Ordinary citizens can serve as a critical defence against democratic backsliding. But beneath the surface, citizens' commitment to democracy is sometimes fragile, with crises exacerbating existing anxieties. We introduce ‘democratic persuasion’ as an actionable intervention to foster the resilience of citizens' commitment to liberal democracy. ‘Democratic persuasion’ seizes the opportunity of communicating with wavering democrats. ‘Democratic persuasion’ entails actively making the case for democracy and discussing democracy's inherent trade-offs while engaging existing doubts and misperceptions. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which stirred frustrations with democracy and highlighted democratic trade-offs, we invited citizens via Facebook to participate in one of sixteen Zoom town halls to engage in discussions on pandemic politics with members of German state and federal parliaments. Each representative hosted two town halls, with random assignment to a condition of ‘democratic persuasion’ in one of the two town hall meetings. The field experiment yielded mixed results, demonstrating significant effects on some indicators of democratic commitment but not on others. This study contributes to the nascent body of research aimed at reinforcing the societal pillars of liberal democracies.

What determines countries’ successful transition to democracy? This article explores the impact of granting civil rights in authoritarian regimes and especially the gendered aspect of this process. It argues that both men's and women's liberal rights are essential conditions for democratisation to take place: providing both women and men rights reduces an inequality that affects half of the population, thus increasing the costs of repression and enabling the formation of women's organising – historically important to spark protests in initial phases of democratisation. This argument is tested empirically using data that cover 173 countries over the years 1900–2012 and contain more nuanced measures than commonly used. Through novel sequence analysis methods, the results suggest that in order to gain electoral democracy a country first needs to furnish civil liberties to both women and men.

Numerous studies show an association between military pressures and fiscal development, often based on cross-national correlations between wars and fiscal outcomes (e.g., tax ratios). However, investments in fiscal capacity may take time to yield higher tax revenues, obscuring the importance of factors that contributed to those investments. This article shifts attention from fiscal outcomes to the policymaking process. Using text-as-data techniques to analyse British parliamentary debates from 1803 to 1913, it offers new micro-level evidence of the relationship between military pressures and fiscal policymaking in the United Kingdom during the long 19th century. Our analyses show that military issues were associated with higher fiscal salience and lower contestation in tax debates. Qualitative analyses indicate that military issues were recurrently invoked to support the renewal of the personal income tax despite attempts to repeal it, confirming the close link between military and fiscal issues in shaping the modern British fiscal state.

In the context of public disaffection towards representative democracies, political leaders are increasingly establishing citizens’ assemblies to foster participatory governance. These deliberative fora composed of randomly selected citizens have attracted much scholarly attention regarding their theoretical foundations and internal functioning. Nevertheless, we lack research that scrutinizes the reasons why political leaders create such new institutions. This article fills this gap by analysing a specific case: the first permanent randomly selected citizens’ assembly that will work in collaboration with a parliament in the long-term (Ostbelgien, Belgium). This case is analysed through a framework that pays close attention to the context in which it developed, the profiles of political elites that supported its creation, as well as the multiple objectives it was vested with. The findings reveal that initiators of citizens’ assemblies fundamentally conceive them as a way to strengthen a polity's identity, to save the electoral model of democracy, and to restore the legitimacy of traditional political leaders. Our analysis of this particular conception lead us to argue for the need of developing context-sentive approaches to participatory and deliberative procedures, as well as to discuss whether we should consider the latter as mere elites’ legitimation tools.

Many scholars and policymakers see rising debt burdens in the industrialised world as the product of ageing populations. Prominent theoretical models of government debt accumulation – used to justify fiscal rules and austerity measures – explicitly assume that support for debt reduction decreases with age. While such models have been influential, the fundamental relationship between age and preferences for debt has not been tested empirically. We test this argument but further theorise that the relationship between age and debt preferences is non‐linear. While the elderly have a clear preference for ignoring debt burdens, we add that the young should also prefer to delay reckoning with high national debts given their low income and expectations of higher future earnings. Using survey data (N = 112,689), we find that age does have a small to modest non‐linear impact on concern for national deficits and debt burdens. Middle‐aged respondents are most concerned about debt reduction, while the young and old view reducing government debt as less of a policy priority. Notably, the relationship is strongest in countries with more generous old‐age benefits.

Does austerity influence incumbent support? Existing studies struggle with conceptualizing the evolution of austerity's impact over time, estimating a causal effect, and analysing the reactions of different voters. This study theorizes that the effect of austerity on electoral preferences is not immediate, but gradual, as voters find out about the measures' consequences via the media. It leverages a survey in the field at the time of the austerity announcement in Romania in 2010, additional survey data collected immediately after this event and comprehensive daily media coverage to show that austerity measures do not have an immediate impact on incumbent support, anticipated turnout and expressing a vote preference. Instead, there is a gradual effect that is associated with increased media attention to budgetary cuts. This natural experiment allows the estimation of the immediate causal effect of austerity on electoral intentions. Difference‐in‐differences (DID) models show that the announcement triggered a massive loss of support for the incumbent among those who had voted for the party in power only a few months before. Austerity also led to the demobilization of the governing party's supporters. There is no evidence that those most directly affected by the spending cuts are more likely to punish the incumbent party.

This article advances the literature on media effects by examining how contrasting partisan narratives influence support for regulation after a real-world corporate scandal. Using both multi-wave observational and randomized experimental data, we show that self-selected media exposure and experimentally assigned information shape public opinion in distinct ways. While scandals are narratives of regulatory failure, partisan media environments differently attribute blame for that failure. In two separate observational waves, only Democrats exposed to news about the FTX bankruptcy increased their support for crypto regulation. In the experiment, only Republicans shifted in favor of regulation. Research on media effects needs to take into account not only media content, but also the partisan information environments that expose citizens to that content.

This study analyses the dynamics of the global rare earth element market, with a focus on China’s dominant role as the primary supplier, which is crucial for the energy transition and digitalization. Using a game-theoretic approach, the research examines a potential duopoly market structure that may emerge over time, as well as potential shifts in supply from China to other countries in this scenario. It considers China’s low marginal costs and factors such as resource extraction and discoveries. Additionally, the study examines the strategic market interactions, the role of technological advancements, and policy support in shaping market outcomes. The methodology assumes that agents have limited foresight and use a learned value function to strategically assess outcomes based on their own and others’ actions, while accounting for environmental constraints.

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.

In 1999 most issues in Irish politics fall into one of three categories; Northern Ireland, the economy or the revelations about and attempts to reform the political process.

To what extent can the dramatic differences in social policy efforts in rich and poor countries be accounted for by genuinely political explanations? The hypothesis that is advanced in this article rests upon the combination of two schools of thought in comparative social policy analysis: socioeconomic models which focus attention on levels of economic wealth, need and demand for social security, and models of a comparative‐historiographic and political‐institutionalist nature. Empirical applications of socio‐economic models with lagged dependent variables reveal the existence of two deviant families of nations: overspenders in social policy (such as overspenders of social‐democratic complexion and of Christian‐democratic composition) and underspenders (such as superpowers in East and West as well as Japan and East Germany). The residuals that can be derived from these models are amenable to an explanation which resides in comparative‐historiographic political analysis of social policy.

This article asks whether the willingness of partisans to condone democratic backsliding is a uniquely American phenomenon and explores why partisans would tolerate a party leader subverting democratic norms. We focus on executive aggrandizement as a key mechanism through which democratic backsliding occurs and develop three potential explanations for why partisans would accept the weakening of checks on the power of the executive. First, in a context of affective polarization, partisans may condone executive aggrandizement in order to advantage their party and disadvantage the opponent. Second, partisans may be willing to trade off democratic norms in pursuit of their ideological agenda. Third, partisans may take cues from the behaviour of party elites. These explanations are tested using a candidate‐choice conjoint experiment administered to Americans and Canadians in 2019 that involved respondents choosing between hypothetical candidates in intra‐party contests. Regardless of party, partisans in both countries proved willing to choose candidates who would loosen legislative and judicial restraints on the executive. While the partisan advantage explanation only held for strong Republicans in the United States, partisans in Canada and the United States alike were apparently willing to weaken restraints on the executive for the sake of their ideological agendas, at least in the case of abortion. Finally, Republicans who approved of the Trump presidency were much less likely than other Republicans to punish undemocratic candidates, lending support to the cue‐taking explanation.

By ‘Time-Democracy’ is understood a system of representation and government formation in which the relative strength of a party or a coalition determines the fraction of an election period during which the party/coalition will be in executive office. This system is based upon the assumption that the structure of the legislative body as well as the length of the electoral period will be laid down in the constitution. Some questions related to the applicability and practical implementation of the system are discussed.

Leaders and members of parliament serve as a political party's public face. Their image casts a shadow in which observers interpret policy statements. It is hypothesized in this article that media cover and voters understand policy messages through the lens of prominent party members’ characteristics. Easy-to-observe descriptive traits, such as gender or ethnicity, cue parties’ policy priorities. Media are more likely to emphasise party messages on issues historically related to these groups when they are visible in the party's public image. Hypotheses from this theory are tested using data on prominent party members’ descriptive characteristics, policy statements and media coverage of statements from the European Election Studies. Data from the 1999, 2004 and 2009 European elections evidence support for the theory. Parties with more female representatives signal stronger emphasis on gendered issues in media reports. The results hold implications for understanding the ways in which parties deliver and voters receive campaign messages. This research offers an explanation for voters’ limited knowledge of parties’ policy positions; media reinforce existing gender stereotypes and voters’ predispositions by selectively reporting policy statements.

During the last two decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have argued that civil society is structurally deficient in postcommunist countries. Yet why have the seemingly strong, active and mobilised civic movements of the transition period become so weak after democracy was established? And why have there been diverging political trajectories across the postcommunist space if civil society structures were universally weak? This article uses a new, broader range of data to show that civil societies in Central and Eastern European countries are not as feeble as commonly assumed. Many postcommunist countries possess vigorous public spheres and active civil society organisations strongly connected to transnational civic networks able to shape domestic policies. In a series of time‐series cross‐section models, the article shows that broader measures of civic and social institutions are able to predict the diverging transition paths among postcommunist regimes, and in particular the growing gap between democratic East Central Europe and the increasingly authoritarian post‐Soviet space.

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.

Populist radical right parties are considerably more popular in some areas (neighbourhoods, municipalities, regions) than others. They thrive in some cities, in some smaller towns, and in some rural areas, but they are unsuccessful in other cities, small towns, and rural areas. We seek to explain this regional variation by modelling at the individual level how citizens respond to local conditions. We argue that patterns of populist radical right support can be explained by anxiety in the face of social change. However, how social change manifests itself is different in rural and urban areas, so that variations in populist radical right support are rooted in different kinds of conditions. To analyse the effects of these conditions we use unique geo‐referenced survey data from the Netherlands collected among a nationwide sample of 8,000 Dutch respondents. Our analyses demonstrate that the presence of immigrants (and particularly increases therein) can explain why populist radical right parties are more popular in some urban areas than in others, but that it cannot explain variation across rural areas. In these areas, local marginalization is an important predictor of support for populist radical right parties. Hence, to understand the support for the populist radical right, the heterogeneity of its electorate should be recognized.