The focus is on the problem of dimensionality of left–right evaluations in mass publics. Starting from findings of earlier research showing that the left–right dichotomy can be interpreted in terms of a partisan and a value/issue component, it is argued here that the latter component has to be further differentiated into a more general value preference and a pro-/anti-establishment component. A subsidiary hypothesis maintains that the establishment component shows substantial life-cycle effects. This differentiation thus can help to clarify conceptually the aging–conservatism thesis. The analysis reveals an age-specific split on the meaning of Left and Right. While older cohorts interpret these terms predominantly via the traditional partisan frame of reference, in younger cohorts the value- and anti-establishment components overwhelmingly explain left–right evaluations. These effects are strongest in the group of university-educated younger-age cohorts. This is a reversal of the traditional alignments of the better educated; in Germany they have had a position closer to the Right. Education thus has become the basis of a new left–right conflict. In addition, in all the younger cohorts, the value components are increasingly detached from the traditional partisan frame. The ‘floating’ New Left has distanced itself from the established Left–Right camps to focus upon the new German party, the Greens.

Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), the first comprehensive antislavery treatise authored by a black writer in the West, was quickly published in an anonymous French translation, Réflexions sur la traite et l’esclavage des Nègres, Traduite de l’Anglais, d’Ottobah Cugoano, afriquain, esclave à la Grenade et libre en Angleterre (Paris, 1788). Marshalling several forms of evidence—bibliographical, book-historical, biographical, and textual—this article argues that it seems highly probable that the French politician and abolitionist the Marquis de Condorcet was the principal agent in bringing Cugoano’s jeremiad to the French reading public. Tendering the first scholarly assessment of the publication and reception of this translation, the essay situates the Réflexions in the contexts of Condorcet’s own abolitionist writings and the work of the Société des amis de noirs, which he helped to found.

Veto player theory generates predictions about governments’ capacity for policy change. Due to the difficulty of identifying significant laws needed to change the policy status quo, evidence about governments’ ability to change policy has been mostly provided for a limited number of reforms and single‐country studies. To evaluate the predictive power of veto player theory for policy making across time, policy areas and countries, a dataset was gathered that incorporates about 5,600 important government reform measures in the areas of social, labour, economic and taxation policy undertaken in 13 Western European countries from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐2000s. Veto player theory is applied in a combined model with other central theoretical expectations on policy change derived from political economy (crisis‐driven policy change) and partisan theory (ideology‐driven policy change). Robust support is found that governments introduce more reform measures when economic conditions are poor and when the government is positioned further away from the policy status quo. No empirical support is found for predictions of veto player theory in its pure form, where no differentiation between government types is made. However, the findings provide support for the veto player theory in the special case of minimal winning cabinets, where the support of all government parties is sufficient (in contrast to minority cabinets) and necessary (in contrast to oversized cabinets) for policy change. In particular, it is found that in minimal winning cabinets the ideological distance between the extreme government parties significantly decreases the government's ability to introduce reforms. These findings improve our understanding of reform making in parliamentary democracies and highlight important issues and open questions for future applications and tests of the veto player theory.

This article analyses the mechanisms establishing time consistency of constitutions. It explains why shorter and more locked constitutions are more likely to be time consistent (change less) and that long constitutions are more time inconsistent (change more, despite locking). Empirical evidence from all of the democratic countries in the world indicates that the length and locking of constitutions are not independent criteria, and that their combination leads to less time consistency. To address this inter‐relationship, a measure of time inconsistency (a combination of locking and amendment rate) is developed and it is demonstrated that it is connected with the length of constitutions. The article shows how time inconsistency is incompatible with theories of ‘constitutional amendment culture’ not only at the theoretical level, but also empirically. Finally, the article proves that the empirical finding that the length of constitutions is related to lower per capita income and higher corruption are not only in agreement with time inconsistency arguments, but this also extends beyond OECD countries to all democracies.

This article analyses how high‐level bureaucrats evaluate the leadership of technocrat and partisan cabinet ministers in different roles of policymaking. The argument is that bureaucrats perceive ministers with policy expertise to have a central role in policymaking, especially in policy‐directing tasks. Despite their essential contribution to coalition formation, ministers with political experience are negatively evaluated in all policymaking roles. The article presents evidence based on an endorsement experiment conducted with the high‐level bureaucracy in Brazil. The results show that ministers with policy experience receive positive evaluations from the bureaucracy in policy formulation and implementation roles but not to carry out political coordination activities with the presidency or the legislature. Ministers with a partisan profile receive negative evaluations in all tasks of the policy process. Exploring the mechanism, we show that the negative assessment of ministers with a partisan profile is maintained even when the profile of the bureaucrat is considered. These results show the negative attitudes of high‐level bureaucrats towards partisan ministers in contexts of substantial patronage and corruption and contribute to the debate on ministerial appointments and their implications for policymaking.

In this article, the effects of regional autocratic linkage on the survival of autocratic regimes are analysed. Scholars have suggested that regional factors shape regime survival through processes of diffusion. However, in most accounts, diffusion is simply derived from characteristics of the region, such as the number or proportion of regional autocracies. In contrast, it is argued here that it is the actual linkages between countries that must be examined. Regional political, economic and social ties between autocratic regimes create domestic and external stakes in the regime, counterweigh democratisation pressure and facilitate autocratic learning. The study employs the average volume of trade, migration and diplomatic exchanges between autocratic regimes within a region as proxies for regional autocratic linkage, and asserts that regional autocratic linkage is on the rise. Applying Cox survival models on a dataset of regional autocratic linkage and regime survival between 1946 and 2009, it is found that regional autocratic linkage significantly reduces the likelihood of autocratic regime breakdown. These effects hold when the proportion of autocratic regimes within a region is controlled for, suggesting that one must look beyond the characteristics of the countries within a region and focus on the ties and linkages between them.

Traditionally, party systems are classified by the number of parties they include. More recently their coalitional possibilities have been taken into account, even though policy positions of parties were ignored. Closed Minimal Range Theory holds that parliamentary coalitions in support of a government will consist of parties that are adjacent on an ordinal scale of social-economic policy positions, and will span a range along that scale that is no larger than is necessary for the coalition in order to control a majority of seats in the voting body. This theory, which has achieved very satisfactory empirical results, allows the classification of parties according to the number of closed minimal range coalitions they are part of in a given situation. There is always a party that is a member of every such closed minimal range coalition; in actual fact such pivotal parties may maintain this position for very long periods and were found to be a member of the government in 104 out of 108 coalitions studied. Party systems may be classified according to the number of closed minimal range coalitions they present in a given situation and whether or not all parties are included in at least one such coalition. Coalitional situations in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden since 1918, and in Israel since 1948, Italy since 1945, in the French IVth Republic, and the German Weimar Republic are presented in a table and discussed briefly.

In addition to immigration grievances, research shows that radical right voters grieve societal developments regarding gender equality and sexual freedom. Adding to research treating these grievances separately, this article advances a joint understanding of these grievances. I analyse interviews with voters of the German radical right Alternative für Deutschland for perceptions about discrimination and (dis)advantages of natives versus immigrants, men versus women and cis‐hetero versus LGBTQI+ people. I find similar argumentations about these social groups: Most interviewees do not perceive existing structural discrimination. They further perceive zero‐sum dynamics between advances for outgroups and losses for ingroups. In doing so, they consider different ingroup and outgroup characteristics, resulting in perceptions of different material and symbolic (dis)advantages for different groups and a hitherto under‐researched perception of legal (dis)advantages. Additionally, some interviewees jointly refer to various social groups in an expression of ‘multidimensional’ grievances, and some refer to the intersections between several ingroup and outgroup identities in determining a person's (dis)advantages. The parallels in argumentation and the perceptions of multidimensional and intersectional grievances highlight the importance of jointly studying different kinds of cultural grievances.

Can a directly elected European Parliament help deliver standards by which the European Union can be indirectly legitimated through its component national democracies? This article argues that the Union can be indirectly legitimate where it helps member state democracies meet their own obligations to their own publics. The Union can do just that by managing externalities in ways needed to secure core values of justice, democracy and freedom from arbitrary domination within member states. Yet that poses a predicament: for if any one member state has an interest in imposing negative externalities or in freeriding on positive externalities provided by another, then so may its voters and democratic institutions. The article argues a directly elected European Parliament can help manage that predicament both by identifying externalities and by ensuring their regulation meets standards of public control, political equality and justification owed to individual national democracies.

Path planning, as a critical component of mobile robotic systems, significantly impacts operational efficiency and energy consumption ratios. State-of-the-art algorithms often suffer from inadequate real-time adjustment capability, insufficient dynamic environment adaptation, and suboptimal computational efficiency. To resolve these limitations, we propose a bidirectionally optimized path planning algorithm named Bidirectional Q-learning LPA* (BQ-LPA*), which incorporates three key innovations. Specifically, to enhance the global search capability of the LPA* framework, we replace fixed heuristic functions with a Q-learning-driven adaptive heuristic mechanism, which improves path quality through dynamic heuristic weighting and update strategies. Additionally, to improve the convergence rate and sample efficiency of Q-learning in complex environments, we propose integrating the LPA* framework to provide prior knowledge guidance, which can effectively minimize redundant exploration attempts by informed pathfinding initialization. Moreover, the Q-learning method inherently faces dimensionality challenges in high-dimensional continuous spaces, which manifest as action space congestion, storage bottlenecks, and computational inefficiency. To mitigate these risks, we devise an LPA*-based space discretization strategy that can reduce action space dimensionality and preserve the path feasibility. Experimental results show that, compared with mainstream path planning algorithms, BQ-LPA* achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence in mobile robot path planning.

When Ehud Barak formed his government, following his impressive success in the May 1999 elections, the government enjoyed a formal majority of 73 Members of Knesset (MKs), with even larger informal support. The coalition formation was not ‘closed’ (‘connected’) as one major political party (Likud) and a couple of minor political parties (Am Ehad and the party established by Yisrael Ba’Aliyah defectors, Democratic Choice) remained in opposition although one could claim that all three did belong within the policy range of Barak I.

This study focuses on the exit of MPs of underrepresented groups – that is, women, visible minorities and the lower educated– from parliamentary parties. Research has mostly focused on what brings these politicians into parliament, but not on what determines their survival within parliamentary parties. Based on the economic and sociological literature on organisations, we develop the homophily hypothesis, positing that MPs from underrepresented groups will be more likely to exit their parliamentary party if their share within the parliamentary party is low. Utilising the PATHWAYS dataset, based on 5,889 unique MPs that served during 37 legislative periods across eight Western European countries between 1991 and 2015, this hypothesis is confirmed. These findings have important implications for the literature on descriptive representation and legislative turnover.

This paper examines the qualities of governments that influence their perceived trustworthiness, presenting the first experimental study of the distinct roles of ‘competence’, ‘benevolence’ and ‘integrity’ (CBI) in shaping trust in government. We empirically test the effects of these three dimensions of trustworthiness through conjoint experiments conducted in five countries: Britain, Croatia, Spain, Argentina and France. The results indicate that benevolence – government acting in citizens' interests – is the most significant determinant of trust judgements across individuals and nations. Competence and integrity have a secondary, approximately equal effect. Building on recent advances in analyses of conjoint experiments, we explore how these attributes are conditional on each other, and how respondent characteristics moderate those effects. The findings reveal that the effects of attributes are generally consistent, although respondent left‐right ideology moderates the impact of government competence.

This article examines a neglected but fundamental facet of electoral accountability: responsibility attribution under grand coalition governments. Contrary to much of the existing literature that focuses on retrospective voting, this article focuses on responsibility attribution testing the effect of perceived performance of the government and partisan attachments for parties in grand coalition governments. Novel survey questions on responsibility attribution from Austria and Germany show that when the lines of responsibility are blurred, partisanship functions as an important heuristic for all voters including supporters of opposition parties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of electoral accountability and political representation in grand coalition governments.

Earlier research has shown a strong connection between anti‐immigration attitudes and political trust in Western Europe. In this research note, we examine if nativists’ low levels of specific political support translate into a more general scepticism about democracy as a system of government. Using comparative data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the European Values Study (EVS), we investigate the relationship between nativist attitudes and several indicators of principled, or diffuse, support for democracy. The findings testify to a nativist divide in diffuse political support. We find a systematic and significant difference in support for democracy between strong nativists and other citizens. West European nativists are less likely than other citizens to view their country as democratic. They also tend to perceive living in a democracy as less important than people with a more positive outlook on immigrants. Moreover, and maybe more worrying, nativists express lower levels support for democracy in relation to non‐democratic regime alternatives, that is, they are less likely to be “principled” democrats. The found negative associations remain also after controlling for nativists’ levels of specific support, which indicates that there may be a more fundamental opposition between nativism and diffuse support for democracy than previously acknowledged. We believe that these findings have important implications for research trying to understand challenges to liberal democracy in a time when nativist parties have been successful in politicizing immigration and continue to score electoral victories all over Europe.

Emigrants’ ideologies and partisan attitudes may diverge from other voters’: overseas voters are ideologically self‐selected, receive distinctive information about campaigns and have experiences abroad that are likely to shape their political views. Parties, anticipating these emigrant attitudes, can manipulate overseas voting availability to give the vote primarily to their own supporters. Alternatively, parties may expect newly enfranchised voters to provide electoral support in gratitude for the right to vote. To distinguish these separate processes, this project undertakes a case study of Turkey to trace a ruling party's strategic expectations as it makes overseas‐enfranchisement decisions. To see how generalisable these results are, the study further extends to a statistical analysis of differences in vote choice between voters at home and abroad across all 23 European countries that report overseas votes separately, using an original dataset encompassing 121 elections. Both the case study and the statistical analysis suggest that emigrant‐enfranchising parties tend to garner overseas voters’ support in a lasting way. This suggests that overseas enfranchisement most often appears to involve incumbent parties (correctly) expecting long‐term ideological compatibility with their overseas nationals, not simply exchanging the franchise for short‐term, transactional support.