Partisan‐based affective polarization has been posited as a key explanation for citizens' tolerance towards democratic backsliding, with voters more likely to overlook democratic violations conducted by in‐party candidates. Our study theorizes and empirically explores the reverse perspective on this relationship: focusing on the role of the opposition, we submit that backsliding may crystallize an affective dislike among opposition supporters towards the governing party and its supporters that stems from a regime divide over democracy itself. To probe the plausibility of this argument, we leverage original survey data collected in Hungary, where democratic backsliding under the Fidesz government has resulted in an extensive remodelling of the political system since 2010. Our results point to a government–opposition divide in partisan affect and show how liberal democratic attitudes, especially among opposition party supporters, play into this dynamic. We suggest that where backsliding persists over a longer period, this process can shift even multi‐party systems towards increasing bipolarity along what we term a ‘democratic divide’. Ultimately, our study proposes a novel lens on the dynamics of democratic backsliding by suggesting that affective polarization may play a positive role in backsliding contexts by uniting the opposition around the defence of democracy. Our findings point to a number of future research avenues to further analyse the interactive relationship between democratic backsliding and affective polarization.

Having long shied away from proactively politicizing issues of European integration, the past crisis decade has put generally pro‐European mainstream parties under pressure to spell out more clearly which kind of Europe they support. We distinguish two such fundamental ideas of Europe: the redistributive polity, organizing transnational solidarity and the regulatory polity, strengthening national self‐reliance. Both notions are integrationist, but they come with distinct policy implications. What determines mainstream party support for either of these polity ideas? We investigate this question on data provided by the ‘EUandI’ voting advice application, which contains party positions on core issues of integration for all EU member states for the four European Parliament elections between 2009 and 2024. Mainstream party support for redistribution, we find, is generally driven by their ideological placement on the economic and cultural dimension. While progressive and left parties tend towards EU‐level redistribution, conservative and right parties are wedded to the idea of a regulatory European polity. This general dynamic, however, interacts with parties’ domestic considerations, that is, the public salience of an issue and a country's net‐payer status in the EU. We further find that the effect of mainstream parties’ ideological positioning differs across policy domains. While cultural and economic positions drive support for redistribution in fiscal and taxation policy to a nearly equal extent, support for redistribution in migration policy is driven by cultural factors alone, while in matters of security and defence right mainstream parties are more supportive of European solidarity than parties of the mainstream left. Our analysis demonstrates that mainstream parties now compete visibly over EU‐level redistribution, but that their stances on transnational solidarity differ depending on the domestic situation and the policy domain in question.

Past research has often attributed electoral backlash to structural economic change to a lack of compensation and interest group representation for affected groups. Is that backlash then mitigated in contexts where both of these conditions are fulfilled? I argue that perceived economic deprivation fuelling political disengagement as well as disappointment with the issue‐owning party are important factors contributing to such a backlash. Using the case of Germany, I empirically analyse the electoral repercussions of a coal phase‐out in the presence of compensation for affected groups as well as active involvement of labour and business interests in political decision‐making. By employing a series of staggered difference‐in‐differences models, I investigate whether the closures of coal plants and mines between 2007 and 2022 affected voting behaviour at the municipal level. I find that these closures resulted in an asymmetric backlash in the form of lower vote shares for the issue owner, the Social Democratic Party and higher abstention rates in affected municipalities. With the significant politicisation around fossil fuel‐based energy generation, these findings have important implications for the remaining coal phase‐outs worldwide.

Experimental research has shown that political parties often, but not always, suffer reputational costs when they change their policy positions. Yet, it is not clear who accepts and who rejects party policy change. Using newly collected observational data from five European countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom), we examine the individual‐level determinants of party policy change. We examine support for policy change with a new survey item that directly captures party policy change acceptance. We theorise that acceptance of party policy change varies as a function of individuals' political attitudes such as their level of interest in politics and their ideological positions, as well as their views about democratic decision‐making. Although we find that many citizens agree that change is sometimes necessary and understand the conditions and constraints that lead parties to alter their positions, we also show that populist attitudes have a strong negative effect on accepting party policy change. A textual analysis of an open‐ended survey item furthermore indicates that those who perceive party policy change negatively, associate change with opportunism and power‐seeking. Our results imply that even though parties have some leeway to change their positions when external conditions require them to do so, populist beliefs and anti‐elite sentiment make citizens rather sceptical of the motivations that parties have when they alter their positions.

Democracy and gender equality are increasingly contested in European parliamentary contexts, with the rise of political parties and movements that oppose feminist politics and the rights of women, LGBTI* and racialised people. Existing literature exploring far‐right and anti‐gender actors in institutional settings has focused on their discourse and impact on parliamentary politics and governments. Yet, limited attention has been paid to the feminist responses articulated in parliamentary contexts that face active opposition to gender and LGBTI* equality. This article addresses this gap by analysing feminist parliamentary responses to such opposition, and the factors that enable and constrain these responses, by undertaking a multi‐level comparison between the Catalan Parliament (2021–2024) and the Spanish Parliament (2019–2023), based on content analysis of 21 parliamentary debates and 42 in‐depth interviews.

We argue that the capacity of parliaments to respond to anti‐gender, far‐right opposition to gender, racial and LGBTI* equality is structured by macro‐, meso‐ and micro‐level enabling and constraining factors that include the state of democracy and its legacies, state structure, the constellation of anti‐gender and pro‐equality forces, the institutionalisation of equality, and the role of critical actors. By identifying a range of feminist strategies employed in the Spanish and Catalan parliamentary contexts – including ‘knowledge’, ‘coalition‐building’, ‘rule‐making’ and ‘everyday pragmatic engagement’ – this article contributes to developing the emerging scholarly field of feminist institutional responses to anti‐gender politics, thereby advancing the theory of feminist institutionalism, state feminism and anti‐gender politics in parliamentary contexts.

This study examines interest groups’ agenda‐setting influence, a question extensively theorised but lacking empirical investigation. Specifically, it explores whether business groups are more effective than citizen groups in pushing their ‘dream’ issues on the policy agenda while keeping their ‘nightmare’ issues off. Empirically, I rely on a content analysis of 818 media articles, 37 interviews with public officials and 148 interviews with interest representatives, all involved in 56 EU policy issues. The findings demonstrate that citizen groups are more influential in the agenda‐setting stage when compared to their business counterparts, particularly when they garner media visibility. These results bear important implications for democratic governance, offering new insights into the political influence wielded by interest groups.

This paper examines why some ethnic minorities in Europe have successful ethnic parties while others pursue their political interests through mainstream parties. To study differential success of ethnic minorities in establishing successful ethnic parties, I adapt threats‐vs‐resources approach, comparing relative importance of ethnic threats (acting as motivator for collective political activism) and ethnic resources (providing different opportunities facilitating ethnic mobilization). Empirically, I focus on the post‐Cold War period, including ethnic minorities in Western and Eastern Europe. I find that both ethnic threats and ethnic resources matter for success of ethnic parties. I show that increased salience of issues tied to ethnicity, either through promotion of majority ethnonationalism, or through advancement of minority ethnic rights, can foster successful ethnic parties. I also show that the logic behind successful minority political mobilization differs between Western and Eastern Europe.

The ideological fit between party grassroots and leaderships has long been a concern for political science, with members in general, and young members in particular, thought to be more radical. However, we do not know, first, whether this is still the case and, if it is, what drives members in different ideological directions. To investigate, we propose a new typology of members as radicals, moderates and aligned, and develop a theoretical framework that accounts for how political socialization and party contexts drive congruence and incongruence. We test this using YOUMEM survey data from over 4,000 members of 12 youth wings in six countries. Our results show that while radicals are the largest group in most youth wings, they are more common on the centre‐left than the centre‐right. They tend to have been in the youth wing for longer than aligned members, but are under‐represented among politically ambitious members. Our findings thus shed light on opinion structures within political parties and provide a typology for future research on intra‐party cohesion.

How do welfare systems affect natives' attitudes to immigration? The impact of immigration on public support for welfare and redistribution has received considerable scholarly attention, but we know much less about how welfare policies shape citizens' views about immigration. We focus on two mechanisms: an instrumental channel and a values‐based approach. Our empirical strategy is two‐pronged. Hierarchical models leveraging variation in immigration attitudes and welfare generosity both between countries and over time (2002–2019) suggest that more comprehensive welfare regimes are associated with more positive views of immigrants. Furthermore, a regression discontinuity design drawing on a natural experiment in Denmark reveals that hostility towards immigrants increased following the announcement of a welfare retrenchment reform. Together, these analyses shed light on how the welfare state influences immigration attitudes.

We examine long‐run effects of automation risk on turnout. We expect gendered negative effects because men's turnout is more sensitive to job loss and earnings, but negative effects might be offset by populist right‐wing mobilization on economic grievances. We rely on population‐wide administrative data to avoid well‐known biases in survey data. We find both men and women with high automation risk to suffer in the labour market, but automation risk is associated with lower turnout for men only. The negative association with turnout is weaker where the populist right is stronger, consistent with mobilization on economic grievances. Finally, we show experimentally that priming of automation risk produces null findings, suggesting that risks need to have material consequences to affect political behaviour. Our findings imply that technological change has contributed to the emergence of gender gaps in turnout and populist voting as well as the participation drop among the working class.

Urban–rural divides are large and growing in many national elections, but the sources of this widening divide are not well understood. Recent research has pointed to policy disagreement as one possible mechanism for this growing divide; if urban and rural residents hold increasingly dissimilar policy preferences, this disagreement could produce ever‐widening urban–rural electoral divides. We investigate this possibility by creating a synthesized dataset of nearly 1000 policy issue questions across 10 distinct Canadian national election studies conducted between 1993 and 2021 (N = 5.3 million), combined with a measure of the urban or rural character of every federal electoral district. This dataset allows us to measure urban–rural policy disagreement across a much larger range of policy issues and over a much longer time period than has previously been possible. We find strong evidence of urban–rural policy disagreement across a range of issues, and especially in areas of cultural policy, including questions relating to gun control, immigration and Indigenous affairs. We further find strong support for the ‘progressive cities’ hypothesis; in nearly all policy domains, urban residents support more left‐wing positions on policy issues than rural residents. However, we find no evidence these urban–rural policy divides have grown since the 1990s. Urban–rural policy disagreement, while large and meaningful, cannot explain the ever‐widening urban–rural political divide.

Political parties face inherent risks when making election promises, as voters tend to penalize them for unfulfilled commitments. Nonetheless, parties make hundreds of promises. Why do parties engage in such precarious behaviour? I argue that parties employ a policy‐committing strategy when they need to increase the credibility of their policy programme and that they do so more today than previously because the political landscape has changed considerably in many Western democracies (time trend). Moreover, I expect parties to use the policy‐committing strategy more when they operate in a political arena with more competitors (system‐level factor), when they are a mainstream party (party‐level factor) and when they have increased the saliency of an issue (issue‐level factor). I test these four expectations with a unique, new dataset containing 330,850 quasi‐sentences coded from party manifestoes in 11 countries covering several decades of elections. Empirically, I find support for a time trend and show strong effects for the party‐level and issue‐level factors. However, a more competitive environment at the system level makes parties less, not more, likely to use the policy‐committing strategy. These results have important implications for party strategies, issue competition and policymaking in today's democracies.

Online public consultations are an instrument frequently used by governments to invite citizens and interest organisations to participate in the formulation of public policies. A key feature of the consultation design is the prerogative of policymakers to send formal invitations to consultations with stakeholders. The extent to which these invitations shape the patterns of stakeholder participation in online consultations is a relevant theoretical and empirical research puzzle that remains largely overlooked in the literature on participatory governance and bureaucratic policymaking. Our study addresses this gap in research and asks: Do government invitations to consultations increase the levels and diversity of stakeholder participation in online public consultations? We explain when and why the number of government invitations is systematically associated with higher levels of participation and diversity of stakeholder interests and how this systematic co‐variation is conditional upon the policy act type on which the government consults. We test our argument on a new dataset containing information about 251,153 instances of stakeholder participation in 4062 online public consultations organised by the Norwegian government across all policy areas during 2009–2023. We find that a higher number of government invitations is systematically associated with significantly higher stakeholder participation, higher diversity of interests represented and a higher likelihood of and more frequent citizen participation. This positive association is, however, moderate in size and is also conditional upon policy act type. Invitations increase participation and stakeholder diversity more in consultations on legislative acts and government reports relative to all other acts. These are acts on which the demand for stakeholder participation successfully meets stakeholders’ interest in supplying it. Our study underscores the importance of government invitations as a relevant feature of consultation design that shapes patterns of participation in public consultations while accounting for the impact of the policy context in which consultations are organised.

When do politicians debate each other in parliament, and when do they prefer to avoid discourse? While existing research has shown MPs to unilaterally leverage the dialogical nature of legislative debates to their advantage, the circumstances facilitating actual discursive interaction have so far received less attention. We introduce a new framework to study the emergence of discourse in political debates. Applying this framework, we expect ideological differences and government–opposition dynamics to shape politicians' choices about seeking or avoiding discourse. To test these hypotheses, we draw on an original dataset of all 14,595 attempted and successful interventions (Zwischenfragen) – extraordinary, voluntary discursive exchanges between speakers and MPs in the audience – in the German Bundestag (1990–2020), extracted using an annotation pipeline developed specifically for this study. We find that MPs separated by diverging preferences seek discourse with one another more often than their ideologically aligned counterparts. At the same time, these exact attempts do less frequently result in discursive interactions. When considering government–opposition dynamics in this process, we observe very similar patterns: Attempts to initiate discourse are particularly common among opposition MPs facing government speakers, and we find tentative evidence suggesting that government actors are most likely to avoid these invitations to discursive interaction. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of elite behaviour in public environments.

Do border closures affect political attitudes? While a large body of research has discussed the effects of the COVID‐19 pandemic on nationalism and outgroup hostility, much less is known about how one of the main policy responses to stop the virus, closing the national borders, has impacted political attitudes. We argue that the sudden and unprecedented closures of national borders in the COVID‐19 crisis decreased EU support and increased hostility towards immigrants. These closures signalled that people from across the border are a threat to public health and showed little trust in European governance. We have collected fine‐grained regional data on COVID‐19‐related border closures in Germany that we matched with survey data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel. We rely on a difference‐in‐differences design to estimate the causal effect of closed borders on European identity and outgroup hostility. While we find that border closures decrease EU support and increase hostility towards immigrants, these effects fade away relatively quickly. Hence, our study suggests that border closures have only limited impact on political attitudes. Our findings have important implications for the growing literature on border politics in the EU and elsewhere.

This study examines the ideological alignment of beliefs within opposing partisan camps in Europe. Integrating multiple types of research, I hypothesize that partisans on the ideological left exhibit greater alignment in their beliefs compared to those on the right – an asymmetry that extends across various issues. I argue that on the scale of ideological contention, it matters if partisans on one ideological pole are more aligned in beliefs than those on the other. Only the less ideological of opposing camps determines the extent of mutual disagreement. Utilizing conventional methods and innovative belief network modelling, I analyse survey data from the fourth and eighth waves of the European Social Survey (2008, 2016). To test the hypothesis, I match partisans with the data on their party's ideology, covering partisans from 131 parties in 15 European countries to test this hypothesis. My findings reveal that, both at the European level and within national contexts, there is a broad and substantive asymmetry between the right and the left across ideological dimensions and issues. However, the study also uncovers the limits of this asymmetry, highlighting a significant shift in ideological alignment on sociocultural issues on the right, indicating the emergence of a deeper, broader ideological conflict in that dimension. Furthermore, my analysis demonstrates the marginal influence of strategies like position blurring and programmatic nicheness. These insights shed light on the nature of partisan contention in Europe and how it disproportionately depends on ideological alignment on the right.

Social media platforms offer MPs the opportunity to directly signal attention to their local voters in the constituency. And while previous research has linked the strategic use of such local cues in social media posts to electoral motives, we know very little about their effectiveness. In this study, we trace the impact of local cues in social media posts in three steps. First, we revisit the claim that MPs are electorally motivated in their use of local cues by analysing 1,316,458 Tweets by Swiss and German national MPs (2009–2019). Second, we use survey experiment data (N = 16,597) to gauge whether voters reward local cues in social media posts with a higher likelihood of voting for a politician. Lastly, we investigate whether MPs' use of explicit local cues in Tweets leads them to obtain more preference votes in Swiss National Council elections (2011–2019). The overall image that emerges from these results is that while politicians use local cues particularly when campaigning, they are not directly electorally rewarded: both the results based on experimental and observational data do not provide evidence for the idea that adding local cues to social media posts comes with an electoral advantage.

A well‐established body of research has highlighted the importance of geographic representation in party‐centred political systems. In party‐centred systems, geographic ties are commonly expressed through non‐binding legislative instruments such as parliamentary questions. While this literature has advanced our understanding of representation in parliamentary systems, there are notable gaps in the existing research. Most importantly, previous studies have almost exclusively analysed geographic representation in national politics, where legislators represent comparatively large electoral districts. In contrast, this study focuses on patterns of geographic representation at the local level to understand whether and how specific neighbourhoods are represented in local politics. By studying parliamentary questions in 12 German city councils, we assess party efforts to represent their electoral strongholds. Methodologically, we go beyond existing research on geographic representation by building comprehensive dictionaries to assess geographic representation based on geolocated data from Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. The results show that geographic representation is a common feature of local politics and that parties tend to focus on areas where they are electorally strong, particularly when they are incentivized to do so by the electoral system and when their electorate is highly localized.

Recent studies suggest that citizens are unlikely to trade off free elections for other desirable outcomes, such as economic growth. However, while free elections are central to democracies, today democracy is not often undermined by abolishing elections. Our study shifts the focus to citizens' willingness to trade off the more granular democratic principles frequently eroded in backsliding processes – such as judicial independence, media freedom or horizontal accountability – for higher incomes. Through a seven‐country conjoint experiment, we analyse how citizens prioritize among these principles and estimate their ‘willingness to pay’ – or the additional income needed to persuade citizens to give these principles up. We find that while citizens do not relinquish free elections easily, they are more open to forgo liberal principles undermined in backsliding processes, especially when these principles are eroded gradually, one at a time. These findings help explain why democratic backsliding may be often tolerated by citizens.

Can communicative interventions by the government influence political trust and increase public compliance during crises? This study examines the impact of a televised speech by German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Using an unexpected‐events‐during‐survey‐design, we find that the speech led to a 7‐percentage point increase in trust in the federal government and up to a 25‐percentage point decrease in citizens' mobility. We also observe demographic variation in susceptibility to speech. We explore the underlying mechanisms by comparing Merkel's speech with similar televised addresses by Mark Rutte and Boris Johnson, where we observe no comparable effects on attitudes. We suggest that specific content, such as an emphasis on solidarity and positive sentiment, may have played a role in mobilizing public support. Our findings indicate that effective leader communication can be a powerful tool for sustaining public support and ensuring compliance with crisis measures.