For outside observers, Northern Ireland probably dominated the news from Ireland in 2000 but ‘the North’ was less of an issue within the Republic. Domestic matters were more important to the people of the fastest growing economy in the EU.

A key function of centralized budgets in federal and political unions is to act as an equalizing mechanism to support economic and social cohesion. This is also the case with the European Union's (EU) budget, which operates as a redistributive mechanism that counteracts the cross‐national and cross‐regional inequalities created by the single market. Despite the limits on cross‐national redistribution imposed by a centrifugal system of representation, the net fiscal position of member states – what they pay to the EU budget minus what they receive from it – is very diverse and has changed quite remarkably over the last decades. In this paper, we investigate how and why the net fiscal position of each member state toward the rest of the EU changes over time. We develop a novel panel dataset (1979–2014) to study how key national and EU‐level political and economic variables affect the EU redistributive dynamics. We find that redistribution via the EU budget primarily targets developments in inequality within EU member states, and that an increase in domestic unemployment may also improve the country's fiscal balance. Moreover, we find that voting power in the Council is unrelated to a more positive fiscal balance. However, we find that governments with a centre‐right profile are in general more successful in improving their redistributive position vis‐à‐vis the other member states. This may create a problem of budgetary ‘rent extraction’.

How do politicians in advanced democracies get away with violating political norms? Although norm violators confront a powerful establishment that can penalize them, norm violations currently occur in many advanced democracies. This article analyzes the conflicts between norm‐violating challengers and established politicians and parties as norm defenders in multiparty systems to contribute to the discipline's understanding of norm erosion processes. Based on diachronic and synchronic comparisons of conflicts over norm violations in Austria and Germany, the article reveals how political challengers can already damage democratic norms from a position of institutional weakness. Norm violators that make ambiguous provocations and can leverage their previously acquired democratic credentials, can more credibly dispel attempts to stigmatize them as undemocratic. In doing so, they turn the tables on the political establishment and portray its sanctions as a form of ‘excessive retaliation’ that constitutes a norm violation in itself. The article concludes with the unsettling finding that (verbal) norm protection can facilitate norm erosion.

Governments around the world are experimenting with deliberative mini‐publics as a means of integrating public input into policymaking processes, including as a method for directly creating policy. This raises the important question of when ordinary people will judge the outputs of mini‐publics to be legitimate and support their use. We investigate how public support for mini‐publics is shaped by: (1) whether the mini‐public is held in response to calls from politicians or from the general public; (2) which political party sets up the mini‐public; and (3) whether there is partisan conflict surrounding the mini‐public's creation. To do so, we use two pre‐registered survey experiments fielded in the United Kingdom that focus on climate assemblies, a prominent form of deliberative mini‐public. Results are three‐fold. First, we find some evidence that assemblies are more positively evaluated when they stem from the demands of local residents rather than partisan actors, but this effect is relatively modest and does not emerge consistently across our analyses. Similar findings are noted with regard to partisanship. Partisan conflict, by contrast, has a more robust effect – leading respondents to adopt more ideologically stereotypical views of the assembly, with left‐wing (right‐wing) respondents being more supportive of Labour‐sponsored (Conservative‐sponsored) assemblies.

This article explains legislative turnover in eight West European legislatures over 152 general elections in the period 1945–2015. Turnover is measured as the rate of individual membership change in unicameral or lower chambers. It is the outcome of a legislative recruitment process with a supply and a demand side. Decisions made by contenders affect supply, while decisions made by parties and voters influence demand. Such decisions are shaped by four political and institutional factors: the institutional context of political careers, or structure of political career opportunities; political party characteristics; electoral swings; and electoral systems. Ten specific hypotheses are tested within this theoretical framework. The structure of political career opportunities is the most decisive factor explaining variability in turnover rates, followed by electoral swings and political parties. Electoral systems show less substantive effects. Electoral volatility is the predictor with the most substantive effects, followed by duration of legislative term, strength of bicameralism, regional authority, gender quotas, level of legislative income and district magnitude.

Researchers on inequalities in representation debate about whether governments represent the preferences of the rich better than those of less affluent citizens. We argue that problems of high‐ and low‐status citizens are treated differently already at the agenda‐setting stage. If affluent and less affluent citizens have different priorities about which issues should be tackled by government, then these divergent group priorities explain why government favours high‐ over low‐status citizens. Due to different levels of visibility, resources and social ties, governments pay more attention to what high‐status citizens consider important in their legislative agenda and pay less attention to the issues of low‐status citizens. We combined three types of data for our research design. First, we extracted the policy priorities (most important issues) for all status groups from Eurobarometer data between 2002 and 2016 for 10 European countries and matched this information with data on policy outcomes from the Comparative Agendas Project. We then strengthen our results using a focused comparison of three single country studies over longer time series. We show that a priority gap exists and has representational consequences. Our analysis has important implications for the understanding of the unequal representation of status groups as it sheds light on an important, yet so far unexplored, aspect of the political process. Since the misrepresentation of political agendas occurs at the very beginning of the policy‐making process, the consequences are potentially even more severe than for the unequal treatment of preferences.

The year 1999 in Swedish politics was characterised by stability, despite a multitude of underlying tensions. The minority Social Democratic government faired badly in the opinion polls and performed disastrously in the European election. In addition, it suffered from internal tension, highlighted by the resignation of the Minister of Finance. Despite these problems, however, the government entered the new millennium remarkably intact. It remained in office, with the parliamentary support of the Left and Green parties, and could boast a successful economic record.

We know from previous research that an exclusionary reaction in public opinion is likely following a sudden and large‐scale influx of refugees of the sort experienced in many European countries in 2015. Yet, we know much less about the scope of these expected reactions. This article makes a conceptual and empirical contribution to the analysis of the scope of exclusionary reactions following a refugee crisis. Conceptually, we distinguish between three scope dimensions: substantive reach, duration and politicization. Empirically, we evaluate each of the scope dimensions using seven‐wave panel‐data collected before, during and after the large‐scale influx of refugees to Norway. We find that the expected exclusionary reaction (a) spilled over to opinion about immigration broadly speaking; (b) endured in that it lasted long after the situation in Norway had been brought under control; (c) encompassed voters of all political stripes. Nevertheless, we also document an important limitation to the scope of the reaction: The sudden influx of refugees to Norway did not cause a permanent shift in public opinion. Approximately two years after the situation had been brought under control, opinion about both refugee rights and immigration generally had reverted back to pre‐crisis baseline levels. Interestingly, the conceptual and empirical analysis suggests that public opinion dynamics following a sudden and large‐scale influx of refugees is similar to that found in response to other forms of large national or international crises.

This paper argues that issue salience divergence – the extent to which parties in a party system diverge in their allocation of salience across issues – is a key characteristic of party system decidability. Elections do not only matter in that politicians and parties with different policy positions may come to power. They can also matter if competing elites emphasize different issues. Using data from the MARPOR project and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I demonstrate that voters perceive greater differences between parties when parties propose agendas that diverge with respect to issue salience. Furthermore, I demonstrate that perceptions of differences between parties mediate the effect of issue salience divergence on respondents’ satisfaction with democracy and self‐reported voter turnout. These findings indicate that salience‐based differentiation influences the quality of party systems alongside the traditional party system characteristics with important implications for public opinion and political behavior.

Western democracies have developed complex policies to manage migration flows. Much of the scholarly literature and political discourse assume that countries have become increasingly selective and that they prioritise economic intakes. Despite clear efforts by policymakers to distinguish between refugees and migrant workers, we know surprisingly little about how countries combine different policy dimensions and which factors shape their relative openness to different target groups. In this article, we shed light on how countries combine two of the main admission channels, asylum and labour migration, by introducing the concept of the ‘immigration policy mix’. A comparative analysis of 33 OECD countries between 1980 and 2010 examines the pattern and drivers behind their immigration policy mix: Does the policy mix follow a pattern of convergence, is it subject to political dynamics or is it path dependent? The results reveal that despite a shift in political sympathies from asylum to labour migration, countries' immigration policy mixes have strongly converged into more liberal policies overall. The immigration policy mix primarily reflects governments’ limited room to manoeuvre due to competing political pressures. These insights demonstrate that the immigration policy mix serves to enhance our understanding of countries’ complex regulation of immigration.

In information environments characterized by institutional distrust, fragmentation and the widespread dissemination of conspiracies and disinformation, citizens perceive misinformation as a salient and threatening issue. Especially amidst disruptive events and crises, news users are likely to believe that information is inaccurate or deceptive. Using an original 19‐country comparative survey study across diverse regions in the world (N = 19,037), we find that news users are likely to regard information on the Russian war in Ukraine as false. They are more likely to attribute false information to deliberative deception than to a lack of access to the war area or inaccurate expert knowledge. Russian sources are substantially more likely to be blamed for falsehoods than Ukrainian or Western sources – but these attribution biases depend on a country's position on the war. Our findings reveal that people mostly believe that falsehoods are intended to deceive them, and selectively associate misinformation with the opposed camp.

2000 was the third year in a row in which Hungary was struck by serious floods of the Tisza River and its tributaries. In addition to actual damages, the government will have to spend more money in flood defence in the future because about one-third of the flood protection system is outdated and does not perform its function adequately. Luckily, the floods contributed to clearing the Tisza of the consequences of serious water pollution caused by cyanide released by a gold and silver producing factory in Romania. The damage was estimated at about US$100 million.

How are parties' ideological positions and levels of populism connected? Existing research either advocates for a U‐shaped relationship between parties' left‐right position and their degree of populism or uses specific dimensions of a two‐dimensional policy space to describe right‐wing populist parties. We provide an integrated perspective to describe parties' degree of populism by arguing that populism is higher when parties put strong emphasis on a collectivist host ideology. This has implications on how these ideologies relate to the two‐dimensional policy space. Combined with salience of policy dimensions, such a perspective allows for a better understanding of the occurrence of populism among right‐ and left‐wing populist parties. Using expert survey data on parties in Europe, we find strong and robust empirical support for the expected patterns.

Radical‐right parties have gradually penetrated the political mainstream in many liberal democracies, marking a trend of ‘democratic backsliding’. We propose that women's increasing visibility as representatives of radical‐right agendas makes democratic backsliders, their policies and their parties seem more legitimate, and may help explain their growing public acceptance. Our studies provide the first systematic examination of this hypothesis in three countries – Israel, Germany and the United States (N = 7203). In Studies 1a‐c, we show that voters perceive democracy‐eroding policies through a gendered lens – they attribute gender stereotypes to the parties promoting these policies and to the public supporting these policies. In Studies 2a‐c, we experimentally demonstrate the effect of politicians’ gender on public acceptance of democracy‐eroding policies, politicians and parties, and demonstrate the role of gender stereotypes in mediating this effect. Finally, we show that the audiences susceptible to the mainstreaming effect of politicians’ gender are precisely those that are often particularly repelled by radical‐right agendas and their perceived masculine image: Women and left‐wing voters.