Despite the government’s monotonous arguments over the previous months that an early election would endanger the country’s course into EMU, on 4 February Prime Minister K.Simitis actually announced an early election, to be held on 9 April. He thus completed his tactical triumph over ND leader K. Karamanlis, who had tried to force an early parliamentary election on the basis of the presidential election due in February (which would require 180 votes in Parliament). In December 1999, however, Karamanlis had himself been forced to declare his support for the incumbent President of the Republic, K. Stephanopoulos, whose re-election was therefore a foregone conclusion (see previous Yearbook.

Parties strive to set the ‘terms of the debate’ in elections by selectively emphasising issue areas that enhance their popular appeal. Yet, do citizens respond to parties’ issue emphasis, or do they mainly respond to objective factors such as economic and environmental conditions, crime rates, immigration flows, and so on? We report a time-series, cross-sectional analyses of the relationship between the public's issue attention, parties’ issue emphases and objective national conditions across seven issue areas in 13 western publics between 1971 and 2021, finding a strong association between objective conditions and citizens’ subsequent issue attention, but weaker associations to party system issue attention. There are stronger links, however, between parties’ issue emphases and their supporters’ subsequent attention.

Semi‐parliamentary government is a distinct executive‐legislative system that mirrors semi‐presidentialism. It exists when the legislature is divided into two equally legitimate parts, only one of which can dismiss the prime minister in a no‐confidence vote. This system has distinct advantages over pure parliamentary and presidential systems: it establishes a branch‐based separation of powers and can balance the ‘majoritarian’ and ‘proportional’ visions of democracy without concentrating executive power in a single individual. This article analyses bicameral versions of semi‐parliamentary government in Australia and Japan, and compares empirical patterns of democracy in the Australian Commonwealth as well as New South Wales to 20 advanced parliamentary and semi‐presidential systems. It discusses new semi‐parliamentary designs, some of which do not require formal bicameralism, and pays special attention to semi‐parliamentary options for democratising the European Union.

Immigration has historically been of low salience in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet, the region has consistently higher levels of ethnocentrism than the rest of Europe. Scholars argue that the East's limited politicization of immigration is due to its status as a region of emigration and the presence of ethnic minority ‘others’. I argue that this is changing. The politicization of the European refugee crisis by domestic elites has begun to refocus the sociocultural dimension on the immigration issue. Using structural equation models, I compare European Values Study data from 2008 and 2017 across 10 East European EU member states. I find evidence that traditionalist attitudes are more strongly related to anti‐immigration attitudes since the crisis, particularly for those who are interested in politics. Further, immigration attitudes are polarizing across the GAL‐TAN dimension and by education. Hence, immigration is bolstering a pre‐existing, socially structured divide around both nationalist and traditionalist values.

Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens’ trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent – giving voters a chance to ‘have their say’ – can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)-invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust-inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent-triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust-inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum – those most inclined to support the incumbent May-led Conservative government in 2017 – became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left-wing or non-Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust.

Many voters support the inclusion of technocrats in government. Yet we know very little about why technocrats are considered more appealing than traditional party representatives. In particular, it is unclear which advantages and disadvantages voters attach to the defining traits of technocratic ministers: party independence and expertise. We engage with this question drawing on a pre-registered survey experiment in Austria. We examine how manipulating ministers' party affiliation and expertise affects voters' perceptions of their issue competence and bargaining competence. Findings indicate that voters ascribe lower levels of issue competence to partisan ministers than to non-partisan ministers, notwithstanding their actual expertise, and that ministers' partisanship shrinks the positive effect of expertise on perceived issue competence. However, this ‘partisanship penalty’ disappears for supporters of the minister's party. Moreover, voters perceive partisanship as an advantageous trait with regard to a minister's bargaining competence. While voters like technocrats for their expertise and independence from party politics, our findings reveal nuanced perceptions, with voters still recognizing distinct advantages in being represented by party politicians.

Nutrient gaps are differences between recommended and actual intakes and are often based on the estimated average requirement (EAR), the average daily intake estimated to meet the requirement of 50% of healthy individuals. While nutrient gaps have been established in the general population, their presence in exercising adults has not been extensively investigated. In the present analyses, 681 dietary recalls were obtained from 226 healthy exercising adults (154 F, 72 M) using the Automated Self-Administered 24-h (ASA24®) Dietary Assessment Tool. Intakes of seventeen vitamins and minerals were compared to corresponding EAR values to determine if nutrient gaps were present. Additionally, the potential for sex differences in absolute and relative nutrient intakes was examined. Median intakes of vitamin D fell below the EAR in both female and male adults, with the median intake of vitamin E below the EAR in female adults only (p ≤ 0.003 for each). In female participants, >50% exhibited intakes below the EAR for calcium, folate, magnesium, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, and vitamin E. In male participants, >50% exhibited intakes below the EAR for vitamin C, vitamin D, and vitamin E. Sex differences were present for intakes in sixteen of seventeen micronutrients (p < 0.001 for each), with lower intakes observed in female adults. Collectively, the present analyses indicate underconsumption of some micronutrients, particularly in exercising female adults. The potential to improve vitamin and mineral intakes and attendant health and performance outcomes through targeted interventions in exercising adults should be explored in future research.

Existing research mainly analyzes mass attitudes towards the European Union (EU) from the national and individual‐level perspective. This paper adds to this literature by focusing on the relationship between EU support and subnational economic conditions, using harmonized survey data covering 40 years and 1.1 million respondents in 197 European regions. We first describe Europe's changing subnational conditions in terms of catch‐up, wealthy, declining and glass‐ceiling regions. The paper then develops and tests a set of hypotheses regarding the temporally dynamic relationship between EU attitudes and regions’ long‐ and short‐term economic conditions. Our analyses reveal important longitudinal variations in this relationship with low levels of geographic differentiation in public opinion giving way to clear spatial differences in recent years. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the Great Recession and Brexit have generated a new geography of both Euroscepticism in Europe's declining regions and EU support in its wealthy and catch‐up regions.

Building on to the earlier work by Stein Rokkan and by Douglas Rae, Victor Hanby, and John Loosemore on the relationship of parties' vote shares and seat shares at the district level in list proportional representation (P.R.) systems, we propose sets of formulas for (1) the thresholds of representation and exclusion that a party has to cross to win its first seat, and (2) the minimum and maximum proportions of the vote required to obtain a given number of seats. The electoral systems on which we focus our analysis are the main variants of list P.R. that have been used in practice: the d'Hondt, modified Saint-Laguë, and largest remainder systems. The thresholds of representation and the minimum vote shares tend to show greater differences among systems than the thresholds of exclusion and the maximum vote shares. These differences, however, may be outweighed by two other factors: the number of seats in a district, and the number of parties presenting lists.

The 1893 drought will, according to the science journal Nature in July, ‘unquestionably take its place among the recorded events of history, if regard be had to its intensity [and] the length of time during which it has lasted’. Communities reported being stretched beyond endurance. Rivers ran dry, reservoirs dropped to record lows, wells failed, and domestic water supplies were restricted to a few hours per day. But while the 1893 drought was severe, it was not unusual. As this article reveals, urban and rural communities faced regular droughts of varying intensity and duration during the long nineteenth century. What did this mean for them? Where previous interest in extreme weather events has focused on recovering historic patterns, or examined resilience or adaption, this article explores the lived experiences of drought to offer a new perspective on the impact of weather shocks and water scarcity on people’s lives. By combining evidence from meteorological reports, newspapers, official reports, and local government archives, the article undercovers the fragility of urban and rural water supplies and examines how behaviours were adapted in response to water scarcity and precarity.

Parties with left‐wing positions on economic issues and right‐wing (i.e., authoritarian) positions on cultural issues have been historically largely absent from the supply side of the policy space of Western European democracies. Yet, many citizens hold such left‐authoritarian issue attitudes. This article addresses the hypotheses that left‐authoritarian citizens are less likely to vote, less satisfied with the democratic process and have lower levels of political trust when there is a left‐authoritarian supply gap. Using data for 14 Western European countries from the European Social Survey 2008 in the main analysis, it is shown that left‐authoritarians are less likely to vote and exhibit lower levels of satisfaction with democracy and political trust. A supplementary analysis of national election studies from Finland before and after the electoral breakthrough of the left‐authoritarian True Finns Party in 2011 indicates that whether left‐authoritarians participate less and believe less in the efficacy of voting is contingent on the presence of a strong left‐authoritarian party. This study illuminates how constrained party supply in a two‐dimensional policy space can affect voter turnout as well as political support, and has broader implications for the potential further rise of left‐authoritarian challenger parties.

Multiparty government in parliamentary democracies entails bargaining over the payoffs of government participation, in particular the allocation of cabinet positions. While most of the literature deals with the numerical distribution of cabinet seats among government parties, this article explores the distribution of individual portfolios. It argues that coalition negotiations are sequential choice processes that begin with the allocation of those portfolios most important to the bargaining parties. This induces conditionality in the bargaining process as choices of individual cabinet positions are not independent of each other. Linking this sequential logic with party preferences for individual cabinet positions, the authors of the article study the allocation of individual portfolios for 146 coalition governments in Western and Central Eastern Europe. The results suggest that a sequential logic in the bargaining process results in better predictions than assuming mutual independence in the distribution of individual portfolios.

Research has consistently shown that women are less likely than men to participate in political parties as members and activists; this participation gender gap has persisted despite narrowing gender gaps in education, employment and in other types of political participation.  Yet while the gaps are widespread, their size varies greatly by country as well as by party.  To what extent do party organizational factors help explain these disparities? More pointedly, are there any lessons to be learned from past experiences about party mechanisms which might help to reduce these gaps? To answer these questions, this study investigates grassroots partisan participation in 68 parties in 12 parliamentary democracies, considering whether factors that have been shown to boost the number of women candidates and legislators are also associated with changing the traditionally male dominance of grassroots party politics.  We find evidence of links between some party mechanisms and higher women's intra‐party participation; however, because the same relationship holds for men's participation, they do not alter the participation gender gap. Only greater participation of women in parties’ parliamentary delegations is associated with smaller grassroots gender gaps. We conclude that parties which wish to close grassroots gender gaps should not rely solely on efforts aimed at remedying gender gaps at the elite level.

Measuring affective polarization, defined as the liking for one's political ingroup and the dislike for political outgroups, poses methodological challenges in multiparty systems: evaluations of seven, 13 or even more parties in a survey are costly, time‐consuming and demanding. Some studies therefore use subsets of parties to create brief affective polarization measures. However, it is unclear how this affects the construct and predictive validity of these brief measures, potentially causing problematic inferences. Across 39 countries ($N=\mathrm{>66},\mathrm{>880}$), we demonstrate that brief measures that include ratings of only three to five parties can maintain acceptable validity, as illustrated by strong correlations with full measures and consistent associations with political correlates. The construct and predictive validity of brief measures are best when selecting a set of large, ideologically diverse parties. We provide specific recommendations for the effective measurement of affective polarization in different multiparty systems.

There were two changes in the Clinton cabinet during 2000. In the first, Secretary of Commerce William Daley resigned in June to replace Tony Coelho as the head of the Gore presidential campaign. He was replaced by former congressman NormanMineta. The other change came in July, when Secretary of Veterans Affairs Togo West, whose two-year tenure had seen significant charges of mismanagement, resigned to return to the private sector. Hershel Gober became acting secretary.

What explains the variation in institutional adaptation of national parliaments to European integration? Whereas the existing literature has mainly focused on domestic conditions, this article explains institutional adaptation to integration by focusing on inter‐parliamentary diffusion. The argument draws on ‘learning’ mechanisms of diffusion on the demand side and on ‘emulation’ mechanisms on the supply side. Parliamentary demand for external inspiration is related to uncertainty about functional oversight institutions, and the selection of sources to perceptions of similarity and success. Demand arises in new European Union member parliaments and young democracies that then turn towards culturally alike countries and old democracies. Using spatial econometrics, support is demonstrated for the argument in the article while ruling out alternative diffusion mechanisms such as spatial proximity and learning from Scandinavian frontrunners once links along cultural similarity and democratic experience are controlled for. The results underline the limits of the ‘isolated polity’ approach in the comparative study of institutions in Europe's closely integrated political system, while also showing that, even in this favourable environment, diffusion pathways are contingent on the mechanisms generating demand among policy makers and shaping their selection of sources for external information.

Becoming a parent can affect the lives of men and women by introducing salient new social roles and identities, altered social networks and tighter constraints on financial resources and time. Even though modern family life has evolved in many important respects, parenthood continues to shape the lives of men and women in very different ways. Given that parenthood can change the lives of men and women in profoundly different ways, it seems that it would bring about changes in the way women and men think about politics and policy issues. Using data from the Wave 4 of the European Social Survey, this article investigates how parenthood, and the distinctions of motherhood and fatherhood, influence attitudes. The findings suggest that parenthood can have a polarising effect on attitudes, and that the polarising effect is most evident in countries where there is less support from the state for parental responsibilities.