote for far-right parties and identifies the attitudinal drivers of such support. The analysis finds no systematic evidence that security forces vote for far-right parties at higher rates than the broader population. Moreover, immigration attitudes—not law-and-order preferences—emerge as the strongest predictor of far-right voting across both groups. These findings challenge the common view that security forces are uniquely drawn to the far right for authoritarian reasons and underscore the central role of immigration politics in shaping far-right support more broadly.

This study investigates expenditure of European parties in referendum campaigns. Previous work exploring why parties initiate referendums hints at the importance of subsequent campaigns to parties, but theoretical insights regarding party behavior in campaigning contexts are fragmented and limited. We argue that party expenditure indicates the extent of their engagement, and identifying explanatory factors can offer insights into underlying strategic goals driving parties in their behavior. Drawing on referendum instrumentalization literature and existing empirical studies, we propose a framework with three strategic factors and corresponding hypotheses. These are tested using official expenditure data for 47 parties campaigning in 24 referendums in eight European countries through bivariate and multivariate analysis. Our findings mainly suggest that parties see referendum campaigns as avenues for image building, spending more on average when they initiate them and when referendums are publicly salient. Additionally, parties seemingly prioritize elections, while spending limits are ineffective in curbing expenditure.